Balduin Möllhausens »Reliquien«

Die ethnologische Sammlung seiner Nordamerika-Reisen. Eine Hommage zu seinem 200. Geburtstag

Abstract

Balduin Möllhausen, born in 1825, is well known as a writer of more than 40 novels about the American West. Between 1849 and 1858 he made three trips to North America. During his first one (1849–52) he came into contact with various tribes in the Mississippi-Missouri region, foremost Otoe and Omaha. As a draftsman he made sketches and drawings which he later executed as watercolors. His second trip (1853–54) as a member of the U.S. government expedition under the command of lieutenant Whipple, in search of a railway route to the Pacific Ocean, took him into the American Southwest. The third one (1857–58) under Lieutenant Ives was meant to explore the navigation conditions of the Colorado river. Möllhausen took various ethnological objects back to Germany. These relics (Reliquien), as he called them, were hanging on the walls of his studio for the rest of his life. A few months before his death he donated them to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, together with his watercolors. In this article, his small collection of 25 ethnological artifacts is published entirely for the first time.