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Lot 2449

[RED JACKET OR SAGOYEWATHA. 1758?-1830.]

11 June 2008, 13:00 EDT
New York

Sold for US$720 inc. premium

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[RED JACKET OR SAGOYEWATHA. 1758?-1830.]

Lock of hair clipped from the body of Red Jacket, together with a pencil note and envelope from George Copway, the Ojibwa lecturer also known as Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh. The note reads in full: "My dr Dr, I leave here on your table the hair of the celebrated Red Jacket whose body I took up last week and got this [on] purpose for you- I am yr friend- Yours faithfully, G Copway."

The circumstances of Red Jacket's exhumation, some 20 years after his death, are detailed in a letter that William Cullen Bryant wrote to an authenticator at the Buffalo Historical Society in 1884. In 1852 (the envelope is dated March 20th, 1852), George Copway was lecturing in Buffalo. He called attention to Red Jacket's neglected grave and inspired a neighboring businessman, Wheeler Hotchkiss, to exhume the remains with the intention of placing them in a new coffin with a suitable monument. Why Copway and Hotchkiss, assisted by the undertaker Farwell, decided to exhume Red Jacket before the monument was built is unclear, but their action offended local Seneca who promptly reclaimed the body. Red Jacket had stated that he wished no white man to dig his grave and no white man to bury him.

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