Dan Flores

Yet the more Rice learned, the more experience he had, the more he thought it critical to portray the post-frontier world of his Indian subjects as opposed to Old West nostalgia.

For Curtis, the arrow of time flew backwards into a retreating past.

For Rice, that projectile flew into an open-ended future where neither the West nor his subjects had vanished.

Rice hardly started out immune to Western romance.

Like all of us, he was a product of time and place.

And in his case, the place was Germany and the time, the late 19th century, when perhaps more so than anywhere, Rice's countrymen were intoxicated with the idea of people living in nature.

Like other German boys, Rice grew up reading Karl May, who mesmerized generations of German readers with a kind of fantasy American West.

May remains so crucial to European ideas about America that Der Schuh der Monotone, an Austin Powers-like send-up of a 1962 Karl May movie, is the most popular film in Germany right now in 2025.

It wasn't cowboys or miners or buffalo hunters who entranced Germans, though.

It was Western Indians, like Mai's heroic Apache chief, Venatu, who mesmerized them.

Actually, Mai never visited the American West, knew nothing about it beyond reading a few dubious books and entirely confused geography and tribes.

None of that mattered.

Mai's novels made the West appear the only place on Earth one could really be alive.

Vinod Rice was one of his converts.

Prepared for a version of the West hardly more real than a galaxy far, far away, a 27-year-old Rice arrived in New York in 1913 expecting to see Indians on Fifth Avenue or living in teepee villages outside New York or Boston.

Eventually, he stumbled across a homeless ex-Wild West performer named Yellow Elk, who was Blackfeet, and told the young German if his heart's desire was to paint real Indians, the best place to go was to newly created Glacier National Park and its adjacent Blackfeet Reservation in Montana.

There, Yellow Elk said, were the Indians of Rice's imagination.

The Great War years obviously were not the time for a painter from America's enemy nation to travel the U.S.

in search of subjects from the margins of American life.

So a 1913-1914 trip to the West didn't happen.