'The Girl in the Middle' explores the American West through a multiracial 8-year-old caught in a photo

Martha A. Sandweiss’ website says she’s a historian who has written and edited many books on photography and the history of the American West.

Sandweiss’ newest book brings together those two subjects in a way that shows her extraordinary ability as a historian-detective. She possesses as well a writing style that transforms the people on the page into three-dimensional characters.

Sandweiss’ main objective was to learn the identity of a shawl-wrapped 8-year-old girl in an archival photograph. She learned her name was Sophie.

The photograph is on the front cover of Sandweiss’ book, “The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West.”

The girl is in the middle of six Anglo men, all standing in a field. The girl’s identity wasn’t confirmed until Sandweiss began researching.

The men were known, identified as members of a federal Indian Peace Commission, tasked with negotiating a treaty with the Lakota and other Northern Plains tribes.

The government wanted the tribes on reservations so westward-bound American migrants and railroads would not have to engage in warfare with nomadic tribes that long lived on the plains; and confinement to reservations would, it hoped, “civilize” the tribes.

The photograph, Sandweiss surmised, was a pause in photographer Alexander Gardner’s documenting work.

The negotiations were held in 1868 at Fort Laramie, then part of the Dakota Territory; today it is in the state of Wyoming.

Initially, Sandweiss came across a note card by an Eddie Ryan in the archives of the Fort Laramie National Historic Site. At the site in 1978, Sandweiss writes, Ryan saw a modern copy of the photo.

In the note card, Ryan identified the girl as his grandmother, born Sophie Mousseau, known also as Little Flower.

Ryan personally knew Sophie; she was alive for the first 30 years of his life, “and there was no reason to doubt he could recognize a picture of her as a child,” Sandweiss writes.

“Having Sophie’s name, the world just opened up to me,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Santa Fe.

She sent a copy of the photo to the Lakota Times with a query asking for help to learn more about this Sophie Mousseau. That eventually led her to a few direct descendants of Sophie’s large, extended, multiracial family.

Sandweiss learned that Sophie was born in 1860 to an Oglala Lakota named Yellow Woman and a French Canadian trader/businessman/rancher named Magloire Alexis Mousseau.

“Sophie is truly a girl in the middle,” Sandweiss writes.

She’s in the middle of a family tale stretching from Quebec to Wyoming to Washington, D.C., in the center of the American story about the start of westward expansion right after the Civil War, and in the midst of the diminished Indigenous dominance of the Northern Plains.

Sophie is also caught in the middle of a world rent by different kinds of violence. Violence inflicted by armies and government officials, by family members and by legal systems, Sandweiss writes.

Sophie married twice. Her first, likely a common-law marriage, was with the Irish-born Civil War veteran John “Posey” Ryan.

Sophie suffered a horrible act of domestic violence when Ryan took their five children, one a nursing baby, and fled to marry a just-divorced white woman. Ryan suffered no consequences because Sophie had no legal standing, Sandweiss writes.

She remarried and had eight children with John Monroe, a man of white and Native descent. Sophie lived out her years on the Pine Ridge Reservation, dying in 1936 at age 76.

“When you are looking at the girl in (Gardner’s photograph) you are reminded that these commissioners had private lives,” Sandweiss writes.

The book focuses sharply on the private lives of several men associated with the photograph. They are Gardner, the photographer, and retired U.S. Army Gen. William S. Harney, a peace commissioner.

Gardner had immigrated to the United States with the idea of building a frontier utopian community. It didn’t work out. By 1868 Gardner was widely known for his iconic photographs of President Abraham Lincoln, of Lincoln’s assassins and of his graphic pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, the Civil War’s bloodiest day.

Harney led his soldiers in the Blue Water Creek Massacre in 1855 against mostly Brulé Sioux with some Lakota lodges nearby. The book, citing a source, says Sophie’s mother was shot in the leg by Harney’s troops in that battle.

Harney married into money in St. Louis and for a spell was responsible for the family’s enslaved household members. One was a servant named Hannah whom Harney whipped to death with a piece of rawhide, Sandweiss writes.

He was indicted by a grand jury for murdering Hannah, though found not guilty at trial.

Credit Sandweiss for applying her detective skills in detailing Harney’s rancorous family relations and in tracking down archived records of his 1834 trial, held in a rural county.

Another peace commissioner, Gen. John B. Sanborn, knew Sophie’s father prior to the treaty negotiations. The author surmised that Mousseau probably spoke with Sanborn, a lawyer, at Fort Laramie and was promised help with depredation claims against the federal government.

Yet another peace commissioner was a Union general known widely for his role in the Civil War. He led troops in the devastating 1864 scorched-earth policy across Georgia and the Carolinas. His name? William Tecumseh Sherman.

The author, Sandweiss, is professor emerita in history at Princeton University, where she is founding director of the Princeton & Slavery Project.