Tom Benjey's Weblog

Late last week an email message dropped into my inbox with a link to a 2022 newspaper article from Rice Lake, Wisconsin, Lone Star Dietz’s home town: https://www.apg-wi.com/rice_lake_chronotype/sports/restoring-respect-discovered-photographs-show-new-light-to-controversial-lone-star-dietz/article_239bed98-673c-541a-85fc-ce1f170d9844.html

The article discussed the three youthful photos of Lone Star Dietz (included in the top row above). The photos are now owned by a successful Washington State attorney who grew up near Rice Lake. His parents bought them at an auction some years ago. The name Carl Overby was in pencil on the back of one of them. Overby was a year younger than Dietz and lived two streets away from him. Four questions about these photos remain:

1. When were they taken?
2. Who took them?
3. When were they taken?
4. Why were they sent to Overby?

Dietz is clearly young, in his late teens or early twenties, when they were taken. That would mean between 1902 and 1910. From the backgrounds in the photos, they were taken in a professional studio. Carlisle photographers slapped their names onto the photos they took, so they could have been taken anywhere Dietz had been. The reason for sending them to Carl Overby may have been an attempt by Dietz to solidify his claims of Indian heritage to the people of Rice Lake. A 1912 article from Carlisle’s press agent told a story of Dietz’s birth to a Lakota woman. This prompted denials from Dietz’s father. In 1915, the elder Dietz went so far as to have six prominent men from Rice Lake attest to Lone Star being his and his white wife’ natural-born son. Lone Star might have sent them to Overby sometime during this period.

I sent images of Syke’s photo to the photo curator at Cumberland County Historical Society to see if he had seen them before. He hadn’t but sent me the closest images he had (in the lower row above). These photos were clearly not taken in a studio. Dietz arrived at Carlisle in September 1907 and took classes in the Native Art Building, which was originally intended to be a photography studio. He may have gotten a fellow student to take these photos in a storage area in that building. At the end of the 1907-08 school year, the administration acknowledged his elopement with Angel deCora, head of the Art Department, and made him an assistant instructor. After that, he would have had the run of the building and income to pay for professional photographs. So, it is possible he had the Sykes photos taken somewhere between 1908 and 1915, when he left Carlisle.