A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Historiae Literarum et Artium, 4. (Szeged, 2004)

Nagy Imre: A Preliminary Report on the Friedman Kein Canvas

[He] Never owned one of his own [shield], but carried several which belonged to others. He did not borrowed them, but owners lent them to him to „make a record for the shields." Probably carried more shields than any other man, but not borrowed them (Mooney MS #2531, Vol. 5: 107a). The Yellow Nose tracing illustrates that rare occasion when we can identify the Cheyenne hero of a drawing, but not the historic circumstances. Our final example for the depiction of a Little Buffalo Thigh shield also comes from the James Mooney files. The MS #2531, Vol. 8., contains several drawings made from the so-called „Grinnell Canvas". During the early 1900s this canvas with pictographic paintings was in the collection of George B. Grinnell, but its present location is unknown. As a result of cooperation between the two foremost Cheyenne scholars, Mooney could arrange the copying of a limited number of scenes and shield designs by the Arapaho artist, Carl Sweezy. Among these the one marked No. 16 shows a mounted Cheyenne warrior on a white horse (Fig. 17). He carries an eagle feathered banner lance of the Bowstring Society in his right hand. On his left, the variant of the well known shield is visible, where four white patches indicate the bear paw designs in the black field. There is a narrow red, vertical stripe in the middle, and green horizontal stripes and small dots cover the other half of the field. The Cheyenne wears a cloth shirt with thin red stripes, and his legs are covered by black cloth leggings. His breechcloth is made from black trade cloth in front, and from red trade cloth at back. A long row of small circles indicates a string of German-silver conchos behind his back. At the back of his head, a blue lizard figure is tied with a great, yellow-painted plume into his hair. In the upper right corner of the sheet we can read the identification: „No 16 Wolf Face, Grinnell Canvas." Fortunately, Mooney described - rather shortly - the major scenes of this important, but lost visual document. His informants were Touch Clouds and Wolf Robe. They identified three scenes of the canvas the following way: „15-16-17) Wolf Face - vs. [in scene #]15 [the enemy is a] Pawnee, [in scene #]16 [the enemy is a] Ponca, and [in scene #]17 [the enemy is a] Southern Apache ('Ermine People'). Wolf Face = Honí-iwóiní= 'Face Like a Wolf ; i.e. 'Wolf Faced' (Mooney MS # 2531, Vol. 5: 35). Unfortunately no date is connected with any of these three encounters. However, if we compare the Carl Sweezy drawing from the Mooney files with the R2C4 scene on the Friedman Kein Canvas (Fig. 3), we find strong correspondences. The shirt, the leggings, the German-silver conchos, the shield, and the lance are all identical. The breechcloth is also identically depicted: black in front, red behind. The major difference is, that the blue lizard figure is missing from the head of Wolf Face on the Friedman Kein Canvas. This, in the light of our proposition that the hero figures were drawn by the actual warriors themselves, is hard to understand. But if we take into account that this canvas was made about 1880, it suggests that during more than two decades the personal memory faded. The Friedman Kein Canvas gives other details, not shown on the redrawn figure in the Mooney files. Here we can see the foe, in the characteristic attire of the Prairie tribes -roach headdress, and shaved head with pigtail behind. These visual details support Mooney'

s information that Wolf Face encountered a Ponca in the depicted engagement. The „flying bow" at the forehead of Wolf Face indicates that his Ponca adversary counted a coup with this weapon on Wolf Face. 117