ResoluteReader: Martha A. Sandweiss - The Girl in the Middle: A recovered history of the American West

Thursday, April 30, 2026

Martha A. Sandweiss - The Girl in the Middle: A recovered history of the American West

In 1868 the pioneer American photographer Alexander Gardner joined a delegation from the US government that was negotiating with the Lakota and other Native American tribes. They met at Fort Laramie in Wyoming Territory, and Gardner made a number of images of the negotiators, the Native Americans and the landscape. One of these is a striking picture showing six men, some in military uniform, others in different smart clothes. All of them stand rather incongrously, facing the camera, each other, or staring into the middle distance. In the middle, a young woman faces the camera directly on. To my eyes there's an air of defiance about her look. She is not named on the back of copies of the photos though the others are.

When Martha A. Sandweiss came across this image she was immediately, and unsurprisingly, struck by it. But she was also taken by the fact that the woman was unnamed. The anonymity might stand for the way women are written out of history, something doubly true for indigenous women. Who was she? Why was she there? What became of her? Answering these questions required a lot of detective work, a bit of luck and dogged determination. In finding out the answers Sandweiss unearthed a lot about American history, its violence and the complicated and intersecting lives of the subjects of the picture.

Standing over the story is Gardner. The photographer's fascinating life began with his immersion in the Scottish radical movement. Emigrating to the Americas with others he hoped to set up a utopian town were settlers like him could live equally. Ironically, given the book's context, the land they settled on was taken forcibly from Native Americans. The project, like many others of its type, fell apart. Gardner tried his hand at many things, but eventually became a celebrated photographer who almost single handedly was responsible for inventing photo-journalism. His pictures of the aftermath of Civil War battlefields brough the war home to the American public and were taken with not a little risk to himself. His portraits of the great and the good were also celebrated, and Gardner is perhaps most famous today for his pictures of Abraham Lincoln and his assassins.

Of the other white men in the picture, some were veterans, some politicians and all of them had led lives that reflected aspects of American history and life on the frontier. One of them was a killer. General William S. Harney is the only white person in the photo who is looking directly at the camera. He was experienced in "Indian affairs" though the nature of his experience is best illustrated by the name the Lakota gave him: "Woman Killer". He epitomises both the violence of the US government against Native Americans, but also the insidious way that the violence of US society embedded itself in individuals. Sandweiss describes him:

Harney carried with him to Fort Laramie not just a long military record but also a pesonal history of cruelty and abuse. He beat subordinates. He abused women. He drove away his own family. And he was a murderer. Not just according to the fuzzy rules of wartime engagement, but within his own household. His violent streak often erupted in public life, yet early on, it was honed at home.

The murder "within his own household" was the beating to death of Hannah, an enslaved woman whom he suspected of stealing his keys. While he was found to killed her according to the coroner, he was acquitted in court. The lives of enslaved people mattering little.

The young Native American woman was Sophie Mousseau. We owe this knowledge to a chance identification by someone who saw the picture and annotated it for Sandweiss to stumble upon later. Oral and family history, archival material and legal documents have fleshed out an incredible tale.

The Mousseaus were a mixed heritage family, who arrived in Fort Laramie after losing their business due to a Native American attack. The backstory is a fascinating account of life on the US frontier, settler history and the way that families were destroyed by the US Army. Sophie's parents were married fifty years. Her father was a French-Canadian trader, M. A. Mousseau. Her mother, Yellow Woman, was a Lakota woman who survived a horrific massacre at Blue Water Creek. This massacre saw almost 90 Native Americans murdered by troops led by General Harney. Coincidences like this abound throughout the book and throughout the stories of those who are in the photo.

Sophie's life is complicated and chaotic. One feels that she was never far from the horrors of the American West and the poverty inflicted on Native Americans by the victorous government. In 1890, she was working in the Pine Ridge Reservation when the Wounded Knee Massacre took place.

But by failing to name Sophie on the photograph, Gardner showed how unimportant Native Americans were to those who were building the United States. Her anonimity stands for the rewriting of history, which relegated Native Americans to being people who were lost to time. Gardner's title for the collection of images of which this was one was "Scenes from Indian Country". It reflects the way that Native Americans were being turned into curiosities.

But as Sandweiss says, by knowing who Sophie was and what happened to her, we rescue her history and wider history. She is no longer just surrounded by famous white men. She represents the lost and forgotten history of the Native American peoples. Sandweiss writes:

But knowing who that girl is shifts things, refocussing our attention from the men around her to her. In centering her, we decenter them. Sophie's living descendants have had scattered stories, but no picture with which to visualise their ancestor. Conversely the viewers of Gardner's photograph have had a face without a name. Put the name and the face together, dig into the historical records and a largely forgotten life becomes more knowable.

This matters because Sophie had a life that was inseperable from the history of America. Tragically her life reflected the violence of US history, a violence that is often ignored or downplayed. It is mostly a violence done to Indigenous people. But it is also domestic violence, murder and family trauma.

If Sandweiss had only rescued Sophie from anonymity it would be important and interesting enough. But something more comes from this. Martha A. Sandweiss reminds us all, but American people in particular, that we have to resist the current US government's attempts to rewrite US history.

In National Parks across the United States, on monuments and in museums, officials are removing historical markers, names and descriptions that seek to tell visitors and tourists real stories. The story of The Girl in the Middle - Sophie Mousseau - reminds us of the importance of all those labels, nametags, markers and monuments. If history is a battleground, this book is a good example of the fights we need to wage to remember the past and shape the future.