Dixon-Wanamaker Expedition to Crow Agency

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
File:Information icon4.svg This page needs visual enhancement.
You can help All The Tropes by finding a high-quality image or video to illustrate the topic of this page.



The original nitrate footage that comprises the 1908 Dixon-Wanamaker Expedition to Crow Agency was discovered in a Montana antique store in 1982 and subsequently donated to the Human Studies Film Archives, Smithsonian Institution. It is the only known surviving film footage from the 1908 Rodman Wanamaker-sponsored expedition to record American Indian life in the west, filmed and produced both for an educational screening at Wanamaker's department store in Philadelphia and to document what Wanamaker and photographer Joseph K. Dixon considered a "vanishing race." Dixon and his son Roland shot motion picture film as well as thousands of photographs (most of the photographs are archived at Indiana University).

This film captures life on Crow Agency, Crow Fair and a recreation of the Battle of Little Big Horn featuring four of Custer's Crow scouts.

Films from later Wanamaker expeditions are archived at the National Archives and the American Museum of Natural History. The original film was photochemically preserved at Cinema Arts in 1983.

Dixon-Wanamaker Expedition to Crow Agency was added to the National Film Registry in 2018.

Tropes used in Dixon-Wanamaker Expedition to Crow Agency include: