Dressing Globally

This dress reveals fascinating insights into the changing lives of Plains Indian women as the developing global economy reached western North America during the early 1800s. While its “side-fold” style is traditional, the dress is covered with a wealth of exotic materials from distant parts of the world, such as Italian glass beads and English brass buttons. French, English, and Spanish traders introduced many of these items to Indian peoples before Lewis and Clark’s expedition and even before the United States was created.

Locate geographical territories, indigenous trade routes, English fur-trading routes, tribal regions, forts and settlements.

Explore the information presented here via a selection of images.

Explore the far-flung origins and social histories of the materials on this unique dress.

What goods did Indian and non-Indian people want from each other, and how did they get them?

Investigate the identity of the cosmopolitan Indian woman who owned this dress 200 years ago.

Design and Production
Robin Marlowe

Maps
Deborah Reade
Jesse Taggert

Research and Content
Castle McLaughlin, curator
Emily Van Dyke, student intern
T. Rose Holdcraft, objects conservator

Photography
Hillel Burger, Peabody Museum
Harley Erickson, Peabody Museum
Castle McLaughlin, Peabody Museum

Images
Anna Vojtech: original paintings of the Bloodroot plant
Winfield Coleman: original drawings of dress and quillwork techniques
Al Kirsch: photograph of Murano glass factory
Mark Taylor: photograph of the Maldives
George Catlin: Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians, New York, Riley and Putnam, 1841
State Historical Society of North Dakota: photographs of Mrs. Little Crow quilling and of woman scraping hide at Fort Berthold
Joslyn Art Museum: engraving of Fort Union by Karl Bodmer, 1833
The British Library: illumination of dyers, a miniature in Jean de Ries’s
Le Livre des propriétés des choses, 1482
The National Trust (U.K.): reproduction of the painting Sir William Heathcote, 3rd Bt (1746-1819), the Rev. William Heathcote, and Major Vincent Hawkins Gilbert out Hunting, by Daniel Gardner, c. 1790

Copy editor
Donna Dickerson, Peabody Museum