By Edgar M. Howell
Hermann Stieffel,
Soldier Artist
of the West
A number of gifted artists painted the West and the colorful Indian-fighting army of the post-Civil-War period, but since none of these were military men their work lacked the viewpoint that only a soldier could provide.
German-born Hermann Stieffel, for 24 years a private in the U.S. Infantry, painted a series of water colors while serving in the Indian country in the 1860's and 1870's. Although Stieffel could never be called talented, and certainly was untutored as an artist, his unusually canny eye for the colorful and graphic and his meticulous attention to detail have given us valuable pictorial documentaries on the West during the Indian wars.
The Author: Edgar M. Howell is curator of military history in the United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
The American West has never wanted for artists with a high sense of the documentary. Through the talented hands of men like George Catlin, Carl Bodmer and Alfred Jacob Miller, Frederick Remington, and the cowboy painter Charles M. Russell the trans-Mississippi regions have been pictured as have few other areas on earth.[1] From historical and ethnological standpoints these men made tremendous and timeless contributions to our American heritage. But the West held an esthetic fascination for the untutored and less talented as well, and not a few soldiers, miners, stage drivers, and just plain adventurers recorded their impressions on paper and canvas. Crude though many of these works are, they are nonetheless significant, for they are a graphic record of what these men saw, where they lived, and what they did, in many cases the only record of particular places and events, for the camera of L. A. Huffman and his colleagues did not come into its own until the late 1870's.[2] Without them we would have no description, graphic or otherwise, of much of the West both before and after the Civil War—the early trading posts and forts, the Oregon, Santa Fe, and Overland Trails, the Bozeman Trail, the stage stations, all of which played a part in the opening and development of the West.[3]
