The Girl in the Middle

A Recovered History of the American West

By: Martha A. Sandweiss

Narrated by: Kate Handford

This audiobook narrated by Kate Handford spins a spellbinding tale of the American West from a single haunting image of an unnamed Native child

In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government's treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern Plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket. The hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the girl is never identified. As The Girl in the Middle goes in search of her, it draws listeners into the entangled lives of the photographer and his subjects.

Martha A. Sandweiss paints a riveting portrait of the turbulent age of Reconstruction and westward expansion. She follows Gardner from his birthplace in Scotland to the American frontier, as his dreams of a utopian future across the Atlantic fall to pieces. She recounts the lives of William S. Harney, a slave-owning Union general who earned the Lakota name "Woman Killer," and Samuel F. Tappan, an abolitionist who led the investigation into the Sand Creek massacre. And she identifies Sophie Mousseau, the girl in Gardner's photograph, whose life swerved in unexpected directions as American settlers pushed into Indian Country and the federal government confined Native peoples to reservations.

Spinning a spellbinding historical tale from a single enigmatic image, The Girl in the Middle reveals how the American nation grappled with what kind of country it would be as it expanded westward in the aftermath of the Civil War.

©2025 Martha A. Sandweiss (P)2025 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

"[Sandweiss's] deeply researched book takes its title from an arresting black-and-white photograph of the peace commissioners gathered at Fort Laramie in 1868. . . . Sandweiss is an elegant writer who knows how to craft a satisfying story."--Melanie Kirkpatrick, Wall Street Journal (Melanie Kirkpatrick)

"Sandweiss's forensic investigation of a single photograph widens the aperture to depict an astonishingly intertwined frontier society where everyone—soldier, trader, photographer, man, woman, Native, mixed-race, or white—was connected to most everyone else. The result is a fascinating snapshot of this "oddly intimate" world, a bubbling cauldron of people constantly on the move, in contact or in conflict, their lives beset by unremitting public and familial violence."--Alix Christie, American Scholar (Alix Christie)

"Riveting. . . . Sandweiss effectively details a previously unknown life and insists that the rest of us could do better."--Anne Hyde, Western Historical Quarterly (Anne Hyde)

"Part detective story, part traditional history book, The Girl in the Middle brings to life an often overlooked part of US history. . . . A richly textured view of America both during and in the decades directly after its brutal civil war. . . . A window into the lives of ordinary people at a time and in a place when everyone was on the move and constantly reinventing themselves. It is also a testament to the broader suffering that occurred as the American government repeatedly broke its promises to the continent's original inhabitants."--Brooke Masters, Financial Times (Brooke Masters)

Fleshing Out a Photo

The author gathered and described related characters and events so as to give historical flesh to the otherwise pictorial skeleton of a single photo adding much to this reader’s knowledge of the mid-continental confrontation of cultures & peoples.

Great idea, questionable execution

The concept is fantastic, and very well written. However, the narrator mispronounced multiple names of people and locations. This could have been caught by more diligent editing.