Photograph of the Nebraska Indians Baseball Team, 1909.
N.P. 1909. Silver gelatin print 5 ½ x 3 ¾ inches on larger mount. Some fading, very good overall. Very Good. Item #List2015
The Nebraska Indians were perhaps the most successful and longest tenured American Indian barnstorming baseball team, playing for twenty-one years, from 1897-1917, and touring prolifically. The first team was composed of players from the Genoa Industrial and Agricultural School, the Santee Normal School, and the nearby Omaha and Winnebago reservations. Guy Wilder Green, a young lawyer who had graduated from the University of Nebraska Law School, organized the team after watching the Genoa Industrial School team play. Green would eventually recruit players from the network of indigenous boarding schools that were active at the time, and pick up other players including Euro-Americans while touring from town to town. This image, of which we find no similar examples, shows the team in 1909, the year in which the Nebraska State Journal reported that the team had won thirty-nine of its last forty games. While some postcards, which were sold as souvenirs, exist in the trade, photographs are less common, with only one to our knowledge appearing in auction records. This image, which shows the team in their baseball uniforms and without any stereotypical props, as were used in much of the advertising material, is an important record of the team.
Price: $750.00