Ep. 19: Shadows of the Frontier

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Speaker 1: 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.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hunt meets the harvest.

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Speaker 1: A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com. Enjoy responsible shadows of the Frontier. For many Americans, the West occupies a mental space similar to how we imagine phases in our history, like the Confederacy, say, or World War Two. 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 nineteen sixties, for the West, not so much. And there’s a simple reason the West is different. 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 US Census announced in eighteen ninety that the West by then had been so broken up by 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 eighteen sixty five. My point is that the end of the so called frontier was hardly a black line across history. The way Appomattox Courthouse are, Hiroshima and 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.

00:02:39
Speaker 2: Maybe some still are.

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Speaker 1: Some people in the early twentieth 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 eighty years after the eighteen ninety 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 booths 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 twenty first 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. 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 twentieth and twenty first 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 ven Old 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 honysty of someone like ven Old Rice painting the Blackfeet Indians of Montana from roughly nineteen twenty to nineteen fifty helped.

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Speaker 2: Show us the way towards the West we actually live in or visit.

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Speaker 1: No One remotely interested in American Indians or merely the beauty and dignity of humanity ever, forgets their 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 Cepia tones of Curtis’s Prince. Mostly you’re stunned by the depth of character in Curtis’s human subjects. As George horse Capture of Montana’s Fort bell Knapp 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 horse Capture’s great grandfather. But he speaks for most of us. Whether we encounter Curtis’s images and books on calendars or on postcards, and these days his CPIA photo do seem to be everywhere. Were spellbound, as if deposited in the past by a time machine. But 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 eighty tribes of Indians and shoot more than forty thousand photographs of them. How was someone like this on the scene in the Old West with a camera? Well, that’s the first fantasy about the shadow Catcher to brush aside. Curtis was not photographing eighty indigenous tribes while the frontier raged on. The census had declared the frontier over a full decade before Curtis said 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 scent of flesh biography. The simple version is that he was an almost uneducated Seattle mountaineer who in the twentieth 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 mouthed 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 and his case Wisconsin. Sold their farm to become an itinerant preacher by the time Edward was twelve, 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 eighteen hundreds, 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.

00:09:33
Speaker 2: The Civil War.

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Speaker 1: In eighteen eighty seven, when Curtis was nineteen, 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 fourteen by seventeen view camera. Then, in a capitalization strategy 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 twenty four, his future beginning to open before him, and 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 lean. But he also dreamed of being a fine arts photographer and 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. On his mountain climbing and fishing trips. Curtis kept coming across local Native people, still engaged in their ancient subsistence, even as the post frontier West whorled around them. Fortuitously, one of these turned out to be Princess Angeline, the elderly daughter of Chief Seattle, namesake of the burgeoning city. Curtis befriended her and she allowed him to shoot a few soft focused photos of her as she engaged in a timeless indigenous pursuit digging for clowns along the Pacific shore. In a true epiphany, it struck Curtis that he should put the finished print through a CPO wash so the image looked brown aged, so viewers would feel a timelessness about it. Entered in the eighteen ninety six National Photographic Exhibit, it took first prize in portraiture. Overnight, Curtis became one of seattle best known photographers. Now he had his subject and his leit motif. Like toppling Domino’s, the breaks came in rapid succession. Two years later, high up on the shoulders of one of his favorite peaks, Mount Rainier, Curtis encountered a lost climbing party that he guided to safety. It was the kind of group any ambitious young man might want to run into, let alone rescue. The party included Gifford Pinchot of the US Forestry Division see Heart, Miriam head of the US Biological Survey, and, most importantly for Curtis, the famous author George byrd Grennell.

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Speaker 2: He was a photographer.

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Speaker 1: Curtis told them and back in Seattle when he showed them some of his photographs, including his early Indian works.

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Speaker 2: They were impressed.

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Speaker 1: Grennell and Miriam both had already signed on for an upcoming grand expedition financed by railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman, to Alaska the next summer. Might young Curtis be interested in accompanying the party as photographer? This was the domino that collapsed the table. The Harriman expedition included three dozen of America’s most famous scientist, writers, artists, a kind of camelot afloat on the Alaskan seas. Curtis got their rubbed shoulders with the natural history writers John Muir and John Burrows, the geologist Grove Carl Gilbert, biologists William Dahl, Frederick Dellenbaugh and William Brewer, even mister Harriman himself. They were the core of Washington’s prestigious Cosmos Club. For Curtis, the trip served as passport to the whole American scientific and conservation community, and the ship, the George day Elder, was, in John Mure’s words, a floating university, providing Curtis the education he had never gotten. He was thirty one years old. The trip particularly made Grinnell a good friend, and the writer now invited Curtis along in the summer of nineteen hundred to a Plains Indian sundance among the Blackfeet on their reservation in Montana. All of Curtis’s life had been preparation for this moment. As he wrote later, he was intensely affected. It was the start of my effort to learn about the Plains Indians and to photograph their lives. He would preserve the Indian world before Indian ness, as Curtis and all his new friends firmly believed, what happen would vanish for all time. What Curtis had in mind was a monumental undertaking, but it wasn’t untilnineteen o six that JP Morgan finally bankrolled him with seventy five thousand dollars for his grand project. Morgan’s deal wasn’t much of a bargain. He wanted Curtis to do the field and print work, plus in the matter of John James Ottoman, to publish and even market the Finnish books himself. Curtis called the books in question the North American Indian, and they came near to being still born at the outset. When the anthropological community got word of what Curtis was proposing, a photographic record of traditional Indian life, three decades after most tribes had settled onto reservations, it ran up a red flag.

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Speaker 2: Professor Franz Boaz.

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Speaker 1: At Columbia expressed what still is the most obvious objection in the twentieth century. What Curtis was proposing was impossible. Despite widespread nostalgia for the Old West, by the early nineteen high hundreds, most tribes had already endured decades of systematic policy driven a culturation. To show traditional Indian life as it was lived in the eighteen hundreds, Curtis would have to fake the details and most of the contexts of his project. Boas His 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 forward to Volume one, 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, enter jet and inspired and thought he could wrap up the entire project in five years, but if dated from that nineteen hundred sun dance in Montana where he got the idea, it actually took up thirty 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 world win trip after another. Volume, one on the Novajos in the Southwest, came out in nineteen oh seven, and it was led.

00:17:34
Speaker 2: Off by a photo whose title.

00:17:36
Speaker 1: 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 passed 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 quaky Udel, 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 twenty finally appeared in nineteen thirty, much of the rest of Curtis’s world was imploding. Clara filed for divorce from her absentee husband in nineteen sixteen. Curtis was convicted of failure to pay alimony in nineteen eighteen, and when the divorce was settled in nineteen twenty, Clara got possession not only of his studio but of all the negatives he had shot so far. The subsequent disappearance of Curtis’s studio materials dating before nineteen twenty has led to one of the great treasure hunts in Western art so.

00:19:11
Speaker 2: Far, to no avail.

00:19:13
Speaker 1: Clara wasn’t through, though, having him arrested one more time as he passed through Seattle Enroot, home from his last photo shoot for The North American Indian in nineteen twenty seven. 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.

00:19:52
Speaker 2: Allure of Native America.

00:19:54
Speaker 1: Other photographers and painters certainly attempted this, but no one else pulled it off with the a line 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, but of course hardly anyone reads the text anymore. So we’re back to the fact that rarely do his photo show Indian life as it actually was in the post frontier. Instead, Curtis went to extraordinary links to exercise the whole twentieth 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 dark room tricks to erase an alarm clock he found to his horror beside the right elbow of his blackfeet subject in the State eighteen seventies, looking photo in a Paygan lodge. Of the more than twenty two thousand photographs in the North American Indian, a few can’t be trusted or are questionable today for other reasons. Sometimes Indians do Curtis. Some of the novel hosts did their ceremonies backwards for his camera.

00:21:23
Speaker 2: As one of the only white.

00:21:24
Speaker 1: Men ever to participate in the nine Day Hopey Snake Dance, Curtis even.

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Speaker 2: Photographed that’s sacred ritual.

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Speaker 1: Today, the Hopies 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 Thom, 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 Strengthson’s 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 Irvingkows, Ernest Blumenshein 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. Ving Old Rice, who immersed himself in the northern West between roughly nineteen twenty and nineteen fifty, 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, Blumensheine 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.

00:23:54
Speaker 2: For Rice, that projectile flew.

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Speaker 1: Into an open ended future where neither of 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 nineteenth century, when, perhaps more so than anywhere, Rice’s countrymen were intoxicated with the idea of people living in nature. Like other German boys, Reis grew up reading Karl Mei, who mesmerized generations of German readers with a kind of fantasy American West. Mai remains so crucial to European ideas about America that Durshue de monitu An Austin Powers like Sendup of a nineteen sixty two Karl my movie is the most popular film in Germany right now. In twenty twenty five, it wasn’t cowboys or miners or buffalo hunters who entranced Germans, though it was Western Indians like My’s heroic apache chief Vinetou who mesmerized them. Actually, My never visited the American West, knew nothing about it beyond reading a few dubious books and entirely confused geography and tribes.

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Speaker 2: None of that mattered.

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Speaker 1: My’s novels made the West appear the only place on Earth one could really be alive. Ven Old Rice was one of his converts, prepared for a version of the West hardly more real than a galaxy far far away. A twenty seven year old Rice arrived in New York in nineteen thirteen expecting to see Indians on Fifth Avenue are 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 US in search of subjects from the margins of American life. So a nineteen thirteen nineteen fourteen trip to the West didn’t happen, but it’s quickly following the war’s end as he could make it happen. In the absolute dead of winter of December January nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty, Rice took the Great Northern Railroad west to Montana. As soon as he stepped off the train, the Germans spotted a group of blanket draped Indians, and, to the profound shock of the group, strolled up to them, wrapped one on the back, held up his hand, and, in a recreation of scenes in carl My novels, blurted out, how lucky for vin Old Rice, lucky for all of us. The Blackfeet, by this time in their history, had learned to be amused and tolerant of the unfathomable antics of white people. Maybe the innocence of how was downright endearing. In nineteen nineteen, So, recognizing a fallible fellow human when he saw one one of the Blackfeet men, whose name was Turtled, motioned for his friends to choke off their laughter and to welcome this strange individual, as the Blackfeet had done with empathetic whites for decades. The Blackfeet had experiences with artists and photographers that went back at least twenty years, and after a few minutes of translated but good spirited conversation, some of the group Rice approached with how agreed to sit for him. Rice had taken the first big step. He was on his way to a long and celebrated career as one of the best twentieth century portraitists of American Indians. A few years ago, I toured a first rate Blackfoot exhibit in the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. The tribal name in Canada is rendered Blackfoot that had been assembled and interpreted by the elders of the Canadian Blackfoot bands and the Southern Pagans the Montana Blackfeet. What caught my attention were panels claiming the Blackfoot and Southern Pagan people remembered the artists and photographers from a century ago as people they especially liked and admired. One exhibit panel put it this way, these artists had a profound respect for us as human beings. Their respect shows in the images they created. Adjacent to those very words were several portraits of their ancestors done in brilliantly colored pastels by ving Old Rice. Rice became the most successful of all the Great Northern Railroads finds as a painter, promoter of Glacier National Park and the railroad’s ticket sales to Western tourists. Just as the Southwestern Railroads had done with the art of the Southwest, the Great Northern, led by Louis Hill, son of founder James J. Hill, hoped to use artists to help establish Glacier as a premier American vacation destination. Urged on by George Burgrenelle in nineteen ten, Congress had created Glacier out of pieces of the Flathead National Forest and the Blackfeet Reservation. For the next half century, the national Park acted like some deep space singularity that bent the railroad around it. As part of the Great Northern’s Sea America First campaign in nineteen fifteen, it built many Glacier Hotel 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 of the park open, Hill hired Austria John Ferry as the first sponsored artist to help with this promotion, and between nineteen ten and nineteen thirteen, Ferry produced three hundred and forty seven pieces, for which Hill paid by the square foot of canvas, at a price that worked out to roughly thirty dollars a painting. The railroad’s publicity department used Ferri’s work in ads, pamphlets, even on menus.

00:30:54
Speaker 2: Other artists followed.

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Speaker 1: In a whirlwind of promotional notions in nineteen thirty eighteen. In nineteen fourteen, Hill invited the German modernist Julius Seidler to the park, then Indian genre painter Edwin Demming. By nineteen seventeen, 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 glaciers, lodges, and as advertising posters on the West coasts. Dixon came and painted and sent a dozen finished oils to Saint Paul in nineteen eighteen. 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 vn Old Rice’s arrival in Blackfeet Country in nineteen nineteen. I once was privileged to have lunch with Renate Rice, vn 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 Art’s instruction was fascinated with the lives and art of so called primitive people think Paul Gogan 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 black Feet of the West. The paintings then became commercial work in the form of the Great Northern Railroads.

00:33:07
Speaker 2: Calendars and menus. He just loved people.

00:33:11
Speaker 1: Rice’s daughter in law told me he loved the way people looked. But as Riis’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 black Feet, Rice churned out a remarkable thirty six portraits exhibited back east. The entire cash 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 Redducks, a twentieth century biographer of Indians who everyone in New York believed at the time were vanishing. As with Curtis, some times life requires a lucky break. In early nineteen twenty seven, 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 Veno come out that summer at the invitation of the Great Northern, which would fund his trip in lodging in return for rights of first refusal on whatever art resulted. Vn Old was passed. Ready, he 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.

00:35:11
Speaker 2: The railroad ended.

00:35:12
Speaker 1: Up with beautiful portraits he would use to advertise the line to tourists. Leisher 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.

00:35:36
Speaker 2: Something more honest than Curtis ever did.

00:35:39
Speaker 1: 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, ten of them between nineteen twenty seven and nineteen forty eight, Reis returned to Glacier, gathered black Feet and occasionally Cootney sitters, and from his studio on Saint Mary’s Lake, faithfully recorded their changing circumstances. With his chromatic modernist colors. Rice painted Indians with a skill of George Catlan could never have imagined possible. Their faces, evoking the ancient and the exotic, were rendered into great art. Increasingly, he sought to paint the black Feet as they appeared daily to one another, the way they dressed and looked, not in the eighteen seventies, but in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties 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 church 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 one hundred years, the Great Northern began to waffle about lodging Rice for the summers. Rice’s last visit to Glacier came in nineteen forty eight, 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 and advertising without paying her a royalty. What buffalo hunting Indian would ever do such a thing? Following a stroke, Veno Rice passed away in nineteen fifty three.

00:38:00
Speaker 2: What a life he had had.

00:38:01
Speaker 1: He left marvelous pictorial evidence of just the kind of existence he had hoped for. Even the ending was straight out of a Carl My novel. In nineteen fifty four, Jark shipped his father’s ashes to bull Child, one of Rice’s Blackfeet friends in Montana. As the Chinooks ate away the snow that spring, bull Child climbed Red Blanket Hill and spread Rice’s ashes across the Blackfeet country, just as he had daydreamed in Germany as a boy, ving old Rice had finally merged with the West and the Indians.

00:38:58
Speaker 3: Dan, I think one of the first thing that stood out to me in this in this episode is the idea that these photographs from Curtis are sepia toned. Yeah, and we wouldn’t really, I don’t think very many Americans would be familiar with that prior to the age of Instagram. But in telling the story, you sort of peel back what’s behind the image, which up until recently, you know, with digital manipulation, it was more obscure to the to the viewer right or to the audience.

00:39:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think those CPA images that I mean, and that’s that’s how Curtis photograph you know, his two hundred thousand photographs, a shot of Native people. That’s how he did it. That’s how he processed them. I mean, they were black and white photographs, but he processed them in a chemical mix in his dark room in order to turn them brown, and the idea, of course, was some make these look aged. And that was kind of one of his epiphanies when as a young man he found himself in a position to produce a kind of a photography that could be considered art and that other people would would think of him as an artist. That was one of the insights he had. The second inside, of course, was I’m going to make Native people my focus, and I’m particularly going to photograph them as if we were still in the eighteen forties, the eighteen fifties, the eighteen sixties. And one of the ways to make all this work is to make the images is to do a CPA wash on them so they look like they’re one hundred years old or something, you know. And as I said early on in the script for this episode, I had a friend one time who had his wife had bought him a book of Curtis photographs for Christmas one year, and we were going through them and he said, I gotta say, I I had no idea there were cameras back then.

00:41:18
Speaker 2: And I said, well, back then.

00:41:22
Speaker 1: Yes, is that’s the rub because back then was actually as late as nineteen twenty seven, nineteen thirty, So yeah, there were cameras, but what he’s doing is he’s attempting to make these images look like they’re one hundred years old.

00:41:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think, at least when it comes to this style of art, right portraits of Native people, I always have I guess, conflicting thoughts or emotions when it comes to it, because there’s there’s this question of often ticity. You know, is this objectifying Native people? Is this or is this like a celebratory representation. In this case, you have two artists who, you know, some there’s some commercial motivation obviously, but they do seem to have sort of an authentic calling to do this, and they have good motivation, pure motivations for lack of a better term, but yeah, to historicize Native people in that way, it’s it’s problematic for a lot of reasons. And I wonder if you can just sort of talk about some of the conversations around that.

00:42:47
Speaker 2: Well, when when the world discovered.

00:42:52
Speaker 1: That Curtis was going to do this, when JP Morgan gave him seventy five thousand dollars to do it, and and Teddy Roosevelt, who was still president at the time, announced that he was writing the forward for this anthropologists of the day were stunt and shocked, and Franz Boas at Columbia in particular, said, I mean, this is fake. You’re going to have to fake it all because, I mean, we’ve had an Indian policy in place for a century to try to assimilate native people, and many, a great many of the world’s native people, including in the West, have been fully assimilated. So how are you going to do this? So the sort of label the great Fabricator was placed on Curtis early on in the project, and it’s been a hard thing for him to live down. I think most of the people who see these images now, who buy Curtis calendars or postcards or buy books of Curtis’s work, probably don’t understand that that at one time was that this was This project was very controversial for that reason. And one of the reasons I wanted to pair him in this episode with ven Old Rice is because Rice is he’s a contemporary. He’s a painter rather than a photographer. He’s a very wonderfully trained, academically trained portraitist in modern art, and so he’s really really skilled. He’s got the same sort of romantic nostalgia about the West, operating from a different perspective, not the frontier for an American, but from the karl My novels.

00:44:41
Speaker 3: And it’s a clumsy, it’s a clumsy and awkward nostalgia.

00:44:45
Speaker 1: It’s a very clum because Karl May, the guy who made so many Germans fascinated with the West and with native people, never visited the West, knew very little about it, sort of botched the names of tribes, and I mean, he was really kind of awful at it. I lived, at one time taught at university on the yostaccato, and Carl Me evidently made the toccado into a real focus, a geographic focus. And in carl My’s books, the onoisocado is a mountain range. Well Yanois tacato, in truth is actually a dead flat surface, a plateau, the top of a plateau. And when I was at Texas Tech back in my early career, a bunch of the carl My society came to Texas Tech to hold their annual conference, and they all got off the plane and were stunned to find themselves rather than in snow capped mountains, standing out on a bald ass open plane full of cotton plants and so, I mean it was a very I got to do a talk for them, and it was very funny to talk to these Germans who had a completely erroneous idea, as I say in the in the episode, it’s they had the sort of in a galaxy, far far away idea about the American West. And so and that’s what my ca I mean, that’s what the Old Rice came to America with. But he ended up at this moment that he and Curtis were both working, the Frontier had come to an end. Many Americans were confronting the whole idea of of what historians called frontier anxiety. I mean, what are we going to do without a frontier? This is what has made America what it is. And so you’re confronted with do you do the Curtis thing, where you act as if the Frontier is not over and you continue to portray the Old West as if it still exists, or you do what then Old Rice did, which was he began portraying the Blackfeet. He was painting in cowboy hats and jeans and checkered shirts and driving pickups, and of course the railroad that employed him was not happy at that. But he was honest about it. And one of the things that I think is important about that is that from the Curtis perspective and many of the people who bought Curtis’s books, native people were a vanishing race, right, And for ven ol Rice, they weren’t vanishing at all. They were simply segueing into twentieth century America, right.

00:47:32
Speaker 3: And I think that’s you get into that that there’s serious I mean serious thinkers believe that Native people will go extinct, and that that had been the case since, you know, even back to Jefferson and before. But then there’s this question of again authenticity and indian ness. But they’re people driving pickups, right, and there are people working jobs, and it’s it’s fast that it takes an outsider to recognize that.

00:48:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, it takes a German coming over. And because I think because he was very sympathetic and he treated his subjects, the people he was painting, as real human beings, which of course they reciprocated with him. I mean, it became important to him to portray them realistically and honestly, rather than to try to do what the Great Northern Railroad wanted, which was to keep putting bonnets on them and acting as if they were still buffalo hunters, because of course that was what worked for tourism on the rail line.

00:48:41
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:48:42
Speaker 1: So an interesting time in the story of the West because this magical thing of the frontier.

00:48:51
Speaker 2: Is over, but the West is.

00:48:55
Speaker 1: As I try to stay in the beginning. The West is not like say, you know, the Civil War, which comes to an end. The West is a place, and so it continues to have a story and a history forward into time, and that becomes to me as fascinating as the time in the previous century.

00:49:16
Speaker 2: Well, thanks Dan, you Bet Randall. Thanks it’s been fun.