The Girl in the Middle

A Recovered History of the American West

In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal peace commission negotiating to push the Lakota onto fixed reservations. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his Civil War views, posed six of the commissioners with a young Native girl. His hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the child 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 subjects, following each of them into the photograph and then watching as they walk away. The child’s remarkable story — with its unexpected connections to the men who pose beside her — shows how history becomes richer when we recover the experiences of people long forgotten.

Reviews

“Martha Sandweiss is not only a delightfully readable historian, she’s a first-rate sleuth. Using one haunting group photograph as a starting point, she succeeds in recreating the intertwined lives of a fascinating cross section of individuals. The Girl in the Middle is an engaging exercise in photographic detective work that gives us many fresh and astonishing insights into the history of the American West.” —Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of Blood and Thunder

“An astonishing achievement of scholarship, insight, and empathy.” —Amanda Cobb-Greetham, author of Listening to Our Grandmothers’ Stories

 “An unmatched piece of historical detective work, Martha Sandweiss’s painstaking identification of an anonymous Native American girl in an old picture unspools the rich, painful canvas that was the nineteenth-century United States. Replete with generals, killers, survivors, and a photographer, The Girl in the Middle offers a profound meditation on those people too easily thought to be lost to the past—and thus on the meaning and practice of history itself.” —Philip J. Deloria, author of Playing Indian