What You Actually Get With David Cusick Sketches Of Ancient History
The 1828 book by David Cusick is a small, odd thing. It's about 35 pages long, printed in red and black, and contains his retelling of Tuscarora oral history alongside woodcut-style illustrations he carved himself. If you're looking to get a copy or work with the images, here's what that actually means in practice. The original 1828 edition is rare. You'll see copies popping up at academic book dealers for somewhere between $800 and $2,500 depending on condition. The binding is usually compromised, the paper is foxed, and a few copies have missing pages. I picked up a worn one at a rare book auction back in 2019 and honestly spent more on repair than the book itself cost. For most people, the public domain scans are the practical route. The Internet Archive has a full scan, and the HathiTrust Digital Library also carries one. Both are decent quality but the scans can be a bit murky on the illustration details. If you need to reproduce the images, you're better off using a research library copy and photographing the plates yourself under controlled lighting.
What's Actually In The Book
Cusick structured it as a history of the Six Nations from creation onward, but his version doesn't match European missionary accounts. He describes the world's creation, the spread of disease, European contact, and the displacement of Native peoples. The illustrations include figures of people in traditional dress, mythological scenes, and what look like stylized depictions of everyday life. They're crude by academic illustration standards but deliberately so — they carry a visual language that's distinctly Iroquoian in character. One thing beginners miss is that Cusick was writing in a very specific moment. This came out ten years before the great forced removals of the 1830s. He knew what was coming. A lot of the text reads like testimony, not mythology. That's important context if you're citing this in any serious work.
Working With The Images
I ran into a specific problem a while back where I needed high-resolution reproductions of the Cusick plates for a publication. The online scans were fine for reading but completely unusable for printing at 300 DPI. My workaround was contacting the New York State Library directly. They allowed me to visit their reading room and photograph the plates myself using a DSLR with a macro lens. You need a appointment and a research purpose, but it worked. Takes about two hours and you walk away with clean digital files. If you're scanning at home and your source is a deteriorated copy, the paper is usually quite thin and translucent. Light bleeds through from the opposite page and ruins the image quality. I solved that by placing a piece of black archival mat board behind each page while scanning. It killed the bleed-through immediately and cut my post-processing time from about 45 minutes per plate down to maybe 10.
Get the Full Details
Common Mistakes People Make
Someone on a forums recently posted a cropped version of one of the Cusick illustrations and attributed it to "unknown Native American woodcut." That's wrong on multiple levels. Cusick signed his name in the title page and on several of the illustrations. The attribution matters because it changes how you interpret the work entirely. This is a documented author making deliberate artistic choices, not an anonymous folk artifact. Another issue is translation. Cusick wrote in English but his phrasing carries Tuscarora syntax and conceptual frameworks. When he describes certain spiritual concepts, literal English translations flatten the meaning. If you're using this for research, you'll want to cross-reference with works by scholars like William N Fenton or Bruce E. Johansen who understand the linguistic subtleties involved.
When This Approach Doesn't Work
If you need scholarly critical editions with annotations, the public domain scans won't help much. There's no modern annotated version that's widely available. The few academic references that exist are buried in journal articles. You're mostly on your own for textual analysis unless you're willing to dig through microfiche at university libraries. That's a significant bottleneck if you're doing this work without institutional access. Also, the illustrations are not copyright-free in every jurisdiction. The 1828 text and images are public domain in the United States, but reproductions created by museums or digital archives may claim their own copyright on the photographs or scans. Check the terms of the institution before using any modern digital reproduction commercially. I learned that the hard way when a journal publisher flagged my usage of a particular scan.
Practical Summary
The Cusick work is valuable primarily as a primary source document from an Indigenous perspective during early American expansion. It's not a comprehensive history by any standard. The illustrations are historically significant more for what they reveal about cultural transmission than for artistic sophistication. If you're studying it, treat it as one voice among many from that period, not as definitive record. The best approach is reading the text alongside oral histories collected by later researchers and comparing the two to see where they align and where they diverge.
