Cree Woman

Description

According to the diaries, Bodmer made two drawings in October of the wife of Deschamps, a man employed by the fur company as a hunter. She was said to be Cree, with a distinctive pattern of blue-black tattoo marks on her chin. Although an inscription associated with Plate 267 implies that the subject is Assiniboin, this portrait and Plate 268 seem clearly to depict the same person and are presumably the paintings done of Deschamps's wife at Fort Union. She was pictured again in Tableau 33 of the aquatint atlas. The woman is wearing a hide dress, possibly elk skin, with a flaplike attachment on the yoke that may be the tail of one of the animals used to make the garment. Her ears are adorned with a pair of elaborate, multitiered earrings of dentalium shells and blue beads as well as a number of smaller ones made of the same materials. A detail of the earrings is shown in the corner of Plate 268.