Featured Photo: Is This Really the Legendary Cochise?

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This image, supposedly of Chiricahua Apache leader Cochise, has surfaced yet again.

The illustration shows an elderly man sitting with a red bandana around his head, and a red blanket on his lap. The image most recently surfaced on the jacket of The Peacemaker, a novel published in June 2016 about a peace agreement with Cochise.

The book’s author, Andrew McBride, claims the image is an “original portrait of Cochise” and credits the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma Libraries as the source. The Western History Collections owns only the black-and-white version, not the color version on the cover of McBride’s book.

Read more about the history of the image, and who it really is, below:

RELATED: Is This Really the Legendary Cochise?

This image appeared in this week’s Indian Country Today Media Network newsletter.

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Comments

verncox

Ask if it's "the Original" or the "Colorized original". Every original photo of aborigines I've seen has always been black and white. Colorization is a new process by which you estimate what the colors most likely would have been, then apply them. It may not be 100% accurate, but a better idea of his actual features is the goal. This is done frequently with older Biblical artwork such as Gustave Dore' where some of his woodcarvings and etchings have had color added to them.

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Mon, 10/24/2016 - 08:47

Sharon McElroy

The original isn't a photo. The original colorized version was from a magazine cover which was created as a lithograph. The black and white photo was made from the colorized lithograph.

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Mon, 10/31/2016 - 22:48