The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West

by Andrew R. Graybill

  Clarke died in November of the following year at the age of eighty-nine, and was interred near Helen and Horace in the small family plot. His home studio languished for several years, until his daughter, Joyce—just like her great-aunt Helen—tired of California and moved, permanently, back to East Glacier. Upon her return to the Upper Missouri, Joyce discovered that her father’s home was too dilapidated to preserve but managed nevertheless to save some of the wood from the original building, which she incorporated into the design of the present structure, opened in 1977 as the John L. Clarke Western Art Gallery and Memorial Museum.

  Inside, the gallery is warm and inviting, with soft lights and a plush rug that absorbs the footfalls of the many visitors who stop in during the tourist season, which runs from Memorial Day to the end of September, when the temperatures drop and the snow begins to fall. A few John Clarke originals are on display but not for sale, given Joyce’s ongoing attempts to buy back from museums and private collectors those sculptures of her father’s that she can locate and afford. In the back of the building, though, are several glass cases that feature a small sample of the artist’s tools as well as bronze casts made from miniature Clarke carvings, among them a playful bear cub caught in midstride and a Rocky Mountain goat perched on a ledge, with a muscled back and a shaggy beard. Beneath their alloy veneer and a thin coating of dust, they pulse with the life breathed into them by a master now four decades gone.

  Joyce Clarke Turvey, 2007. John’s daughter, Joyce, opened a gallery in 1977 in East Glacier Park that honors her father and displays a small collection of his artwork. Photograph by the author.

  Epilogue

  In the summer of 1959, not long after John Clarke finished his masterpiece, Blackfeet Encampment, occupants of the Blackfeet Reservation noticed a white newcomer in and around Browning. Malcolm McFee was a graduate student in anthropology at Stanford University, but he was hardly a typical academic. Born in Seattle in 1917, McFee had dropped out of the University of Washington during the Depression to take a job selling plumbing supplies. After serving as a copilot on a B-29 during World War II, he returned to the plumbing business, working as an office manager at a Yakima firm until 1955, when—at the age of thirty-eight—he decided to go back to school and complete his undergraduate education. McFee was so taken with his studies that he opted to pursue a doctoral degree at Stanford, even though he was close to forty and had a wife and young son to support.1

  McFee had come to northern Montana that summer to do fieldwork among the Blackfeet, as Clark Wissler and John Ewers had before him. The Indians graciously opened their homes to the scholar, who became a virtual fixture among them over the course of the next decade, returning four more times to gather data. McFee dropped in at private residences and public ceremonies, usually armed with a notepad in order to record his observations. His research served as the basis for a scholarly article and a book, both considered classics of cultural anthropology today.2

  As McFee discovered, the postwar period on the Blackfeet Reservation was a profoundly troubled time, as it was all across Native America during the Termination Era of the 1950s and 1960s. If the Blackfeet did not suffer quite as much as groups like the Klamaths and the Menominees, who faced almost unimaginable poverty and high incidence of disease once federal welfare programs evaporated, conditions at Browning were nevertheless bleak, if not desperate. For instance, statistics from the late 1960s showed that the median annual income for a Blackfeet family was $1700, less than a quarter of the U.S. national average, and McFee reported that numerous Indian homes (especially in outlying areas) had neither electricity nor running water.3

  While these economic questions interested him, McFee was far more curious about cultural matters among the Blackfeet, to which he devoted most of his attention. What most intrigued him was the Indians’ demographic diversity, reflected in tribal enrollment figures from 1960. Those records indicated that of the 4,850 members living on the reservation, 13 percent claimed full-blood status and another 10 percent were less than a quarter Indian, revealing that the vast majority of enrolled Blackfeet were of mixed ancestry, a fact that had struck Ewers, too, just a few years earlier.4 McFee wanted to know how the Blackfeet in this majority understood their hybrid identity, and after years of interviews and observation he concluded that such persons fell into two basic categories: a “white-oriented” majority and a smaller “Indian-oriented” group.

  Divisions between the two populations, he noted, were marked not by biology or appearance but rather by values and behavior. White-oriented people prized hard work and material success, while their Indian-oriented counterparts cherished ceremonies and rituals aimed at preserving the tribe’s ancient ways. But, as McFee added in his most enduring assertion, some individuals on the reservation combined traits of both cultural groups. These he called “150% men,” explaining that in the case of such a person, “if, by one measure, he scores 75% on an Indian scale, we should not expect him to be limited to a 25% measure on another scale.”5 In other words, one could be powerfully acculturated to both white and native ways simultaneously; the process was not a zero-sum calculation.

  McFee’s book, Modern Blackfeet: Montanans on a Reservation, was praised even before its publication as “without doubt the most definitive piece written on a contemporary American Indian community.”6 But if it was a major contribution to the anthropological literature, in some respects all that the author had done was to illuminate a longstanding demographic phenomenon: the enduring presence of peoples in between, those who were at once both red and white. Such individuals, of course, had existed since the earliest days of colonial America, counting among their number men like Thomas Rolfe, born in Virginia in the early seventeenth century to the English settler John Rolfe and his wife, Pocahontas, a Powhatan Indian. Or, closer in time and space to the Clarkes, consider the life of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, born during the voyage of the Corps of Discovery to a French Canadian interpreter and his Shoshone wife, Sacagawea. Meriwether Lewis became so enamored of the boy, whom he called “Pomp,” that Clark arranged for his education in St. Louis following the expedition.

  In a foreword to McFee’s book, the series editor hailed the study as a rebuke to “the American mania for cultural uniformity,” referring, presumably, to the era that had just passed, the 1950s and early 1960s, a period marked by an apparent spirit of conformism that had flattened difference while imposing stifling orthodoxies.7 But just as with the concept of the “150% man,” the impulse derided by the editor also had a long history in America, emerging in places where Europeans and their descendants achieved social and political dominance, even when they were outnumbered by nonwhite peoples. This process unfolded at different speeds, usually in response to the pace of white settlement—slowly at first in the East, but with blinding swiftness in places like the Rocky Mountain West in the period after the Civil War.

  The tale of the Clarkes is so rich and instructive because it captures, in the history of a single such family composed of extraordinary members, the before-and-after qualities attendant to this transformation. Indeed, the world of Coth-co-co-na and Malcolm Clarke—one in which individuals of mixed ancestry stood near the pinnacle of the social order on the Upper Missouri, serving as brokers between white and native societies—was washed away in the course of a single generation. The Clarke children thus inherited a realm in which hybrid peoples were pushed increasingly to the margins by white newcomers, a process laden with physical as well as emotional violence.

  And yet the Clarke story also shows that, even as the social space for bicultural people contracted sharply after the end of the fur trade era and the period of rapid national consolidation during Reconstruction, some individuals still found room to maneuver in the quickly dividing worlds of their mothers and fathers. Take the cultural ambidexterity of Horace Clarke, who served on the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council (the tribe’s governing body) in the early twentieth century while simultaneously pursuing entrepreneurial ambit
ions and sustaining close personal relationships with some of Montana’s leading white citizens. The same was true for Helen Clarke, seen in her journey from the Broadway stage to elective office to the Indian Service—“white” occupations all—before returning at last to live among the Piegans, whom she counseled and supported to the end of her days, her racial in-between-ness remarked upon frequently (and often favorably) by white residents of the Treasure State. And McFee would surely have identified John Clarke as a “150% man,” married to a white woman and with countless non-Indian friends and customers, but dedicated to preserving Blackfeet craft practices and transmitting his knowledge to younger native artists, ensuring that such customs survived even as men like him—born at the tail end of the halcyon buffalo days—grew scarce on the reservation.

  Nevertheless, even as the Clarkes and others of mixed Piegan-white ancestry embraced both halves of their heritage, “the mania for cultural uniformity” persists in northern Montana, as it does elsewhere throughout Native America. Visitors today can sense it at either edge of the Blackfeet Reservation, whether in East Glacier Park or Cut Bank, but according to some it has taken root, ironically, among the residents themselves. This “blood-ism” discriminates against those who are actually, or are perceived to be, of lower blood quantum, and it promises to intensify because—with a casino that opened in 2006 and with renewed interest, owing to hydraulic fracturing, in the oil reserves underneath tribal land—there is more at stake now than mere identity.8 As a result, walking in two worlds—one red, the other white—will continue to pose challenges for those people in between.

  Notes

  Prologue

  1 The best historical treatment of the event is Philip Goldring, “Whisky, Horses, and Death: The Cypress Hills Massacre and Its Sequel,” Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History 21 (1979): 41–70. More satisfying (though fictional) is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s wondrous novel The Englishman’s Boy (New York: Picador, 1996).

  2 James Welch, Fools Crow (New York: Penguin, 1986), 156–58.

  3 There are, of course, notable exceptions to this general rule, chief among them two works by Gary B. Nash: “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (Dec. 1995): 941–64; and Forbidden Love: The Secret History of Mixed-Race America (New York: Henry Holt, 1999). See also Thomas N. Ingersoll, To Intermix with Our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from Earliest Times to the Indian Removals (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2005); Theda Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2003); and Theresa Schenck, “Border Identities: Métis, Halfbreed, and Mixed-Blood,” in Gathering Places: Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories, ed. Carolyn Podruchny and Laura Peers (Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press, 2010), 233–48. Most recently, Anne F. Hyde’s reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century West as a region of families, many of them mixed, has recast our understanding of native-white intermarriage. See her Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2011). It is worth noting that there is a fine and growing body of literature that examines the complex legacies of interracial marriage among peoples of African, Indian, and white ancestry in Oklahoma. See, e.g., Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2005); Claudio Saunt, Black, White and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005); and Fay A. Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

  4 See David Fridtjof Halaas and Andrew E. Masich, Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent (New York: Da Capo Press, 2004).

  5 On the Bents and other families of mixed ancestry, see Anne F. Hyde, “Hard Choices: Mixed-Race Families and Strategies of Acculturation in the U.S. West after 1848,” in On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American Southwest, ed. David Wallace Adams and Crista DeLuzio (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2012), 93–115.

  6 I have been inspired in my narrative approach by a number of exemplary works, most especially John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Knopf, 1994).

  Chapter 1: Cutting Off Head Woman

  1 Pierre Clément de Laussat, Memoirs of My Life to My Son during the Years 1803 and After, ed. Robert D. Bush (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1978), 88–91, quote p. 90. A nearly identical ceremony took place in St. Louis on 9–10 March 1804, once word of the transfer at New Orleans reached communities upriver following the reopening of traffic after the winter. See Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2011), 1.

  2 Numerous volumes deal with these events; this account relies upon George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), 101–14, quote p. 106.

  3 The literature on the Louisiana Purchase is enormous. Particularly helpful to this telling are Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2004); Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003); and Robert Morgan, Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2011), esp. pp. 1–44. For the importance of the Louisiana Purchase in securing American claims to the eastern portion of the continent, especially the Ohio Valley, see François Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in American History, 1754–1815,” American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (June 2008): 647–77. See also Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2012).

  4 Adam Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2011), 12; Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2010), 13–21.

  5 Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery: The Abridgment of the Definitive Nebraska Edition (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2004), xiv–xv.

  6 Ibid., xxi–xxvi. See also James P. Ronda, Lewis and Clark among the Indians (1984; Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2002).

  7 See John C. Ewers, The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains (1958; Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 3–18; and Oscar Lewis, The Effects of White Contact upon Blackfoot Culture, with Special Reference to the Rôle of the Fur Trade (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1942). See also the work of two Canadian scholars: Hugh Dempsey, “The Blackfoot Nation,” in Native Peoples: The Canadian Experience, ed. R. Bruce Morrison and C. Roderick Wilson (1986; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), 381–413; and Diamond Jenness, The Indians of Canada (1932; Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1977), 317–24. Some scholars emphasize also the distinction between North Piegans (living in Canada) and South Piegans (living in the United States).

  8 Moulton, ed., The Lewis and Clark Journals, l–lii, 340–46, quote p. 345. For the Piegan perspective on these events, see Two Worlds at Two Medicine, DVD, directed by Dennis Neary (Browning, Mont.: Going-to-the-Sun Institute and Native Pictures, 2004).

  9 In July 2006 a group of Blackfeet held a ceremony commemorating the bicentennial of the event. As the participant George Heavy Runner noted, members of the tribe hoped that U.S. officials might attend and offer an apology, explaining, “That’s a way of healing and moving on.” Great Falls Tribune, 18 June 2006.

  10 For excellent surveys of the period, see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991); and Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).

 
; 11 For the settlement of the trans-Appalachian West, see Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996). See also Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006).

  12 See R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983); Gregory E. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991); and Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). For recent accounts of that most obscure and overlooked conflict, see Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Knopf, 2010); and Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

  13 See Robert Martin Owens, Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2007).

  14 See Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 203–42.

  15 Quoted in Peter Bernstein, The Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation (New York: Norton, 2006), 319.

  16 For the meaning of Napi, see Betty Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing (Calgary: Univ. of Calgary Press, 2004), 226. Bastien explains, “Napi is representative of the fallibility of man. He reminds us that to do things that are wrong will result in negative consequences.”