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A rare boudoir-format image by Dana B. Chase, showing five men of the San Ildefonso Pueblo posed during a ceremonial dance, likely the Buffalo or Comanche Dance, incorporating regalia exchanged across Pueblo and Plains cultures. Two wear feathered war bonnets and hold carved dance sticks, while the others provide musical accompaniment with frame drums and a rattle. The dancers stand on a barren patch of desert earth, with no pueblo architecture in view, suggesting the image was staged by Chase, who often composed scenes for the tourist and collector market rather than documenting private ceremonial moments.
Chase purchased William Henry Brown’s Santa Fe studio in 1884 and numbered his negatives sequentially; the present print, numbered 136, dates to his earlier years of work in New Mexico Territory.
This view is an important early record of San Ildefonso ceremonial culture as mediated through late-nineteenth-century photographic practice. It predates the pueblo’s later restrictions on photography and reflects the early commodification of Native ritual for outside audiences during the territorial period. As a primary document, it is of particular value to scholars of Pueblo visual sovereignty, early Southwestern tourism, and the formation of Indianist iconography in the American imagination.
Dana B. Chase was a frontier photographer whose work offers one of the most detailed visual records of New Mexico during its territorial period. Born in Maine in 1848, Chase trained in the photographic trade under his father, John Chase, in Atchison, Kansas, before establishing his own studios in Colorado in the early 1870s. He operated in Trinidad, Pueblo, and Denver, producing cartes de visite, boudoir cards, and stereographs of local landmarks, mining towns, and prominent citizens for a growing tourist and settler audience.
In 1884, Chase purchased the established Santa Fe studio of William Henry Brown and began what would become his most significant photographic period. Working primarily from his plaza gallery, he created at least 230 catalogued views, numbering his negatives sequentially. His output during this period included landscape scenes, architectural studies, portraits of territorial elites, and some of the earliest photographic representations of Pueblo ceremonial life available to outsiders. His staged depictions of dances at San Ildefonso and other pueblos became widely circulated in tourist markets, often printed as boudoir cards and sold in Santa Fe curio shops.
Chase divorced his first wife, Ella, in 1888, and soon after married photographer Belle Bybee, with whom he ran the Santa Fe studio until 1892. That year he sold the business to his assistant, Thomas J. Curran, and returned to Denver. He died there in 1897 at the age of 49. Belle Chase continued to operate under the Chase name for several years after his death.
Though much of his original negative archive has been dispersed, Chase’s work is preserved in institutional collections including the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Getty Research Institute, and History Colorado. His images remain a key primary source for understanding the built environment, dress, and ceremonial practices of New Mexico’s Native communities during a period of cultural transition, political uncertainty, and increasing tourist attention.
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