Drawings from a Pictorial Calendar

These pages come from a book displaying one hundred years of Kiowa history—the summer of 1828 to the winter of 1928–29. Images of ceremonial activities as well as scenes that record romances and personal losses document the world that Silver Horn knew during a relentless period of change on the Plains. He generally provided three images per page, which an oral historian would have used as memory aids for presentations at social and ceremonial gatherings.
Silver Horn descended from important chiefs and warriors that continued a family tradition of calendar keeping. His grandnephew, Stephen Mopope, became one of the important Kiowa Six painters whose work is also included in this exhibition.

1874—1875—1876
The first scene on the left includes an icehouse used as a temporary prison at Fort Sill. In the central panel, a man and woman are wrapped in a single blanket, illustrating a form of courtship practiced among many Plains couples. The final scene, on the right, next to a bare winter tree, refers to the sheep issued by the U.S. government in an unsuccessful attempt to transform the Kiowa buffalo hunters into settled herders.

Winter 1883, Summer 1884, and Winter 1885
On the left of the second page, Silver Horn drew domestic cattle and a silver dollar to show the modest income gained in 1883–84 from leasing reservation land to American cattlemen. In the central section, a tree in leaf represents the summer of 1884 when the planned Medicine Lodge ceremony did not occur. The death of a woman struck by lightning after she took refuge under a wagon during a storm is also pictured. In the winter scene on the far right, the artist records an instance of wife stealing.