The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A haunting image of an unnamed Native child and a recovered story of the American West

In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government’s treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket. The hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the girl is never identified. As The Girl in the Middle goes in search of her, it draws readers into the entangled lives of the photographer and his show more subjects.

Martha A. Sandweiss paints a riveting portrait of the turbulent age of Reconstruction and westward expansion. She follows Gardner from his birthplace in Scotland to the American frontier, as his dreams of a utopian future across the Atlantic fall to pieces. She recounts the lives of William S. Harney, a slave-owning Union general who earned the Lakota name “Woman Killer,” and Samuel F. Tappan, an abolitionist who led the investigation into the Sand Creek massacre. And she identifies Sophie Mousseau, the girl in Gardner’s photograph, whose life swerved in unexpected directions as American settlers pushed into Indian Country and the federal government confined Native peoples to reservations.

Spinning a spellbinding historical tale from a single enigmatic image, The Girl in the Middle reveals how the American nation grappled with what kind of country it would be as it expanded westward in the aftermath of the Civil War.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: One image, not typical of Alexander Gardner the Civil War photographer's work, sent Martha Sandweiss on an intense journey of genealogical and historical research. Author Sandweiss is an archive-divin' fool in this book. As you'd expect from this book coming out via Princeton University Press, the evidence is in the sixtyish pages of endnotes. Impressive recordkeeping, impressive intensity of trolling the census data, genealogy databases, newspaper morgues, Federal records of official actions...I'm very slightly overawed by the depth of Author Sandweiss' commitment to her search for one child's identity when, at the time, it's clear she was unimportant.

Yet she was there...why?

I could easily see the intrigue; I could not match the dogged pursuit of facts. In any lifetime. The revelation that there had ever been a Federal Peace Commission (made up of those white guys in the photo), tasked with meeting Native people from all groups, was news to me. That its mission was to determine the course that would bring about lasting and just peace shocked me...talk about honored in the breach not the observance! So the book expanded my knowledge about the injustice, the lies, and the chicanery that acquiring our empire necessitated.

Sophie Mousseau, the titular girl in the titular middle, serves as a lens for Author Sandweiss to bring the role of women, Native and settler, in the wars and peaces of that time and place into focus. It was all new information to me, so I enjoyed the whole experience...despite the expected violence against women, it was reported not detailed for titillation.

I'd rate the read a full five were it not for some...unusual...thoughts the author had about the nature of photography.... show less