On Tuesday evening I attended a presentation by the Dickinson College Archives’ Carlisle Indian School Resource Center about their digital scanning project. The handout for this program included cover images of two Carlisle Indian School publications: The Indian Craftsman and The Red Man. They caught my eye because Lone Star Dietz and his bride—he and Angel DeCora had been married a little over a year when the first edition appeared—created and produced the school’s literary magazine. Dietz contributed the artwork and almost all of the cover images. The title of the magazine was changed starting with the second year because of confusion with Stickley’s popular journal The Craftsman.
The differences between the first cover art and that Dietz made for later works was striking. It was similar to a drawing he made for the December 1904 edition Chilocco Indian School’s The Indian School Journal. Although that school claimed him as a student and arranged his transportation to Chilocco, there is no evidence that he actually arrived there. The piece used on the February 1909 magazine might have originally been intended for a Chilocco publication.
The first piece of Dietz’s art to appear in a Carlisle document was on page 3 of the June 19,1908 edition of the school’s newspaper The Arrow. This design was published about the time the school acknowledged Dietz’s elopement with the head of the Native Art Department. The shift in style was likely due to DeCora’s influence. Dietz would never return to the previous style.
The other cover image used of the handout came from a later edition of The Red Man magazine—cover art was often used multiples times across several years. Dietz’s style would evolve but never back to how it was for Chilocco publications.
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