Dan Flores

As part of the Great Northern's See America First campaign, in 1915 it built many glacier hotels along with several of the park's Swiss chalets and hired local Blackfeet to entertain tourists.

Then it advertised Glacier as the American version of the Swiss Alps, except with Indians.

The year the park opened, Hill hired Austrian John Ferry as the first sponsored artist to help with this promotion.

And between 1910 and 1913, Ferry produced 347 pieces, for which Hill paid by the square foot of canvas at a price that worked out to roughly $30 a painting.

The railroad's publicity department used Ferry's work in ads, pamphlets, even on menus.

Other artists followed in a whirlwind of promotional notions.

In 1913 and 1914, Hill invited the German modernist Julius Seiler to the park, then Indian genre painter Edwin Deming.

By 1917, Hill placed his hopes on one of the West's most famous illustrator painters, San Francisco artist Maynard Dixon, with a plan for Dixon to produce a set of large oils for Glacier's lodges and as advertising posters on the West Coast.

Dixon came and painted and sent a dozen finished oils to St.

Paul in 1918.

They disappeared and have never been found.

As for the Blackfeet, they had reasons of their own for posing and performing for the railroad.

Getting to dress in their traditional clothing, going on excursions into their old haunts, now deep in the park, were among those reasons.

And yes, there was cash to be earned.

All these made the Blackfeet, for a time, among the most willing Indian subjects in the West.

All these elements set the table perfectly for Vina Old Rice's arrival in Blackfeet country in 1919.

I once was privileged to have lunch with Renate Rice, Vina Old Rice's engaging daughter-in-law in Santa Fe.

She told me that Rice came to Montana with outstanding training at the Munich Royal Academy of Fine Arts when arts instruction was fascinated with the lives and art of so-called primitive people.

Think Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso.

Rice was exposed to all those currents, including modern art like Fauvism and Cubism.