Geronimo Was a Prisoner of War When His Cigarette Card Came Out

Fifty cards, one per packet of Allen and Ginter cigarettes, printed in Richmond in 1888. Beautiful full-colour lithographs of Native American leaders. And almost every man on them was alive when the cards went into the packs.

That last fact reorganises everything else, and it is the one most write-ups of this set skip past.

We are used to treating nineteenth-century cards as history. This set wasn't history when it was printed. It was current events, sold with tobacco.

What the set is

Allen and Ginter were a Richmond, Virginia tobacco firm formed around 1880 by John F. Allen and Lewis Ginter, and they are the company that created the first cigarette cards in the United States. The card began as a stiffener to stop the packet crushing in a pocket. They worked out that people would choose a brand to get the picture.

The American Indian Chiefs set, catalogued N2, ran to fifty cards. An inch and a half by two and three-quarter inches, full-colour lithography, and a checklist printed on the back. The set is unnumbered, which is why you will see different numbering depending on whose checklist you are reading.

It is one of the most collected nineteenth-century non-sport issues there is, and it sits alongside the company's better-known N28 and N29 Champions sets in most serious tobacco-card collections.

Geronimo, 1888

Start with one of the two cards everybody wants.

Geronimo surrendered to General Nelson Miles at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona on 4 September 1886, the last Native American leader to formally surrender to the United States. He was taken east as a prisoner of war and held in military custody for the rest of his life, another twenty-three years. He never returned to Arizona.

In 1888 he was at Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, having already been moved from Fort Pickens in Florida. Fort Sill in Oklahoma, the place his name is usually attached to, came later: he arrived there in 1894 and died there in 1909.

So when somebody opened a packet of Allen and Ginter cigarettes in 1888 and found Geronimo looking back at them, he was in federal custody in Alabama, two years into a captivity that would not end.

Not a legend from the past. A man with an address, held by the government of the country selling the cigarettes.

Sitting Bull, with two years left

The other anchor card is stranger still.

Sitting Bull led his Lakota and two allied tribes against Custer at the Little Bighorn in June 1876. Twelve years later he is on a cigarette card, which is a fast turnaround by any standard.

By then he had also toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, for four months in 1885 at fifty dollars a week, which made him a celebrity in the country he had fought. PSA's history of the set credits that tour with driving American interest in these men, and the commercial logic is easy enough to follow: Buffalo Bill built the audience, Allen and Ginter sold to it.

On 15 December 1890, two years after the card, Sitting Bull was shot and killed by Indian agency police at Standing Rock during an attempt to arrest him, along with seven of his followers.

Collectors chase his card because he is the most famous man in the set. It is worth holding in mind that the card is older than his death.

Red Cloud and Chief Joseph

Two more names that carry premiums, and for related reasons: both had beaten or embarrassed the United States within living memory.

Red Cloud fought the campaign of 1866 to 1868 that forced the army to abandon its forts along the Bozeman Trail. It is the one war of the period the Plains tribes can fairly be said to have won outright, and it is still called Red Cloud's War.

Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce in 1877 on a fighting retreat of more than a thousand miles toward the Canadian border, pursued the whole way, surrendering short of it. He spent the rest of his life speaking for his people and became, in the American imagination, the dignified defeated opponent.

Both men were alive in 1888. Both could have been handed their own cards.

The four they got wrong

Now the detail that tells you how much care went into this.

Four cards were released with the wrong man named on them, and they are not four independent slips. They are two pairs swapped.

Agate Arrow Point and White Swan were exchanged with each other. British and Chief Gall were exchanged with each other. Allen and Ginter corrected them, which is why both the error and the corrected version exist, and the errors are now among the scarcest cards in the set.

Collectors treat them as prizes, which is fair enough. But consider what the mistake actually was. A company selling fifty portraits of famous living men mixed up four of them in two clean pairs, which looks like transposed images at the printing stage rather than a research failure.

Nobody caught it before the cards went out.

What the set was for

Worth being clear-eyed about the commercial purpose, because the set is genuinely beautiful and that can obscure it.

These were advertising inserts. The pictures existed to sell cigarettes in a market where firms competed on what they put in the packet. The checklist on the back does exactly what a checklist does now, which is tell you what you have not got yet.

The subjects were chosen because they were famous, and they were famous because of a conflict that was still within living memory and in places had not finished. Wounded Knee was two years away when these cards were printed.

How to think about collecting it

I am not going to tell anyone what to feel about this set, and most writing on it goes one of two unhelpful ways: straight past the subject matter, or into a lecture.

What I would say is that the discomfort is information. This set is a better record of how the United States saw these men in 1888 than any retrospective summary, precisely because nobody making it was being careful about the impression it left.

The cards are lovely. They were also a way of turning a recently defeated enemy into a sales promotion, and the men on them mostly could not have consented and were not paid.

Both things are true at once, and the set is more interesting if you hold them together.

What to check before you buy

Three practical notes.

Know which numbering you are looking at. The set is unnumbered, so checklists differ. Sellers quote numbers from whichever guide they have, and two listings for card 15 may not be the same card.

The errors are worth confirming. Because both error and corrected versions exist for those four, the description matters more than usual, and the difference is a name rather than an image.

And these are 137 years old and were carried in pockets. Low grades dominate the surviving population, which is what you would expect of something designed to be thrown away.

This index tracks the full N2 American Indian Chiefs set card by card and grade by grade, with what is listed and what has verifiably sold. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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