Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 20))

GERTRUDE KÄSEBIER.*

SHE simply had to make pictures. She could not help it. Why,
she did it from the beginning. When she was a little bit of a
thing, out at our frontier home, often, when the water fell upon
the kitchen floor, I have caught her, tracing with a stick (by
drawing it through the little pool and making the water follow the line of
the stick) funny little pictures.
“We tried to make a musician of her, but she would have none of it.
Her father had a piano packed all the way across the prairie for her use.
At the same time he had one or two paintings brought out by the pack-
train to beautify our bare log walls. These were hung in the room that
served as our dining-room and parlor. Shortly afterward, glancing into the
room, looking for little Gertrude, whom I had missed for some while, I
found the child on one knee on the floor, on the opposite side of the room
from one of the pictures, viewing it through her small hands, telescope-like,
talking to herself meanwhile, asking herself if it would ever be possible for
her to make such a picture. The child was simply crazy about pictures,
while no persuasion or threat could make her take up the study of the
piano. This was specially aggravating, as it was no simple matter to have a
piano in that part of the country, whereeven a house of any size was a
curiosity, and white women and children almost unknown.
" I and my children were the only ones in our section, and the white
hunters and trappers used to come miles and miles to see us. They were
very good and kind to us, and it would have fared ill with any one who
attempted to insult or injure us. I remember how at Christmas-time they
told me I should hang outside our house-door, not our stockings, but a big
pillowcase. They went or sent hundreds of miles to get some of the gifts
that they showered upon us, and the pillowcase was full to overflowing with
their kindly and quaint offerings. Among other things was a little packet
which Gertrude seized and tore open. It contained a little, illustrated
spelling primer—a great rarity in those parts—and a beautifui gold ring.
The ring fell to the floor unnoticed, as the child simply devoured the crude
little illustrations of the book.
“ We always had to keep on the watch for hostile Indians. I don’t see
why Gertrude likes Indians so much now. She has not them to thank that
she is here to-day. I can not help feeling, from my own knowledge and
experience, that the only good Indian is the dead one. Once, on one of my
trips, it was so terribly cold that I had to make the children walk through the
heavy exhausting snow to keep them from dozing off into the great frozen
sleep of those terrible winters. You feel so tired, your eyes get terribly
heavy, a delicious feeling of sleep creeps all through your blood; you find
it hard to resist the tempting rest. It seems so good, so good, too good to
be harmful. But very few ever again wake out of it in this world. Gertrude


*Reprinted with permission from PHOTOGRAPHY (London), March 19, 1904.

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