clipping. Amos Bad Heart Buffalo's original ledger, we learned, was buried with his sister Dollie Pretty Cloud at the time of her death in 1947.2 Fortunately Helen Blish's mentor, Hartley B. Alexander, had had the foresight to have the drawings photographed at the time Bfish studied them.'So, while the drawings are gone, a complete record of them does exist. Locating missing objects was a major part of this project and we had quite a few successes. For a number of years Jean Lipman had been stockpiling visual images with this project in mind. These were often pieces she had used in the past to illustrate one of her many
articles and books. But she'd lost track of the pieces themselves. One of the most difficult objects to locate was Joseph Becker's "Snowsheds on the Central Pacific Railroad:' which Lipman had illustrated in American Primitive Painting in both 1942 and 1972, and in American Folk Painting in 1966. We had just about given up when the piece was found at the Gilcrease Institute of History and Art in Ifilsa, Oklahoma. Closer to home we finally discovered a painted tobacco sign which had been published in the May,1954,issue ofArt in America. After endless querying, we learned that it was kept in the storeroom
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a desire for historical perspective that motivated the search for an irreplaceable photograph of a late nineteenth century tin man shop figure in its original setting. Lipman had published the photograph in 1970 in Art in America, but exhaustive searches failed to turn it up. As a last resort we tried the Archives of American Art where Lipman had deposited a large amount of material more than ten years ago. The Lipman material had not yet been put on microfilm, so it took a dedicated member of the Archives staff to travel to their warehouse some distance from Washington to search through the boxes
LOST AND FOUND: Snow Sheds on the Central Pacific Railroad in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, May 18, 1869, Joseph Becker. Circa 1869; Oil on canvas;19 x 26"; Thomas Gikrease Institute ofAmerican History and Art, 7141sa, Oklahoma. 39