Book Review: The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West

The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West. By Martha A. Sandweiss. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025. Hardcover, 368 pp. $32.00.

Reviewed by Megan Kate Nelson

Today, photographs are ubiquitous in our lives. We see hundreds of them in a single day courtesy of websites, social media accounts, and group texts. We are all photographers in our own right, snapping and cropping images before posting them for everyone to see.

Such an image-dense world was likely unimaginable to Alexander Gardner, one of the first commercial photographers to document major American events in the mid-19th century. In his time, photographs were laborious productions, each one a singular, time-consuming achievement that required glass plates, an array of chemicals, abundant light for exposure, a dark room for developing, and clean water.

Gardner is best known to Civil War historians for his portraits of President Abraham Lincoln and his haunting images of the war’s aftermath, full of torn bodies and looming ruins. His post-war career photographing scenes in the American West is less well-known.

In the late 1860s, the West was a landscape of contention and conflict. Indigenous peoples had long defended their sovereignty in the region and threatened to prevent white settlement of the region. During and after the Civil War, the federal government sought to assert more control over the West, protecting American migrants and railroad workers building the transcontinental line.

In 1867, Congress created a Peace Commission to negotiate with the Great Plains nations. In the spring of 1868, the commission members arrived at Fort Laramie in Wyoming, along with traders, translators, more than 9,000 Indigenous peoples, and Alexander Gardner.

One of the photographs Gardner took at Fort Laramie is the subject of Martha Sandweiss’ insightful and beautifully written new book, The Girl in the Middle. The image captures six Peace Commissioners posed alongside an Indigenous girl wrapped in a blanket. Sandweiss uses this single photograph as a “springboard” into the complex and violent world of the mid-19th-century American West.

The Girl in the Middle is a history of a time and place. It is also a narrative of Sandweiss’ quest to find the girl, who despite her centrality to Gardner’s photograph, got lost because she lived “beyond the reach of record keepers.” (4)

Until now, historians did not know the girl’s name. Gardner and William Tecumseh Sherman misidentified her as “Arapaho” and “Fawn” (respectively) in their copies of the photograph. (95) The mystery of her identity captivated Sandweiss. In the archives of the Fort Laramie National Historic Site, she finally found a note that a man named Eddie Ryan left in 1978. The girl, he wrote, was his grandmother, Sophie Mousseau. (96) With this name in hand, Sandweiss continued her hunt, trying to find out who Sophie was and how she ended up in Gardner’s photograph.

She discovered that Sophie was the daughter of the French-Canadian trader M. A. Mousseau and his Oglala Lakota wife, Yellow Woman. The Mousseaus were part of a large network of mixed-race families who had long operated in the West, creating community and economic ties across the region. Sophie was born in 1860 and lived with her parents and siblings in the Sweetwater Country of Wyoming. In the spring of 1868, Lakota raiders attacked their ranch and Mousseau’s trading post, and the family fled to Fort Laramie for safety. (170-71)

Sophie Mousseau and Alexander Gardner are two of the major protagonists of the book. The third is the villain: Gen. William Harney, a career military man whose acts of domestic and professional violence were already legendary in the American West by 1868. The five other members of the Peace Commission receive less attention from Sandweiss, and William Tecumseh Sherman—the most famous of all the photographic subjects, then and now—receives almost none. This was likely a strategic choice on Sandweiss’ part; Sherman tends to suck all the air out of the room if you give him a chance.

Sandweiss writes short, elegant chapters that track Gardner and his photographic subjects through their lives (Part One) until they come together at Fort Laramie for only a few minutes (Part Two) and then disperse (Part Three). In the final fifty pages, Sophie’s story dominates. We follow her family through the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 and the years afterward, until her death in 1936.

Later in the book, there are a few chapters that don’t seem quite necessary, and within some chapters there are flashbacks and narrative swerves that create confusion. Surprisingly, Sandweiss devotes only two paragraphs to the taking of the photograph itself. (190)

These are minor quibbles, however. The bulk of the book is propulsive and compelling. It is replete with sensory details that bring the reader into the past, and stunning sentences that make this reviewer jealous that she did not write them. Take, for example, this one: “The handful of stories preserved by her descendants are like snapshots faded by time and repeated handling, faint smudges of the girl captured so sharply on Gardner’s glass-plate negative.” (232)

Ultimately, The Girl in the Middle explores how we know what we know about the past and whose stories endure. “Knowing the identity of the girl in the middle,” Sandweiss argues, “changes everything.” (280)

It is also a book that speaks to the importance of the historical work of recovery, especially in our current moment. Sophie Mousseau was always in the center of Alexander Gardner’s photograph. By identifying and centering her in this story of mid-19th-century America, Martha Sandweiss shows how important the country’s most vulnerable citizens have been to the creation of its histories.

Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer based in Boston. She is the author of The Westerners: Myth-Making and Belonging on the American Frontier (Scribner, forthcoming in 2026), the Spur Award-winning Saving Yellowstone (2022), and The Three-Cornered War (2020), a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History and the recipient of the 2021 Emerging Civil War Book Award.