By: Joe Ort '21

Access the two digitized photo albums via Princeton University Library.

recounted Dr. Walter Hough of the United States National Museum in 1903.[1] The sentiment did not arise out of some macabre fantasy. As an employee of the Department of Anthropology at the United States National Museum (itself a part of the Smithsonian Institution), Hough’s superiors had commissioned him two years prior to collect every piece of information he could about the indigenous inhabitants of what is now northeastern Arizona—including human remains, where and when possible. “From the fragmentary bones thrown out by the vandals who sacked the east cemetery it is obvious…material could have been acquired here,” Hough rued, adding moralistically, “this is another example of the destruction of valuable scientific evidence by careless and unskilled hands.”[2] Complain though he did, the irony was seemingly lost on Hough that the same allegations could be leveled at his own grisly and ethically fraught excavations, some of which are rendered below.

The captions written in the album by A.C. Vroman respectively read: "Excavating," "Excavated," and "Excavating for Pottery." In the third image, Vroman also made a note that Dr. Hough is the erect figure farthest to the right, seemingly overseeing the digging while chewing on a pipe.

These unsettling images, and hundreds of others—ranging from gritty archaeological digs to nightly campfires, mud that routinely mired the wagon used by Hough and his party, and dozens of studies of Native American sitters—were captured by “the well-known photographer of Pasadena,” Hough’s 1901 travel companion Adam Clark Vroman.[3] From July 17 to September 23, 1901, Vroman, Hough, and a third man, Peter Goodard Gates, a retired lumber tycoon allowed to join after he volunteered to take on half the trip’s costs, covered some “800 miles of wagon travel” across Hopi (known to Vroman as "Moki," from the Spanish word "Moqui") and Navajo land.[4] The outing was suitably called the Museum-Gates Expedition, and in his official summary Hough took special care to note that “a large series of photographs was made by Messrs. Vroman, Gates, and the writer” over the two months and hundreds of miles.[5]

Princeton possesses two spectacular albums that depict the trip through Vroman’s lens. The first, “Volume 11 Gates Party, Navaho’s,” contains 100 platinum print photographs taken by the photographer; its counterpart “Volume 12 Hopi, Pueblos” features 118. The 200+ pictures thread together the often problematic intersections of turn-of-the-century anthropology—a prejudiced and extractive profession in those days—and Vroman’s own inclination to forge intimate relationships with Native American men, women, and children through deeply personal portraits. As argued by Heather Shannon, the Pasadena resident's dogged work also challenged prevailing skepticism about the status of photography as an art, as Vroman assembled stunning compositions and articulated intricate production methods that left little doubt about the skill involved.[6] The beauty and wonder of many of these images belie the complex dynamics of power, representation, and cultural autonomy (or lack thereof) that play out on nearly every page of the albums now housed at Princeton. Though Vroman has become a minor celebrity for the compassion and respect with which he portrayed Native sitters, controlling the narratives his images tapped into would prove a far more vexing uphill battle than “climbing...the high, abrupt sandstone [of] the Keam mesa” that confronted the party.[7]

In the first image, Peter Goodard Gates ("P.G.") appears to squat and smoke his pipe while Hough struggles to free their wagon. The other captions read, sequentially: "Navaho silversmith at work," "Moki [Hopi] Souie Moktu Rabbit Hunt," "A Juliet, of Sichumovi," & "A Hopi Merchant." In the fourth caption, Vroman incorporates a trope from his own culture—Shakespeare's Juliet—in describing a Hopi subject leaning out of a window.

Vroman did not grow up in the American West, but he quickly found his niche there. Born in 1856 in small-town La Salle, Illinois, to Dutch immigrants, Vroman worked in the railroad industry before his wife’s ailing health brought the couple to southern California in 1893.[8] Vroman opened an eponymous bookstore with a partner, “Vroman & Glasscock,” the following year. Pasadena proved the perfect market for the venture.[9] By 1900, Vroman was the store's sole owner, and he had expanded from books to cameras, photography paraphernalia, stationary, and curios as well.[10] (Vroman’s today prides itself as “southern California’s oldest independent bookstore”).[11] Outside of business, the California émigré soon garnered a local and even regional reputation as an able and intrepid photographer. By the time of the Museum-Gates Expedition, Vroman had already photographed two prior trips, first visiting the Hopi pueblo of Walpi in 1895, and tagging along with ethnologist Frederick Webb Hodge, one of Hough’s bosses at the Smithsonian, in 1899.[12] Each time, Vroman refused compensation, as he would for the Museum-Gates Expedition.[13]

Vroman had crossed paths with Gates as early as 1900. Gates, an amateur photographer himself, had long admired the cloud effects of Vroman’s images (a testament to the latter’s technical prowess), and first pitched the “summer camping trip to the Southwest” that became the Museum-Gates Expedition, no doubt at least in part to receive instruction himself.[14] Gates was an established philanthropist, funding a chemistry building for the California Institute of Technology (today, the Gates Chemistry Laboratory is the oldest building on Caltech’s campus).[15] Gates had a particular interest in excavating indigenous artifacts on the Hopi reservation in Arizona Territory, and funding the 1901 expedition was a logical extension of his largesse, especially considering the personal benefits it promised. Out of convenience, overlapping institutional and individual agendas, and a little serendipity, the Gates party formed.

When it came to actually capturing the expedition, Vroman took matters into his own hands. Though he was one of the earliest Eastman Kodak dealers in the country and certainly in California, the bookseller favored a traditional view camera for his own purposes.[16] The 1888 advent of the Kodak and its continuous rolls of film offered a tidy alternative to the laborious process of reloading negatives between every shot.[17] Despite its enhanced flexibility and compactness, Vroman stuck with a camera that required 6 ½ x 8 ½ inch glass plates and accompanying equipment that weighed nearly fifty pounds—gear that he remarkably lugged for the duration of the 1901 expedition.[18] (That being said, Vroman did incorporate some technological innovations, transitioning from wet-plate negatives that needed to be sensitized immediately before exposure to less tedious dry-plates).[19] Even so, the added clarity and “sharpness” of his unwieldy dry-plate camera was worth its literal weight to Vroman.[20] Embracing the cutting-edge Kodak made sense when it came to promoting his store, but Vroman, as with so many artists, maintained his own idiosyncratic style.

Prior to his departure in July 1901, Vroman made an agreement with Hodge, his travel companion in 1899, to “duplicate” every image that he took for and of the Museum-Gates party.[21] In reality, "duplication" was a bit of a misnomer, as he actually shot the same photo twice, creating a pair of “variants.” As the name suggests, there were subtle but sometimes deliberate differences between the two.[22] Vroman was permitted to keep one set of the negatives, and visual analysis between variants shows that, in many instances, he retained the richer and more interesting compositions for himself, while handing the more banal “duplicates” to the appropriate museum department or ethnologist.[23] By 1895, he had completed a private darkroom back in Pasadena, which enabled him to develop his plates to his exact specifications.[24] The carefully arranged photographs in the two Princeton albums speak for themselves.

Given the vast number of personal photographs Vroman produced over his amateur career (never paid for his work, Vroman technically was not a “professional,” though his acumen may have rivaled the best), the photographer also became known for meticulously arranging his photographs before gifting albums to “friends and associates.” He almost always captioned these sets in his unique cuneiform handwriting, as is the case in both of Princeton's albums.[25]

Of Princeton’s images of the Museum-Gates Expedition, many show individual Native sitters. As historian Martha Sandweiss has pithily noted, among many comparisons with firearms, “the cannon was a more apt metaphor for the photographic devices than either a pistol or quick action rifle,” given the extended set-up times required to capture a photograph.[31] Without the rapidity of a Kodak, “photographic portraits of Indian subjects,” a favorite for Vroman, “involved a collaboration between a willing (or at least aware) sitter and photographer, a kind of suspended moment that belies the normal interaction between hunted and hunter.”[32] Despite these obstacles to candid capture, Vroman made images that sought “to understand highly localized, non-Western customs and beliefs,” distinguishing his work from virtually all of his contemporaries.[33] These stirring portraits situated Native people in their actual environments, without interpolating details or adding props from the photographer.[34]

Vroman labelled these subjects, respectively, "A Navaho Mother [from] Cottonwood Camp," "Me•pat•dle•jene (Navaho)," "(Moki Bowman),""Ahstine (Navaho Medicine Man)," and "Three Principal Men of Walpi."

Even so, it is important not to lose sight of potentially more damaging effects of Vroman's vast body of photographs. For one, his work sometimes evoked the notion of the “vanishing race.”[35] In Vroman’s milieu, the notion that Native Americans were on the verge of disappearing was deeply familiar. A discourse on the "vanishing race" had existed in the United States since the time of its founding.[36] The relentless use of metaphors comparing Native Americans to erosive forces in nature—sand, winds, melting snow, and evaporating dew, among others—spelled out a “rhetoric of doom” that implied imminent erasure.[37] This widely-held premise not only justified the pernicious seizure of Native American lands, but it spurred anthropologists and other interested academics to venture into Native lands before, they reckoned, it was too late.[38] The seeming urgency of doing so was heightened by the policies of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, which pushed a staunchly assimilationist agenda by the 1890s.[39] In consequence, the opportunity to document Native inhabitants seemed fleeting.

The harm inflicted by anthropologists was less concrete than governmental rapine, but the logic of a "vanishing race" largely impeded academics' ability to portray Native American communities accurately or respectfully. The same ideas influenced the 1901 Museum-Gates party. Walter Hough argued that “in much of this region, on account of the work of untrained explorers and curio hunters, it is too late to do more than secure what they have left [of Zuñi archaeology] or to trace the material to private or museum collections for the purpose of study."[40] The message was clear: without swift and decisive action, not only would the Zuñi people be gone, but so would all the evidence of their centuries-long presence in the region.

Most concerningly, Vroman’s photographs could factor into culturally chauvinistic (not to mention factually inaccurate) anthropological narratives, even without his consent—the sorts of ideologies that deemed it permissible for Hough to seek and take skulls. The Museum-Gates Expedition, after all, was sent out on behalf of the US National Museum’s Department of Anthropology, along with the closely related but distinct Bureau of Ethnology (BAE), in turn headed by famed Civil War veteran-turned-adventurer John Wesley Powell.

Every year, the BAE filed an official report to Congress to secure its budget for the following year.[41] (The twenty-first annual report, summarizing events from 1899-1900, even made mention of “a noteworthy trip made early in the fiscal year by Mr. F.W. Hodge, with a party of volunteer assistants [including] … Mr A.C. Vroman, of Pasadena").[42] More generally, that year's letter from Powell asserted, “as during previous years, the researches have been carried forward in accordance with a scientific system developed largely in this Bureau.”[43] This vague assertion attested to a new ethos under development, one that saw Native Americans not only as vanishing but as inhabiting a cultural dead-end, having failed to progress to “civilized” forms of art.[44] The twenty-third report expanded on this notion, arguing, “the researches of the year were conducted in accordance with an ethnic system set forth in earlier reports. This system may be defined as the Science of Ethnology in its modern aspects … now that the system has assumed definite form, it affords a foundation not only for future researches, but for applying the principles of ethnology to practical questions.” Those “practical questions” consisted of “the immediate aim…to record the primitive customs and crafts as a contribution to knowledge of a passing race, but the investigations have reached the stage of yielding useful lessons to the superior race.”[45] The Bureau's racism is nakedly apparent.

To that end, photographs taken by Vroman could be used to uphold narratives about the supposed primitivism and regression of indigenous peoples. Nowhere did this become more apparent than in Vroman’s images of the Snake Dance, which by 1901 had become a sensationalized tourist attraction. White observers exoticized the Dance, with many accounts emphasizing its “bizarre” features, such as the participants’ seeming ability to withstand venomous snake bites.[46] Vroman eschewed that approach. In lectures and articles, he underscored the reverence of the ceremony and frequently compared it to Christian customs (while stressing that the religion of his upbringing was in no way superior).[47] In his photographs, Vroman thus refrained from imposing his own expectations, desires, or prejudices on subjects who did not share his background.

Captions read: "'Moki Towns' (Snake Dance Walpi 'Snake Priests')," "'Moki Towns' (Snake Dance, Walpi," "Walpi Snake Priests," and "Walpi Chief Snake Priest (Harry)." Walpi is a Hopi village in northeastern Arizona.

Vroman, however, did not hold a monopoly on his images. A February 1911 article in National Geographic by Marion L. Oliver included upwards of ten images attributed to Vroman, including at least two from "Volume 12, Hopi, Pueblos." Though Vroman had endeavored to present the scenes without judgement, the article added captions and accompanying text that Vroman seemingly never vetted.

In the first-person, the narrator recounted, with apparent contempt, “a young squaw with the fattest and brownest baby I have ever seen. He was as naked as the day he came into the world, and was eating, much to my horror, a melon.” In contrast to such a disparaging description of the baby, Oliver described an animal in far more charitable (and indeed humanizing) terms: “instead of seeing some Indian child … a little gray burro’s face looked back at me. He seemed quite at home in the room.”[48] After the spectacle, Oliver reflected, “the intense religious attitude … impressed me more than I was willing to admit” and that “the whole thing [left] me rather dazed. It seemed so weird, so unreal.”[49] Descriptions of the Hopi ritual were wrapped in derision, in effect "otherizing" an “uncivilized” people. Oliver conveyed as much, writing that “the little Hopi town" was "unchanged, unmoved by the centuries of civilization.”[50] In this way, anthropological tropes about a culture in stasis were actively used to diminish Native ways of life. Any professed admiration for the Dance obscured deep animus towards Native peoples.

Any appraisal of Vroman's body of work on the Museum-Gates Expedition must arbitrate between the dignity it bestowed on native subjects and the oppressive systems of knowledge it helped uphold. There are, unfortunately, no easy answers, not least because those who accompanied Vroman took far more than photos. Hundreds of physical objects collected from the expedition still reside in the District of Columbia, rather than their places of origin in present-day Arizona.

A final selection from the Arizona, Gates Party, Navaho's album attests to many of these paradoxes. A "Navaho cook" identified as "Charlie" is pictured with Vroman, Hough, Gates, and a man named "John Divelbess." (Notably, this means someone other than Vroman snapped the shot). In Vroman's caption, Charlie's name appears alongside the others. Yet, the Navajo man serves the party supper, and stands while they sit and eat. An American flag hangs limply above Charlie's left shoulder, freighted with its own symbolism. In this photograph and hundreds of others, Vroman both elevated and suppressed the people he endeavored to portray without prejudice.

Identical notes at the beginning of both albums that read "C. Pardee" suggest that they made their way to Princeton via the Pardee family, a theory proposed by Princeton’s formative former Curator of Western Americana, Alfred Bush.[51]

The family’s patriarch, Ariovistus Pardee (1810-1892), was a coal baron credited with building up the town of Hazleton, Pennsylvania and Lafayette College from virtually nothing.[52] His son was Lieutenant Calvin Pardee (1841-1923), a veteran of the Civil War and, like his father, a “millionaire coal operator of Hazleton, Pa.”[53]

It seems that it was Calvin who originally purchased the Vroman albums, likely while perusing the photographer’s eponymous bookstore in Pasadena. (The two albums fetched quite a price at the time; one inflation calculator estimates that the $175 that Pardee paid would be worth $5,310 in 2021 dollars).[54] Not only do Calvin's initials match each album's penciled inscriptions, both dated April 1903, but a Philadelphia newspaper reported in February 1903 that “Mr. and Mrs. Calvin Pardee and Miss Olive Pardee, of Germantown, will spend the remainder of the winter in California.”[55] (Olive Pardee was one of Calvin’s seven children).[56] After this 1903 sojourn, it would seem the albums returned eastward with Calvin Pardee.

In recent years, appraisal of Vroman's work has undergone a wholesale revival, with his photography newly esteemed. In 2011, Swann Auction Galleries set a new record for prices for the photographer when it auctioned his album "165 Works: Arizona and New Mexico, Volume II" for $62,400.[57] Though from an 1897 trip to the "Moki towns," the record-setting album appears nearly identical in layout and theme to the two at Princeton, filled with over 100 platinum prints, all exactingly labelled in Vroman's calligraphy and depicting the same subjects—"the Snake Dance, Native American dwellings, landscapes, and [his] traveling party."[58]

Other members of the Pardee family would later become intimately tied to Princeton. Mary Grumman Winans Pardee (1888-1980) married another of Calvin's children, Ariovistus Pardee, and by the 1970s owned Tusculum, the house originally built by University president John Witherspoon in 1773.[59] (The Winan family also knew Princeton well, with Mary’s father Samuel Winans serving as a professor of Greek and dean of the university from 1899 to 1903).[60] Ariovistus “Ario” Pardee (presumably named after his grandfather), in turn, expanded the family fortune in anthracite coal mining and himself graduated from the Class of 1897.[61]

With the Pardee family's numerous connections to Princeton, it seems the Vroman albums converged with the Western Americana collection at Firestone sometime in the latter half of the 20th century. It was there, in the library's old "duplicates room"—a large repository for unsolicited gifts or ones already in Princeton's possession, though curators could intercede if they found anything desirable—that Bush happened upon these "obvious treasures."[62] Had he not recovered the albums, they would have gone on sale to Princeton students (at bargain basement prices, no less) at the end of the week![63] Though Bush had been a friend of Mary Winans Pardee, she had passed away by the time he accessioned the albums, leaving only an obscure idea as to who in the Pardee family actually donated them.[64] It is thus unclear exactly when or how the albums came to Princeton in the decades after Calvin Pardee's pivotal 1903 trip to California.

[1] Walter Hough, “Archaeological Field Work in Northeastern Arizona. The Museum-Gates Expedition of 1901” (Washington, D.C.: Government Press Office, 1903), 296.

[2] Ibid., 296.

[3] Ibid., 287.

[4] Gina Rappaport, “Peter Goodard Gates photograph album of ‘Museum-Gates’ archaeological expedition to the Southwest, circa 1901,” Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2015, https://sirismm.si.edu/EADpdfs/NAA.PhotoLot.2011-38.pdf. Hough, “Archaeological Field Work,” 288.

[5] Hough, “Archaeological Field Work,” 288.

[6] Heather A. Shannon (2017), “Primitive Camera: Adam Clark Vroman and the Status of Photography in Late-Nineteenth-Century America,” PhD diss., Graduate School-New Brunswick: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (retrieved from author), 99-100, 106-108.

[7] Hough, "Archaeological Field Work," 332.

[8] William Webb and Andrew Smith, Dwellers at the Source: Southwestern Indian Photographs of A.C. Vroman, 1895-1904 (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973), 3-4.

[9] Jennifer Watts, “Adam Clark Vroman: The Inquisitive Eye,” in Adam Clark Vroman: Platinum Prints, 1895-1904 (Los Angeles: Michael Dawson Galley; Santa Fe: Andrew Smith Gallery, 2005), 5.

[10] Ibid., 5.

[11] https://www.vromansbookstore.com.

[12] Watts, “The Inquisitive Eye,” 5; Shannon, “Primitive Camera," 101.

[13] Shannon, “Primitive Camera,” 102.

[14] Ibid., 118.

[15] Siders, Jennifer Torres, “Caltech’s Oldest Building Turns 100,” Caltech Magazine (Fall 2017), https://magazine.caltech.edu/post/caltechs-oldest-building-turns-100.

[16] Shannon, “Primitive Camera,” 19-20.

[17] Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 225.

[18] Watts, “The Inquisitive Eye,” 6.

[19] Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 225.

[20] Shannon, “Primitive Camera,” 20.

[21] Ibid., 103.

[22] Ibid., 102.

[23] Ibid., 115-16.

[24] Ibid., 121.

[25] Watts, “Inquisitive Eye,” 5.

[26] Ibid., 8.

[27] Ibid., 8.

[28] Shannon, “Primitive Camera,” 21.

[29] Comments from Martha Sandweiss, May 12, 2021.

[30] Shannon, "Primitive Camera," 117.

[31] Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 224-25.

[32] Ibid., 225.

[33] Shannon, “Primitive Camera,” 38.

[34] Watts, “The Inquisitive Eye,” 6.

[35] Peter Gold, Review of Hopi Photographers/Hopi Images, Victor Masayesva Jr. and Erin Younger, eds. Studies in Visual Communication 10(1), Winter 1984: 87.

[36] Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), xi.

[37] Ibid., 13.

[38] Webb and Smith, Dwellers at the Source, 6.

[39] Ibid., 6-7.

[40] Hough, “Archaeological Field Work,” 297.

[41] “Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1901-1902,” Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

[42] “Twenty-First Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1899-1900,” Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, x-xi.

[43] Ibid., ix.

[44] Shannon, "Primitive Camera," 98-99.

[45] “Twenty-Third Annual Report, x-xi.

[46] William Webb and Andrew Smith, Dwellers at the Source: Southwestern Indian Photographs of A.C. Vroman, 1895-1904 (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973), 85.

[47] Ibid., 85.

[48] Marion L. Oliver, “The Snake Dance,” National Geographic Magazine, vol. XXII, no. Two, Feb. 1911, 108. National Geographic Archive 1888-1994, https://natgeo-gale-com.ezproxy.princeton.edu/natgeo/archive/FeatureArticlesDetailsPage/FeatureArticlesDetailsWindow?disableHighlighting=false&displayGroupName=NatGeo-Features&currPage=1&scanId=&query=TX+marion+AND+DA+119110200+AND+PUPH+%22National+Geographic+Magazine%22&docIndex=&source=&prodId=NGMA&searchwithinresults=&p=NGMA&mode=view&catId=&u=prin77918&limiter=&display-query=TX+marion+AND+DA+119110200+AND+PUPH+%22National+Geographic+Magazine%22&displayGroups=&contentModules=&action=e&sortBy=&documentId=GALE%7CBYRRSL409197851&windowstate=normal&activityType=AdvancedSearch&failOverType=&commentary=#pageNo=22. Accessed 9 May 2021.

[49] Ibid., 137.

[50] Ibid., 137.

[51] Electronic correspondence with Alfred Bush, May 3, 2021.

[52] “Pardee king of coal fields, father of Hazleton,” Standard Speaker, January 16, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20170924081616/http://standardspeaker.com/news/pardee-king-of-coal-barons-father-of-hazleton-1.1993917.

[53] “Flashes: $50,000 for Princeton,” Trenton Evening Times, March 31, 1923, https://infoweb-newsbank-com.

[54] CPI Inflation Calculator, https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1903?amount=175.

[55] “Purely Personal,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 22, 1903, https://infoweb-newsbank-com. The Pardee couple would continue wintering in California, traveling there with a different child, Howard, in 1907. “Chat about Germantown Society Folks,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 13, 1907, https://infoweb-newsbank-com.

[56] “Lieut Calvin Pardee,” Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/10126868/calvin-pardee.

[57] "Adam Clark Vroman," MutualArt.com, https://www.mutualart.com/Artist/Adam-Clark-Vroman/499CD4EBCA5DE411.

[58] "Lot 38: Vroman, Adam Clark (1856-1916) Lavish album entitled "Arizona and New Mexico, Volume II," invaluable.com, March 24, 2011 https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/vroman-adam-clark-1856-1916-lavish-album-titled-a-38-c-1dc2366137.

[59] Bush, May 3, 2021.

[60] “Mary Winans Pardee,” Trenton Evening Times, May 9, 1980, https://infoweb-newsbank-com; “Prof. Sam’l Winans of Princeton Dead,” Trenton Evening Times, July 26, 1910, https://infoweb-newsbank-com.

[61] “Pardee, Princeton Resident, Is Dead,” Trenton Evening Times, January 44, 1944, https://infoweb-newsbank-com.

[62] Bush, May 3, 2021.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Ibid.

Bibliography

“Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.” Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. • Twenty-First Annual Report, 1899-1900 • Twenty-Second Annual Report (Parts I and II), 1900-1901 • Twenty-Third Annual Report, 1901-1902

Bush, Alfred. Personal correspondence. Email, May 3, 2021.

Dippie, Brian. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982.

Hough, Walter. “Archaeological Field Work in Northeastern Arizona. The Museum-Gates Expedition of 1901.” Washington: Government Press Office, 1903.

Gold, Peter. Review of Hopi Photographers/Hopi Images, Victor Masayesva Jr. and Erin Younger, eds. Studies in Visual Communication 10(1), Winter 1984: 86-89.

Lévy Zumwalt, Rosemary. Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

Jacknis, Ira. “Franz Boas and Photography.” Studies in Visual Communication 10(1), Winter 1984: 2–60.

Oliver, Marion. “The Snake Dance.” National Geographic Magazine, Vol. XXII (no. 2), February 1911. National Geographic Archive 1888-1994, library.princeton.edu/resolve/lookup?url=https://natgeo.gale.com/natgeo/archive/CoversDetailsPage/CoversDetailsWindow?disableHighlighting=false&displayGroupName=NatGeoCovers&currPage=&scanId=&query=&docIndex=&searchwithinresults=&p=NGMA&mode=view&catId=&limiter=&displayquery=&displayGroups=&contentModules=&action=e&sortBy=&documentId=GALE%7CBYQQPV562659851&windowstate=normal&activityType=&failOverType=&commentary=&source=Bookmark&prodId=NGMA&u=prin77918. Accessed 9 May 2021.

Shannon, Heather A. (2017). “Primitive Camera: Adam Clark Vroman and the Status of Photography in Late-Nineteenth-Century America.” PhD diss., Graduate School-New Brunswick: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Retrieved from author.

Sandweiss, Martha A. Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Sandweiss, Martha. Comments over email. May 12, 2021.

“United States National Museum, 1881-1911.” Smithsonian Institution Archives. https://siarchives.si.edu/history/featured-topics/baird/united-states-national-museum-1881-1911.

Watts, Jennifer A. and Andrew Smith. Adam Clark Vroman: Platinum Prints, 1895-1904. Los Angeles: Michael Dawson Gallery; Santa Fe: Andrew Smith Gallery Inc., 2005.

Webb, William and Robert A. Weinstein. Dwellers at the Source: Southwestern Indian Photographs of A.C. Vroman, 1895-1904. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973.

Newspapers & Magazines consulted:

• Caltech Magazine

• Philadelphia Inquirer

• Princeton Alumni Weekly

• Times-Union

• Trenton Evening News

Databases consulted:

• America's Historical Newspapers

• Ancestry Library

• CPI Inflation Calculator

• Find a Grave

• Invaluable.com