Overview
Photographs documenting the late 19th century Kickapoo Indian Medicine Show.
Dates
- Creation: circa 1891
Language of Materials
English
Condition Description
Good
Conditions Governing Access
Open for research.
This collection is shelved offsite at the Harvard Depository. Retrieval requires advance notice. Readers should check with Houghton Public Services staff to determine what material is offsite and retrieval policies and times.
Extent
.04 linear feet (1 volume)Four photographs, including cabinet cards, depicting Kickapoo Indian Medicine Show performers, one of its managers, and a camp after a cyclone. All are annotated on the verso; one was produced by G.M. Koentz. This set of photographs represents Troup #22 on location in Kansas.
Biographical / Historical
The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Show, run by the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company and based for a time in New Haven (Conn.), was a traveling medicine show featuring the sale of cure-alls to the audience in between performances by Iroquois and Plains Indians of fake ritual dances and marriages, acrobatics, fire eating, rifle shooting, ventriloquism and other vaudeville acts. The company was begun by John E. Healy and E.H. Flagg, a salesman and a peddler, who offered Kickapoo Indian Oils, Kickapoo Indian Cough Cure, and Kickapoo Indian Sagwa for sale with false promises of healing. The show did not include Kickapoo Indians. R.W. Tilford was a troupe manager (depicted in a photograph) in 1891.
Arrangement
Collection is minimally processed.
Physical Location
Harvard Depository
Immediate Source of Acquisition
2020MT-72. Purchased with funds from the Frank E. Chase Bequest, 2019 November.
Processing Information
Processed by Melanie Wisner, 2019 December.
Subject
- Kickapoo Indian Medicine Co. (Organization)
- Title
- Kickapoo Indian Medicine Show photographs, circa 1891 (MS Thr 2016): Guide
- Status
- completed
- Author
- Houghton Library, Harvard University
- Date
- 2019 December 12
- Description rules
- dacs
- Language of description
- und
- EAD ID
- hou03292
Repository Details
Part of the Houghton Library Repository
Houghton Library is Harvard College's principal repository for rare books and manuscripts, archives, and more. Houghton Library's collections represent the scope of human experience from ancient Egypt to twenty-first century Cambridge. With strengths primarily in North American and European history, literature, and culture, collections range in media from printed books and handwritten manuscripts to maps, drawings and paintings, prints, posters, photographs, film and audio recordings, and digital media, as well as costumes, theater props, and a wide range of other objects. Houghton Library has historically focused on collecting the written record of European and Eurocentric North American culture, yet it holds a large and diverse number of primary sources valuable for research on the languages, culture and history of indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
Houghton Library’s Reading Room is free and open to all who wish to use the library’s collections.
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