Mexkemáuastan, Atsina Chief

Description

Mexkemáuastan ("Stirring Iron") was among the many Indians who boarded the keelboat during the tense encounter at the Atsina camp on August 5. He was, in fact, one of the principal causes of concern, for he had threatened to shoot the superintendent at Fort McKenzie the year before. On this day and at a later meeting at Fort McKenzie he adopted a friendly manner, but the portrait and the corresponding aquatint (Vignette XX) show him as a seemingly forbidding figure armed with a gun and a bow. Like Niätóhsä (see Plate 239), Mexkemáuastan was a chief and a medicine man and wore his hair in the same characteristic fashion. There are large shell ornaments in his ears and he apparently wears fringed and beaded leggings under his red painted buffalo robe.