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Káma-Kapúska! Making Marks in Indian Country, 1833–34

Mató-Tópe, Seven wooden coup symbol replicas, 1833.

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Fort Clark as a Commissioning House
Mixed in with the list of workshop projects at Fort Clark were object commissions issued by Wied-Neuwied. On November 24, 1833, Wied-Neuwied asked Mató-Tópe to finish a bear claw necklace for him, providing additional elements purchased from the fort store (fig. 10).‍[40] Mató-Tópe returned the completed item on January 8, 1834. A week later, Wied-Neuwied commissioned Mató-Tópe to make duplicates of his carved hair sticks (fig. 11). Commissions may have been a standard practice between fur traders and Native artisans, as Bodmer had visited Síh-Chidä and Mató-Tópe in Mít uta hako'sh in late December and found the latter painting a hide robe for Michel Bellehumeur, an Ojibwe interpreter stationed at Fort Clark.‍[41] And like the workshop alterations between warrior drawings and sittings for Bodmer’s executed portraits, commissioning went in both directions: in early March, Mató-Tópe requested a drawing of an eagle from Wied-Neuwied.
Commissions like these tested Middle Ground participants; they demonstrated whether or not a given participant knew the expectations and obligations that came with their Middle Ground involvement. As Wied-Neuwied records in his first entry describing Mató-Tópe, the painter George Catlin had been a poor gift giver in the required exchange for a painted robe. When Mató-Tópe returned Catlin’s paltry proffered items, saying he would instead gift the robe to Catlin, he was refusing to entertain Catlin on the Middle Ground: gifting on the part of Mató-Tópe meant that no exchange occurred and that the related kinship obligations were therefore not initiated. Such failures in the required exchange customs of the Middle Ground could have a profound impact on one’s subsequent reputation. One evening at Fort Clark, Charbonneau, an independent fur trader and translator who resided in Amatihá (Fourth Village), related stories of Duke Paul Wilhelm of Württemberg, a European visitor to the Missouri River region in the 1820s, using similarly stingy terms, as “he accepted sugar and coffee and did not give anything in return.”‍[42] Wied-Neuwied wrote that Württemberg had a bad reputation “here and there” along the Missouri as a result.
Like the portraits produced at Fort Clark, commissions were both expressions and products of Middle Ground relationships. This means that an exchanged object’s significance is not only in the material thing exchanged, but also in the behaviors of exchange that surrounded it. Prior to being asked to complete the bear claw necklace, Mató-Tópe spent the night in front of the Europeans’ fire. Such visits often produced knowledge for Wied-Neuwied’s notebooks, but they also involved tobacco, food, and a bed for guests.‍[43] Sometimes visitors brought specimens for Wied-Neuwied’s collections. While Wied-Neuwied’s surviving collections of objects and recorded knowledge are usually understood in ethnographic terms, their work and significance in Indian country included their creation and enforcement of Middle Ground fictive kin relationships and obligations.
In this way, the whitewashed room at Fort Clark came to mimic the open doors expected of Native leaders in the villages. Numak'aki peoples knew a village leader as a numakshí (“man-to-be-good”) or miti ko-mne-ka (“one who is the village door”). Leaders were expected to be generous, playing host at any time, with food always at the ready. This hospitality was extended to Bodmer at the Numak'aki earth lodge of Dipäuch (Broken Marrow), where Bodmer constructed a complex sketch of the lodge interior over the course of the winter (fig. 12).‍[44] Pots of food are visible by the central firepit, as are the women kin of Dipäuch who were responsible for meal preparation. By the spring of 1834, when food was running desperately short, Mató-Tópe and Péhriska-Rúhpa extended their roles as village leaders and providers to the residents of Fort Clark, gifting meat to the emaciated Europeans.‍[45] Bodmer and Wied-Neuwied mirrored the role of the numakshí as they worked at Fort Clark, hosting and feeding their many visitors in a demonstration of their facility with the proffered terms of the Middle Ground.
15 January 1834
About noon Mató-Tópe came with many Indians. One of them wore a long, trailing bonnet of white and black kiliou feathers (máhchsi-akum-háschka) on his head. This beautiful bonnet had about 40 eagle feathers attached to a broad red strip of cloth. They went to Ruhptare to adopt a medicine son and to dance the medicine pipes.
Mató-Tópe was dressed beautifully. In his hair he had [symbolized] all his wounds with small wooden sticks: four yellow, one red, and one blue. I had precise copies made. On the right side of his head, he also wore a knife made from wood, painted partly red as a sign that he had killed a Cheyenne chief with a knife. On top of each wooden piece, there is a yellow nail driven in, like a little button. On the back of his head, he wore a large tuft of eagle owl feathers, a symbol of the Meníss-Óchatä, and eagle feathers stuck radially upright in his hair. I lent him my necklace of bear claws, and he took an ornamented eagle’s feather belonging to Máhchsi-Karéhde that was at our place and stuck that in his hair, too. One eye was painted yellow, the other red; his forehead and the lower part of his chin [were] red. His body and arms were marked with reddish brown vertical stripes, and his coups [were] indicated by horizontal stripes on his arms. On his chest [was] a yellow hand that indicated he had taken prisoners. . . . They stayed for about an hour and then went to Ruhptare.