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Frank Blackwell Mayer (1827-99) was a young artist from Baltimore when he decided in 1851 to travel far into the American frontier came to Minnesota Territory in order to document the Traverse des Sioux treaty negotiations and other aspects of Dakota life. He brought along a sketchbook, and the drawings he made at the treaty signing are the most important visual documents we have of this historic event. In 1886, he worked up his earlier drawings into an oil painting of the treaty signing, now in the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society. The small painting was used as the basis for a large mural rendition of the scene for the Minnesota State Capitol in 1905.
Why had Mayer been so keen to capture these scenes? Maybe he had read this passage in the 1850 annual report of the Baltimore museum where he worked before leaving for Minnesota:
"The aboriginal inhabitants of this great continent are fast yielding to the more powerful race now peopling their ancient domain. . . . The greater the necessity for now rescuing from oblivion every memorial of a people so soon to be extinguished or blended with those who are so superior to them in numbers if not in intellectual endowment."
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Treaties
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Bibliography
Mayer, Frank Blackwell. With Pen and Paper on the Frontier in 1851: The Diary and Sketches of Frank Blackwell Mayer. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1932, 1986
