Speaker 1: As indicated by the work of painters and photographers. Nostalgia
Speaker 1: and honesty about the West dueled with one another as
Speaker 1: the Frontier ended and the modern West began. I'm Dan
Speaker 1: Flores and this is the American West, brought to you
Speaker 1: by Velvet Buck Wine, where the.
Speaker 2: Hunt meets the harvest.
Speaker 1: A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters
Speaker 1: and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.
Speaker 1: Enjoy responsible shadows of the Frontier. For many Americans, the
Speaker 1: West occupies a mental space similar to how we imagine
Speaker 1: phases in our history, like the Confederacy, say, or World
Speaker 1: War Two. It had a beginning and in the arc
Speaker 1: of time, it had an end, and the best one
Speaker 1: can do with it now is to read about it
Speaker 1: or watch movies, because the real thing, the beating heart,
Speaker 1: flesh and blood of it, has now receded into the past.
Speaker 1: While that may work for wars or the Great Depression
Speaker 1: or the societal upheaval that was the nineteen sixties, for
Speaker 1: the West, not so much. And there's a simple reason
Speaker 1: the West is different. The West was never just a phase,
Speaker 1: but a place, a remarkable region of the country that
Speaker 1: still exists and whose present story is intertwined with its
Speaker 1: past the way morning emerges from sunrise. When the US
Speaker 1: Census announced in eighteen ninety that the West by then
Speaker 1: had been so broken up by settlement that a frontier
Speaker 1: line no longer existed, the West did not end the
Speaker 1: way the Confederacy did when Grant accepted Lee's surrender in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty five. My point is that the end of
Speaker 1: the so called frontier was hardly a black line across history.
Speaker 1: The way Appomattox Courthouse are, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were as
Speaker 1: wild as the Western past had been as a part
Speaker 1: of history, the region's future looked just as exciting and
Speaker 1: just as troublesome. Of course, we all know there were
Speaker 1: Americans upset by the end of the Frontier.
Speaker 2: Maybe some still are.
Speaker 1: Some people in the early twentieth century experienced a psychological
Speaker 1: alarm historians have labeled frontier anxiety. After all, if the
Speaker 1: so called frontier thesis was true, that Darwinian argument that
Speaker 1: the wilderness had selected out traits that created the American character,
Speaker 1: then how are we going to preserve americanness without a frontier.
Speaker 1: A remarkable thing in itself is that nostalgia for the
Speaker 1: Old West lasted for at least eighty years after the
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety census announced the frontier was over. It was
Speaker 1: nostalgia that made Bill Cody's Wild West Show legendary, made
Speaker 1: the careers of painters Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell, of
Speaker 1: filmmaker John Ford, And of course, it was Old West
Speaker 1: nostalgia that made Tom Mix, John Wayne, Audie Murphy, and
Speaker 1: Roy Rogers cinema stars, and got Clint Eastwood his start.
Speaker 1: Maybe writer Zane Gray captured the magic best The Old West,
Speaker 1: he once wrote, was the last time in the history
Speaker 1: of Earth humans got to live a sensuous life in
Speaker 1: a state of nature. The Old West virus infected all
Speaker 1: of us. As a five year old, I once found
Speaker 1: myself in an Oklahoma City elevator looking up at a
Speaker 1: fellow passenger I realized was film star Randolph Scott. The
Speaker 1: excitement almost took me out. I've never been without a
Speaker 1: pair of cowboy booths since. American country music centered in
Speaker 1: the South had little beyond a regional appeal until it
Speaker 1: rebranded itself country Western and affected cowboy hats and jeans. Now,
Speaker 1: not even Beyonce can resist it, even in the twenty
Speaker 1: first century. The writer David Milch's HBO series Deadwood, or
Speaker 1: as I like to call it, back to the Fucking
Speaker 1: West Cocksuckers, proved just how resilient the Old West could
Speaker 1: be as a compelling subject. More of Milch and Deadwood
Speaker 1: in another episode. What I want to argue now and
Speaker 1: across the remaining episodes in this podcast is that the
Speaker 1: twentieth and twenty first century West has maybe been an
Speaker 1: even more thrilling place for history to play out. Nostalgia
Speaker 1: for the Old West, as I'm about to demonstrate here,
Speaker 1: with the careers of two famous artists, the photographer Edward
Speaker 1: Sheriff Curtis and the painter ven Old Rice, could be
Speaker 1: pretty much a drag on understanding the possibilities of modern
Speaker 1: life in the West. We've not yet entirely escaped the
Speaker 1: pull of the Western pass but the honysty of someone
Speaker 1: like ven Old Rice painting the Blackfeet Indians of Montana
Speaker 1: from roughly nineteen twenty to nineteen fifty helped.
Speaker 2: Show us the way towards the West we actually live
Speaker 2: in or visit.
Speaker 1: No One remotely interested in American Indians or merely the
Speaker 1: beauty and dignity of humanity ever, forgets their reaction standing
Speaker 1: before an Edward Sheriff Curtis photograph, after the initial shock
Speaker 1: of seeing what appears to be pre modern people preserved
Speaker 1: by a modern medium. I had no idea cameras existed
Speaker 1: that long ago, a friend said to me. Once you
Speaker 1: start looking more closely, becoming aware that the sense of
Speaker 1: age here is in part due to the Cepia tones
Speaker 1: of Curtis's Prince. Mostly you're stunned by the depth of
Speaker 1: character in Curtis's human subjects. As George horse Capture of
Speaker 1: Montana's Fort bell Knapp Reservation said of his first sight
Speaker 1: of a Curtis portrait, the world stopped for several moments.
Speaker 1: That was a special case since the portrait was of
Speaker 1: horse Capture's great grandfather. But he speaks for most of us.
Speaker 1: Whether we encounter Curtis's images and books on calendars or
Speaker 1: on postcards, and these days his CPIA photo do seem
Speaker 1: to be everywhere. Were spellbound, as if deposited in the
Speaker 1: past by a time machine. But why what is it
Speaker 1: we see in Curtis's photographs? Who was this shadow catcher,
Speaker 1: as some of his subjects called him, who in a
Speaker 1: good piece of one lifetime managed to befriend some eighty
Speaker 1: tribes of Indians and shoot more than forty thousand photographs
Speaker 1: of them. How was someone like this on the scene
Speaker 1: in the Old West with a camera? Well, that's the
Speaker 1: first fantasy about the shadow Catcher to brush aside. Curtis
Speaker 1: was not photographing eighty indigenous tribes while the frontier raged on.
Speaker 1: The census had declared the frontier over a full decade
Speaker 1: before Curtis said about his project. As for who he was,
Speaker 1: there's the simple characterization of the kind we'd all reject
Speaker 1: if it were applied to us. Then there's the more
Speaker 1: complex scent of flesh biography. The simple version is that
Speaker 1: he was an almost uneducated Seattle mountaineer who in the
Speaker 1: twentieth century became consumed with romantic notions about how Indians
Speaker 1: once lived. He had some talent, got lucky with influential friends,
Speaker 1: and so obsessively pursued his goal that he sacrificed his
Speaker 1: marriage and money to consummate it and died virtually forgotten.
Speaker 1: The longer version is more interesting and gets us a
Speaker 1: lot closer to being able to answer the kinds of
Speaker 1: questions people mouthed silently when they stand wrapped before the photographs.
Speaker 1: Like so many first generation Americans who grew up in
Speaker 1: the Northwest, Curtis's family roots were in the Midwest and
Speaker 1: his case Wisconsin. Sold their farm to become an itinerant
Speaker 1: preacher by the time Edward was twelve, but he had
Speaker 1: briefly gotten to attend a one room school that seems
Speaker 1: to have been his only formal education. Photography was in
Speaker 1: the air in the late eighteen hundreds, and both the
Speaker 1: technology and the possibilities entranced him. Somewhere, Curtis acquired a
Speaker 1: how to manual, and, unable to afford the real thing,
Speaker 1: built his first camera from a wooden box and a
Speaker 1: stereoscopic lens his father brought home from.
Speaker 2: The Civil War.
Speaker 1: In eighteen eighty seven, when Curtis was nineteen, his father
Speaker 1: moved the family west to Washington State, where they homesteaded
Speaker 1: a farm just across Puget Sound from Seattle. With income
Speaker 1: he brought in from commercial fishing and small scale logging,
Speaker 1: young Edward finally managed to buy a fourteen by seventeen
Speaker 1: view camera. Then, in a capitalization strategy rely on most
Speaker 1: of his life, he mortgaged the Curtis farm to buy
Speaker 1: into a partnership and a photographic studio in bustling, growing Seattle.
Speaker 1: At twenty four, his future beginning to open before him,
Speaker 1: and what turned out to be an ill fated move,
Speaker 1: he married a young neighbor named Clara Phillips. For most photographers,
Speaker 1: making a living largely involves capturing images of two rather
Speaker 1: mundane subjects, weddings and families. For four years, Curtis refined
Speaker 1: his abilities in these fields and paid the mortgage lean.
Speaker 1: But he also dreamed of being a fine arts photographer
Speaker 1: and a new movement that saw photography as a kind
Speaker 1: of technologically assisted form of painting and the photographer as
Speaker 1: an artist. What he needed most of all, Curtis decided,
Speaker 1: were a subject matter and a style he could make
Speaker 1: his own. These were savvy insights. On his mountain climbing
Speaker 1: and fishing trips. Curtis kept coming across local Native people,
Speaker 1: still engaged in their ancient subsistence, even as the post
Speaker 1: frontier West whorled around them. Fortuitously, one of these turned
Speaker 1: out to be Princess Angeline, the elderly daughter of Chief Seattle,
Speaker 1: namesake of the burgeoning city. Curtis befriended her and she
Speaker 1: allowed him to shoot a few soft focused photos of
Speaker 1: her as she engaged in a timeless indigenous pursuit digging
Speaker 1: for clowns along the Pacific shore. In a true epiphany,
Speaker 1: it struck Curtis that he should put the finished print
Speaker 1: through a CPO wash so the image looked brown aged,
Speaker 1: so viewers would feel a timelessness about it. Entered in
Speaker 1: the eighteen ninety six National Photographic Exhibit, it took first
Speaker 1: prize in portraiture. Overnight, Curtis became one of seattle best
Speaker 1: known photographers. Now he had his subject and his leit motif.
Speaker 1: Like toppling Domino's, the breaks came in rapid succession. Two
Speaker 1: years later, high up on the shoulders of one of
Speaker 1: his favorite peaks, Mount Rainier, Curtis encountered a lost climbing
Speaker 1: party that he guided to safety. It was the kind
Speaker 1: of group any ambitious young man might want to run into,
Speaker 1: let alone rescue. The party included Gifford Pinchot of the
Speaker 1: US Forestry Division see Heart, Miriam head of the US
Speaker 1: Biological Survey, and, most importantly for Curtis, the famous author
Speaker 1: George byrd Grennell.
Speaker 2: He was a photographer.
Speaker 1: Curtis told them and back in Seattle when he showed
Speaker 1: them some of his photographs, including his early Indian works.
Speaker 2: They were impressed.
Speaker 1: Grennell and Miriam both had already signed on for an
Speaker 1: upcoming grand expedition financed by railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman,
Speaker 1: to Alaska the next summer. Might young Curtis be interested
Speaker 1: in accompanying the party as photographer? This was the domino
Speaker 1: that collapsed the table. The Harriman expedition included three dozen
Speaker 1: of America's most famous scientist, writers, artists, a kind of
Speaker 1: camelot afloat on the Alaskan seas. Curtis got their rubbed
Speaker 1: shoulders with the natural history writers John Muir and John Burrows,
Speaker 1: the geologist Grove Carl Gilbert, biologists William Dahl, Frederick Dellenbaugh
Speaker 1: and William Brewer, even mister Harriman himself. They were the
Speaker 1: core of Washington's prestigious Cosmos Club. For Curtis, the trip
Speaker 1: served as passport to the whole American scientific and conservation community,
Speaker 1: and the ship, the George day Elder, was, in John
Speaker 1: Mure's words, a floating university, providing Curtis the education he
Speaker 1: had never gotten. He was thirty one years old. The
Speaker 1: trip particularly made Grinnell a good friend, and the writer
Speaker 1: now invited Curtis along in the summer of nineteen hundred
Speaker 1: to a Plains Indian sundance among the Blackfeet on their
Speaker 1: reservation in Montana. All of Curtis's life had been preparation
Speaker 1: for this moment. As he wrote later, he was intensely affected.
Speaker 1: It was the start of my effort to learn about
Speaker 1: the Plains Indians and to photograph their lives. He would
Speaker 1: preserve the Indian world before Indian ness, as Curtis and
Speaker 1: all his new friends firmly believed, what happen would vanish
Speaker 1: for all time. What Curtis had in mind was a
Speaker 1: monumental undertaking, but it wasn't untilnineteen o six that JP
Speaker 1: Morgan finally bankrolled him with seventy five thousand dollars for
Speaker 1: his grand project. Morgan's deal wasn't much of a bargain.
Speaker 1: He wanted Curtis to do the field and print work,
Speaker 1: plus in the matter of John James Ottoman, to publish
Speaker 1: and even market the Finnish books himself. Curtis called the
Speaker 1: books in question the North American Indian, and they came
Speaker 1: near to being still born at the outset. When the
Speaker 1: anthropological community got word of what Curtis was proposing, a
Speaker 1: photographic record of traditional Indian life, three decades after most
Speaker 1: tribes had settled onto reservations, it ran up a red flag.
Speaker 2: Professor Franz Boaz.
Speaker 1: At Columbia expressed what still is the most obvious objection
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century. What Curtis was proposing was impossible.
Speaker 1: Despite widespread nostalgia for the Old West, by the early
Speaker 1: nineteen high hundreds, most tribes had already endured decades of
Speaker 1: systematic policy driven a culturation. To show traditional Indian life
Speaker 1: as it was lived in the eighteen hundreds, Curtis would
Speaker 1: have to fake the details and most of the contexts
Speaker 1: of his project. Boas His objections did lead to President
Speaker 1: Roosevelt appointing a committee to investigate those arguments, but the
Speaker 1: committee included William H. Holmes of the Bureau of Ethnology,
Speaker 1: who despised Boas and who knew Roosevelt wanted Curtis to succeed. Roosevelt,
Speaker 1: in fact, wrote the forward to Volume one, and it's
Speaker 1: easy to conclude that the President was as caught up
Speaker 1: in the romance of the undertaking as Curtis. Nonetheless, a
Speaker 1: reputation as the great fabricator has been Curtis's albatross ever since.
Speaker 1: Curtis was in over his head anyway. He was young,
Speaker 1: enter jet and inspired and thought he could wrap up
Speaker 1: the entire project in five years, but if dated from
Speaker 1: that nineteen hundred sun dance in Montana where he got
Speaker 1: the idea, it actually took up thirty years of his life.
Speaker 1: With offices both in New York for marketing and Seattle
Speaker 1: for the photographic end, he embarked on years and years
Speaker 1: of one world win trip after another. Volume, one on
Speaker 1: the Novajos in the Southwest, came out in nineteen oh seven,
Speaker 1: and it was led.
Speaker 2: Off by a photo whose title.
Speaker 1: The Vanishing Race, captured the whole underlying premise. Over the
Speaker 1: next seven years, ten more volumes appeared. By this time,
Speaker 1: Curtis had gone through Morgan's initial investment and was barely
Speaker 1: passed halfway to his goal. His novel solution for money
Speaker 1: was to turn into an indie filmmaker, but his silent
Speaker 1: film In the Land of the Headhunters, a quaky Udel,
Speaker 1: Romeo and Juliet story, was a box office flop. By
Speaker 1: taking out a second mortgage on his house, this one
Speaker 1: without his wife's knowledge, and appealing to the Morgan family
Speaker 1: for continued financing, Curtis was finally able to turn out
Speaker 1: the last nine volumes of his grand project. While all
Speaker 1: this was happening, the last volume twenty finally appeared in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty, much of the rest of Curtis's world was imploding.
Speaker 1: Clara filed for divorce from her absentee husband in nineteen sixteen.
Speaker 1: Curtis was convicted of failure to pay alimony in nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: and when the divorce was settled in nineteen twenty, Clara
Speaker 1: got possession not only of his studio but of all
Speaker 1: the negatives he had shot so far. The subsequent disappearance
Speaker 1: of Curtis's studio materials dating before nineteen twenty has led
Speaker 1: to one of the great treasure hunts in Western art so.
Speaker 2: Far, to no avail.
Speaker 1: Clara wasn't through, though, having him arrested one more time
Speaker 1: as he passed through Seattle Enroot, home from his last
Speaker 1: photo shoot for The North American Indian in nineteen twenty seven.
Speaker 1: Curtis lived for another quarter century without ever producing another
Speaker 1: significant work, so the meaning of his life is largely
Speaker 1: synonymous with what we think about his great project. There's
Speaker 1: no question today of Curtis's status as an artist, but
Speaker 1: the mesmerizing quality of his images is largely a consequence
Speaker 1: of his understanding of the nostalgic.
Speaker 2: Allure of Native America.
Speaker 1: Other photographers and painters certainly attempted this, but no one
Speaker 1: else pulled it off with the a line that Curtis did.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, there's always the question of whether
Speaker 1: you can entirely trust a Curtis image. The text of
Speaker 1: the North American Indian, edited by Frederick Webb Hodge of
Speaker 1: the Bureau of Ethnology, presents a straightforward ethnography of the
Speaker 1: tribes as Curtis found them, but of course hardly anyone
Speaker 1: reads the text anymore. So we're back to the fact
Speaker 1: that rarely do his photo show Indian life as it
Speaker 1: actually was in the post frontier. Instead, Curtis went to
Speaker 1: extraordinary links to exercise the whole twentieth century. He provided
Speaker 1: his Indian subjects with outfits and props from a half
Speaker 1: century earlier. He airbrushed away power lines in his photos,
Speaker 1: once even used dark room tricks to erase an alarm
Speaker 1: clock he found to his horror beside the right elbow
Speaker 1: of his blackfeet subject in the State eighteen seventies, looking
Speaker 1: photo in a Paygan lodge. Of the more than twenty
Speaker 1: two thousand photographs in the North American Indian, a few
Speaker 1: can't be trusted or are questionable today for other reasons.
Speaker 1: Sometimes Indians do Curtis. Some of the novel hosts did
Speaker 1: their ceremonies backwards for his camera.
Speaker 2: As one of the only white.
Speaker 1: Men ever to participate in the nine Day Hopey Snake Dance,
Speaker 1: Curtis even.
Speaker 2: Photographed that's sacred ritual.
Speaker 1: Today, the Hopies don't even allow non Indians to see
Speaker 1: this ceremony. It's not easy then, to know what to
Speaker 1: think about Curtis. Listening to George Horse Capture helps Thom,
Speaker 1: a defender of Curtis Horse Capture, remains awestruck at Curtis's
Speaker 1: dedication to his project and at the stunning quality of
Speaker 1: the resulting imagery. Most importantly, he believes that Curtis's work
Speaker 1: Strengthson's native confidence. What Curtis's images show is that what
Speaker 1: Indians suspected about the depth and beauty of their ancestors
Speaker 1: culture in the Old West was true. As Curtis was
Speaker 1: journeying to tribe after tribe, then disappearing into his dark room.
Speaker 1: All over the West, painters were fixing images of Native
Speaker 1: people and the Old West as rapidly as they could work.
Speaker 1: Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell became the most famous and
Speaker 1: successful the artists captivated by Indians believed their subjects were vanishing,
Speaker 1: so artists like Joseph Henry Sharp, who particularly focused on
Speaker 1: the Crows and Taos and Santa Fe based painters like
Speaker 1: e Irvingkows, Ernest Blumenshein and John Sloan captured the pueblos
Speaker 1: of the Southwest at a frantic pace. At a time
Speaker 1: when railroads were one of the biggest businesses in the country,
Speaker 1: Tourism seemed the future, and nothing advertised a Western adventure
Speaker 1: in a strange land like images of exotic natives. Ving
Speaker 1: Old Rice, who immersed himself in the northern West between
Speaker 1: roughly nineteen twenty and nineteen fifty, was one of the
Speaker 1: painters who attracted the attention of a Western railroad. Rice's
Speaker 1: mission began very much in the genre that Curtis, Remington,
Speaker 1: Blumensheine and others had already laid out. Yet the more
Speaker 1: Rice learned, the more experience he had, the more he
Speaker 1: thought it critical to portray the post frontier world of
Speaker 1: his Indian subjects as opposed to old West nostalgia. For Curtis,
Speaker 1: the arrow of time flew backwards into a retreating past.
Speaker 2: For Rice, that projectile flew.
Speaker 1: Into an open ended future where neither of the West
Speaker 1: nor his subjects had vanished. Rice hardly started out immune
Speaker 1: to Western romance. Like all of us, he was a
Speaker 1: product of time and place, and in his case the
Speaker 1: place was Germany and the time the late nineteenth century, when,
Speaker 1: perhaps more so than anywhere, Rice's countrymen were intoxicated with
Speaker 1: the idea of people living in nature. Like other German boys,
Speaker 1: Reis grew up reading Karl Mei, who mesmerized generations of
Speaker 1: German readers with a kind of fantasy American West. Mai
Speaker 1: remains so crucial to European ideas about America that Durshue
Speaker 1: de monitu An Austin Powers like Sendup of a nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty two Karl my movie is the most popular film
Speaker 1: in Germany right now. In twenty twenty five, it wasn't
Speaker 1: cowboys or miners or buffalo hunters who entranced Germans, though
Speaker 1: it was Western Indians like My's heroic apache chief Vinetou
Speaker 1: who mesmerized them. Actually, My never visited the American West,
Speaker 1: knew nothing about it beyond reading a few dubious books
Speaker 1: and entirely confused geography and tribes.
Speaker 2: None of that mattered.
Speaker 1: My's novels made the West appear the only place on
Speaker 1: Earth one could really be alive. Ven Old Rice was
Speaker 1: one of his converts, prepared for a version of the
Speaker 1: West hardly more real than a galaxy far far away.
Speaker 1: A twenty seven year old Rice arrived in New York
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirteen expecting to see Indians on Fifth Avenue
Speaker 1: are living in teepee villages outside New York or Boston. Eventually,
Speaker 1: he stumbled across a homeless ex Wild West performer named
Speaker 1: yellow Elk, who was Blackfeet and told the young German
Speaker 1: if his heart's desire was to paint real Indians, the
Speaker 1: best place to go was to newly created Glacier National
Speaker 1: Park and its adjacent Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. There, yellow
Speaker 1: Elk said, were the Indians of Rice's imagination. The Great
Speaker 1: War years obviously were not the time for a painter
Speaker 1: from America's enemy nation to travel the US in search
Speaker 1: of subjects from the margins of American life. So a
Speaker 1: nineteen thirteen nineteen fourteen trip to the West didn't happen,
Speaker 1: but it's quickly following the war's end as he could
Speaker 1: make it happen. In the absolute dead of winter of
Speaker 1: December January nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty, Rice took the
Speaker 1: Great Northern Railroad west to Montana. As soon as he
Speaker 1: stepped off the train, the Germans spotted a group of
Speaker 1: blanket draped Indians, and, to the profound shock of the group,
Speaker 1: strolled up to them, wrapped one on the back, held
Speaker 1: up his hand, and, in a recreation of scenes in
Speaker 1: carl My novels, blurted out, how lucky for vin Old Rice,
Speaker 1: lucky for all of us. The Blackfeet, by this time
Speaker 1: in their history, had learned to be amused and tolerant
Speaker 1: of the unfathomable antics of white people. Maybe the innocence
Speaker 1: of how was downright endearing. In nineteen nineteen, So, recognizing
Speaker 1: a fallible fellow human when he saw one one of
Speaker 1: the Blackfeet men, whose name was Turtled, motioned for his
Speaker 1: friends to choke off their laughter and to welcome this
Speaker 1: strange individual, as the Blackfeet had done with empathetic whites
Speaker 1: for decades. The Blackfeet had experiences with artists and photographers
Speaker 1: that went back at least twenty years, and after a
Speaker 1: few minutes of translated but good spirited conversation, some of
Speaker 1: the group Rice approached with how agreed to sit for him.
Speaker 1: Rice had taken the first big step. He was on
Speaker 1: his way to a long and celebrated career as one
Speaker 1: of the best twentieth century portraitists of American Indians. A
Speaker 1: few years ago, I toured a first rate Blackfoot exhibit
Speaker 1: in the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. The tribal name in
Speaker 1: Canada is rendered Blackfoot that had been assembled and interpreted
Speaker 1: by the elders of the Canadian Blackfoot bands and the
Speaker 1: Southern Pagans the Montana Blackfeet. What caught my attention were
Speaker 1: panels claiming the Blackfoot and Southern Pagan people remembered the
Speaker 1: artists and photographers from a century ago as people they
Speaker 1: especially liked and admired. One exhibit panel put it this way,
Speaker 1: these artists had a profound respect for us as human beings.
Speaker 1: Their respect shows in the images they created. Adjacent to
Speaker 1: those very words were several portraits of their ancestors done
Speaker 1: in brilliantly colored pastels by ving Old Rice. Rice became
Speaker 1: the most successful of all the Great Northern Railroads finds
Speaker 1: as a painter, promoter of Glacier National Park and the
Speaker 1: railroad's ticket sales to Western tourists. Just as the Southwestern
Speaker 1: Railroads had done with the art of the Southwest, the
Speaker 1: Great Northern, led by Louis Hill, son of founder James J. Hill,
Speaker 1: hoped to use artists to help establish Glacier as a
Speaker 1: premier American vacation destination. Urged on by George Burgrenelle in
Speaker 1: nineteen ten, Congress had created Glacier out of pieces of
Speaker 1: the Flathead National Forest and the Blackfeet Reservation. For the
Speaker 1: next half century, the national Park acted like some deep
Speaker 1: space singularity that bent the railroad around it. As part
Speaker 1: of the Great Northern's Sea America First campaign in nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 1: it built many Glacier Hotel along with several of the
Speaker 1: park's Swiss chalets, and hired local Blackfeet to entertain tourists.
Speaker 1: Then it advertised Glacier as the American version of the
Speaker 1: Swiss Alps except with Indians. The year of the park open,
Speaker 1: Hill hired Austria John Ferry as the first sponsored artist
Speaker 1: to help with this promotion, and between nineteen ten and
Speaker 1: nineteen thirteen, Ferry produced three hundred and forty seven pieces,
Speaker 1: for which Hill paid by the square foot of canvas,
Speaker 1: at a price that worked out to roughly thirty dollars
Speaker 1: a painting. The railroad's publicity department used Ferri's work in ads, pamphlets,
Speaker 1: even on menus.
Speaker 2: Other artists followed.
Speaker 1: In a whirlwind of promotional notions in nineteen thirty eighteen.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fourteen, Hill invited the German modernist Julius Seidler
Speaker 1: to the park, then Indian genre painter Edwin Demming. By
Speaker 1: nineteen seventeen, Hill placed his hopes on one of the
Speaker 1: West's most famous illustrator painters, San Francisco artist Maynard Dixon,
Speaker 1: with a plan for Dixon to produce a set of
Speaker 1: large oils for glaciers, lodges, and as advertising posters on
Speaker 1: the West coasts. Dixon came and painted and sent a
Speaker 1: dozen finished oils to Saint Paul in nineteen eighteen. They
Speaker 1: disappeared and have never been found. As for the Blackfeet.
Speaker 1: They had reasons of their own for posing and performing
Speaker 1: for the railroad. Getting to dress in their traditional clothing,
Speaker 1: going on excursions into their old haunts now deep in
Speaker 1: the park were among those reasons, and yes, there was
Speaker 1: cash to be earned. All these made the Blackfeet for
Speaker 1: a time among the most willing Indian subjects in the West.
Speaker 1: All these elements set the table perfectly for vn Old
Speaker 1: Rice's arrival in Blackfeet Country in nineteen nineteen. I once
Speaker 1: was privileged to have lunch with Renate Rice, vn Old
Speaker 1: Rice's engaging daughter in law in Santa Fe. She told
Speaker 1: me that Rice came to Montana with outstanding training at
Speaker 1: the Munich Royal Academy of Fine Arts. When Art's instruction
Speaker 1: was fascinated with the lives and art of so called
Speaker 1: primitive people think Paul Gogan and Pablo Picasso. Rice was
Speaker 1: exposed to all those currents, including modern art like Fauvism
Speaker 1: and Cubism. Borrowing his love of pure chromatic colors and
Speaker 1: a fascination with exotic people from modern art, Rice translated
Speaker 1: those into a completely fresh take on the black Feet
Speaker 1: of the West. The paintings then became commercial work in
Speaker 1: the form of the Great Northern Railroads.
Speaker 2: Calendars and menus. He just loved people.
Speaker 1: Rice's daughter in law told me he loved the way
Speaker 1: people looked. But as Riis's son Jark always said, the
Speaker 1: real reason Rice came to America was always to paint
Speaker 1: the Indians. Over a few weeks on that first visit
Speaker 1: to the black Feet, Rice churned out a remarkable thirty
Speaker 1: six portraits exhibited back east. The entire cash quickly sold.
Speaker 1: Already one of the most celebrated Modernist portrait painters in
Speaker 1: New York, Rice had finally painted Indians, but he was
Speaker 1: still living in New York, and what he really wanted
Speaker 1: was to be George Catlin Redducks, a twentieth century biographer
Speaker 1: of Indians who everyone in New York believed at the
Speaker 1: time were vanishing. As with Curtis, some times life requires
Speaker 1: a lucky break. In early nineteen twenty seven, Rice's sculptor
Speaker 1: brother Hans, was guiding climbers in Glacier Park when he
Speaker 1: happened to meet Louis Hill of the Great Northern. When
Speaker 1: he showed Hill a portfolio of his brother's portraits, Hill
Speaker 1: did not hesitate. Could Veno come out that summer at
Speaker 1: the invitation of the Great Northern, which would fund his
Speaker 1: trip in lodging in return for rights of first refusal
Speaker 1: on whatever art resulted. Vn Old was passed. Ready, he
Speaker 1: remarked to friends in the East the previous year, how
Speaker 1: beautiful the West is. You people in New York don't
Speaker 1: realize I've lived in New York. But now I can't
Speaker 1: stand it any longer. I feel I must break away,
Speaker 1: get among the Indians again, live with them in their
Speaker 1: simple way, and study and paint them. The relationship that
Speaker 1: now formed between an artist, a railroad, a national park,
Speaker 1: and several score Western Indians lasted for the next quarter century.
Speaker 1: It had something for everybody. The painter got to fulfill
Speaker 1: a lifelong ambition and leave an enduring legacy.
Speaker 2: The railroad ended.
Speaker 1: Up with beautiful portraits he would use to advertise the
Speaker 1: line to tourists. Leisher Park's identity was forged by the arrangement,
Speaker 1: and as for the Blackfeet, early on it was a
Speaker 1: chance to hold on to and showcase clothing and other
Speaker 1: elements of their traditional culture. Later, at least as much
Speaker 1: as the railroad would allow, Rice's relationship with the Blackfeet showed.
Speaker 2: Something more honest than Curtis ever did.
Speaker 1: He produced an unmatched portrait of a generation of Native
Speaker 1: people who were no longer buffalo hunters, but ranchers who
Speaker 1: lived in clapboard houses or federal employees who drove pickups.
Speaker 1: In other words, modern Indians surviving in a West different
Speaker 1: from the old Frontier. Summer after summer, ten of them
Speaker 1: between nineteen twenty seven and nineteen forty eight, Reis returned
Speaker 1: to Glacier, gathered black Feet and occasionally Cootney sitters, and
Speaker 1: from his studio on Saint Mary's Lake, faithfully recorded their
Speaker 1: changing circumstances. With his chromatic modernist colors. Rice painted Indians
Speaker 1: with a skill of George Catlan could never have imagined possible.
Speaker 1: Their faces, evoking the ancient and the exotic, were rendered
Speaker 1: into great art. Increasingly, he sought to paint the black
Speaker 1: Feet as they appeared daily to one another, the way
Speaker 1: they dressed and looked, not in the eighteen seventies, but
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties to his managers
Speaker 1: in the railroad offices. However, showing exotic and nostalgic images
Speaker 1: to tourists was the moneymaker. Portraying the Black feet in
Speaker 1: jeans and cowboy hats and checkered church how was that
Speaker 1: going to sell train tickets? So alarmed at Blackfeet intermarriage
Speaker 1: with non Indians and with what appeared to be their
Speaker 1: growing assimilation into the modern West, which of course had
Speaker 1: been the whole point of American Indian policy for one
Speaker 1: hundred years, the Great Northern began to waffle about lodging
Speaker 1: Rice for the summers. Rice's last visit to Glacier came
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty eight, and this time something happened that
Speaker 1: the Railroad interpreted as certain evidence that the world had
Speaker 1: turned upside down. Eileen Schilt, a Blackfeet woman whose portrait
Speaker 1: Rice painted that summer, ended up bringing a lawsuit against
Speaker 1: the railroad for using her image and advertising without paying
Speaker 1: her a royalty. What buffalo hunting Indian would ever do
Speaker 1: such a thing? Following a stroke, Veno Rice passed away
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 2: What a life he had had.
Speaker 1: He left marvelous pictorial evidence of just the kind of
Speaker 1: existence he had hoped for. Even the ending was straight
Speaker 1: out of a Carl My novel. In nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: Jark shipped his father's ashes to bull Child, one of
Speaker 1: Rice's Blackfeet friends in Montana. As the Chinooks ate away
Speaker 1: the snow that spring, bull Child climbed Red Blanket Hill
Speaker 1: and spread Rice's ashes across the Blackfeet country, just as
Speaker 1: he had daydreamed in Germany as a boy, ving old
Speaker 1: Rice had finally merged with the West and the Indians.
Speaker 3: Dan, I think one of the first thing that stood
Speaker 3: out to me in this in this episode is the
Speaker 3: idea that these photographs from Curtis are sepia toned. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and we wouldn't really, I don't think very many Americans
Speaker 3: would be familiar with that prior to the age of Instagram.
Speaker 3: But in telling the story, you sort of peel back
Speaker 3: what's behind the image, which up until recently, you know,
Speaker 3: with digital manipulation, it was more obscure to the to
Speaker 3: the viewer right or to the audience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think those CPA images that I mean, and
Speaker 1: that's that's how Curtis photograph you know, his two hundred
Speaker 1: thousand photographs, a shot of Native people. That's how he
Speaker 1: did it. That's how he processed them. I mean, they
Speaker 1: were black and white photographs, but he processed them in
Speaker 1: a chemical mix in his dark room in order to
Speaker 1: turn them brown, and the idea, of course, was some
Speaker 1: make these look aged. And that was kind of one
Speaker 1: of his epiphanies when as a young man he found
Speaker 1: himself in a position to produce a kind of a
Speaker 1: photography that could be considered art and that other people
Speaker 1: would would think of him as an artist. That was
Speaker 1: one of the insights he had. The second inside, of course,
Speaker 1: was I'm going to make Native people my focus, and
Speaker 1: I'm particularly going to photograph them as if we were
Speaker 1: still in the eighteen forties, the eighteen fifties, the eighteen sixties.
Speaker 1: And one of the ways to make all this work
Speaker 1: is to make the images is to do a CPA
Speaker 1: wash on them so they look like they're one hundred
Speaker 1: years old or something, you know. And as I said
Speaker 1: early on in the script for this episode, I had
Speaker 1: a friend one time who had his wife had bought
Speaker 1: him a book of Curtis photographs for Christmas one year,
Speaker 1: and we were going through them and he said, I
Speaker 1: gotta say, I I had no idea there were cameras
Speaker 1: back then.
Speaker 2: And I said, well, back then.
Speaker 1: Yes, is that's the rub because back then was actually
Speaker 1: as late as nineteen twenty seven, nineteen thirty, So yeah,
Speaker 1: there were cameras, but what he's doing is he's attempting
Speaker 1: to make these images look like they're one hundred years old.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think, at least when it comes to
Speaker 3: this style of art, right portraits of Native people, I
Speaker 3: always have I guess, conflicting thoughts or emotions when it
Speaker 3: comes to it, because there's there's this question of often ticity.
Speaker 3: You know, is this objectifying Native people? Is this or
Speaker 3: is this like a celebratory representation. In this case, you
Speaker 3: have two artists who, you know, some there's some commercial
Speaker 3: motivation obviously, but they do seem to have sort of
Speaker 3: an authentic calling to do this, and they have good motivation,
Speaker 3: pure motivations for lack of a better term, but yeah,
Speaker 3: to historicize Native people in that way, it's it's problematic
Speaker 3: for a lot of reasons. And I wonder if you
Speaker 3: can just sort of talk about some of the conversations
Speaker 3: around that.
Speaker 2: Well, when when the world discovered.
Speaker 1: That Curtis was going to do this, when JP Morgan
Speaker 1: gave him seventy five thousand dollars to do it, and
Speaker 1: and Teddy Roosevelt, who was still president at the time,
Speaker 1: announced that he was writing the forward for this anthropologists
Speaker 1: of the day were stunt and shocked, and Franz Boas
Speaker 1: at Columbia in particular, said, I mean, this is fake.
Speaker 1: You're going to have to fake it all because, I mean,
Speaker 1: we've had an Indian policy in place for a century
Speaker 1: to try to assimilate native people, and many, a great
Speaker 1: many of the world's native people, including in the West,
Speaker 1: have been fully assimilated. So how are you going to
Speaker 1: do this? So the sort of label the great Fabricator
Speaker 1: was placed on Curtis early on in the project, and
Speaker 1: it's been a hard thing for him to live down.
Speaker 1: I think most of the people who see these images now,
Speaker 1: who buy Curtis calendars or postcards or buy books of
Speaker 1: Curtis's work, probably don't understand that that at one time
Speaker 1: was that this was This project was very controversial for
Speaker 1: that reason. And one of the reasons I wanted to
Speaker 1: pair him in this episode with ven Old Rice is
Speaker 1: because Rice is he's a contemporary. He's a painter rather
Speaker 1: than a photographer. He's a very wonderfully trained, academically trained
Speaker 1: portraitist in modern art, and so he's really really skilled.
Speaker 1: He's got the same sort of romantic nostalgia about the West,
Speaker 1: operating from a different perspective, not the frontier for an American,
Speaker 1: but from the karl My novels.
Speaker 3: And it's a clumsy, it's a clumsy and awkward nostalgia.
Speaker 1: It's a very clum because Karl May, the guy who
Speaker 1: made so many Germans fascinated with the West and with
Speaker 1: native people, never visited the West, knew very little about it,
Speaker 1: sort of botched the names of tribes, and I mean,
Speaker 1: he was really kind of awful at it. I lived,
Speaker 1: at one time taught at university on the yostaccato, and
Speaker 1: Carl Me evidently made the toccado into a real focus,
Speaker 1: a geographic focus. And in carl My's books, the onoisocado
Speaker 1: is a mountain range. Well Yanois tacato, in truth is
Speaker 1: actually a dead flat surface, a plateau, the top of
Speaker 1: a plateau. And when I was at Texas Tech back
Speaker 1: in my early career, a bunch of the carl My
Speaker 1: society came to Texas Tech to hold their annual conference,
Speaker 1: and they all got off the plane and were stunned
Speaker 1: to find themselves rather than in snow capped mountains, standing
Speaker 1: out on a bald ass open plane full of cotton
Speaker 1: plants and so, I mean it was a very I
Speaker 1: got to do a talk for them, and it was
Speaker 1: very funny to talk to these Germans who had a
Speaker 1: completely erroneous idea, as I say in the in the episode,
Speaker 1: it's they had the sort of in a galaxy, far
Speaker 1: far away idea about the American West. And so and
Speaker 1: that's what my ca I mean, that's what the Old
Speaker 1: Rice came to America with. But he ended up at
Speaker 1: this moment that he and Curtis were both working, the
Speaker 1: Frontier had come to an end. Many Americans were confronting
Speaker 1: the whole idea of of what historians called frontier anxiety.
Speaker 1: I mean, what are we going to do without a frontier?
Speaker 1: This is what has made America what it is. And
Speaker 1: so you're confronted with do you do the Curtis thing,
Speaker 1: where you act as if the Frontier is not over
Speaker 1: and you continue to portray the Old West as if
Speaker 1: it still exists, or you do what then Old Rice did,
Speaker 1: which was he began portraying the Blackfeet. He was painting
Speaker 1: in cowboy hats and jeans and checkered shirts and driving pickups,
Speaker 1: and of course the railroad that employed him was not
Speaker 1: happy at that. But he was honest about it. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that I think is important about
Speaker 1: that is that from the Curtis perspective and many of
Speaker 1: the people who bought Curtis's books, native people were a
Speaker 1: vanishing race, right, And for ven ol Rice, they weren't
Speaker 1: vanishing at all. They were simply segueing into twentieth century America, right.
Speaker 3: And I think that's you get into that that there's
Speaker 3: serious I mean serious thinkers believe that Native people will
Speaker 3: go extinct, and that that had been the case since,
Speaker 3: you know, even back to Jefferson and before. But then
Speaker 3: there's this question of again authenticity and indian ness. But
Speaker 3: they're people driving pickups, right, and there are people working jobs,
Speaker 3: and it's it's fast that it takes an outsider to
Speaker 3: recognize that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it takes a German coming over. And because I
Speaker 1: think because he was very sympathetic and he treated his subjects,
Speaker 1: the people he was painting, as real human beings, which
Speaker 1: of course they reciprocated with him. I mean, it became
Speaker 1: important to him to portray them realistically and honestly, rather
Speaker 1: than to try to do what the Great Northern Railroad wanted,
Speaker 1: which was to keep putting bonnets on them and acting
Speaker 1: as if they were still buffalo hunters, because of course
Speaker 1: that was what worked for tourism on the rail line.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So an interesting time in the story of the West
Speaker 1: because this magical thing of the frontier.
Speaker 2: Is over, but the West is.
Speaker 1: As I try to stay in the beginning. The West
Speaker 1: is not like say, you know, the Civil War, which
Speaker 1: comes to an end. The West is a place, and
Speaker 1: so it continues to have a story and a history
Speaker 1: forward into time, and that becomes to me as fascinating
Speaker 1: as the time in the previous century.
Speaker 2: Well, thanks Dan, you Bet Randall. Thanks it's been fun.