The Ghost Dance. Kickapoo Indian Medicine Co. Trade Card (verso).  Advertising Ephemera Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork88210

Founded in 1881 by two non-Native white men, John Healy and Charles Bigelow, the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company sold “healing” salves and cures, including a concoction they called “Sagwa.” Allegedly derived from Native sources, with claims that it could heal everything from stomach pains to coughs to kidney disease, “Sagwa” was in reality Healy and Bigelow's own formulation. They not only told fictional accounts of its origins but likely invented its name to make their product sound more “Indian.” The company rose to prominence through successful advertising campaigns and popular traveling medicine shows that hired both Native and non-Native performers to peddle their products. They even had plans to build a store, which never materialized, where a performer would stir a large kettle of “Sagwa” on display. These marketing strategies relied heavily on a common trope—that because of their supposed innate connection to nature, Native people possessed esoteric, spiritual knowledge that Western medicine had yet to grasp. 

The Ghost Dance. Kickapoo Indian Medicine Co. Trade Card (recto).  Advertising Ephemera Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork88210

In the late 19th century, the Ghost Dance began on the Plains, becoming widespread among many different tribal communities as a form of resistance against white settlers and colonialism. Such ceremonies galvanized anxiety among U.S. officials and Indian agents, who feared increasing Native organization and a possible uprising. This was especially so, given the formation of the Northwestern Confederacy (aka the United Indian Confederacy), which began in 1783 and ended briefly in 1795, before Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa revived it around 1805.

The inclusion of a Ghost Dance on this advertising trade card for Kickapoo Indian Remedies shows the company’s awareness of the practice but no serious attempt to understand its significance to Indigenous communities. The bright colors and lively composition of the generic image were intended to intrigue audiences and lend legitimacy to the dubious product. Here, the dance is presented to potential consumers as the “Ghost Dance” and associated, given the branding, only with Kickapoo, lacking specificity, accuracy, and a key element—why it was practiced.

Attacking the Grizzly Bear. Kickapoo Indian Medicine Co. Trade Card. Advertising Ephemera Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork88217

Appearing in some of the earliest European prints of the so-called “New World,” images of Native people have circulated in American culture from the moment of first contact up to the present. They evolved over time, with early depictions featuring woodland communities. As European Americans moved westward, though, beginning in the 19th century and persisting to this day, images of Plains people have predominated. Plains people became the paradigmatic “Indian” through the spread of such images in prints, paintings, novels, and later, in Hollywood films. In this card, while the company connects itself through its brand name to the Kickapoo—an Algonquian-speaking group that arose out of the Great Lakes region—the illustration shows Plains warriors fighting a grizzly bear, with a man on a white horse at right raising a gunstock war club to fend off attack. 

By their resistance, Plains tribes also became conflated with earlier symbols of Native peoples, emphasizing their violent attributes. These associations between Indigenous people and violence never changed, even as Indian Country did. The results are still evident today in the enactment of the “tomahawk chop” and the pernicious use of Native mascots, particularly in sports. This perpetuates a stereotype of Native people as fierce warriors, while cleverly obscuring the violence that the very groups being misrepresented continue to endure. 

Buffalo Hunt. Kickapoo Indian Medicine Co. Trade Card. Advertising Ephemera Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork88212

The presence of buffalo or horses in a depiction of Native people is always a clear sign that the subject is from a Plains tribe. Plains folk were famous for hunting buffalo, on which they depended, and for using horses to do so after the Spanish reintroduced them to the Americas in the 16th century.

Plains tribal communities relied on the buffalo for food, clothes, tools, and shelter. As their buffalo hunts grew in renown, the buffalo, horses, and Plains lifeways became emblematic of the “American Indian.” Ironically, as the older images and stories involving woodland tribes were replaced by those of highly romanticized Plains peoples, claims to authenticity of communities like the Kickapoo tribe came under scrutiny in the West. Meanwhile, too, companies like the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company were appropriating their very names for profit.

By the time this advertising card was produced, the buffalo hunt was a practice of the past, as the vast herds of North American bison that had once roamed the Plains were intentionally slaughtered by westward-moving Americans. In the span of just three decades, almost forty million buffalo were destroyed—over ninety percent by 1899—something entirely unseen in this card.

Antelope Shooting. Kickapoo Indian Medicine Co. Trade Card. Advertising Ephemera Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork88219

Here a Native man in a feathered headdress and buckskin lies prone in the grass, waiting, while a herd of antelope advances toward the red flag he has rested on a stick—a common practice for antelope hunting employed in western lands like Nevada. This card, however, seems to depict a landscape more akin to the Great Plains or even what is today Missouri. Hunting customs varied by region, yet here the illustrator seems to have conflated a known hunting strategy from one area with that of another people and place, perhaps even in a location beyond the range of antelope, to use “Nativeness” to sell a product. What is missing from this card, if this is indeed picturing the Plains, is the often large-scale, sophisticated hunt organized by a tribal community in particular seasons, and as an activity essential to their society.

New Jersey. Arbuckle Bros. Trade Card. Advertising Ephemera Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork81662

Driven by the development of color lithography, from the 1870s until the turn of the century, advertising trade cards were a popular way for American companies to promote products. People would collect and trade their cards, often produced in series, which featured stories, scenes, product testimonials, and even episodes from American history. The coffee company Arbuckle Brothers, for instance, unveiled their Pictorial History of the United States and Territories series of advertising trade cards in the early 1880s, with a pictorial history on the front and a description on the back.

As industrialization reshaped American society during the Gilded Age, companies used nostalgic, “educational,” and “patriotic” content on advertising cards to deflect tensions resulting from societal changes of the period and to present a company and its products as particularly “American.” In their card for the state of New Jersey, a dynamic image of George Washington in battle dominates the upper half of the card. In stark contrast is the scene of conflict between armed settlers and unarmed Indigenous people at lower left, followed by a picturesque image of Washington’s Headquarters at Morristown, New Jersey, at lower right. Together, these scenes work to legitimize violence toward Native people as an inevitable part of forming and expanding a nation. The text on the verso echoes this idea: “The last tribe left the state in 1802.”

Vermont. Arbuckle Bros. Trade Card. Advertising Ephemera Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork81665

Although Arbuckle Bros. was the first national brand to seal roasted coffee beans and sell them in one-pound packages for travel, the company did not highlight its innovations in this series of trade cards. Instead, it aimed to associate itself with what it viewed as accomplishments of the past and key moments in American history.

In this card for the state of Vermont, Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys are pictured at left, with three Native figures, presumably Huron, in the distance. At right is an image of General Stark at the Battle of Bennington. In the center is a depiction of Samuel de Champlain “discovering” the lake that would come to bear his name. Even though Native peoples were instrumental in Europeans’ arrival into the lands represented on this card, in this image, the Huron are pushed to the edge of the frame and positioned behind a pointing Champlain. Here, they recede from their own histories through quite literal marginalization.

New Mexico. Arbuckle Brothers. Trade Card. Advertising Ephemera Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork81667

Famed for their gold-hunting expeditions, Spanish Conquistadors led by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in the 16th century searched widely for “Cibola,” a region of seven supposed “Cities of Gold” in the North American interior. On arrival in what is now New Mexico, they encountered well-organized societies and communities of Zunian-speaking peoples who had been living there for centuries. The Spanish then attacked and ultimately forced them out in the 1540 Battle of Hawikuh. The Spaniards are illustrated as aggressive, armored warriors defeating Native peoples and as explorers encountering uninhabited adobe pueblos. Yet the text on back of the card describes them (and the Apache) simply as responsible for the Puebloan “decline.”

While some of the text and images on this card perpetuate the myth that “America” was a new world and something to be discovered, the central image contradicts the notion of the “vanishing Indian.” This card is significant, too, in that it pictures a continued presence of Native people. The image is even captioned on the verso as “A Zuni of to-day decorating pottery.” Unlike the other Arbuckle Bros. cards in this exhibit, the New Mexico card positions Indigenous people as central to the history and culture of the Southwest, while simultaneously associating the company with the area. Later Arbuckle Bros. would market its product as the “coffee that won the West.” 

Frontispiece from Henry Villard photograph album, 1883. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvgroup12715

As railroads expanded coast-to-coast, images of “progress” permeated American culture in an array of media. From monumental murals and paintings to popular prints and paper currency, such portrayals spread. One example is this illustrated album page produced for Henry Villard (1835-1900) and the Northern Pacific Railway, with its numerous transportation, trade, and German financial connections. This album also contains 35 photographic portraits of prominent German financiers who supported the construction of the Northern Pacific Railway. It was presented to Henry Villard by the German delegation attending the celebration commemorating the completion of the railroad in 1883.

Above a plume of smoke from the train’s smokestack, an eagle leads the way westward toward a cornucopia of plenty. It carries an American shield with stars and stripes and a German shield with the imperial eagle (or Reichsadler) to symbolize German-American relations, cross-cultural collaboration, and international investment in industry. The United States and Germany are represented as partners in both the railroad and imperialist expansion. In such images of “manifest destiny” that clearly transcended national borders, Native Americans are often moved to the margins or the side so that empire can make its way. The Native family is not only cast aside but aligned with a felled tree, signifying an obstruction cleared.

Such depictions, however, ignore the Native resistance to westward expansion in the US, including a Cheyenne attempt at derailing a train in 1867, as well as a Sioux blockade built from railroad ties and telegraph line in 1868 that did succeed in a derailing. This picture also avoids showing the harsh reality of this period for Native communities from coast to coast—an effect of Euro-American expansion across the continent, many broken treaties, ongoing Indian Wars, and the deaths of thousands of Indigenous people resulting from the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Top: City Bank (Worcester, Mass.), 2 dollars, 1853. American Currency Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork366233; Bottom: Merchants Bank (Rhode Island), 1 dollar, 1854. American Currency Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork365898

Before the Civil War, hundreds of local banks issued thousands of different kinds of currency in an array of designs. Other state-chartered corporations—including railroads and insurance companies—also issued notes. As historian Stephen Mihm described in his book A Nation of Counterfeiters, “the money supply became a great confluence of more than ten thousand different kinds of paper that continually changed hands” (Mihm 2009, p. 3). The passage of the Legal Tender Act in 1862, which introduced the US currency known as “greenbacks,” was the first step toward creating a unified monetary system for the United States, and by 1876, a law was passed to mark fraudulent notes as counterfeit, as in the stamped note above.

These two bills, printed by different local banks in the 1850s, include images of a single Native American standing on a promontory, waving a train onward as it winds unimpeded through a picturesque and, more importantly, settled valley below. This, like other images of westward expansion that circulated throughout the United States at the time, portrays “Native people as noble savages,” as part of an uncorrupt but primitive past, contrasting with technology and industrialization but passively accepting the inevitable “progress” of white civilization. 

Top: Mechanics Bank (Georgia), 10 dollars, 1861. American Currency Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork366409; Bottom:  Adrian Insurance Company (Michigan), 1 dollar, 1856. American Currency Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork365732

The images at the centers of these two bills celebrate American transportation and agriculture, respectively. On the ten-dollar bill printed by Mechanics Bank of Georgia, an eagle seeming about to take flight appears in the foreground, with a steamboat, which revolutionized travel and trade, in the background. In the margins, identical images of a Native American seated and passively watching as “progress” steams ahead flank the central scene.

On the one-dollar bill produced by the Adrian Insurance Company of Michigan, a white man on saddled horseback oversees field workers harvesting crops, visually reinforcing the predominant Euro-American view that a hallmark of civilization is “proper” usage of the land, privileging tilling and resource extraction over other methods of cultivation. Of course, Indigenous peoples have engaged for centuries in regenerative forms of crop cultivation, shaping the environment in different ways, from creating fisheries in inlets to burning of forest duff and dry grasses to add nutrients to the soil.

As on the ten-dollar bill, the Native American man shown on the one-dollar bill is relegated to the margins, seated in the wilderness, with the addition of a waterfall in the background and a rifle resting against his leg. By portraying Native peoples as passive figures in the process of US expansion and associating them only with the wilderness and in opposition to “civilization,” such illustrations reinforce stereotypes and obscure the complexity, diversity, and richness of Indigenous societies.

Top: Blackstone Canal Bank, 2 dollars, 1856. American Currency Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork36590; Bottom: Mahaiwe Bank (Massachusetts), 10 dollars, 1854. American Currency Collection. Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School, olvwork365901

During the colonial period, America was frequently represented by the figure of the “Indian Princess.” She appeared in prints, medals, coins, and paper currency. During the neoclassical period, particularly in the United States, she underwent a transformation to a plumed Greek goddess, as in the female figure on the right-hand side of this two-dollar bill from Blackstone Canal Bank. Wearing a feathered headdress and a quiver of arrows on her shoulder, in this case she is likely a hybrid of the Roman goddess Diana (Greek Artemis) and an “Indian Princess” blended to symbolize the Americas.  

The two female figures on this ten-dollar bill from Mahaiwe Bank of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, are most likely Roman goddesses associated with the harvest, with crops emblematic of American abundance and the caduceus in the central image representing commerce. However, given the bank’s appropriation of the word mahaiwe, Mohican for “the place downstream,” as its company name, it is possible that the female figure who stands holding an ear of corn in the lower right corner could also allude to an “Indian Princess,” even without the standard feathered headdress.

Cyrus Edwin Dallin (American, 1861-1944), Appeal to the Great Spirit, 1913, Bronze. Gift of Lewis K. Sillcox, 1949, HBS Art and Artifacts Collection, 1949.1

Railroad companies often employed images of Native Americans in advertisements and albums. Such imagery clearly appealed to their executives, as evidenced by this sculpture of a Native man on horseback wearing a feathered headdress, which was in the collection of railroad executive and mechanical engineer Lewis K. Sillcox (1886–1989) and given to Harvard Business School in 1949. 

This bronze statuette is one of more than 400 casts that artist Cyrus Dallin produced in various sizes after his monumental sculpture was installed at the Huntington Avenue entrance of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1912. Dallin’s anachronistic, generalized, and romantic representation reveals much more about the artist and the prevailing Euro-American view of Native people as a “vanishing race” than it does about the spiritual practices and experiences of Indigenous people living then or now.