In 1946 the heirs of Lt. Col. David H. Brotherton, U.S. Army, an Indian-fighting officer of many years experience on the frontier, donated to the United States National Museum a collection[4] comprising a number of Sioux Indian specimens, including a Model 1866 Winchester carbine said to have been surrendered in 1881 to Colonel Brotherton by the Sioux chief, Sitting Bull, and ten water colors by a German-born private soldier, Hermann Stieffel of Company K, 5th U.S. Infantry. Nine of these paintings (the tenth being a view of Rattenberg in the Tyrol Alps) are photographically reproduced herein. They constitute an unusually graphic and colorful, if somewhat unartistic, series of documentaries on the West of the post-Civil-War Indian fighting period. It can be surmised that Brotherton obtained the paintings from Stieffel, for from 1861 to 1879 he commanded the infantry company in which the latter spent the entire 24 years of his Army career. Brotherton's career itself is an interesting sidelight on the West of the period and an excellent if somewhat sad commentary on the promotion system in the Army during a period when the development of the West was so heavily dependent on the Army's curbing Indian depredations. Brotherton was graduated from the U.S. Military Academy with the class of 1854 along with several officers who later distinguished themselves in the Confederate States Army, including George Washington Custis Lee, son of Robert E. Lee, John Pegram, J. E. B. Stuart, Stephen D. Lee, and William Dorsey Pender.[5] Assigned to the 5th Infantry, Brotherton by 1861 had risen to the rank of captain and had acquired considerable experience against the Comanches and Apaches in the Southwest, the Seminoles in Florida, and the Mormons in Utah. Electing to remain with his regiment at the outbreak of the Civil War rather than resign and enter a volunteer or militia unit where he easily might have risen to general rank as did so many of his contemporaries, he remained a captain in the Army until 1879 when a vacancy occurred and he was promoted to major. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1883 after 29 years of service, but only at the expense of transferring from his old regiment to the 7th Infantry, where there was a vacancy at that rank. He retired for disability in 1885 after 30 years of almost constant service in the field.