Deadly Dan, the Dare-Devil, 1878
Above, we close out our annual Native American Heritage Month postings, with “Deadly Dan, the Dare-Devil, A Dime Novel of Today” or “What Our Boys Are Reading”, by artist Livingston Hopkins, from the August 27th, 1878 front page of the (New York) Daily Graphic. Click on the page, to view it in a larger size, [...]
“Little Jimmy” Meets “Canyon Kiddies”, by James Swinnerton
Next in our Native American Heritage Month coverage, we’ve scanned part of the Little Jimmy section, from the 1934 Book 2 of Famous Comics. Each of Famous Comics’ three issues collected daily comic strips of three different series. In Book 2, the run of artist James Swinnerton’s strip, Little Jimmy, crossed over with another Swinnerton [...]
Pictorial History of New Brunswick
Next in our Native American Heritage Month coverage, we have the October 1930-published Pictorial History of New Brunswick, reprinting twenty-five strips by George A. Bradshaw, which ran in the New Brunswick Sunday Times. The first strip focuses on the natives, ending in panel four with Dutch troops suddenly entering the picture, to “demand satisfaction from [...]
Canadian 1890 Aboriginal Wit
We continue our Native American Heritage Month coverage, with cartoons & comics by whites, revealing the attitude of white society towards the Americas’ original inhabitants. Above, from the July 12th, 1890 issue of the Canadian comic weekly, Grip, comes Ab-Original Wit — A Brantford Fact. The strip plays on the stereotype of Indians as drunkards, [...]
Selling Out the Red Man: American Advertisers Portray the Natives, Part 2
WARNING: The following cartoons contain racist imagery and slurs. Resuming our Native American Heritage Month postings, we start above with a sequence of circa 1870s/1880s trade cards, advertising R.W. Bell’s Buffalo Soap. This sequence follows a 19th century racist theme common in soap advertising, most often seen involving African Americans, but here, using an American [...]
Native American Heritage Month: Harvard Lampoon, October 1877:
WARNING: The following cartoons contain racist imagery and slurs. The Presidential Election is over. So now, it’s time to move on to our annual series of Native American Heritage Month postings! Let’s get started… Dealing as we do with old published comics & cartoons, our Native American History postings are, in truth, really more about [...]
Selling Out the Red Man: American Advertisers Portray the Natives
WARNING: The following cartoons contain racist imagery and slurs. To close out our series on Native American Heritage Month (until next year), we bring you artist Livingston Hopkins’ Big Scalper & Big Smoker. During the nineteenth century, there were a great number of sources that reinforced the projected image that Native Americans were uncivilized, hostile, [...]
Thanksgiving with the Natives
For Thanksgiving Day and Native American Heritage Month, we bring you a few sample images from late nineteenth century comic periodicals. (For prior postings in the Native American Heritage series, click here.) The first two examples are idealized images, depicting peaceful co-existence between European settlers and the indigenous natives. Repeating to these publications’ predominantly white readers, the false myth [...]
Buffalo Bill & Queen Victoria, at her Golden Jubilee, 1887
For those who may have missed it, we re-present for Native American Heritage Month an article from this past Spring, on how comic periodicals covered the 1887 tour of England by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Bill and his show, filled with Native Americans, had been sent as America’s main contribution to the celebrations of [...]
Dime Store Novel Kid Indian Fighters
Click on any picture, to open an enlarged version. For Native American Heritage Month, we’ve been showing examples of how 19th century American and European comic publishers presented indigenous people to the European-derived public. Such images and stories from all sources, drilled in the view of Native Americans as savages, and white expansion into their [...]
