Chapter 1: What historical context surrounds the end of the American Frontier?
As indicated by the work of painters and photographers, nostalgia and honesty about the West dueled with one another as the frontier ended and the modern West began. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers.
Limited supply available at velvetbuckvineyards.com. Enjoy responsibly. Shadows of the Frontier For many Americans, the West occupies a middle space similar to how we imagine phases in our history like the Confederacy, say, or World War II.
Chapter 2: How did nostalgia for the Old West influence American culture?
It had a beginning, and in the arc of time, it had an end. And the best one can do with it now is to read about it or watch movies because the real thing, the beating heart, flesh, and blood of it, has now receded into the past. While that may work for wars or the Great Depression or the societal upheaval that was the 1960s, for the West, not so much.
And there's a simple reason the West is different.
Chapter 3: What was the significance of the 1890 U.S. Census announcement?
The West was never just a phase, but a place, a remarkable region of the country that still exists and whose present story is intertwined with its past the way morning emerges from sunrise. When the U.S.
Census announced in 1890 that the West by then had been so broken up by bodies of settlement that a frontier line no longer existed, the West did not end the way the Confederacy did when Grant accepted Lee's surrender in 1865. My point is that the end of the so-called frontier was hardly a black line across history the way Appomattox Courthouse or Hiroshima-Nagasaki were.
As wild as the western past had been as a part of history, the region's future looked just as exciting and just as troublesome. Of course, we all know there were Americans upset by the end of the frontier. Maybe some still are. Some people in the early 20th century experienced a psychological alarm historians have labeled frontier anxiety.
After all, if the so-called frontier thesis was true, that Darwinian argument that the wilderness had selected out traits that created the American character, then how are we going to preserve Americanness without a frontier? A remarkable thing in itself is that nostalgia for the Old West lasted for at least 80 years after the 1890 census announced the frontier was over.
It was nostalgia that made Bill Cody's Wild West show legendary, made the careers of painters Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell, of filmmaker John Ford, and of course it was Old West nostalgia that made Tom Mix, John Wayne, Audie Murphy, and Roy Rogers cinema stars and got Clint Eastwood his start. Maybe writer Zane Gray captured the magic best.
The Old West, he once wrote, was the last time in the history of Earth humans got to live a sensuous life in a state of nature. The Old West virus infected all of us. As a five-year-old, I once found myself in an Oklahoma City elevator looking up at a fellow passenger I realized was film star Randolph Scott. The excitement almost took me out. I've never been without a pair of cowboy boots since.
American country music centered in the South had little beyond a regional appeal until it rebranded itself Country Western and affected cowboy hats and jeans. Now not even Beyonce can resist it.
Even in the 21st century, the writer David Milch's HBO series, Deadwood, or as I like to call it, Back to the Fucking West, cocksuckers, proved just how resilient the Old West could be as a compelling subject.
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Chapter 4: How did Edward Sheriff Curtis document Native American life?
More of Milch and Deadwood in another episode. What I want to argue now and across the remaining episodes in this podcast is that the 20th and 21st century West has maybe been an even more thrilling place for history to play out.
Nostalgia for the Old West, as I'm about to demonstrate here with the careers of two famous artists, the photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis and the painter Vino Rice, could be pretty much a drag on understanding the possibilities of modern life in the West. we've not yet entirely escaped the pull of the Western Pass.
But the honesty of someone like Vino Rice, painting the Blackfeet Indians of Montana from roughly 1920 to 1950, helps show us the way towards the West we actually live in or visit. No one remotely interested in American Indians or merely the beauty and dignity of humanity ever forgets their first reaction standing before an Edward Sheriff Curtis photograph.
After the initial shock of seeing what appears to be pre-modern people preserved by a modern medium, I had no idea cameras existed that long ago, a friend said to me once. You start looking more closely, becoming aware that the sense of age here is in part due to the sepia tones of Curtis's prints. Mostly you're stunned by the depth of character in Curtis's human subjects.
As George Horscapture of Montana's Fort Belknap Reservation said of his first sight of a Curtis portrait, the world stopped for several moments. That was a special case, since the portrait was of Horsecaptor's great-grandfather. But he speaks for most of us, whether we encounter Curtis's images in books, on calendars, or on postcards. And these days, his sepia photos do seem to be everywhere.
We're spellbound, as if deposited in the past by a time machine. But why?
Why?
What is it we see in Curtis's photographs? Who was this shadow catcher, as some of his subjects called him, who in a good piece of one lifetime managed to befriend some 80 tribes of Indians and shoot more than 40,000 photographs of them? How was someone like this on the scene in the Old West with a camera?
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Chapter 5: What impact did Curtis's photographs have on perceptions of Native Americans?
Well, that's the first fantasy about the shadow catcher to brush aside. Curtis was not photographing 80 indigenous tribes while the frontier raged on. The census had declared the frontier over a full decade before Curtis set about his project. As for who he was, there's the simple characterization of the kind we'd all reject if it were applied to us.
Then there's the more complex, sin-of-flesh biography. The simple version is that he was an almost uneducated Seattle mountaineer who in the 20th century became consumed with romantic notions about how Indians once lived.
He had some talent, got lucky with influential friends, and so obsessively pursued his goal that he sacrificed his marriage and money to consummate it and died virtually forgotten. The longer version is more interesting and gets us a lot closer to being able to answer the kinds of questions people mouth silently when they stand wrapped before the photographs.
Like so many first-generation Americans who grew up in the Northwest, Curtis's family roots were in the Midwest, in his case, Wisconsin. His father sold their farm to become an itinerant preacher by the time Edward was 12, but he had briefly gotten to attend a one-room school that seems to have been his only formal education.
Photography was in the air in the late 1800s, and both the technology and the possibilities entranced him. Somewhere, Curtis acquired a how-to manual and, unable to afford the real thing, built his first camera from a wooden box and a stereoscopic lens his father brought home from the Civil War.
In 1887, when Curtis was 19, his father moved the family west to Washington State, where they homesteaded a farm just across Puget Sound from Seattle. With income he brought in from commercial fishing and small-scale logging, young Edward finally managed to buy a 14x17 view camera.
Then, in a capitalization strategy he'd rely on most of his life, he mortgaged the Curtis farm to buy into a partnership and a photographic studio in bustling, growing Seattle. At 24, his future beginning to open before him in what turned out to be an ill-fated move, he married a young neighbor named Clara Phillips.
For most photographers, making a living largely involves capturing images of two rather mundane subjects, weddings and families. For four years, Curtis refined his abilities in these fields and paid the mortgage lien.
But he also dreamed of being a fine arts photographer in a new movement that saw photography as a kind of technologically assisted form of painting and the photographer as an artist. What he needed most of all, Curtis decided, were a subject matter and a style he could make his own. These were savvy insights.
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Chapter 6: Who was Vino Rice and how did he differ from Curtis?
To show traditional Indian life as it was lived in the 1800s, Curtis would have to fake the details and most of the context of his project. Boas's objections did lead to President Roosevelt appointing a committee to investigate those arguments. But the committee included William H. Holmes of the Bureau of Ethnology, who despised Boas and who knew Roosevelt wanted Curtis to succeed.
Roosevelt, in fact, wrote the foreword to Volume 1. And it's easy to conclude that the president was as caught up in the romance of the undertaking as Curtis. Nonetheless, a reputation as the great fabricator has been Curtis's albatross ever since. Curtis was in over his head anyway. He was young, energetic, and inspired, and thought he could wrap up the entire project in five years.
But if dated from that 1900 Sundance in Montana where he got the idea, it actually took up 30 years of his life. With offices both in New York for marketing and Seattle for the photographic end, he embarked on years and years of one whirlwind trip after another.
Volume 1 on The Navajos in the Southwest came out in 1907, and it was led off by a photo whose title, The Vanishing Race, captured the whole underlying premise. Over the next seven years, ten more volumes appeared. By this time, Curtis had gone through Morgan's initial investment and was barely past halfway to his goal. His novel solution for money was to turn into an indie filmmaker.
But his silent film, In the Land of the Headhunters, A Quacky Oodle Romeo and Juliet Story, was a box office flop. By taking out a second mortgage on his house, this one without his wife's knowledge, and appealing to the Morgan family for continued financing, Curtis was finally able to turn out the last nine volumes of his grand project.
While all this was happening, the last volume, 20, finally appeared in 1930, much of the rest of Curtis's world was imploding. Clara filed for divorce from her absentee husband in 1916. Curtis was convicted of failure to pay alimony in 1918. And when the divorce was settled in 1920, Clara got possession not only of his studio, but of all the negatives he'd shot so far.
The subsequent disappearance of Curtis' studio materials dating before 1920 has led to one of the great treasure hunts in Western art, so far to no avail. Clara wasn't through, though, having him arrested one more time as he passed through Seattle en route home from his last photo shoot for the North American Indian in 1927.
Curtis lived for another quarter century without ever producing another significant work. So the meaning of his life is largely synonymous with what we think about his great project. There's no question today of Curtis's status as an artist, but the mesmerizing quality of his images is largely a consequence of his understanding of the nostalgic allure of Native America.
Other photographers and painters certainly attempted this, but no one else pulled it off with the elan that Curtis did. On the other hand, there's always the question of whether you can entirely trust a Curtis image. The text of the North American Indian, edited by Frederick Webb Hodge of the Bureau of Ethnology, presents a straightforward ethnography of the tribes as Curtis found them.
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Chapter 7: What challenges did Vino Rice face in portraying modern Native Americans?
But of course, hardly anyone reads the text anymore. So we're back to the fact that rarely do his photos show Indian life as it actually was in the post-frontier. Instead, Curtis went to extraordinary lengths to exercise the whole 20th century. He provided his Indian subjects with outfits and props from a half century earlier.
He airbrushed away power lines in his photos, once even used darkroom tricks to erase an alarm clock he found to his horror beside the right elbow of his Blackfeet subject in the stunning 1870s-looking photo in a pagan lodge. Of the more than 22,000 photographs in the North American Indian, a few can't be trusted or are questionable today for other reasons. Sometimes Indians duke Curtis.
Some of the Navajos did their ceremonies backwards for his camera. As one of the only white men ever to participate in the nine-day Hopi snake dance, Curtis even photographed that sacred ritual. Today, the Hopis don't even allow non-Indians to see this ceremony. It's not easy then to know what to think about Curtis. Listening to George horse capture helps though.
A defender of Curtis, horse capture remains awestruck at Curtis's dedication to his project and at the stunning quality of the resulting imagery. Most importantly, he believes that Curtis's work strengthens Native confidence. What Curtis's images show is that what Indians suspected about the depth and beauty of their ancestors' culture in the Old West was true.
As Curtis was journeying to tribe after tribe, then disappearing into his dark room, all over the West, painters were fixing images of native people and the Old West as rapidly as they could work. Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell became the most famous and successful.
The artists captivated by Indians believed their subjects were vanishing, so artists like Joseph Henry Sharp, who particularly focused on the crows, and Taos and Santa Fe-based painters like E. Irving Kaus, Ernest Blumenshine, and John Sloan captured the pueblos of the Southwest at a frantic pace.
At a time when railroads were one of the biggest businesses in the country, tourism seemed the future, and nothing advertised a Western adventure in a strange land like images of exotic natives. Vino Rice, who immersed himself in the Northwest between roughly 1920 and 1950, was one of the painters who attracted the attention of a Western railroad.
Rice's mission began very much in the genre that Curtis, Remington, Blumenshine, and others had already laid out. 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.
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Chapter 8: How did the relationship between artists and Native communities evolve over time?
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.
Borrowing his love of pure chromatic colors and a fascination with exotic people from modern art, Rice translated those into a completely fresh take on the Blackfeet of the West. The paintings then became commercial work in the form of the Great Northern Railroad's calendars and menus. He just loved people, Rice's daughter-in-law told me. He loved the way people looked.
But as Rice's son, Jark, always said, the real reason Rice came to America was always to paint the Indians. Over a few weeks on that first visit to the Blackfeet, Rice churned out a remarkable 36 portraits. Exhibited back east, the entire cache quickly sold. Already one of the most celebrated modernist portrait painters in New York, Rice had finally painted Indians.
But he was still living in New York, and what he really wanted was to be George Catlin Redux, a 20th century biographer of Indians who everyone in New York believed at the time were vanishing. As with Curtis, sometimes life requires a lucky break. In early 1927, Rice's sculptor brother, Hans, was guiding climbers in Glacier Park when he happened to meet Louis Hill of the Great Northern.
When he showed Hill a portfolio of his brother's portraits, Hill did not hesitate. Could Vino come out that summer at the invitation of the Great Northern, which would fund his trip and lodging in return for rights of first refusal on whatever art resulted? Being old was past ready.
He'd remarked to friends in the East the previous year, how beautiful the West is you people in New York don't realize. I've lived in New York, but now I can't stand it any longer. I feel I must break away, get among the Indians again, live with them in their simple way and study and paint them.
The relationship that now formed between an artist, a railroad, a national park, and several score Western Indians lasted for the next quarter century. It had something for everybody. The painter got to fulfill a lifelong ambition and leave an enduring legacy. The railroad ended up with beautiful portraits it would use to advertise the line to tourists.
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