Mr. J. Proctor, in his Great Original Character of the Jibbenainosay in "Nick of the Woods."

This colored print depicts an actor, Joseph Proctor, playing the role of the avenging Jibbenainosay in the play Nick of the Woods. Dressed in leggings and animal skins, he holds a stick in one hand and points with his other hand, in which he holds a large knife.

Joseph Proctor (1816-1897) was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and began his stage career in Boston in 1833. Although he acted in several of the great tragic dramas, he became best known for his starring role in Nick of the Woods, a melodrama set on the Kentucky frontier. Making his debut in 1839, at a time when melodramas were especially popular with the American public, Proctor portrayed a savage Indian fighter nicknamed Nathan Slaughter, or Nick and also known as the "Jibbenainosay", which was said to be an Indian expression for the “spirit that walks." The play was written by the Spanish-American dramatist Louisa Medina (ca 1813-1838), who adapted it from an 1837 novel of the same name by American author Robert Montgomery Bird (1806-1854). Procter portrayed Nick some 2500 times in the United States and Europe until he retired from the stage in the 1880s.

This lithograph was produced by Currier & Ives. Nathaniel Currier (1813-1888) was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts. After apprenticing at a Boston printing firm, he moved to Philadelphia and then New York, where in 1834 he partnered with Adam Stodart. Their firm dissolved within a year, and Currier established his own company in 1835. He initially printed written material like sheet music and letterheads, then turned to creating pictures of catastrophic fires and other current events. In 1857 he formed a new partnership with James M. Ives (1824-1895), who had been working as a bookkeeper at the firm. The lithography firm of Currier and Ives became famous for producing thousands of prints that depicted a broad cross-section of American life: crowded city streets and idyllic country landscapes, railroads, steamships and bridges, sporting matches and battlefield clashes, political personalities and cultural icons, even political cartoons. Those prints became among the most popular wall hangings in American homes of the era. The firm was later passed on to the sons of Currier and Ives and continued to produce prints until 1907.

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