The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West
Page 31
24 For more on the demographics of late-nineteenth-century Milwaukee, see Robert Nesbit and William F. Thompson, Wisconsin: A History, 2nd ed. (1973; Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 341–61.
25 Cornell, “An Artist’s Vision,” 28.
26 I have found only one exception to this. Cornell claims that on the day of their marriage, John and his fiancée, Mamie Peters Simon, traveled to the nearby town of Whitefish for the ceremony, as “they desired a Catholic wedding.” This is the only reference to John’s religious observance I have discovered. See ibid., 29.
27 For information on Clarke’s attendance at St. John’s see author correspondence with Shelly Solberg (archivist of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee), 28 Jan. 2011. Burk, New Interpretations, 166.
28 John Taliaferro, Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 12–28.
29 Ibid., 9.
30 For a photographic reproduction of the letter itself, see Brian W. Dippie, ed., Charles M. Russell, Word Painter: Letters, 1887–1926 (Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum, 1993), 253.
31 Debate lingers about Russell’s attitude toward Indians. For instance, Taliaferro notes in Charles M. Russell (p. 79) that the only surviving erotica produced by the artist involves cowboys having intercourse with native women. Still, the historian Brian W. Dippie, a leading Russell scholar, asserts that “the man known as the ‘Cowboy Artist’ was a sympathetic student of the Indian and a vigorous champion of native rights.” See Dippie, ed., Charles M. Russell, 6.
32 “‘So Understanding,’ Says Wife of the Indian Sculptor John L. Clarke,” Federal Illustrator 9 (Winter 1926–27): 23. Curiously, in an interview not long before his death, Horace Clarke insisted that the only Montana artist who had true “genius” was Charlie Russell. Whether this was intended as an insult directed at his son is uncertain. See Martha E. Plassmann, notes taken in an interview with Horace Clarke [n.d.], Montana Historical Society (cited hereafter as MTHS), Horace Clarke Reminiscence, SC 540.
33 Larry Len Petersen, The Call of the Mountains: The Artists of Glacier National Park (Tucson: Settlers West Galleries, 2002), 138. Prices come from Bob Morgan, “Reminiscences of John L. Clarke,” 29 Oct. 1993, courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey (copy in author’s possession).
34 Extensive email correspondence (courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey, in author’s possession) between the editor of Deaf Life Magazine and several members of the Great Northern Railway Historical Society from Feb. 2007 to July 2008 produced no conclusive answer on the matter, establishing only that the artist who designed “Rocky” (as the logo came to be known) was either John Clarke or Joe Scheurele, an Austrian-born painter who was part of Charlie Russell’s circle. But the cover of the railroad’s journal, The Great Northern Goat 2, no. 3 (May 1927), convinced Clarke’s daughter that her father deserves the credit, an opinion shared by the author. For the changing design of the company logo, see Charles R. Wood, Lines West: A Pictorial History of the Great Northern Railway Operations and Motive Power from 1887 to 1967 (Seattle: Superior Books, 1967), 8.
35 Rocky Mountain Leader 26, no. 5 (Feb. 1927): 2–3. Although the awarding institution is listed in the story as the “American Art Galleries of Philadelphia,” I can find no record of such a place and thus assume that the author meant the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which exhibited several of Clarke’s pieces in the teens and twenties.
36 The Red Man 3, no. 5 (Dec. 1910): 179. It is worth noting that Malcolm Clarke and his wife Ella were part of the delegation of mixed-bloods that discovered Spopee at St. Elizabeth’s hospital and secured his release (see chapter 4, note 19). Farr, Blackfeet Redemption, 169–96.
37 Cornell, “An Artist’s Vision,” 29.
38 For a thorough history of the ranch (including its complex relationship to Blackfeet land claims), see Charles M. Stone, “What Does It Mean to Be at Hillhouse? Resolve to Understand,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession.
39 Cornell, “An Artist’s Vision,” 29. See also author interview with Joyce Clarke Turvey, Oct. 2006.
40 Cornell, “An Artist’s Vision,” 29.
41 Rocky Mountain Leader 26, no. 5 (Feb. 1927), 2.
42 See Erika Marie Bsumek, Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868–1940 (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2008); and Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2009).
43 Quoted in Ewers, Plains Indian Sculpture, p. 216.
44 William Hoffman, David: Report on a Rockefeller (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1971), 86. See also David Rockefeller, Memoirs (New York: Random House, 2002), esp. 39–49; and Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), 641–47. As it happened, David was not among the travelers on the 1924 excursion, which included only his three older brothers—John III, Nelson, and Laurance. David and his brother Winthrop visited Glacier two years later, but did not meet John Clarke at that time. See David Rockefeller to Joyce Clarke Turvey, 14 Aug. 1976 (copy in author’s possession).
45 Bunny McBride, Journeys West: The David & Peggy Rockefeller American Indian Art Collection (Bar Harbor, Maine: Abbe Museum, 2007; catalog in author’s possession). Also author correspondence with Bunny McBride, 17 Nov. 2010 (in author’s possession).
46 The Silent Worker 2, no. 2 (Oct. 1949): 3.
47 Artists Monthly, 5 Dec. 1932 (newspaper clipping in MTHS, John Clarke, vertical file).
48 For a sampling of its bounty, see Museum of Modern Art, Masterpieces of the David and Peggy Rockefeller Collection: Manet to Picasso (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994).
49 Morgan, “Reminiscences of John L. Clarke.”
50 John traded a woodcarving and a horsehair belt for his daughter’s first mount. Author interview with Joyce Clarke Turvey, June 2007. See also Gail Jokerst, “The-Man-Who-Talks-Not,” Montana Magazine, Dec. 1993, p. 30.
51 Author interview with Joyce Clarke Turvey, Oct. 2006.
52 For additional information, see her obituary, New York Times, 7 Sept. 1982.
53 Letter from Eleanor Sherman to John L. Clarke, 9 June 1934, GAU, IEFAA, MSS 91, box 2, folder 11.
54 Letter from Mamie Clarke to Eleanor Sherman, 2 July 1934, GAU, IEFAA, MSS 91, box 2, folder 11.
55 Letter from Mamie Clarke to Eleanor Sherman, 24 July 1939, GAU, IEFAA, MSS 91, box 2, folder 11. (Emphasis in the original)
56 See Adolph Hungry Wolf, The Blackfoot Papers (Browning, Mont.: Blackfeet Heritage Center, 2006), 4:1411–19.
57 For a recent consideration of the issue, see Don Johnson, “Two Guns White Calf—a Model Indian?” Piegan Storyteller 15, no. 1 (Jan. 1990): 1, 3–4.
58 Time, 26 March 1934.
59 Robert E. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978).
60 Hardin Tribune-Herald, 13 April 1934, quoted in Hungry Wolf, The Blackfoot Papers, 4:1415.
61 Paul C. Rosier, Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912–1954 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001), 115–21.
62 New York Times, 14 March 1934.
63 Clarke may have learned how to work in bronze from Adrien Alexandre Voisin (1890–1979), an American sculptor born to French parents; he met Clarke in the 1920s during one his many trips to the West. The artist was so charmed by Clarke that in 1929 he made bronze busts of both him and his mother (who was seventy-nine at the time). For additional information as well as photographs of the sculptures, see Bill Harmsen, Illustrating the Lost Wax Method, Sculpture to Bronze: Featuring the Life and Sculpture of Adrien Alexandre Voisin (Denver: Harmsen Publishing, 1981), 44–45. My thanks to Mary Scriver for this reference.
64 This assessment appeared in the 1941 edition of Who’s Who in Art. Quoted in Dana Turvey, “The Man Who Talks Not,” Flathead Living, July/Aug. 2007, p. 47.
65 Standard works on termination include Donald L. Fixico, Termination and Relocation
: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960 (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1986); Kenneth R. Philp, Termination Revisited: American Indians on the Trail to Self-Determination, 1933–1953 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1999); and Roberta Ulrich, American Indian Nations from Termination to Restoration, 1953–2006 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2010). For the Blackfeet, see Rosier, Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, esp. 217–82.
66 See, e.g., Phil Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), and esp. Sherry L. Smith, Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012).
67 Author interview with Marvin Weatherwax, Oct. 2006. For more on Albert Racine, see Burk, New Interpretations, 39–44.
68 See Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life beyond Limits (New York: Norton, 2009).
69 See Kenneth R. Philp, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920–1954 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1977).
70 See Rosier, Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, esp. 101–29. The bill was also known by a third name, the Indian Reorganization Act.
71 The TSFA was the successor to the significant but short-lived Public Works of Art Project, which lasted from Dec. 1933 to June 1934. The TSFA itself was absorbed into the Federal Works Agency in 1938, where it remained until 1943, which saw the termination of all New Deal art programs. See Jennifer McLerran, A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933– 1943 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2009), 161–97.
72 Letter from Mamie Clarke to Eleanor Sherman, 23 March 1937, GUA, IEFAA, MSS 91, box 2, folder 11.
73 Glacier Reporter, 27 Feb. 1986. In their present installation indoors, the buffalo jump frieze is on the right and the Indian encampment is on the left, with the horizontal frieze currently nowhere on display in the facility. My thanks to Ken Robison and especially Bob Doerk and Bruce Druliner for confirming the placements of these works.
74 McLerran, A New Deal for Native Art, 158.
75 For a broader discussion of this paradigm shift from allotment to revival, with particular attention to the role of non-Indians in facilitating this transformation, see Sherry L. Smith, Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).
76 For a fuller description of such processes, see George Bird Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians: History and Society (1923; Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1972), 1:213–17. Plains Indian peoples used similar techniques in hunting and dressing bison.
77 William Walker, “A Living Exhibition: The Smithsonian, Folklife, and the Making of the Modern Museum” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis Univ., 2007), 21–29.
78 John C. Ewers, The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains (1958; Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1983), ix.
79 For more on Curtis, see Mick Gidley, ed., Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian Project in the Field (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2003); and Timothy Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis (New York: Harcourt, 2012).
80 Ewers, Plains Indian Sculpture, 216.
81 Montana Senior News 19, no. 5 (June/July 2003): 56.
82 Clyde A. Milner II and Carol O’Connor, As Big as the West: The Pioneer Life of Granville Stuart (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009).
83 Mary Strachan Scriver, Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver (Calgary: Univ. of Calgary Press, 2007), 116; author correspondence with Mary Scriver, 31 Jan. 2011.
84 Burk, New Interpretations, 168.
85 Morgan, “Reminiscences of John L. Clarke.”
Epilogue
1 McFee taught at the Univ. of Oregon from 1965 to 1982 and died in 1992. See “Assembly Minutes [University of Oregon] 6 Jan. 1993,” http://pages. uoregon.edu/assembly/dirassembly/A6Jan93.html (accessed 4 Sept. 2012).
2 Malcolm McFee, “The 150% Man, a Product of Blackfeet Acculturation,” American Anthropologist 7 (Dec. 1968): 1096–103; and McFee, Modern Blackfeet: Montanans on a Reservation (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972).
3 McFee, “The 150% Man,” 1097; and McFee, Modern Blackfeet, 31.
4 Ewers wrote in 1958, “The most remarkable trend in the history of [the Blackfeet] during the first half of this century has been the rapid growth in the mixed-blood element of the population.” See The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains (1958; Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 326. Rules pertaining to membership in the tribe changed significantly in 1962, when the tribal constitution was amended to limit enrollment to those of at least one quarter Indian descent; before that time there had been no stipulation concerning degree of Indian blood. See McFee, “The 150% Man,” 1097.
5 “The 150% Man,” 1101. The historian Paul C. Rosier employs McFee’s concept in “Joseph W. Brown: Native American Politician,” in The Human Tradition in the American West, ed. Benson Tong and Regan A. Lutz (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2002), 117–35.
6 Letter from George and Louise Spindler to Malcolm McFee, 4 June 1970, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, George and Louise Spindler Papers, SC0943, box 6, folder 7.
7 McFee, Modern Blackfeet, vi.
8 For “blood-ism,” see author interview with Donald Pepion, Jan. 2008. For the rise of casino gambling and oil development on the reservation, see
Bibliography
Manuscript Collections
Gallaudet University, Deaf Collections and Archives, Washington, D.C.
International Exhibition of Fine Applied Arts by Deaf Artists
Glenbow-Alberta Institute, Calgary, Alberta
Stan Gibson Fonds
Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota
Louis W. Hill Papers
Horatio P. Van Cleve and Family Papers
Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, Missouri
Chouteau Family Papers, Chouteau-Papin Collection
Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana
Helen P. Clarke Papers, SC 1153
Helen P. Clarke, Vertical File
Horace Clarke Reminiscence, SC 540
John L. Clarke, Vertical File
Malcolm Clarke, Vertical File
Andrew Dawson Papers, SC 292
May G. Flanagan Papers, SC 1236
Heavy Runner Records, MF 53
David Hilger Papers, SC 854
James Kipp Papers, SC 936
Nathaniel P. Langford Papers, SC 215
Martha E. Plassmann Papers, MC 78
John W. Ponsford Reminiscence, SC 659
James Upson Sanders Papers, MC 66
Wilbur Fisk Sanders Papers, MC 53
James Willard Schultz Papers, SC 721
Sieben Ranch, Vertical File
Régis de Trobriand Papers, SC 5 and SC 1201
Edith Grimes Waddell Reminiscence, SC 1669
William F. Wheeler Papers, MC 65
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Oral Interviews
Darrell Robes Kipp. Interview by the aut
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Carol Murray. Interview by the author, Oct. 2006.
Darrell Norman. Interview by the author, June 2007.
Donald Pepion. Interview by the author, Jan. 2008.
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Government Documents
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U.S. Congress. Appropriations for Certain Indian Treaties. Senate Executive Document 57, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., 1870.
———. Expedition against Piegan Indians. House Executive Document 185, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., 1870.
———. Piegan Indians. House Executive Document 269, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., 1870.
———. Public Acts of the Forty-First Congress, 2nd sess., 1870.
———. Second Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Senate Executive Document 39, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., 1871.
———. The Annual Message of the President. House Document 1, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 1901.
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Newspapers and Periodicals
Army and Navy Journal
Billings Gazette
Daily Missoulian
Daily Rocky Mountain Gazette
Federal Illustrator
Fort Benton River Press Weekly
Glacier Reporter
Great Falls Daily Tribune
Great Falls Leader Daily
Great Falls Tribune
Great Falls Tribune Daily
Harper’s Weekly
Helena Daily Herald
Helena Weekly Herald
Helena Weekly Independent
The Indian Helper
Milwaukee Sentinel
Monterey New Era
Montana Daily Record
Montana Senior News
National Anti-Slavery Standard
New North-West
New York Times
Owyhee Avalanche
The Red Man
The Register-Guard