DeCost Smith was born in Skaneateles New York. His devotion to Indian subjects in his artwork gained him appreciation and allowed him to continue to record their lives and customs.
Includes correspondence, newspaper clippings, photographs, notebooks, brochures, manuscripts, maps, paintings, and sketches. Focus areas of the notes for articles, speeches, and books cover a wide variety of topics including the Onondaga Indians and their reservation, festivals and culture, Sitting Bull using a telephone, Tendoi The climber, articles by Elizabeth Custer, Moravian missions, history of Amenia, N.Y., Fort Buford, manuscript regarding Indian attitudes towards African Americans, Low Dog, Jean Francois Millet and his Indian paintings, Stockbridge, Karl Bodmer, Indian costumes, and articles from Century and Antiques Magazine. Correspondence from the United States Indian Service, Luther Kelly, B. M. Graff, Edgar S. Cameron, and the Linnaean Society of New York. Pamphlets include information on saddles, big game hunting, and Iroquois mythology. Maps, from the late 1800s, are annotated by Smith with the paths he traveled by wagon. Maps include Oregon, Indian reservations of the United States, and western and southwestern United States. Oil paintings, charcoal and pencil sketches, of Indians and reservations.
De Cost Smith Collection #9174. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Objects associated with this collection are at the National Museum of the American Indian.
Also see collection #9134.
Original Huntington Free Library box numbers have been retained.
Notes and drawings.
Notes and drawings.
Correspondence with between Smith and Graff regarding the artist J. F. Millet. Also photos and newspaper clippings.
Correspondence regarding a coat owned by Smith that may have been drawn by Sitting Bull. Some correspondence with Joshua Low Dog. Also photos.
Correspondence, photographs, printed material, notes, regarding Millet and his paintings. Includes excepts from the Century Magazine, May 1910, a copy of The Month at Goodspeed's, March-April, 1945.
Titles include: L.D. Stone and Co catalog, A Big Game Paradise, Huron Folk-Lore, A Costumed Human Figure from Tampico Washington, Wanderings in South America.
Newspaper clippings, notes
Maps of the United States and Indian Territory, some annotated.
Sketchbook includes drawings of the Onondaga by Smith and Tom Beaver.
DeCost Smith and Millet article