O’Donoghue
Chief John Jumper, Seminole, late nineteenth century
Cabinet card, black-and-white photograph mounted on card, 6 ½ x 4 ¼ inches (16.5 x 10.8 cm)
Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Early Americas, Exploration and Navigation, MDC PC 2020.3.22

Cabinet cards were a type of relatively inexpensive photographs mounted on cardstock, large and sturdy enough to display on furniture, sometimes propped up on small easels. The production of cabinet cards began during the 1860s and lasted until the 1920s. Originally, the photographs most commonly used were albumen prints, but, by the 1890s, other processes—matte collodion, gelatin, and gelatin bromide—came to the fore. Photographers would have their names, and sometimes elaborate advertisements for their studios, printed on the cards, as O’Donoghue—a photographer in West Palm Beach, about whom nothing else, not even a first name, is yet known—did here. During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, cabinet cards constituted the most popular mode of commercial portraiture, used for both family pictures and collectible images of celebrities.

The subject of this portrait, the Seminole leader John Jumper lived a fascinating life that intersected with a number of pivotal events in American history. Born in Florida around 1820, Jumper was also known by his Seminole name Heneha Mekko and was the nephew of Micanopy, the hereditary principal chief of the Seminole. During the Second Seminole War (1835–42), Jumper fought with his people against the United States. After their defeat, Jumper and many of the Seminole were forcibly removed from their homeland to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma, where he succeeded his uncle and his older brother as principal chief from 1849 to 1865. In 1856, he oversaw the establishment of the Seminole Nation.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Jumper sided with the South and enlisted in the Confederate Army, leading Seminole troops into several battles in Indian Territory as a major in charge of the First Battalion Seminole Mounted Rifles and then as a colonel commanding the First Regiment Seminole Volunteers. After the War, Jumper became a Baptist minister, serving as the pastor of Spring Baptist Church in Sasakwa, near his home, until 1894. He was again elected principal chief of the Seminole Nation from 1882 to 1885.

Why Jumper sat for his portrait in a Florida photographer’s studio is unclear, but the resulting cabinet card continues to have historical and cultural value—enough to have been preserved and collected. An inscription on the reverse reads: “Johnny Jumper 100 years old, that fought a hand to hand fight with Billy Bowlegs—the Indian Chief—but with Tommy Hawks. —— Johnny Jumper is a Ceminole Chief.” Billy Bowlegs might refer to one of two Seminole leaders with the same monicker—Holata Micco, who fought in both the Second and Third Seminole Wars, or Sonuk Mikko, who, like Jumper, led a company of Native American soldiers during the Civil War, but on the side of the Union. We do not know if Jumper actually engaged in personal combat with either of these men, but such a tale, even if apocryphal, would have appealed to audiences at the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth eager for accounts of past derring-do, particularly by heroes of formerly independent and warlike Native American tribes. The breathless hyperbole of the story of a duel with tomahawks is seconded by the exaggeration of Jumper’s age. He was around the age of 75 when he died in 1896.

Also of note is the fact that in this studio portrait Jumper wears traditional Seminole clothing, including a long, tunic-like shirt, vest, neckerchief, and turban; he is barefoot and holds a pipe between his lips. Yet, in photographs taken when he was younger, Jumper sports a typical late-nineteenth-century coat and tie. Regardless of the personal, cultural, or economic reasons Jumper may have chosen to pose in Seminole garb in this image, it would have fulfilled the expectations of white viewers wanting to see simplified and stereotypical representations of “authentic” Native Americans. The production of such representations became a veritable industry that endured well into the twentieth century and went hand in hand with continued efforts to cast Native Americans as premodern primitives, thus justifying their ongoing oppression and dispossession by the U.S. government and white society at large. As late as 1930, the American photographer Edward S. Curtis, for example, published the final volume of The North American Indian, a collection of his images of Native American dressed in traditional-appearing costumes that often had little to do with their lives, or even their tribes, as a way of preserving (while marketing) the likenesses of a “vanishing race.”