Rodolphe Petter (1865-1947) was a General Conference Mennonite Church missionary working with Cheyenne people in Oklahoma 1891-1916 and Montana 1916-1947. He and his family members accumulated a large photo collection, including photos they took and others they acquired. The gallery pages on this site include all of the Petter photos, scanned from negatives where we have them, and otherwise digitized from prints.

The numbering system is arbitrary. As far as we know, it does not date back to the Petters. Someone (we don’t know who) made an initial selection of Petter negatives to print, probably in the early 1970s. Those prints were numbered at the time when the prints were made. But at least half of the negatives were not printed, and there were also many prints for which there weren’t negatives. In 2017 we decided to digitize all of the negatives and prints in the collection. We started with the ones that were already numbered, and then simply continued the number sequence with the additional negatives and prints.

• #1-2010 are the 1970s prints
• 1021-1820 are negatives that did not have matching prints
• 1821-2697 are prints for which we did not have negatives
• 2698-2984 are prints from various scattered folders in the Petter papers
• 2985-3026 are glass lantern slides that were in the Petter papers
• 3027-3034 are from a “photographs” scrapbook in box 80 of the Petter papers
• 3035-3059 are from a Selma Sprunger scrapbook in the Petter papers
• 3060-3082 are additional prints which did not have negatives

If there are photos here that should not be displayed, please contact us.

This page has a list of all of the photo captions, for easier searching.

The photo gallery format shows 100 photos per page. Clicking on an individual photo brings up a larger version of that photo.

Searching: Use the Media Search box to search the captions of photos. The regular WordPress search box searches only page text, not photo captions.

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