Improved Order of Red Men The Trail

Uncommon broadsheet promoting one of the oldest fraternal organizations in America.

This stupendous broadsheet was designed and published by T.C. Fielding in Boston in 1888. It was issued to promote the Improved Order of Red Men, a fraternal organization that allegedly traces its roots to the Sons of Liberty and their actions at the Boston Tea Party while dressed as Native Americans.

The incredible composition features numerous scenes of idealized Native American heroism. The buffalo hunt, spiritual dancing, and smoking a peace pipe are all shown, along with portraits of stoic Native warriors. The skillfully engraved images are intertwined with Native American iconography like bows & arrows, pipes, war clubs, and strings of wampum.

Despite the idyllic content, the broadsheets contrast sharply with the contemporary reality of devastated populations constricted to reservations. The relationship with Native Americans was almost entirely superficial. Perhaps unsurprisingly, membership in the Order of Red Men was restricted to white men until 1974. The rituals and regalia of the order are generally based on 19th-century impressions of indigenous populations, with outsiders known as ‘palefaces’ and local ‘tribes’ overseen by a ‘sachem.’ In 1886, its membership requirements were defined in the same pseudo-Indian phrasing as the rest of the constitution:

Sec. 1. No person shall be entitled to adoption into the Order except a free white male of good moral character and standing, of the full age of twenty-one great suns, who believes in the existence of a Great Spirit, the Creator and Preserver of the Universe, and is possessed of some known reputable means of support.