McKenney, Thomas Loraine. History of the Indian tribes of North America…v.2. Philadelphia: J. T. Bowen, 1848-50.

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Thomas Loraine McKenney and James Hall’s highly regarded Indian Trades of North America (1948) is famous for its realistic portraits of Native Americans. These plates are based on paintings by the artist Charles Bird King, who was employed by the War Department to paint the Native American delegates visiting Washington D.C., and form the basis of the War Department's Indian Gallery. Most of King's original paintings were subsequently destroyed in a fire at the Smithsonian, and their appearance in McKenney and Hall's magnificent work is our only record of the depictions of the most prominent Native Americanleaders of the nineteenth century. Among the sitters were Sequoyah, Red Jacket, Micanopy, Major Ridge, Cornplanter, and Osceola.

Osceola was a notable and fierce Seminole war chief who resisted the U.S. government’s efforts to relocate natives from Florida to Oklahoma, after many Seminole chiefs ceded to a truce with U.S. General Thomas Sidney Jesup in May 1837. Osceola was captured in the U.S. camps in October 21, 1837 after being deceived into a “peace council” by Gen. Jesup. He was sometimes called “Billy Powell” due to suspicions that his father was the English trader, William Powell.

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