Dan Flores

The railroad ended up with beautiful portraits it would use to advertise the line to tourists.

Glacier Park's identity was forged by the arrangement.

And as for the Blackfeet, early on, it was a chance to hold on to and showcase clothing and other elements of their traditional culture.

Later, at least as much as the railroad would allow, Rice's relationship with the Blackfeet showed something more honest than Curtis ever did.

He produced an unmatched portrait of a generation of native people who were no longer buffalo hunters, but ranchers who lived in clapboard houses or federal employees who drove pickups.

In other words, modern Indians surviving in a West different from the old frontier.

Summer after summer, 10 of them between 1927 and 1948, Rice returned to Glacier, gathered Blackfeet and occasionally Kootenai sitters, and from his studio on St.

Mary's Lake, faithfully recorded their changing circumstances.

With his chromatic modernist colors, Rice painted Indians with a skill a George Catlin could never have imagined possible.

Their faces, evoking the ancient and the exotic, were rendered into great art.

Increasingly, he sought to paint the Blackfeet as they appeared daily to one another, the way they dressed and looked not in the 1870s, but in the 1930s and 1940s.

To his managers in the railroad offices, however, showing exotic and nostalgic images to tourists was the moneymaker.

Portraying the black feet in jeans and cowboy hats and checkered shirts, how was that going to sell train tickets?

So, alarmed at Blackfeet intermarriage with non-Indians and with what appeared to be their growing assimilation into the modern West, which of course had been the whole point of American Indian policy for a hundred years, the Great Northern began to waffle about lodging rice for the summers.

Rice's last visit to Glacier came in 1948, and this time something happened that the railroad interpreted as certain evidence that the world had turned upside down.

Eileen Schilt, a Blackfeet woman whose portrait Rice painted that summer, ended up bringing a lawsuit against the railroad for using her image in advertising without paying her a royalty.

What buffalo hunting Indian would ever do such a thing?

Following a stroke, Vino Rice passed away in 1953.

But what a life he had had.

He left marvelous pictorial evidence of just the kind of existence he had hoped for.