WEBVTT - Ep. 19: Shadows of the Frontier 0:00:01.440 --> 0:00:05.880 As indicated by the work of painters and photographers. Nostalgia 0:00:06.000 --> 0:00:09.680 and honesty about the West dueled with one another as 0:00:09.720 --> 0:00:14.239 the Frontier ended and the modern West began. I'm Dan 0:00:14.320 --> 0:00:18.760 Flores and this is the American West, brought to you 0:00:18.800 --> 0:00:20.880 by Velvet Buck Wine, where the. 0:00:20.960 --> 0:00:22.240 Hunt meets the harvest. 0:00:22.760 --> 0:00:26.279 A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters 0:00:26.280 --> 0:00:32.000 and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com. 0:00:32.120 --> 0:00:58.400 Enjoy responsible shadows of the Frontier. For many Americans, the 0:00:58.440 --> 0:01:02.320 West occupies a mental space similar to how we imagine 0:01:02.440 --> 0:01:07.000 phases in our history, like the Confederacy, say, or World 0:01:07.000 --> 0:01:10.240 War Two. It had a beginning and in the arc 0:01:10.280 --> 0:01:13.160 of time, it had an end, and the best one 0:01:13.200 --> 0:01:15.880 can do with it now is to read about it 0:01:16.160 --> 0:01:19.800 or watch movies, because the real thing, the beating heart, 0:01:19.959 --> 0:01:24.440 flesh and blood of it, has now receded into the past. 0:01:25.280 --> 0:01:28.839 While that may work for wars or the Great Depression 0:01:29.360 --> 0:01:33.319 or the societal upheaval that was the nineteen sixties, for 0:01:33.400 --> 0:01:36.800 the West, not so much. And there's a simple reason 0:01:36.880 --> 0:01:41.319 the West is different. The West was never just a phase, 0:01:41.640 --> 0:01:45.200 but a place, a remarkable region of the country that 0:01:45.280 --> 0:01:49.280 still exists and whose present story is intertwined with its 0:01:49.400 --> 0:01:54.400 past the way morning emerges from sunrise. When the US 0:01:54.440 --> 0:01:58.120 Census announced in eighteen ninety that the West by then 0:01:58.240 --> 0:02:02.520 had been so broken up by settlement that a frontier 0:02:02.640 --> 0:02:06.480 line no longer existed, the West did not end the 0:02:06.480 --> 0:02:11.200 way the Confederacy did when Grant accepted Lee's surrender in 0:02:11.240 --> 0:02:15.240 eighteen sixty five. My point is that the end of 0:02:15.240 --> 0:02:19.800 the so called frontier was hardly a black line across history. 0:02:19.919 --> 0:02:25.440 The way Appomattox Courthouse are, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were as 0:02:25.560 --> 0:02:28.560 wild as the Western past had been as a part 0:02:28.600 --> 0:02:32.560 of history, the region's future looked just as exciting and 0:02:32.760 --> 0:02:36.320 just as troublesome. Of course, we all know there were 0:02:36.320 --> 0:02:39.000 Americans upset by the end of the Frontier. 0:02:39.400 --> 0:02:40.440 Maybe some still are. 0:02:41.200 --> 0:02:45.480 Some people in the early twentieth century experienced a psychological 0:02:45.600 --> 0:02:51.480 alarm historians have labeled frontier anxiety. After all, if the 0:02:51.520 --> 0:02:56.000 so called frontier thesis was true, that Darwinian argument that 0:02:56.040 --> 0:02:59.800 the wilderness had selected out traits that created the American character, 0:03:00.360 --> 0:03:04.960 then how are we going to preserve americanness without a frontier. 0:03:06.560 --> 0:03:09.840 A remarkable thing in itself is that nostalgia for the 0:03:09.919 --> 0:03:14.080 Old West lasted for at least eighty years after the 0:03:14.160 --> 0:03:19.000 eighteen ninety census announced the frontier was over. It was 0:03:19.160 --> 0:03:24.440 nostalgia that made Bill Cody's Wild West Show legendary, made 0:03:24.480 --> 0:03:28.880 the careers of painters Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell, of 0:03:28.919 --> 0:03:32.200 filmmaker John Ford, And of course, it was Old West 0:03:32.240 --> 0:03:36.680 nostalgia that made Tom Mix, John Wayne, Audie Murphy, and 0:03:36.800 --> 0:03:40.680 Roy Rogers cinema stars, and got Clint Eastwood his start. 0:03:41.640 --> 0:03:46.040 Maybe writer Zane Gray captured the magic best The Old West, 0:03:46.160 --> 0:03:49.920 he once wrote, was the last time in the history 0:03:49.960 --> 0:03:54.040 of Earth humans got to live a sensuous life in 0:03:54.080 --> 0:03:58.840 a state of nature. The Old West virus infected all 0:03:58.840 --> 0:04:01.720 of us. As a five year old, I once found 0:04:01.800 --> 0:04:05.880 myself in an Oklahoma City elevator looking up at a 0:04:05.920 --> 0:04:12.040 fellow passenger I realized was film star Randolph Scott. The 0:04:12.120 --> 0:04:15.600 excitement almost took me out. I've never been without a 0:04:15.600 --> 0:04:19.880 pair of cowboy booths since. American country music centered in 0:04:19.920 --> 0:04:23.760 the South had little beyond a regional appeal until it 0:04:23.839 --> 0:04:30.119 rebranded itself country Western and affected cowboy hats and jeans. Now, 0:04:30.160 --> 0:04:33.800 not even Beyonce can resist it, even in the twenty 0:04:33.839 --> 0:04:39.080 first century. The writer David Milch's HBO series Deadwood, or 0:04:39.120 --> 0:04:41.680 as I like to call it, back to the Fucking 0:04:41.760 --> 0:04:46.000 West Cocksuckers, proved just how resilient the Old West could 0:04:46.040 --> 0:04:50.760 be as a compelling subject. More of Milch and Deadwood 0:04:50.839 --> 0:04:53.839 in another episode. What I want to argue now and 0:04:53.880 --> 0:04:57.160 across the remaining episodes in this podcast is that the 0:04:57.200 --> 0:05:00.920 twentieth and twenty first century West has maybe been an 0:05:00.960 --> 0:05:05.039 even more thrilling place for history to play out. Nostalgia 0:05:05.120 --> 0:05:07.560 for the Old West, as I'm about to demonstrate here, 0:05:07.839 --> 0:05:12.000 with the careers of two famous artists, the photographer Edward 0:05:12.040 --> 0:05:16.520 Sheriff Curtis and the painter ven Old Rice, could be 0:05:16.600 --> 0:05:21.080 pretty much a drag on understanding the possibilities of modern 0:05:21.160 --> 0:05:24.919 life in the West. We've not yet entirely escaped the 0:05:25.000 --> 0:05:28.440 pull of the Western pass but the honysty of someone 0:05:28.560 --> 0:05:32.240 like ven Old Rice painting the Blackfeet Indians of Montana 0:05:32.560 --> 0:05:36.440 from roughly nineteen twenty to nineteen fifty helped. 0:05:36.160 --> 0:05:39.520 Show us the way towards the West we actually live 0:05:39.560 --> 0:05:40.719 in or visit. 0:05:51.720 --> 0:05:56.440 No One remotely interested in American Indians or merely the 0:05:56.480 --> 0:06:01.640 beauty and dignity of humanity ever, forgets their reaction standing 0:06:01.720 --> 0:06:07.119 before an Edward Sheriff Curtis photograph, after the initial shock 0:06:07.160 --> 0:06:11.240 of seeing what appears to be pre modern people preserved 0:06:11.279 --> 0:06:15.120 by a modern medium. I had no idea cameras existed 0:06:15.120 --> 0:06:18.240 that long ago, a friend said to me. Once you 0:06:18.360 --> 0:06:22.159 start looking more closely, becoming aware that the sense of 0:06:22.279 --> 0:06:25.920 age here is in part due to the Cepia tones 0:06:26.040 --> 0:06:30.080 of Curtis's Prince. Mostly you're stunned by the depth of 0:06:30.279 --> 0:06:35.520 character in Curtis's human subjects. As George horse Capture of 0:06:35.600 --> 0:06:39.400 Montana's Fort bell Knapp Reservation said of his first sight 0:06:39.720 --> 0:06:44.360 of a Curtis portrait, the world stopped for several moments. 0:06:45.440 --> 0:06:48.480 That was a special case since the portrait was of 0:06:48.560 --> 0:06:52.479 horse Capture's great grandfather. But he speaks for most of us. 0:06:52.720 --> 0:06:56.960 Whether we encounter Curtis's images and books on calendars or 0:06:57.000 --> 0:07:00.600 on postcards, and these days his CPIA photo do seem 0:07:00.640 --> 0:07:05.120 to be everywhere. Were spellbound, as if deposited in the 0:07:05.160 --> 0:07:10.760 past by a time machine. But why what is it 0:07:10.880 --> 0:07:16.360 we see in Curtis's photographs? Who was this shadow catcher, 0:07:16.720 --> 0:07:19.640 as some of his subjects called him, who in a 0:07:19.720 --> 0:07:23.840 good piece of one lifetime managed to befriend some eighty 0:07:23.960 --> 0:07:28.680 tribes of Indians and shoot more than forty thousand photographs 0:07:28.720 --> 0:07:32.400 of them. How was someone like this on the scene 0:07:32.680 --> 0:07:38.840 in the Old West with a camera? Well, that's the 0:07:38.880 --> 0:07:43.520 first fantasy about the shadow Catcher to brush aside. Curtis 0:07:43.640 --> 0:07:48.560 was not photographing eighty indigenous tribes while the frontier raged on. 0:07:49.880 --> 0:07:54.120 The census had declared the frontier over a full decade 0:07:54.440 --> 0:07:59.080 before Curtis said about his project. As for who he was, 0:07:59.520 --> 0:08:03.480 there's the simple characterization of the kind we'd all reject 0:08:03.560 --> 0:08:06.480 if it were applied to us. Then there's the more 0:08:06.680 --> 0:08:11.560 complex scent of flesh biography. The simple version is that 0:08:11.680 --> 0:08:15.880 he was an almost uneducated Seattle mountaineer who in the 0:08:15.920 --> 0:08:20.760 twentieth century became consumed with romantic notions about how Indians 0:08:20.800 --> 0:08:25.800 once lived. He had some talent, got lucky with influential friends, 0:08:26.160 --> 0:08:30.200 and so obsessively pursued his goal that he sacrificed his 0:08:30.320 --> 0:08:34.559 marriage and money to consummate it and died virtually forgotten. 0:08:35.559 --> 0:08:39.240 The longer version is more interesting and gets us a 0:08:39.280 --> 0:08:41.920 lot closer to being able to answer the kinds of 0:08:42.040 --> 0:08:49.320 questions people mouthed silently when they stand wrapped before the photographs. 0:08:49.360 --> 0:08:52.880 Like so many first generation Americans who grew up in 0:08:52.920 --> 0:08:57.280 the Northwest, Curtis's family roots were in the Midwest and 0:08:57.400 --> 0:09:02.719 his case Wisconsin. Sold their farm to become an itinerant 0:09:02.760 --> 0:09:06.240 preacher by the time Edward was twelve, but he had 0:09:06.280 --> 0:09:09.560 briefly gotten to attend a one room school that seems 0:09:09.600 --> 0:09:14.240 to have been his only formal education. Photography was in 0:09:14.320 --> 0:09:17.560 the air in the late eighteen hundreds, and both the 0:09:17.640 --> 0:09:23.280 technology and the possibilities entranced him. Somewhere, Curtis acquired a 0:09:23.360 --> 0:09:26.720 how to manual, and, unable to afford the real thing, 0:09:27.160 --> 0:09:30.240 built his first camera from a wooden box and a 0:09:30.280 --> 0:09:33.320 stereoscopic lens his father brought home from. 0:09:33.200 --> 0:09:33.960 The Civil War. 0:09:35.040 --> 0:09:38.520 In eighteen eighty seven, when Curtis was nineteen, his father 0:09:38.640 --> 0:09:42.239 moved the family west to Washington State, where they homesteaded 0:09:42.280 --> 0:09:47.000 a farm just across Puget Sound from Seattle. With income 0:09:47.160 --> 0:09:50.760 he brought in from commercial fishing and small scale logging, 0:09:51.160 --> 0:09:55.880 young Edward finally managed to buy a fourteen by seventeen 0:09:56.040 --> 0:10:00.680 view camera. Then, in a capitalization strategy rely on most 0:10:00.720 --> 0:10:04.560 of his life, he mortgaged the Curtis farm to buy 0:10:04.720 --> 0:10:09.960 into a partnership and a photographic studio in bustling, growing Seattle. 0:10:10.760 --> 0:10:14.080 At twenty four, his future beginning to open before him, 0:10:14.160 --> 0:10:16.600 and what turned out to be an ill fated move, 0:10:16.960 --> 0:10:22.920 he married a young neighbor named Clara Phillips. For most photographers, 0:10:22.960 --> 0:10:26.960 making a living largely involves capturing images of two rather 0:10:27.120 --> 0:10:32.880 mundane subjects, weddings and families. For four years, Curtis refined 0:10:32.920 --> 0:10:36.160 his abilities in these fields and paid the mortgage lean. 0:10:36.840 --> 0:10:40.120 But he also dreamed of being a fine arts photographer 0:10:40.400 --> 0:10:43.960 and a new movement that saw photography as a kind 0:10:43.960 --> 0:10:48.600 of technologically assisted form of painting and the photographer as 0:10:48.640 --> 0:10:52.480 an artist. What he needed most of all, Curtis decided, 0:10:52.800 --> 0:10:56.200 were a subject matter and a style he could make 0:10:56.240 --> 0:11:01.160 his own. These were savvy insights. On his mountain climbing 0:11:01.160 --> 0:11:04.959 and fishing trips. Curtis kept coming across local Native people, 0:11:05.080 --> 0:11:09.160 still engaged in their ancient subsistence, even as the post 0:11:09.240 --> 0:11:14.240 frontier West whorled around them. Fortuitously, one of these turned 0:11:14.280 --> 0:11:19.520 out to be Princess Angeline, the elderly daughter of Chief Seattle, 0:11:19.960 --> 0:11:24.600 namesake of the burgeoning city. Curtis befriended her and she 0:11:24.720 --> 0:11:28.320 allowed him to shoot a few soft focused photos of 0:11:28.360 --> 0:11:33.040 her as she engaged in a timeless indigenous pursuit digging 0:11:33.120 --> 0:11:37.719 for clowns along the Pacific shore. In a true epiphany, 0:11:37.920 --> 0:11:41.120 it struck Curtis that he should put the finished print 0:11:41.200 --> 0:11:46.120 through a CPO wash so the image looked brown aged, 0:11:46.400 --> 0:11:51.120 so viewers would feel a timelessness about it. Entered in 0:11:51.160 --> 0:11:55.960 the eighteen ninety six National Photographic Exhibit, it took first 0:11:56.160 --> 0:12:00.560 prize in portraiture. Overnight, Curtis became one of seattle best 0:12:00.640 --> 0:12:05.520 known photographers. Now he had his subject and his leit motif. 0:12:11.240 --> 0:12:16.400 Like toppling Domino's, the breaks came in rapid succession. Two 0:12:16.520 --> 0:12:19.200 years later, high up on the shoulders of one of 0:12:19.240 --> 0:12:23.960 his favorite peaks, Mount Rainier, Curtis encountered a lost climbing 0:12:24.000 --> 0:12:27.680 party that he guided to safety. It was the kind 0:12:27.720 --> 0:12:31.080 of group any ambitious young man might want to run into, 0:12:31.200 --> 0:12:35.800 let alone rescue. The party included Gifford Pinchot of the 0:12:35.960 --> 0:12:40.160 US Forestry Division see Heart, Miriam head of the US 0:12:40.280 --> 0:12:45.240 Biological Survey, and, most importantly for Curtis, the famous author 0:12:45.600 --> 0:12:46.840 George byrd Grennell. 0:12:47.600 --> 0:12:48.920 He was a photographer. 0:12:49.000 --> 0:12:51.839 Curtis told them and back in Seattle when he showed 0:12:51.880 --> 0:12:55.360 them some of his photographs, including his early Indian works. 0:12:55.480 --> 0:12:56.359 They were impressed. 0:12:57.000 --> 0:13:00.839 Grennell and Miriam both had already signed on for an 0:13:01.000 --> 0:13:06.520 upcoming grand expedition financed by railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman, 0:13:06.679 --> 0:13:11.280 to Alaska the next summer. Might young Curtis be interested 0:13:11.360 --> 0:13:15.960 in accompanying the party as photographer? This was the domino 0:13:16.040 --> 0:13:20.760 that collapsed the table. The Harriman expedition included three dozen 0:13:21.080 --> 0:13:25.840 of America's most famous scientist, writers, artists, a kind of 0:13:26.080 --> 0:13:30.439 camelot afloat on the Alaskan seas. Curtis got their rubbed 0:13:30.440 --> 0:13:35.160 shoulders with the natural history writers John Muir and John Burrows, 0:13:35.440 --> 0:13:41.719 the geologist Grove Carl Gilbert, biologists William Dahl, Frederick Dellenbaugh 0:13:42.040 --> 0:13:46.480 and William Brewer, even mister Harriman himself. They were the 0:13:46.520 --> 0:13:51.439 core of Washington's prestigious Cosmos Club. For Curtis, the trip 0:13:51.520 --> 0:13:57.520 served as passport to the whole American scientific and conservation community, 0:13:58.040 --> 0:14:02.160 and the ship, the George day Elder, was, in John 0:14:02.240 --> 0:14:07.640 Mure's words, a floating university, providing Curtis the education he 0:14:07.640 --> 0:14:11.880 had never gotten. He was thirty one years old. The 0:14:11.960 --> 0:14:15.480 trip particularly made Grinnell a good friend, and the writer 0:14:15.679 --> 0:14:19.480 now invited Curtis along in the summer of nineteen hundred 0:14:19.840 --> 0:14:24.160 to a Plains Indian sundance among the Blackfeet on their 0:14:24.200 --> 0:14:29.360 reservation in Montana. All of Curtis's life had been preparation 0:14:29.800 --> 0:14:34.960 for this moment. As he wrote later, he was intensely affected. 0:14:35.600 --> 0:14:38.680 It was the start of my effort to learn about 0:14:38.720 --> 0:14:42.440 the Plains Indians and to photograph their lives. He would 0:14:42.480 --> 0:14:46.920 preserve the Indian world before Indian ness, as Curtis and 0:14:47.120 --> 0:14:51.560 all his new friends firmly believed, what happen would vanish 0:14:51.640 --> 0:14:56.560 for all time. What Curtis had in mind was a 0:14:56.680 --> 0:15:01.520 monumental undertaking, but it wasn't untilnineteen o six that JP 0:15:01.680 --> 0:15:06.480 Morgan finally bankrolled him with seventy five thousand dollars for 0:15:06.640 --> 0:15:10.560 his grand project. Morgan's deal wasn't much of a bargain. 0:15:10.880 --> 0:15:13.840 He wanted Curtis to do the field and print work, 0:15:14.080 --> 0:15:17.480 plus in the matter of John James Ottoman, to publish 0:15:17.560 --> 0:15:22.440 and even market the Finnish books himself. Curtis called the 0:15:22.440 --> 0:15:26.880 books in question the North American Indian, and they came 0:15:27.000 --> 0:15:30.200 near to being still born at the outset. When the 0:15:30.280 --> 0:15:34.120 anthropological community got word of what Curtis was proposing, a 0:15:34.160 --> 0:15:39.400 photographic record of traditional Indian life, three decades after most 0:15:39.440 --> 0:15:43.400 tribes had settled onto reservations, it ran up a red flag. 0:15:44.200 --> 0:15:46.160 Professor Franz Boaz. 0:15:45.760 --> 0:15:50.040 At Columbia expressed what still is the most obvious objection 0:15:50.760 --> 0:15:54.800 in the twentieth century. What Curtis was proposing was impossible. 0:15:55.280 --> 0:15:59.360 Despite widespread nostalgia for the Old West, by the early 0:15:59.440 --> 0:16:03.560 nineteen high hundreds, most tribes had already endured decades of 0:16:03.760 --> 0:16:09.680 systematic policy driven a culturation. To show traditional Indian life 0:16:09.880 --> 0:16:13.040 as it was lived in the eighteen hundreds, Curtis would 0:16:13.120 --> 0:16:16.400 have to fake the details and most of the contexts 0:16:16.440 --> 0:16:20.920 of his project. Boas His objections did lead to President 0:16:21.080 --> 0:16:25.640 Roosevelt appointing a committee to investigate those arguments, but the 0:16:25.640 --> 0:16:29.400 committee included William H. Holmes of the Bureau of Ethnology, 0:16:29.640 --> 0:16:35.560 who despised Boas and who knew Roosevelt wanted Curtis to succeed. Roosevelt, 0:16:35.560 --> 0:16:39.240 in fact, wrote the forward to Volume one, and it's 0:16:39.320 --> 0:16:42.880 easy to conclude that the President was as caught up 0:16:42.960 --> 0:16:47.520 in the romance of the undertaking as Curtis. Nonetheless, a 0:16:47.640 --> 0:16:54.040 reputation as the great fabricator has been Curtis's albatross ever since. 0:16:55.520 --> 0:16:59.160 Curtis was in over his head anyway. He was young, 0:16:59.560 --> 0:17:02.640 enter jet and inspired and thought he could wrap up 0:17:02.640 --> 0:17:06.200 the entire project in five years, but if dated from 0:17:06.200 --> 0:17:09.320 that nineteen hundred sun dance in Montana where he got 0:17:09.320 --> 0:17:14.080 the idea, it actually took up thirty years of his life. 0:17:14.119 --> 0:17:18.119 With offices both in New York for marketing and Seattle 0:17:18.280 --> 0:17:22.440 for the photographic end, he embarked on years and years 0:17:22.640 --> 0:17:28.159 of one world win trip after another. Volume, one on 0:17:28.320 --> 0:17:32.840 the Novajos in the Southwest, came out in nineteen oh seven, 0:17:33.320 --> 0:17:34.400 and it was led. 0:17:34.200 --> 0:17:36.960 Off by a photo whose title. 0:17:36.960 --> 0:17:43.560 The Vanishing Race, captured the whole underlying premise. Over the 0:17:43.600 --> 0:17:47.560 next seven years, ten more volumes appeared. By this time, 0:17:47.640 --> 0:17:51.520 Curtis had gone through Morgan's initial investment and was barely 0:17:51.600 --> 0:17:56.240 passed halfway to his goal. His novel solution for money 0:17:56.720 --> 0:18:01.080 was to turn into an indie filmmaker, but his silent 0:18:01.200 --> 0:18:05.120 film In the Land of the Headhunters, a quaky Udel, 0:18:05.280 --> 0:18:10.200 Romeo and Juliet story, was a box office flop. By 0:18:10.240 --> 0:18:13.240 taking out a second mortgage on his house, this one 0:18:13.280 --> 0:18:17.359 without his wife's knowledge, and appealing to the Morgan family 0:18:17.440 --> 0:18:21.360 for continued financing, Curtis was finally able to turn out 0:18:21.480 --> 0:18:26.800 the last nine volumes of his grand project. While all 0:18:26.880 --> 0:18:31.040 this was happening, the last volume twenty finally appeared in 0:18:31.160 --> 0:18:36.160 nineteen thirty, much of the rest of Curtis's world was imploding. 0:18:37.240 --> 0:18:42.520 Clara filed for divorce from her absentee husband in nineteen sixteen. 0:18:43.280 --> 0:18:48.320 Curtis was convicted of failure to pay alimony in nineteen eighteen, 0:18:49.040 --> 0:18:53.280 and when the divorce was settled in nineteen twenty, Clara 0:18:53.320 --> 0:18:57.200 got possession not only of his studio but of all 0:18:57.320 --> 0:19:01.920 the negatives he had shot so far. The subsequent disappearance 0:19:02.040 --> 0:19:06.879 of Curtis's studio materials dating before nineteen twenty has led 0:19:06.920 --> 0:19:11.080 to one of the great treasure hunts in Western art so. 0:19:11.160 --> 0:19:12.199 Far, to no avail. 0:19:13.440 --> 0:19:17.439 Clara wasn't through, though, having him arrested one more time 0:19:17.680 --> 0:19:21.080 as he passed through Seattle Enroot, home from his last 0:19:21.080 --> 0:19:25.280 photo shoot for The North American Indian in nineteen twenty seven. 0:19:26.760 --> 0:19:30.640 Curtis lived for another quarter century without ever producing another 0:19:30.760 --> 0:19:34.440 significant work, so the meaning of his life is largely 0:19:34.480 --> 0:19:39.000 synonymous with what we think about his great project. There's 0:19:39.000 --> 0:19:43.840 no question today of Curtis's status as an artist, but 0:19:44.000 --> 0:19:48.800 the mesmerizing quality of his images is largely a consequence 0:19:49.080 --> 0:19:52.840 of his understanding of the nostalgic. 0:19:52.200 --> 0:19:53.880 Allure of Native America. 0:19:54.600 --> 0:19:58.360 Other photographers and painters certainly attempted this, but no one 0:19:58.400 --> 0:20:02.000 else pulled it off with the a line that Curtis did. 0:20:02.920 --> 0:20:05.639 On the other hand, there's always the question of whether 0:20:05.720 --> 0:20:10.600 you can entirely trust a Curtis image. The text of 0:20:10.640 --> 0:20:14.240 the North American Indian, edited by Frederick Webb Hodge of 0:20:14.280 --> 0:20:18.359 the Bureau of Ethnology, presents a straightforward ethnography of the 0:20:18.440 --> 0:20:22.640 tribes as Curtis found them, but of course hardly anyone 0:20:22.800 --> 0:20:26.159 reads the text anymore. So we're back to the fact 0:20:26.560 --> 0:20:30.280 that rarely do his photo show Indian life as it 0:20:30.440 --> 0:20:34.879 actually was in the post frontier. Instead, Curtis went to 0:20:34.960 --> 0:20:40.240 extraordinary links to exercise the whole twentieth century. He provided 0:20:40.280 --> 0:20:44.120 his Indian subjects with outfits and props from a half 0:20:44.200 --> 0:20:49.040 century earlier. He airbrushed away power lines in his photos, 0:20:49.359 --> 0:20:52.880 once even used dark room tricks to erase an alarm 0:20:53.000 --> 0:20:57.240 clock he found to his horror beside the right elbow 0:20:57.560 --> 0:21:02.280 of his blackfeet subject in the State eighteen seventies, looking 0:21:02.359 --> 0:21:07.399 photo in a Paygan lodge. Of the more than twenty 0:21:07.400 --> 0:21:11.480 two thousand photographs in the North American Indian, a few 0:21:11.560 --> 0:21:14.840 can't be trusted or are questionable today for other reasons. 0:21:15.400 --> 0:21:19.600 Sometimes Indians do Curtis. Some of the novel hosts did 0:21:19.640 --> 0:21:22.400 their ceremonies backwards for his camera. 0:21:23.280 --> 0:21:25.080 As one of the only white. 0:21:24.760 --> 0:21:29.119 Men ever to participate in the nine Day Hopey Snake Dance, 0:21:29.520 --> 0:21:30.720 Curtis even. 0:21:30.480 --> 0:21:32.720 Photographed that's sacred ritual. 0:21:33.040 --> 0:21:37.000 Today, the Hopies don't even allow non Indians to see 0:21:37.080 --> 0:21:40.840 this ceremony. It's not easy then, to know what to 0:21:40.880 --> 0:21:45.520 think about Curtis. Listening to George Horse Capture helps Thom, 0:21:45.880 --> 0:21:50.680 a defender of Curtis Horse Capture, remains awestruck at Curtis's 0:21:50.720 --> 0:21:54.320 dedication to his project and at the stunning quality of 0:21:54.400 --> 0:21:59.400 the resulting imagery. Most importantly, he believes that Curtis's work 0:21:59.560 --> 0:22:05.439 Strengthson's native confidence. What Curtis's images show is that what 0:22:05.760 --> 0:22:10.480 Indians suspected about the depth and beauty of their ancestors 0:22:10.560 --> 0:22:17.560 culture in the Old West was true. As Curtis was 0:22:17.680 --> 0:22:22.400 journeying to tribe after tribe, then disappearing into his dark room. 0:22:22.800 --> 0:22:26.760 All over the West, painters were fixing images of Native 0:22:26.800 --> 0:22:30.880 people and the Old West as rapidly as they could work. 0:22:32.359 --> 0:22:35.879 Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell became the most famous and 0:22:35.960 --> 0:22:40.880 successful the artists captivated by Indians believed their subjects were vanishing, 0:22:41.280 --> 0:22:44.919 so artists like Joseph Henry Sharp, who particularly focused on 0:22:45.000 --> 0:22:48.840 the Crows and Taos and Santa Fe based painters like 0:22:48.960 --> 0:22:54.680 e Irvingkows, Ernest Blumenshein and John Sloan captured the pueblos 0:22:54.720 --> 0:22:58.480 of the Southwest at a frantic pace. At a time 0:22:58.520 --> 0:23:02.480 when railroads were one of the biggest businesses in the country, 0:23:02.960 --> 0:23:07.840 Tourism seemed the future, and nothing advertised a Western adventure 0:23:07.920 --> 0:23:13.400 in a strange land like images of exotic natives. Ving 0:23:13.480 --> 0:23:17.080 Old Rice, who immersed himself in the northern West between 0:23:17.160 --> 0:23:20.480 roughly nineteen twenty and nineteen fifty, was one of the 0:23:20.520 --> 0:23:25.640 painters who attracted the attention of a Western railroad. Rice's 0:23:25.720 --> 0:23:30.679 mission began very much in the genre that Curtis, Remington, 0:23:30.880 --> 0:23:35.840 Blumensheine and others had already laid out. Yet the more 0:23:35.960 --> 0:23:39.520 Rice learned, the more experience he had, the more he 0:23:39.600 --> 0:23:43.359 thought it critical to portray the post frontier world of 0:23:43.400 --> 0:23:49.120 his Indian subjects as opposed to old West nostalgia. For Curtis, 0:23:49.160 --> 0:23:53.720 the arrow of time flew backwards into a retreating past. 0:23:54.440 --> 0:23:56.960 For Rice, that projectile flew. 0:23:56.840 --> 0:24:00.439 Into an open ended future where neither of the West 0:24:00.600 --> 0:24:06.360 nor his subjects had vanished. Rice hardly started out immune 0:24:06.480 --> 0:24:09.679 to Western romance. Like all of us, he was a 0:24:09.720 --> 0:24:12.879 product of time and place, and in his case the 0:24:12.960 --> 0:24:17.760 place was Germany and the time the late nineteenth century, when, 0:24:17.800 --> 0:24:22.480 perhaps more so than anywhere, Rice's countrymen were intoxicated with 0:24:22.640 --> 0:24:27.760 the idea of people living in nature. Like other German boys, 0:24:27.920 --> 0:24:32.439 Reis grew up reading Karl Mei, who mesmerized generations of 0:24:32.520 --> 0:24:37.160 German readers with a kind of fantasy American West. Mai 0:24:37.240 --> 0:24:42.160 remains so crucial to European ideas about America that Durshue 0:24:42.359 --> 0:24:46.720 de monitu An Austin Powers like Sendup of a nineteen 0:24:46.840 --> 0:24:50.919 sixty two Karl my movie is the most popular film 0:24:51.160 --> 0:24:55.600 in Germany right now. In twenty twenty five, it wasn't 0:24:55.720 --> 0:24:59.960 cowboys or miners or buffalo hunters who entranced Germans, though 0:25:00.680 --> 0:25:05.760 it was Western Indians like My's heroic apache chief Vinetou 0:25:06.040 --> 0:25:11.520 who mesmerized them. Actually, My never visited the American West, 0:25:11.760 --> 0:25:15.160 knew nothing about it beyond reading a few dubious books 0:25:15.520 --> 0:25:18.560 and entirely confused geography and tribes. 0:25:19.400 --> 0:25:20.320 None of that mattered. 0:25:20.960 --> 0:25:24.399 My's novels made the West appear the only place on 0:25:24.520 --> 0:25:28.399 Earth one could really be alive. Ven Old Rice was 0:25:28.440 --> 0:25:32.479 one of his converts, prepared for a version of the 0:25:32.480 --> 0:25:36.399 West hardly more real than a galaxy far far away. 0:25:37.000 --> 0:25:40.120 A twenty seven year old Rice arrived in New York 0:25:40.280 --> 0:25:44.600 in nineteen thirteen expecting to see Indians on Fifth Avenue 0:25:44.920 --> 0:25:50.000 are living in teepee villages outside New York or Boston. Eventually, 0:25:50.040 --> 0:25:54.359 he stumbled across a homeless ex Wild West performer named 0:25:54.440 --> 0:25:58.080 yellow Elk, who was Blackfeet and told the young German 0:25:58.320 --> 0:26:01.560 if his heart's desire was to paint real Indians, the 0:26:01.600 --> 0:26:05.520 best place to go was to newly created Glacier National 0:26:05.600 --> 0:26:10.600 Park and its adjacent Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. There, yellow 0:26:10.680 --> 0:26:17.760 Elk said, were the Indians of Rice's imagination. The Great 0:26:17.800 --> 0:26:21.560 War years obviously were not the time for a painter 0:26:21.720 --> 0:26:26.080 from America's enemy nation to travel the US in search 0:26:26.119 --> 0:26:30.000 of subjects from the margins of American life. So a 0:26:30.160 --> 0:26:34.000 nineteen thirteen nineteen fourteen trip to the West didn't happen, 0:26:35.000 --> 0:26:37.720 but it's quickly following the war's end as he could 0:26:37.800 --> 0:26:40.840 make it happen. In the absolute dead of winter of 0:26:40.920 --> 0:26:46.000 December January nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty, Rice took the 0:26:46.040 --> 0:26:50.480 Great Northern Railroad west to Montana. As soon as he 0:26:50.520 --> 0:26:53.560 stepped off the train, the Germans spotted a group of 0:26:53.640 --> 0:26:57.920 blanket draped Indians, and, to the profound shock of the group, 0:26:58.400 --> 0:27:01.880 strolled up to them, wrapped one on the back, held 0:27:01.960 --> 0:27:05.239 up his hand, and, in a recreation of scenes in 0:27:05.359 --> 0:27:11.000 carl My novels, blurted out, how lucky for vin Old Rice, 0:27:11.200 --> 0:27:13.920 lucky for all of us. The Blackfeet, by this time 0:27:13.960 --> 0:27:17.720 in their history, had learned to be amused and tolerant 0:27:18.040 --> 0:27:22.399 of the unfathomable antics of white people. Maybe the innocence 0:27:22.520 --> 0:27:27.680 of how was downright endearing. In nineteen nineteen, So, recognizing 0:27:27.800 --> 0:27:31.119 a fallible fellow human when he saw one one of 0:27:31.119 --> 0:27:34.439 the Blackfeet men, whose name was Turtled, motioned for his 0:27:34.560 --> 0:27:38.119 friends to choke off their laughter and to welcome this 0:27:38.280 --> 0:27:42.840 strange individual, as the Blackfeet had done with empathetic whites 0:27:42.840 --> 0:27:48.119 for decades. The Blackfeet had experiences with artists and photographers 0:27:48.320 --> 0:27:51.359 that went back at least twenty years, and after a 0:27:51.400 --> 0:27:56.359 few minutes of translated but good spirited conversation, some of 0:27:56.400 --> 0:28:00.000 the group Rice approached with how agreed to sit for him. 0:28:00.560 --> 0:28:03.919 Rice had taken the first big step. He was on 0:28:03.960 --> 0:28:07.399 his way to a long and celebrated career as one 0:28:07.440 --> 0:28:13.359 of the best twentieth century portraitists of American Indians. A 0:28:13.400 --> 0:28:17.720 few years ago, I toured a first rate Blackfoot exhibit 0:28:18.040 --> 0:28:21.919 in the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. The tribal name in 0:28:22.000 --> 0:28:27.240 Canada is rendered Blackfoot that had been assembled and interpreted 0:28:27.440 --> 0:28:31.280 by the elders of the Canadian Blackfoot bands and the 0:28:31.320 --> 0:28:36.760 Southern Pagans the Montana Blackfeet. What caught my attention were 0:28:36.880 --> 0:28:42.200 panels claiming the Blackfoot and Southern Pagan people remembered the 0:28:42.320 --> 0:28:46.440 artists and photographers from a century ago as people they 0:28:46.640 --> 0:28:51.720 especially liked and admired. One exhibit panel put it this way, 0:28:51.880 --> 0:28:56.120 these artists had a profound respect for us as human beings. 0:28:56.720 --> 0:29:01.880 Their respect shows in the images they created. Adjacent to 0:29:01.960 --> 0:29:06.240 those very words were several portraits of their ancestors done 0:29:06.520 --> 0:29:12.520 in brilliantly colored pastels by ving Old Rice. Rice became 0:29:12.680 --> 0:29:17.120 the most successful of all the Great Northern Railroads finds 0:29:17.440 --> 0:29:21.040 as a painter, promoter of Glacier National Park and the 0:29:21.160 --> 0:29:26.120