The Western History Association
Drawn to the West
Author(s): Brian W. Dippie
Source: The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 4-26
Published by: Western Historical Quarterly, Utah State University on behalf of the The
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Brian W. Dippie
Forty-first
President
of the Western
History
Association
to the West
Drawn
Brian
Dippie
W-
Historic western American art is best understood as myth in visual form.
M;y essay argues that art enshrines the ideals of nineteenth-century white
Americans
reputation
who
saw
today
results
as a
the West
from
land. Western
promised
its tendency
to celebrate
art's
contested
as
expansion
frontier
to the shaping of a distinctive national character.
fundamental
CONFERENCE
V/uR
YEAR
THIS
THEME
?S "The
Boundless West: Imagery and Popular Culture." It reflects my own abiding interest
in the art of the American West. My work has focused on imagery. I like words and
love
To
pictures.
us
it makes
art makes
western
Paul
paraphrase
a historian
us
"Art
Klee,
see."1 As
of
it shows,
see?what
does
not
the American
reproduce
West,
an allegorical premise. The Trail's End
an
is
entire historical narrative. An Indian with raised
Destiny. A wagon train creaking into the setting sun
Western
art, to put it baldly, iswestern myth in visual
remains an essential part of any history of the American
is to encounter
Seen from a distance?from
ninth
western
parallel?the
but also the most
American
myth
my
itmeans.
and what
To
what
we
see. Rather,
on
turns
interest
see a feathered
what
Indian
is near. A
single buffalo skull
tomahawk validates Manifest
is the future washed in gold.
form. And that western myth
West.
[See Figure 1J
even
those
located
foreign shores,
along the forty
is not
only
the most
interesting
thing
about
America,
revealing. Foreigners will ever be in quest of the key that unlocks
and
culture,
founding
myths
are
attractive
for
their
explanatory
powers.2
a native
Brian W. Dippie, forty-first president of the Western
History Association,
of Edmonton,
teaches U. S. history at the University
of Victoria,
in
Alberta,
BC, specializing
western American
art.
1
is Everything,"
in the Globe and Mail,
for Globe and Mail
advertisement
"Perspective
is usually rendered, "Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it
6 July 2002. Klee's 1920 dictum
makes visible." Will Grohmann,
Paul Klee (London,
Klee's view implied
1967), 21. Naturally
art was hopelessly
that representational
literal-minded.
But surfaces intended to reflect reality
can mislead
observers
about western
and conceal
art follows
depths
on this premise.
worth
plumbing.
The
last quarter
century
of writing
States,
2
For examples of such studies by scholars situated abroad or born outside the United
see: Peter J. Parish, "Daniel Webster, New England,
and the West," Journal of American
History
Association.
Western
Historical
Quarterly
35 (Spring
2004):
5-26. Copyright
?
2004, Western
6
SPRING2004
Western
From
a
sense
to
Historical
Quarterly
it makes
perspective,
European
see America
as
the
little
trans
that could?and
did. "Westward
plant
the Course of Empire takes itsWay," an
Irish bishop wrote in 1728:
The
four first Acts
already past,
A fifth shall close the
Drama with the Day;
The world's great
Effort is the last.3
Discredited
usages like "Old World"
and "New World" once served to draw
distinctions and to suggest continuity?
Civ, and all that. Is studying the
a Eurocentric
West
enterprise?
mythic
Of course. But then from the perspec
tive of Europe, America was a European
Western
Figure 1.George Catlin,
"Wi-jun-jon, Pigeon's Egg
Head, going to and returning from Washington,"
in George Catlin,
Letters and Notes on
engraving
and Condition
Customs
theManners,
of the North
American
Indians (New York, 1841), vol. 2, plates
271-2. Photo in author's collection.
and "An Exception
1967): 524-49
in the Mid-Nineteenth
Different
History 54 (December
American
Nationalism
Just
enterprise.
over
a year
the
ago
Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody,
in
and the Glenbow Museum
Wyoming,
a
to
teamed
sponsor
Alberta,
Calgary,
to Most
of the Rules: What
Made
Century?"
Prologue 27 (Fall 1995):
to the Idea of the United States (London,
Ideas on the
The Influence of Nativist
218-29; Walter Allen, The Urgent West: An Introduction
"Nativism
and Western
1969); Bronwen
J.Cohen,
Myth:
American
Studies 8 (April
Journal of American
Self-image,"
The
1974): 23-39; David M. Wrobel,
to theNew Deal (Lawrence,
End of American
Frontier Anxiety from the Old West
Exceptionalism:
as the Last Empire,
Schulte Nordholt,
The Myth of theWest: America
KS, 1993); JanWillem
trans. Herbert H. Rowen
"American Exceptionalism
(Grand Rapids, MI, 1995); Eric Kaufmann,
in the 'Universal' Nation,
Reconsidered:
1776-1850," Journal of
Anglo-Saxon
Ethnogenesis
The American West:
Studies 33 (December
Murdoch,
1999): 437-57; David Hamilton
The Effects of
Invention of aMyth
(Reno, 2001); Arnon Gutfeld, American
Exceptionalism:
con
is the symposium
Experience
Plenty on theAmerican
(Brighton, GB, 2002). Also pertinent
of Western
ceived and coordinated
"Imaging the West," Autry Museum
by Kevin Mulroy,
9-11 June 1995.1 would add a few publications
Los Angeles,
of my own to this list:
Heritage,
American
The
"The West
that Was
15 and West-Fever
&
the West
(Los Angeles,
that Is,"Gilcrease
Magazine
of History
and Art
8 (July 1986):
1
1998).
3
George
in The Works of
"America or the Muse's Refuge: A Prophecy"
Berkeley,
ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessup, vol. 7 (London,
1955), 369
George Berkeley, Bishop ofCloyne,
70, quote on 370; see also Loren Baritz, "The Idea of the West," American Historical Review 66
"Westward the Course of Empire: Geography
(April 1961): 618-40; Laurence M. Hauptman,
Schoolbooks
and Manifest
40 (May 1978): 423-37, was based on
1783-1893," Historian
Destiny,
a strong endorsement
a survey of more than one thousand books. Hauptman
discerned
of the
meant
that other races
of continental
expansion. Geographical
inevitability
predestination
advance.
would serve American
needs by melting
away in the face of white civilization's
BrianW. Dippie 7
Canadian
and
traveling symposium called "One West, Two Myths: Comparing
two
western
is
nations
How
could
whose
American
boundary
Perspectives."
simply
an artificial line drawn along the 49th parallel, and who shared in common their
to the British Empire, have produced distinctive societies with measurably
connection
and, most
values
social
different
for purposes
pertinent
of
the
symposium,
contrasting
myths about theirWests?4
the third and final leg of the symposium convened in Berlin in July this
When
was the John F. Kennedy Center for North American
its
host
Studies at the
year,
its coverage had been expanded to include Mexico, and its title had
Free University,
changed to "Narrating Frontiers: Transgressions and Exchanges along North American
Borders." Let me add that since it was an international conference drawing heavily
on European expertise in critical studies, the approach was resolutely literary and the
water got pretty deep for the few historians and sole archeologist in attendance. But
the mythic West still cast a long shadow over the proceedings, appropriately enough,
relations had suffered during the lead-up to the
given the bruising German-American
war
a
to
consider President George W. Bush a "cowboy" in
and
tendency abroad
Iraq
the modern,
had
of
that
word.5
the
Too,
F. Kennedy
John
was
Institute
of celebrating the fortieth anniversary of President Kennedy's speech
a border that, in 1963, literally divided East and West. The Berlin Wall,
denouncing
he
sense
pejorative
in the midst
was
insisted,
"an
offence
not
against
only
but
history
an
offence
hu
against
on behalf of free people
is indivisible"?and,
manity." Itwould one day fall?"freedom
in
their struggle by proclaiming himself a
everywhere, he joined the people of Berlin
Berliner,
too.6
In short,
at the
"Narrating
Frontiers"
as fact and even larger as symbol. The myth
itwas palpable, and pressingly important.
The
formed
power
explanatory
was
into what
what
of frontiering
is?a
seems
European
America
conference,
of theWest
In time,
undeniable.
into
transplant
loomed
large
was not some tired conceit;
an
original
trans
something
phenomenon.7
Bishop Berkeley himself, having proclaimed that "Westward the Course of Empire takes
itsWay," subsequently modified his concluding line, "The world's great Effort is the last,"
to read
"Time's
instead,
to remember
today.8
4See
York,
Seymour
1996), 77-109.
Vancouver
2002),
noblest
Americans
Martin
Offspring
celebrated
Lipset, American
is the
the
of
Exceptionalism:
5
Alex Strachan,
"Lone Justice: How the West
Sun (British Columbia),
5 April 2003.
6
Christian
Bahr, Divided City. The Berlin Wall,
is the
last." That
centennial
version
choose
soon
Sword
(in the Middle
language
we
republic
A Double-Edged
is Being Won
English
their
after
(New
East),"
ed. (Berlin, DEU,
18.
7
A vigorous
Intellectual Construction
in Jack P. Greene,
of the exceptionalist
ismounted
The
premise
and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill,
of America: Exceptionalism
is hard to lay to rest. After all, thinking you are different constitutes
a
NC,
1993). Exceptionalism
case for exceptionalism.
defense
8
on the prospect
"Verses by the Author
Luce and Jessup, Works of George Berkeley, 373.
of Planting
Arts
and Learning
inAmerica,"
8
SPRING
2004
Western
Historical
Quarterly
a convulsive civil war had exposed racial and sectional divisions that threatened its
continued existence. As a reuniting nation with its continental borders fully attained,
the United States in 1876 was emerging as a global power, increasingly unsure of the
very
that
openness
it, to quote
made
had
"discovery" of the New World?a
but now
lifespan,
an eastern
fair held
not
city)?may
"a nation
again,
Kennedy
An explanation
for its rapid rise to greatness
was in order. That the best known explanation
in conjunction with a world's fair celebrating
of
immigrants."
among the older powers of the world
was advanced in an address delivered
the 400th anniversary of Columbus's
in Chicago
(the West within a human
have
it has
but
contemporaries,
impressed
impressed friends and foes of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis ever since.9
"The Significance of the Frontier in American History" offered an explanation
for what made "time's noblest Offspring" different. It became the gold standard for the
exceptionalist
exceptionalism
means
premise.
Exceptional
can accommodate
of course,
distinctive,
and
triumphalism
not
and
wonderful,
self-re
opposite,
triumphalism's
But clearly triumphalism holds the upper hand inTurner. Overwhelmingly,
the qualities he attributed to the frontier experience were entered on the credit side of
crimination.
the ledger?strength,
a "masterful
grasp
vidualism,"
"that
confidence,
and
acuteness,
of material
a
inquisitiveness,
things,"
and
a "restless,
exuberance
buoyancy
a "scorn
of older
which
society,"
with
freedom,"
as a love
translates
of mind,"
a "dominant
energy,"
comes
which
turn
inventive
"practical,
nervous
indi
freshness,
for democracy?
noble qualities all. Only a lack in the artistic and that "dominant individualism" when
to
it works for "evil" fall into the debit column.10 It does not require an accountant
in
is
frontier
of
America's
Turner's
balance
favor
that
sheet
recognize
robustly
legacy.
there
Still,
is that
worrisome
nagging,
at
question
the
end: What
now
now??What
that frontiering is finished? Turner's thesis, triumphalist, but also deeply fretful about
the ending of the very process of frontiering that it celebrated?the
closing of "the
not so much history as founding myth. And
first period of American history"?was
as
myth,
not
dictionary
history,
definition)
it has
proven
is "any
real
astonishingly
or fictional
because
resilient
story,
recurring
myth
(to quote
theme,
or
one
character
its cultural ideals
of a people by embodying
type that appeals to the consciousness
or by giving expression to deep, commonly felt emotions."11 As such, myth is "highly
impervious
to refutation
9
George W.
(Utica, NY, 1870), 45.
by
a show
Pine, Beyond
of
facts
theWest:
to the
containing
contrary."12
an account
of two years'
travel . . .
10
Frederick
of the Frontier in American
History,"
J.Turner, "The Significance
DC,
for the Year 1893 (Washington,
Report of theAmerican Historical Association
see Wrobel,
The End of American
227; Also
Exceptionalism.
Annual
11
William
(NewYork,
Morris,
1969), 869.
ed., The American
Heritage
Dictionary
in
1894),
of the English Language
12
in Truth,
inModern Rationalistic
Societies,"
Gregor Sebba, "Symbol and Myth
and J.Harvey Young
A. Beardslee,
and Symbol, ed. Thomas
J. J.Altizer, William
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1962), 145.
Myth,
BrianW. Dippie 9
The myth-symbol
school of the 1950s, linked to Henry Nash Smith's seminal
so thoroughly repudiated as essentialist,
since
reductivist and, of
Land
and
Virgin
course, triumphalist (terms not even in the 1969 dictionary that provided the common
sense definition
even
could
of myth
predict
just quoted), has reappeared, changed but still recognizable,
writing
on national
memory
a return
to national
character
of recent
in the flood
and
consciousness.13
historical
studies.
Certainly
to those like Thomas
One
events
since
11
who, in 2000,
September have given little comfort
and anti-ex
hoped that historical debate inAmerica would abandon exceptionalism
perspective that
ceptionalism alike and embrace a "splendidly aloof" post-exceptionalist
L. Haskell
would "forthrightly admit that sweeping claims and counterclaims about the similarity
or difference of entire nations will forever elude empirical resolution ." Itmay be, as
is a "barren conundrum" and that searching in the
Haskell wrote, that exceptionalism
supposed "uniqueness of national experience" for "an explanatory key that unlocks
all doors" is a fruitless activity.14 But HaskelPs hopes for a post-exceptionalist
paradise
have been dashed by the plethora of commentators who in the past year began their
observations on international affairs with "[t]he French are . . ."or "[t]he Germans
are
or
..."
to
"Americans
just being
most
of
where
are...."
As
irritating.15
the
The
scrutiny.
Even
the world's
search
that search leads, theWest
went
Canadians
superpower,
continues
for
from
America,
that
elusive
being
but
irritating,
nice,
comes
of course,
"explanatory
in for
And
key."
will not be far behind.
13
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
as the
for what itwrought
1950). The book is granted a conditional
(Cambridge, MA,
discharge
of the myth-symbol
school in Ann Fabian's surprisingly forgiving "Back to Virgin
progenitor
Land," Reviews inAmerican History
American
myth and memory have
In the past decade,
studies in
24 (September
1996): 542-53.
covered everything
from Plymouth Rock, the American
flag,
Barnum's America
and the Alamo
through the Civil War
(including
George Washington,
the Lincoln
Lincoln,
World War
have
Lee and his generals, Pickett's Charge,
and the Lost Cause)
Memorial,
and Monterey,
California.
Historic
and monuments
sites, pageants,
a model
is Edward Tabor Linenthal,
close attention;
Sacred Ground:
especially
to
II,Vietnam,
received
see Michael
and Their Battlefields,
2d ed. (Urbana, IL, 1993). For a standard overview,
inAmerican Culture
(New
Mystic Chords ofMemory: The Transformation
of Tradition
case study, see Clyde A. Milner
of
1991); for a useful western
II, "The Shared Memory
Americans
K?mmen,
York,
Montana
Pioneers," Montana
14
Thomas
History
28 (March
The Magazine
L. Haskell,
2000):
15
See American
ofWestern
"Taking Exception
History
37 (Winter
to Exceptionalism,"
1987): 2-13.
Reviews
inAmerican
164-5.
Review of Canadian
Studies 33 (Spring 2003), special issue,
the Storm: The State of the Canada-U.S.
2003." Wringing
its hands
"Weathering
Relationship,
over a tourist drought
in the summer of 2003, the Times Colonist
(Victoria, BC) on 1August
a letter from Douglas Buchanan
of Bishop, CA who spoke about Americans
when
published
. .
for buying their wine
they get serious: ". we have little time for critics. We also lose our motive
their countries
because we have more impor
(France) and visiting
(France, Germany,
Canada)
tant things
on our minds."
10
SPRING
2004
Western
Historical
Quarterly
So we turn to western myth and the ideas and values it embodies. Conventional
wisdom, Marvin Meyers wrote in the heyday of national character studies, holds that
is never
rhetoric
to be
trusted.16
Long
before
the post-modernists,
of
students
literature
and political oratory knew that they were dealing with unreliable narrators, and that
hidden meanings would have to be teased out of texts. Still, there was confidence
that the effort was worthwhile,
in the spirit of the remark that in order to understand
you had to scrape through the tinsel to get
mythic capital, Hollywood,
to the real tinsel underneath. Rhetoric disguises and confuses; it also reveals. It is
America's
a verbal
strategy adopted for a purpose. The words most often associated with the
in the rhetoric of the first half of the nineteenth
century involved space and
is
old, pretty fully peopled, and
opportunity and freedom and the future. "The East
West
Daniel Webster
told an audience in Pittsburgh in 1833, when
small," Massachusetts^
was
still
West.
"We are bounded; you are boundless."17 The
like
the
Pittsburgh,
Chicago,
on.
not abide the actualities of westward
it
Thoreau
could
Transcendentalists
poured
to California,"
expansion?"Going
he
observed,
"is only
three
thousand
miles
nearer
... or rather
to hell." Still, he doted on the idea of going West: "Westward is heaven
is theWest."18 An essayist in 1857 echoed Bishop Berkeley by writing:
heavenward
The West has always been the land of hope and progress . . . the
.
are beginning
to feel,
land not of the past, but of the future. . . We
as none others have done before us, the true import of this word, the
West. It is a protest against the existing evils of society; as if one should
say, Let me leave this place where mind is trammeled, where I cannot
develop all my powers as Iwould, and let me go where all this can be
me
accomplished?let
There would be hardships,
the West
must
submit
go West.
of course, to test the hardiest of individuals.
to toil,
danger,
privation,
disease,
and
perhaps
"He who seeks
early
death..
.."
some would have to be sacrificed: "The aborigines must be driven out or extermi
nated in the beginning." But the price of progress was as nothing if theWest became
And
16
Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics & Belief (New York, 1960), pref
ace to the Vintage
edition.
17
in Parish, "Daniel Webster,
New England,
and the West,"
527.
Quoted
18
of
View
Western
the
in
Transcendentalist
"The
Lawrence
West,"
Willson,
Quoted
as the "great
Review 14 (Spring 1960): 186-7. More predictably, Herman Melville
Humanities
opinion. Melville's Mardi and a Voyage Thither, ed. Raymond W.
naysayer" shared Thoreau's
Weaver
Mexican
(1849; reprint, New York, 1925 ), 453, satirized the Oregon
and the rush to California:
War and Texas Annexation,
dispute, the
Boundary
"It seems a golden hell."
BrianW. Dippie 11
what
to the world, an addition to its civilization and
a
more
and the theater for
perfect development of humanity than preced
its dreamers dreamed:
refinement,
and
ing ages
Eastern
climes
"a blessing
have
ever
realized."19
"great nation of futurity," as John L. O'Sullivan described the United States
in 1839, in a warm-up forManifest Destiny's full-throated cry, had reached maturity
This
19
5 (August 1857): 186, 189-90.
Delta, "Westward," Emerson's United States Magazine
toWalt Whitman,
the prediction
in 1947 Henry Nash Smith wrote: "In the West
Attributing
to the turbulent and audacious
will appear a new politics and a new literature, appropriate
of the future." See Henry Nash Smith, "Walt Whitman
and Manifest
Destiny,"
10 (August 1947): 375. Thoreau
entertained
grave doubts about
Huntington
Library Quarterly
Manifest
but anticipated Whitman's
point in an 1843 journal entry: "We must look to
Destiny,
the west for the growth of a new literature-manners-architecture
&c Already
there ismore lan
America
is the growth of the soil-than
inWillson,
here." (Quoted
"The
guage there,-which
see Gay Wilson
on Whitman,
Transcendentalist
View of the West,"
Allen
"The
190.) Also
in Essays on American
Influence of Space on the American
Literature inHonor of
Imagination,"
ed. Clarence Gohdes
and Edwin Fussell, Frontier:
(Durham, NC,
1967), 329-42
Jay B. Hubbell,
American
Literature
the West
is essential
turn,
is essential
that
(Princeton, NJ, 1965), for a sustained argument
of early American
literature," and that literature, in
of the West's
in the shaping of an
formative
influence
and theAmerican West
"for an understanding
for an understanding
prior to the Civil War
(quote on p. 3). Moving
beyond literary images, Rush
before the Civil War came to see in the West
"an al
argued that ordinary Americans
most limitless extension
of the social and economic
and political values they associated with
their country at large," thus substituting
for literary idealism in character
utilitarian motives
American
character
Welter
as America's
and hope. See Rush Welter,
"The Frontier
izing the West
repository of opportunity
as Image of American
West
52 (January 1961):
1776-1860," Pacific Northwest Quarterly
Society,
as Image of American
1-6 (quote on p. 2) and "The Frontier West
Society: Conservative
Attitudes
before the Civil War," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 66 (March 1960): 593-614,
traces a shift
once deplored as a drain on New
in eastern attitudes whereby
the West,
as
was
a
"middle-class
the lasting
resources,
England's
reconceptualized
utopia" that "embodied
nation." As the dates of these citations
indicate, such broad-gauged
hopes of the American
studies in intellectual
of
history have not been in fashion for years. Indeed, with the exception
an essay by Rush Welter
titled "On Studying
the National Mind," New Directions
inAmerican
Intellectual History,
ed. John Higham
and Paul K. Conkin
(Baltimore, MD,
1979), vividly docu
which
mented
the complete
character
studies. "In the
collapse of "consensus history" and national
intellectual history had seemed to offer the master key that could unlock the deepest
secrets of the American
past," Higham wrote in the introduction:
"By the late 1960s all claims
issued in the name of an American
mind,' a national
'myth,' a climate of opinion,' or a 'liberal
tradition' were subject to drastic skepticism."
and
(p. xii) But Fred Erisman's "Thoreau, Alcott,
1950s
the Mythic
West," Western American Literature 34 (Fall 1999): 303-15
(quote on p. 303), is a
the rhetoric of hope that extends
sign of a renewed interest in (to paraphrase Wallace
Stegner)
the discussion
of what Erisman describes as Thoreau's well recognized
"part in shaping the
sense of the mythic West"
to include Louisa May Alcott.
Leo P. Ribuffo,
"What Is
Still Living in 'Consensus' History
and Pluralist Social Theory," American
Studies International
38 (February 2000): 42-60
that "we should not reject out of hand
(quote on p. 56), concludes
the possibility
that most Americans
have shared significant beliefs and values, though the
American
components
of this
'consensus'
has certainly
varied
over
the centuries."
12
SPRING
2004
Western
Historical
Quarterly
by 1893, when Turner delivered his paper in Chicago.20 Critics in the heyday of con
sensus history faulted Turner for confusing the literalWest with itsmore potent form,
the metaphorical West, which had indeed shaped a national self-consciousness,
but
had run its course by the end of the Civil War?long
the
census
an
declared
to the
end
frontier.
before the superintendent
"Twentieth-century
of
sentimental-antiquar
was just around the corner," Edwin Fussell noted in dismissing
ianWest-mongering
Turner.21 What he meant was what the novelist Frank Norris meant in a 1902 essay
titled "The Frontier Gone at Last":
... on the first of
May,
a gun was
eighteen hundred and ninety-eight,
.
.
.
a
fired in the Bay of Manila.
Then came
cry for help from Legation
in Peking
Street
and
as
the
. . .
first
marines
of American
contingent
took ground on the Asian shore, the Frontier . . . dwindled down and
in his course of empire had circled the
vanished; for the Anglo-Saxon
new
to the old civilization, had
the
civilization
and
had
globe
brought
reached the starting point of history,
So
began.
soon
as
was
So,
lament
the place from which
was
there
landed
no
the migration
any West,
longer
the problem of the centuries
of the horizon,
and the equation
Anglo-Saxon
the marines
for the
solved.
we
it though
. . . the
may,
one
peculiar
picturesqueness
of our life isno more. We may keep alive formany years yet the idea of a
Wild West, but the hired cowboys and paid rough riders of Mr. William
Cody are more like "the real thing" than can be found today inArizona,
or Idaho. Only the imitation cowboys, the college-bred
New Mexico
fellows
become
who
on
"go out
conscious
of
20
John L. O'Sullivan,
Review 6 (November
are reprinted
Destiny
a ranch"
itself,
acts
carry
the
the
part
revolver.
for
the
. . The
.
Eastern
Frontier
visitor;
and
has
this
and
Nation
of Futurity," United States Magazine
1839): 426-30. This and other specimens of the rhetoric of
inManifest Destiny, ed. Norman A. Graebner
Manifest
(Indianapolis,
in the United States
excludes two fine examples, both also published
1968), 15-21; Graebner
since they bookend Bernard De Voto's
and Democratic
Review (see below), notable
Magazine
to fulfillment
in the compass of a single year, 1846.
"Year of Decision," moving
from prophecy
that "[a]s
The language closely anticipates Turner's case for American
noting
exceptionalism,
Democratic
"The Great
faded more and more
increased and years rolled on, the impress of the Old World
. .
America's
"great mission
away" and political democracy
gained a secure foothold, establishing
.. institutions
. to extend to all the
continent.
based upon the light of
people of the American
. . ."See "America
reason and truth, upon the benefits and inherent and equal rights of all men.
numbers
Review 18 (January
and Democratic
Past-The
Future," United States Magazine
a fact by February 1847, its "annihi
1846): 57-64
(quotes on pp. 62, 64). With war with Mexico
of America's
continental
lation as a nation" was predicted,
destiny:
along with the fulfillment
the plains,
from the Alleghanies,
settlers have descended
"The busy and enterprising
occupied
the passes of the Rocky moun
streams, traversed the prairies, penetrated
pushed across mighty
. . ."See "The War," United
now
in
Pacific
are
harbors
the
even
of
the
vessels
and
tains,
loading
Review 20 (February 1847): 99-102
States Magazine
and Democratic
(quotes on pp. 101, 99).
in 1846: The
21
Fussell,
Frontier,
435 and Smith,
Virgin Land,
250-60.
BrianW. Dippie 13
the
type,
of a
is a sign, surer than all others, of the decadence
self-consciousness
of an
passing
epoch.22
aside, Turner's magic year of 1890 still resonates in any reckoning of theWest's
history. Its beginnings reach back to a time when there was no America except
Critics
mythic
as an unnamed
act must
in which
drama
were
of the West,
imaginings
out
sorting
the
narrative
and
By 1890, opinion-makers
western
of America's
components
but Berkeley's fifth
a conventional
constitutes
the day. Westering
with
is as important as the beginning.
the ending
alike
public
idea in the Old World's
the
close
myth,
enshrining
the buckskin-clad hunter-hero, the blue-clad soldier, the cowboy and, of course, the
Indian in a visual construct representing the Old West. Popular histories and biog
raphies, dime novels and the periodical press were addicted to western stories and
colorful western types. Buffalo Bill had toured Europe by then and made the Wild
a part
West
of European
1889 The Household
Edward Eggleston's
Americans
a revealing
provides
Boone,
according
myth,
though
fitfully,
was
its
assuming
form.
modern
recognizable
The
too.23
culture,
was
to Eggleston,
the
of the United
History
on where
take
matters
stood
of
representative
"a new
States for Young
it was
when
race
published.
of men,"
utterly
self-reliant and forged by frontier conditions, but there isno Crockett, Carson, or Cody.
And no Billys or Jesses or Calamitys orWild Bills, of course. The Alamo? One sentence:
Anna
"Santa
marched
against
the Texans,
and
at
the
of Fort
taking
Alamo"?Fort
Alamo!?"he
put to death all opposed to him, and he also executed five hundred men
atGoliad." Mountain men? No Jim Bridger or Jedediah Smith or Bill Sublette. Not even
a John Jacob Astor. Mormons? Their religion "allows the practice of polygamy," and
"for this reason, Congress has hitherto been unwilling to admit Utah to the Union."
Texas
the war
annexation,
sues. No Donner
"A certain
handled
Captain
in two
with
and
Mexico,
Gray,
sentences.
from
Needless
Boston,"
to
gets
are
California
Party, no Fort Laramie or Oregon
a
say, York
paragraph,
and
discussed
as
and
Lewis
is
political
little Oregon.
Trail, and precious
and
Clark
are
In
go unmentioned.
Sacagawea
1889, the heroic phase of westering?for
Eggleston as for Theodore Roosevelt when
he launched his history The Winning of theWest that year?was
"the settlement of the
area
the
between
the
and
the
great valley,"
Appalachians
Mississippi. But just the year
in
aNew York artist
Roosevelt
had
with
Frederic
1888,
before,
partnered
Remington,
who
was
already
the
rising
Life in the FarWest." The
22
Frank Norris,
star of western
illustration,
in a series
of essays
on
"Ranch
locus of the myth was shifting.24
"The Frontier Gone
at Last," World's Work
3 (February
1902):
1729.
23
See,
issue devoted
for example, Montana
The Magazine
ofWestern History 42 (Spring 1992), spe
to "The European's American West." See also, Ray Allen
cial
Land of
Billington,
Frontier in theNineteenth
Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of theAmerican
Century
influence.
(New York, 1981), a useful study that perhaps undervalues
Cody's
24
Edward
(New York,
Eggleston, The Household History of the United States for Young Americans
1889), 232-3
(quote on p. 232), 285, 361, 293-4
(quote on p. 293), 231. See also
14
SPRING
2004
Western
Historical
Quarterly
in Edward Eggleston, The Household
2. Frederic Remington,
"Battle ofWashita,"
engraving
in
States and Its People for Young Americans
(New York, 1889), 363. Photo
Figure
History of the United
author's collection.
Eggleston's Household History boasts only one plate that could be considered a
an engraving of a Remington
Wild Western,
[See
painting titled Battle ofWashita,
Figure
2.]
It is an
early
work,
at once
awkward,
and
theatrical,
bombastic.
Eggleston
described Black Kettle's "town on theWashita River, in the Indian Territory," where
the soldiers in 1868 "fell upon the sleeping savages at daybreak, defeating them with
great slaughter." How exactly this could stir the soul of an artist who idolized the
brave boys in blue is unclear. Remington
showed the troops charging down a broad
avenue
between
clusters
of
tipis mowing
down
Indian
men
who,
taken
by
surprise,
are
virtually defenseless. A few women react to the solid wall of advancing soldiers with
is not the stuff of which heroic
evident shock. "Great slaughter" of the defenseless
epics
are made.
"Ranch Life in the FarWest:
In the Cattle Country," Century Magazine
35
Roosevelt,
in the March
(February 1888): 495-510, which was continued
through June issues, and revisited
in the October
in an essay on "Frontier Types." This potent partnership,
number
often discussed
in the literature on Remington,
in Richard White,
is nicely contextualized
"Frederick Jackson
Theodore
Turner
American
and Buffalo
Culture:
R. Grossman
Bill," in Richard White
An exhibition at Newberry
(Berkeley, CA,
1994), 6-65.
and Patricia Nelson
Library August
26,
Limerick,
The Frontier
1994-January
in
7, 1995, ed. James
BrianW. Dippie 15
In 1876, however, as Eggleston dutifully reported, Custer attacked another Indian
village, this one wide awake. Badly outnumbered, he "was surrounded and killed, with
all the men under his immediate command."25 Custer's Last Stand was a centennial gift
a precious
for artists,
foes.
Self-sacrifice.
news
the
of defeat."
"epic
death
by
was
No
courage.
Unflinching
of Custer's
This
a "lesson
celebrating
stuff.
soul-stirring
survivors.
Walt
Generals.
Boy
Whitman
Savage
"Continues
opportune":
to
responded
yet
the
old, old legend of our race! / The loftiest of life upheld by death!"26 By spinning con
quest to make the victors the victims, the Last Stand dramatized the terrible price of
pioneering progress. In 1890, Remington
exchanged that headlong charge through a
sleeping Indian village for something farmore congenial, a desperate defense by white
soldiers against hopeless odds. [See Figure 3.] Remington
called his painting The Last
was
the picture
Stand, making the particular generic. When
reproduced in Harpers
Weekly on 10 January 1891, less than two weeks afterWounded Knee, an editorial note
asked, "How many
can
who
scenes of which
this is typical have been enacted on this continent,
Custer's
say?"27 Eventually,
Last
Stand
entrenched
itself
as the
representative
event of the Indian wars, and children's school texts ignored theWashita
in favor of
heroic images of Custer's grand finale. That was still the case when Iwas growing up,
and,
to this
Last
day, Custer's
Stand
me
fascinates
as an
idea
created
by
artists
who,
in giving
collective
it visual form, established the power of repetition to burn images into the
consciousness. And what they created is potently mythic. Repetitions
range
from knowing quotation or homage to outright rip off. The appeal of formula fiction
resides in its predictability,
by
a given
writer.
But
and the pleasure a reader takes in the wrinkles
novelty
introduce novelty without
is not
deviating
an
end
in
itself.
fundamentally
The
test
is whether
introduced
a writer
from formula. Mystery
25
Eggleston, Household History of the United States, both this quote and the one in
the preceding paragraph are on p. 362. Eggleston
reassured his young readers that Custer's death
. . .have now been exterminated
in 1876 had only hastened
the inevitable:
"The bisons
by the
march of civilized man. The old life to which
the savages were so much attached
is fast breaking
the hunting-grounds
will soon be occupied by farms, mines,
is noth
and cities. There
ing left for the Indians but to become civilized or to perish" (p. 364).
26
Walt Whitman,
"A Death-Sonnet
for Custer," New York Tribune,
10 July 1876; and
see Bruce A. Rosenberg,
Custer and the Epic of Defeat
(University Park, PA, 1974). Whitman's
down. All
in Leaves of Grass as "From Far Dakota's Canons,"
has given title to a stan
poem, anthologized
dard, anti-triumphalist
history of the frontier myth, written by Richard Slotkin and titled The
Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in theAge of Industrialization,
1800-1890
(New York,
from California's
1985), just as another Whitman
poem, "Facing West
Shores," gave title to
Richard
Facing West: The Metaphysics
of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building
1980). These books serve as ironic tributes to westering's
poetic champion.
Drinnon,
(Minneapolis,
27
in Brian W. Dippie,
"Frederic Remington's West: Where
Quoted
History Meets
inMyth of theWest, by Chris Bruce et al. (New York, 1990), 111-9
Myth,"
(quote on p. 114). For
an overview of western
art emphasizing
its mythic
H. Goetzmann
and
core, seeWilliam
N. Goetzmann,
William
The West of the Imagination
(New York, 1986). For a selection of
Remington
images of defiant stands, see Dippie, The Frederic Remington Art Museum Collection
(Ogdensburg,
NY,
2001),
142-4
can
readers
16
SPRING
2004
Western
"The Last Stand"
Figure 3. Frederic Remington,
1891): 24-5. Photo in author's collection.
case
want
the
man.
Western
individual
solved
art-Mine
adhering
enshrined
certain
Focusing
themes
artists
once
miss
Romance
a
Imake
as
themes
Last
on
art.29
us
the
tions on the theme of heroic defiance
to see
process
at work. Within
"lesson
get
opportune"?and
and
painters
and
refinement,
of enshrining
weeks
call
certain
of Custer's
were
death,
working
in the face of certain death. This
varia
sort of heroic
28
R?ssel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts inAmerica
(New York,
see Paul Andrew
For the situation today, with the western genre a-changing,
280.
1970),
"Western Writing
and Western Writers," WWA Anniversary
Hutton,
Roundup Special Edition
the fiftieth anniversary
of the Western Writers
of America.
(June 2003): 4-6, marking
29
Dawn
treating Daniel
Glanz
Boone
does
for western
art what
Smith
before her had done
for literature
in
as the prototype
for the frontiersman
figure in popular culture. Smith,
and Dawn Glanz, How theWest Was Drawn: American Art and the Settling
Virgin Land, 49-120
of the Frontier (Ann Arbor, MI, 1982), 1-54. For the paramount
western
55-76.
art, see Dippie, West-Fever,
her
a distinct,
pinheads
western
repetition
through
will
problem and see how he
academic
it."28 Similarly,
of western
allows
and refinement
its meaning?its
have,
style
the themes
Stand
living
at
the
35 (10 January
is to create
purpose
"If he misses,
remarked.
because
on Custer's
settled
"The
Quarterly
the woman
trust
readers
to prevail.
to a representational
through repetition
had
end.
the hero
expect
writer
don't
sculptors
book's
inHarper's Weekly
(1890), engraving
and pit him against a specific human
character
it," a western
meets
by
readers
Historical
narrative
themes
of traditional
it
BrianW. Dippie 17
defiance was the lesson Remington had derived from the Last Stand illustration by
in a biography of Custer published in the fall of 1876; Remington's
Alfred R. Waud
own boyish sketch of the battle done about that time proved his debt toWaud?a
debt still apparent when he painted The Last Stand in 1890.30 It paid interest on the
debt, and Waud collected two years later in a second version of Custer's Last Stand
is obvious.
Indeed, the earliest Last Stands, Waud's
a month of the battle, inspired so much
within
Cary published
case not just of d?j? vu,
an
that
1878 lithograph borrowed both Custers?a
where Remington's
and one byWilliam
emulation
influence
but double vision.
Emulation is a given in art. Since Remington
and Montana's celebrated "cowboy
artist" Charles M. Russell have been among my preoccupations,
letme concentrate on
is obvious; he doted on Last Stand
their influence on other Last Stands. Remington's
to Last Stand
groupings throughout his career. But his most unusual contribution
imagery is buried within the best-known version
Otto Becker after a painting by Cassilly Adams.
in 1896, Custer's Last Fight, as
Anheuser-Busch
iconic status for its flamboyant melodrama played
ever done, the chromolithograph
by
First distributed as advertising art by
itwas titled, has long since attained
out against an accurate backdrop, its
gory details, and its charging Indians armed with Zulu spears and clubs and cowhide
shields: Here come the Sioux-lu! But my favorite touch is that concession to realism
sketches incorporated into the action. Remington
provided by three Remnington
even in his role
himself was a master myth-maker?witness
his The Last Stand?but
as reporter
illustrating
structure
mythic
life on southwestern
of Custer's
Last
reservations
he had contributed
to the
Stand.
too, played an inadvertent role in a variant on Custer's Last Stand. David
Indian battle veterans he
Humphreys Miller, who painted portraits of seventy-one
claimed to have interviewed for his 1957 book Custers Fall, provided the dustjacket
art showing Custer receiving a mortal wound while leading his men across the Little
Bighorn to attack the Indian village. By denying Custer his grand finale on a hilltop,
Russell,
Miller's painting undercut the basis of Custer's mythic fame. Russell was enlisted in the
cause. The mixed-blood
scout on the left trying to mount his panicked horse derives
from Russell's oil When Horseflesh Comes High (1909), while Custer, reeling from the
impact of a bullet, owes his existence to the central figure in Russell's Bushwhacked
(1911). That Miller copied Russell should alert readers to the fact his text is cribbed as
well. His account of Custer's death in the river, for example, had already appeared in
30
For the illustrations
in this and the next paragraph,
see my "Brush,
The Magazine
Look," Montana
ofWestern History 24
and the Mythic Moment," Montana
The
(Winter 1974): 65 and "'What Valor Is':Artists
in
debt to the illustrations
Magazine
1996): 48, 53. Remington's
ofWestern History 46 (Autumn
Frederick Whittaker,
A Complete Life of Gen. George A. Custer: Major-General
Volunteers;
of
Brevet Major-General,
U.S. Army; and Lieutenant Colonel,
Seventh U.S. Cavalry
(New York,
Palette
and the Custer
discussed
Battle: A Second
to his Battle ofWashita, which
1876), extended
Battle of theWashita,
inWhittaker's
book.
relies heavily
on the plate
facing p. 425, The
18
SPRING
2004
a Crow
woman's
on
drew
Western
accounts.
published
years
twenty-five
autobiography
Here
art
serves
earlier,
Historical
and many
as a warning
of his
Quarterly
"interviews"
light.31
treatment of Custer's Last Stand
the layers in a more conventional
Unpeeling
reveals aRussell lurking beneath aRemington,
and sums up my point: repetition is the
hammer that drives home the western images we carry in our heads. In the late 1930s,
artist Carl Lindeberg was often called on to illustrate brochures and posters advertising
the Karl May Museum inDresden, Germany, with its collection of Indian artifacts and
a room devoted to the Battle of Little Bighorn. He contributed to the display a small
painting showing Gall's warriors gathering for the final rush up Custer Hill. There is
a dramatic charm to the work as three Indians in the foreground ride hard to join the
warriors already circling Custer's doomed command. In fact, these Indians are lifted
1897 wash drawing The Pony War Dance, and the
directly from Frederic Remington's
are
to
is
Last Stand they
about
join Russell's 1903 watercolor Custer s Last Fight.32
art has
Western
a curious
status
outside
the West.
is a longstanding
There
tradi
28 July 2001, at an auction in Reno, Charles Russell's
famous 1908 painting, A Disputed Trail, showing a man-bear encounter on a narrow
mountain path, sold for a record-setting price for an American watercolor. Critics took
notice?aroused
by the dollar amount, not the art. A writer in theWall Street Journal,
indifference. On
tion of critical
Brooks Barnes, noted that with the buyer's commission added on, a total of $2.4 mil
lion had just been paid for a work by an "obscure 19th-century American
landscape
art by the likes of Russell and
painter." At least Barnes got one thing right. Western
"has long been sneered at as 'cowboy art' by the art-world elite,
he wrote,
Remington,
and many
collectors
would
rather
sit on
a cattle
prod
than
hang
a rodeo
scene
over
the mantel."33
Western art long ago encountered a frontier line of its own that divided East from
in the
and was defined by condescension,
perceived and real. "There's nothing
care
eastern
a
in
do
1901.
"What
Montana
for
Russell
told
me,"
reporter
people
[E]ast
West
31
Frank B. Linderman,
Red Mother
(New York, 1932), 236-8; David Humphreys
Indian Side of the Story (New York, 1957), 126-30; and see Miller,
the ac
"Echoes of the Little Bighorn," American Heritage 22 (June 1971): 32-3, which publishes
count of Sioux veteran Joseph White
Cow Bull that makes him out to be the Indian who shot
see Dippie, Looking at Russell (Fort
in the river. For the Russell paintings mentioned,
Custer
Miller,
Custer's
Fall: The
Worth,
1987),
112, 115.
32
See Dippie,
"Brush, Palette
and the Custer
Battle,"
67 (illustrations
33
Brooks
Saddam
Barnes, "Art & Money," Wall Street Journal, 7 September
of Rowena Morrill?done
fondness for the kitschy paintings
swords-and-sandals
art, with an exaggerated,
style of scifi/fantasy
Hussein's
exaggerated
and heaving
velvet curvaciousness,
bulging muscles,
George W Bush's fondness for a landscape painting
bosoms?has
been
on p. 32).
2001, sec. W, p. 11.
in the purposely
painting-on-black
likened to President
by Texas artist Tom Lea. That Lea's work is
"He
it all the funnier to those in the know. See Sarah Milroy,
in its sincerity makes
poker-faced
2003.
a
19
and
His
Globe
but
He
Loves
Be
Art,"
Mail,
April
Tyrant,
May
BrianW. Dippie 19
realize and
about my pictures? Why, they wouldn't give 30 cents a dozen for them-I
understand that. It would be useless for me to go East. I am going to stay right here
and paint things as I see them in nature."34 We could chalk up Russell's remarks to
or cultural
provincialism,
a decade
Within
insecurity.
a
have
he would
one-man
splashy
show inNew York. But Thomas Moran, a far more worldly artist whose landscapes
never raised the doubts that beset western genre art, told a Denver audience in 1892
that "[e] astern people don't appreciate the grand scenery of the Rockies. They are
easier to sell a picture of a Long
Island swamp than the grandest picture of Colorado."35 Westerners
could just accept
the situation. "Or should we," as Paul Schullery has suggested, "turn the [e]astern
not familiar with mountain
on
back
perspective
effects and it ismuch
. . .
and
itself
sense
restorative
the
recognize
of
in a remark
scale
once offered, that a two-foot stained-glass
that fishing writer Charley Waterman
window inNew York would get more editorial comment than a year of South Dakota
if
sunsets?"36 But turning the eastern perspective back on itself may be unnecessary
current
and
now
continue.
trends
interest
arousing
as great
"recognized
western
Historical
in eastern
centers
mainstream
art
is today
as a
where,
American
attracting
spokesman
art."37 Even
in droves
buyers
at Christie's
as
I speak,
said,
an
it is
exhibition
of Remington's night scenes that originated at the Smithsonian's National Gallery of
Art is touring the West, and a major exhibition of George Catlin's Indian portraits
organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum is about to hit the road. Another
frontier
vanishes.
conservative
times.
Of
not
course,
An
earlier,
will
everyone
critical
highly
cheer.
We
live,
Smithsonian
as
the
retrospective
saying
goes,
in
on western
art was supposed to tour the country, but closed inWashington
without ever leaving
the nation's capital. "TheWest asAmerica" in 1991 kicked up a storm of controversy,
how ideologically charged the
proving how enduring old western myths can be?and
Anaconda
35
"AMountain
Peter H. Hassrick,
2002), 82.
Western
Drawn
(Montana)
Standard,
15 December
1901.
18 June 1892, quoted
Painter," Rocky Mountain
(Colorado) News,
to Yellowstone: Artists
inAmerica's First National
Park (Los Angeles,
36
Paul Schullery,
History 52 (Summer
"Frontier Fly-Fishing
2002): 5.
in the New West,"
Montana
The Magazine
in
of
37
Eric Widing,
14
"Bonanza!," Traditional Home
quoted in Ann E. Berman,
to accept western
art's subject matter rather than dismiss
2003): 108. A willingness
(September
its appeal. As a character
in Jane Smiley's shrewd
ing it out of hand as boring has broadened
a herd of uninterested
stu
university parody Moo (New York, 1995), 68, muses while observing
dents drowsing
through a lecture, "ignorance was the prime element of boredom." Princeton
Press recently has been involved in two extraordinarily
on
handsome
publications
H. Phelan, Frederic Remington: The Hogg Brothers
Remington:
Emily Ballew Neff, with Wynne
Collection
et
(Princeton, NJ, 2000) and Nancy K. Anderson
of theMuseum
of Fine Arts, Houston
Press
al., Frederic Remington: The Color of Night (Washington,
DC, 2003), while Yale University
its distinguished
continues
in publishing western history and culture with Martha A.
tradition
University
Sandweiss's
Print
the Legend:
Photography
and theAmerican
West
(New Haven,
CT,
2002).
20
SPRING
2004
Western
Historical
Quarterly
art still is.The divide was ideological, not aesthetic, and feelings ran high.38 Western
art is routinely deplored for the values it flaunts. Remington's work, especially in the
last twenty years, has been attacked as triumphalism in paint and bronze, and his con
temporaries have been tarred with the same brush. Russell might offer a sympathetic
vision of the old-time Plains Indian, steeped in nostalgia for the West of his youth,
in his later years might shift to a more complex, almost wistful
and even Remington
stance on Indian subjects, but there isno refuge from modern critiques that condemn
triumphalism and "imperialist nostalgia" as equally obnoxious. Even landscape artists
(and photographers) are considered the tools of despoilers. Because it is an expression
of ideology, western
seductive
imagery.
art cannot avoid the charge that it soft peddles bad values through
Its very
visual
appeal
becomes
evidence
in the
indictment.39
The body of historic western art isvisually appealing. An Albert Bierstadt moun
tain or aMoran canyon can still take the breath away. A group of Remington's wild
riders racing across a boundless land or a Russell party of Blackfeet moving over the
open plains still speak to freedom and possibility. Carlos Schwantes has pondered why
the twentieth-century
failed tomake inroads into popular perceptions of the American
38
for a sample of immediate
comment;
provoked considerable
as America'
West
Exhibition," American Art 5 (Summer
as America'
from 'The West
"Visitors Respond:
Selections
1991): 2-11; and Andrew Gulliford,
Comment
The Magazine
1992): 77-80.
Books," Montana
ofWestern History 42 (Summer
reactions,
"The West
as America"
see "Showdown
at The
39
Alex
Nemerov,
'"Doing the "Old America'": The Image of the American West,
in The West as America: Reinterpreting
ed.
1880-1920,"
Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920,
has been influential. Nemerov's
H. Truettner
William
DC, 1991), 285-343,
(Washington,
the Future: Film and Race in the Art of Charles Russell," American Art 8 (Winter
"Projecting
America
and Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century
(New Haven, CT, 1995)
to those inMatthew
nuanced
readings compared
Baigell, "Territory, Race,
1990): 2-21 and J.Gray
Destiny," American Art 4 (Summer-Fall
Images of Manifest
1994): 70-89
provide
relatively
Religion:
in Race-ingArt
and Nostalgia,"
"Racism, Nationalism,
History: Critical Readings in
Sweeney,
indict
Race and Art History, ed. Kymberly N. Pinder (New York, 2002), 155-68. The blanket
in outlook as Remington
and Russell
is why two artists so different
ment offered by Sweeney
have
Russell
of the West,
as interchangeable.
the winning
celebrated
Remington
work diverged after Russell found his stride in the 1890s, but also
in 1898, lost
as Remington,
battle in Cuba
having satisfied his curiosity by witnessing
in war as a glorious test of manhood.
Still, at the end of their lives, their personal
often been
lamented
converged
confidence
treated
it. Their
as their outlooks. Both were conservatives,
Remington
politically,
was class-conscious
sense
social cachet,
and coveted
in
the
that Remington
culturally,
while Russell clung to the past and resisted change. Seventeen
days before he died in 1909,
at
crowed in his
reviews
of
his
exhibition
latest
annual
Knoedler's,
Remington
strong
buoyed by
credos
remained
as different
Russell
Art Museum, Ogdenburg,
NY):
9, Diary, 1909, Frederic Remington
diary (entry for December
. .The
'Illustrator' phase has become a background."
"The art critics have all 'come down'.
Russell, a year before he died in 1926, laboriously wrote out in pencil his take on life (More
Rawhides
[Great Falls, MT, 1925], 3): "I am an illustrator. There are lots better ones, but some
worse. Any man that can make a living doing what he likes is lucky, and I'm that." For a recent
see Martin A.
to the "innocence"
of western
landscape photography,
example of challenges
of Carleton Watkins,"
and the Landscape
Oxford
Photography
Berger, "Overexposed: Whiteness
Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003): 1-23.
BrianW. Dippie 21
uses
He
West.
for
themes?and,
century
Sand
as a measurement.
tourism
and
Creek
that
the Ludlow
But
his
matter,
us
to remind
twentieth
like
themes
nineteenth-century
serve
Massacre?only
of neglected
examples
of neglected
that
tourism
is about
in all the wrong places. Tourists vote with
pleasure. He is looking for enlightenment
their feet and their wallets. National parks and a sanitized Old West offer romance.
a
wants
Who
not
the
on
check
reality
their
the most
contains
twentieth,
vacation?
No
bankable
wonder
of
parts
"the
nineteenth
the western
century,
past."40
And
no
in western art. There must be five
parts feature so prominently
hundred pictures of Custer's Last Stand, and not two dozen of theWashita.
Certain kinds of history are good at identifying breach of promise, but are of no
wonder
the bankable
help in explaining the promise that was breached. They are good on divorce, but not
on marriage. We may have tired of the dreams of white pioneers who hoped for better
lives
in a western
land.
promised
Itwas Langston Hughes who
dream
the
dreamers
But
come
dreamers
in all colors
late in the Great Depression
wrote,
and
from
all cultures.
"LetAmerica
be the
dreamed":
Let America
be America
again.
it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself
Let it be the dream
never
(America
was
America
is free.
to me.)
O, letAmerica be America again?
The land that never has been yet?
And yet must be?the
land where every man
The
land
that's
mine?the
poor
man's,
Indian's,
is free.
Negro's,
ME?
Who made America,
sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.41
was it John Neihardt
the failure of his
translating Black Elk??saw
in
vision"
of
"the
the
of
sacred
my people," but on a brassy hot
"mighty
shattering
hoop
a
in
in
South
1931 called down
Dakota
little rain from what had been a cloudless
day
a
in
time of drought, and wept with joy because the dream lived on.42 And lives
sky
Black Elk?or
40
Carlos
American
Spence,
ofWestern
A. Schwantes,
"The Case of the Missing Century,
after 1900?" Pacific Historical Review 70 (February
"The Unnatural
History of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial,"
West
Go
orWhere
Did
the
2001): 19. See also Mark
Montana
The Magazine
History 53 (Summer 2003): 56-63.
41
"Let America
Be America Again,"
in The American Writer and
Langston Hughes,
the Great Depression,
ed. Harvey Swados (Indianapolis,
1966), 499-501.
42
Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Ogalala
John G. Neihardt,
Sioux (New York, 1932), 2, 43. Perhaps the most quoted lines in the book come after Black Elk's
22
SPRING
2004
Western
on still, inMexican
with
their
dreamers with
set
compasses
east,
and
set north,
their compasses
even
Canadian
Historical
dreamers
Quarterly
and Asian
with
their
dreamers
set
compasses
south.43 In 2001, more than thirty thousand Canadians moved to the United States,
out of a population
ten times larger, moved to
and about six thousand Americans
Canada.44 Wallace Stegner, who had the experience as an American of growing up in
sod every
literally on the border?"Our
plowshares bit into Montana
that "[t]he 49th
the turn at the south end of the field"?remembered
parallel ran directly through my childhood, dividing me in two."
Saskatchewan
time we made
...
In winter
we
were
almost
Canadian.
totally
The
we
textbooks
used
or English
in school were published inToronto and made by Canadians
men; the geography we studied was focused on the Empire
. . .The
Dominion.
songs
we
sang
. . . "The
were
Maple
Leaf
and "God Save the King"; the flag we saluted was the Union
and the
Forever"
Jack....
and
that, "[u]ndistinguishable
Stegner concluded his musings with the observation
a
was
as
as
it
it
that
climati
and
was, artificially
topographically
ignored
split country
cally one, the international boundary marked a divide in our affiliations, expectations,
loyalties.'**5Perhaps itwas his Canadian childhood that made Stegner so deeply suspi
cious ofWild West mythology. Even though as a boy he lived for awhile inGreat Falls,
and cut Charlie Russell's lawn, he had no patience with Russell's subject
Montana,
matter?the
narrative
The
Knee
ofWounded
author's
art and
of western
heart
very
postscript
art's
that
evocation
(p. 276): "A people's dream died
the book's upbeat ending.
there.
of western
It was a beautiful
myth.46
"The
dream."
provides
43
in Over the Edge: Remapping
"La Frontera del Norte,"
See Jesus Martinez-Saldana,
and Blake Allmendinger
West, ed. Valerie J.Matsumoto
(Berkeley, 1999), 376; the
in Dippie, West-Fever,
Cambodian
8-9; and Peoples of Color in the
story quilt, 1980s, reproduced
and Terry P.
American West, ed. Sucheng Chan, Douglas Henry Daniels, Mario T. Garcia,
theAmerican
immi
the emphasis on the dystopian
reality awaiting
an Art,
See A. Roger Ekirch, "Sometimes
a Science,
with Bernard Bailyn," William and Mary
"Do I agree that there
3d Series, 51 (October
1994): 650, for Bailyn's observation:
Quarterly,
Some
conditions
here? Yes, despite all the miseries.
have been special, in some ways benevolent,
we have never been an
of our peculiarities
have been wonderfully
good, some bad. Obviously,
of power and other
ideal society, and obviously we have never been immune to the corruptions
to save mankind,
and we have no mission
ills and brutalities,
though we have been an asylum
Wilson
grants
Never
MA,
(Lexington,
to America
1994),
in which
implies Utopian expectations.
a Craft: A Conversation
Always
for vast numbers of fearful, oppressed,
from other countries
here voluntarily
were where they came from."
44 "California
Colonist
BC),
(Victoria,
45
Wallace
Frontier
(New York,
46
Wallace
Writing
Wallace
in theWest
Stegner
Dreamin'
7 December
becomes
they thought
reality
all, fifty million
things would be better
people. After
and ambitious
because
for growing
flocks
people came
than they
of snowbirds," Times
2002.
Stegner, Wolf Willow:
1962), 82, 81-2, 84.
A History,
a Story, and aMemory
of the Last Plains
the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and
Stegner, Where
137; and see
3-4, 14, 57-8, 71-2, 102, 106-10,
(New York, 1992), xv-xxiii,
onWestern History and
and Richard W. Etulain, Stegner: Conversations
23
BrianW. Dippie
does not need to explore itsmyths much further," Stegner stated, "it has already
relied on them too long."47Dare I say it? Stegner was wrong. He was wise about the
West
West.
But
it came
when
to myth?the
was
of hope?he
geography
as
as
smitten
the
rest. He derived two titles from a hard times song about a dreamland where the bluebird
sings by the lemonade spring in the Big Rock Candy Mountains. The pleasure he gives
resides in paradox. He knew the futility of dreams without ever denying their power.
He knew that a border separated two different cultures on the northern plains, and
he knew that itwas permeable.
A fellow Albertan back in 1983 noted that an American
and a Canadian could
iswatching
"tune in the same American western" on their TVs, "but the American
some
sense
is
in
Canadian
his
while
the
own,
domestic,
something
watching something
is quite differ
pictures are the same but the experience
he right? Certainly Lewis G. Thomas, chair of the history department at
the University of Alberta when Iwas an undergraduate in the early sixties, thought so.
Thomas's work on the ranching community in southern Alberta where he was raised
to be exotic. The
he knows
ent."48Was
the idea of a Canadian
"mildWest"?law-abiding,
proved influential in entrenching
so
Victorian, and oh
proper. Thomas was especially disturbed by the U. S. penchant
for myth, which glorified instead the wild and woolly. His own belief in a genteel
English tradition on the Canadian range carried within it the seeds of a countervailing
mythology as self-flattering for Canadians as Turner's belief that the frontier nurtured
a distinctive and democratic national character was forAmericans.
"There isno more
or
a society free
is
in
than
Canada
the
that
Canada
has
been
persistent myth
myth
of
crime
and
violence,"
a contrarian
Canadian
historian
remarked.49
Nevertheless,
Thomas, who contributed to this very myth, deplored myth's falsification of history.
"Public taste seems to demand glamorization," he observed in a 1964 interview. "If
don't see any point
Davy Crockett is the price of glamor, then I can do without it-I
in this
to history.
approach
it's a blessing
I think
we
don't
have
it in Canada."50
Literature
in theMind:
(Salt Lake City, 1983), 151-3, 191. See also John L. Thomas, A Country
Stegner, Bernard DeVoto, History, and theAmerican Land (New York, 2000), 51, 185-7,
that Stegner's argument with myth was its veneration
of a rugged individu
229, which contends
alism that he considered
environmentally
catastrophic.
Wallace
47
Wallace
Stegner,
Hills: The Land and Its People
quoted
inWalter
(Saskatoon,
SK,
Hildebrandt
1994), epigraph
and Brian Hubner, The Cypress
on frontal material
that is not
paginated.
(Spring
48Dick
"Fictions of the American
and Canadian Wests,"
Prairie Forum 8
Harrison,
Klooss for this reference.
1983): 91.1 am indebted toWolfgang
49T.
"The Not-So-Peaceable
Thorner,
Kingdom: Crime and Criminal
Justice in
in Frontier Calgary: Town, City, and Region 1875-1914, ed.
Frontier Calgary,"
Anthony W.
and Henry C. Klassen
is enshrined
inMichael
1975), 113. This myth
Rasporich
(Calgary, AB,
Moore's
(2002), which praises Canadians
award-winning
documentary
Bowling for Columbine
their civility at the expense of those gun-crazy Americans.
50
"Myth-makers"
"Canada Better off without Crocketts,"
Edmonton Journal (Alberta), 6 May
were Thomas's
bane. See Lewis G. Thomas,
"The Rancher
and the City:
1964.
for
24
SPRING
2004
Western
Historical
Quarterly
The truth is something else. Artists on either side of the 49th-parallel have con
tributed to a western imagery that knows no borders. Victoria, where I live, nurtured
is now a book-a-year-in
Emily Carr, Canada's Georgia O'Keeffe. Carr, like O'Keeffe,
totem
Carr's
vision
rain
of
forest
and
conforms to Thomas's genteel
dustry.
haunting
vision ofWestern Canada, I suppose, lacking the skulls that salt O'Keeffe's Southwest,
though rich in decapitated trees and Native cultures carved inwood that forCarr, like
Catlin before her, were as impermanent as the poles they created, which would in time
rejoin
the
earth.
step more
Hers
was
no wild West?Vancouver
Island,
[w]estern than theWest."51 But theWild West
she wrote,
has a home
was
"that
one
in Canada,
too,
in Ranchers Legacy: Alberta Essays by Lewis G.
and the Cattlemen,
1883-1914,"
ed. Patrick A. Dunae
Thomas,
(Edmonton, AB,
1986), 45. Jeffrey Brison, "The Rockefeller
Foundation
and Cultural
Frontier," Journal of Canadian Art
Policy on the North Western
Calgary
not being ex
/Annales d'histoire de l'artCanadien
23, nos. 1& 2 (2002): 80: "Canadians,
have not produced a large crop of. . . characters;
their frontiers have carried rela
hibitionists,
. . . and the
of them than
tively subdued colours
'sterling fellow' has been more characteristic
the 'cut-up.'. . .How could it be otherwise when the sedate East was streaming out west in a vast
on American
that carried all its values along with it?" Brison's essay concentrates
migration
History
Robert Gard, who taught at the Banff School of Fine Arts and headed
the Alberta
in the years 1942-1945.
and Local History Project at the University
of Alberta
51
1946), 271. Carr's cryptic
Growing Pains: The Autobiography
of Emily Carr (Toronto,
in New York in 1930 (p. 338 in The Autobiography)
with O'Keeffe
has
reference to a meeting
folklorist
Folklore
curiosity: Carr thought "some of her things" beautiful, but found O'Keeffe
unhappy
see Megan Bice and Sharyn
she speaks of her work." For the Carr-O'Keeffe
connection,
Southwest and West Coast Canada,
1925-1945
Udall, The Informing Spirit: Art of theAmerican
1994); and Sharyn Rohifsen Udall, Carr, O'Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own
(Kleinburg, ON,
linked to her
Carr ismore commonly
(New Haven, CT, 2000). From a nationalistic
perspective,
piqued
"when
Canadian
Canada,
the Group of Seven. For context,
see, The Group of Seven inWestern
contemporaries,
see Robert
M. Mastin
ed. Catharine
(Toronto, ON, 2002). For a regional perspective,
Coast: Emily Carr, Cascadian,"
Pacific Northwest Quarterly
"Being on the Northwest
Thacker,
90 (Fall 1999):
To the Totem Forests: Emily Carr and
182-90 and Jay Stewart and Peter Macnair,
is
the contested
Interpret Coastal Villages (Victoria, BC, 1999), which broaches
Contemporaries
on the debate,
sue of Carr, Native
cultures, and cultural appropriation.
See, for two positions
The
of the Imaginary
Indian," in Vancouver Anthology:
Crosby, "Construction
Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas
(Vancouver, BC, 1991), 267-91; and Douglas Cole,
"The Invented Indian/The
2000):
Imagined Emily," BC Studies nos. 125 & 126 (Spring/Summer
a primary document,
Carr's 1913
is in the works on this topic; meanwhile,
147-62. More
Marcia
for the first time in Opposite Contraries: The Unknown
"Lecture on Totems," was published
ed. Susan Crean
(Vancouver, BC, 2003), 177-203.
Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings,
culture: "And so I have gone about my
in a "passing people" and their vanishing
Carr believed
I have done I
of Indian totems and I am not through yet. What
work making
this collection
nor individuals.
I
I have been backed by neither companies
alone and single-handed.
born and bred. I glo
and done my own work. ... I am a Canadian
borne my own expenses
and I [would] like to leave behind me some o{ the relics of its first
ry in our wonderful West
what the ancient Britons' relics are
things should be to us Canadians
primitive greatness. These
. .
a few more years and they will be gone forever into silent nothingness.
to the English. Only
isGeorge Catlin, A Descriptive Catalogue
ofCatlins
"(pp. 177, 202-3) Here, for comparison,
have
done
have
Indian gallery Portraits, Landscapes, Costumes, &c. and Representations
Indians (London,
1840), on his mission
of theNorth American
Customs
and
of theManners
to form an Indian
BrianW. Dippie
25
?mM?ELa?
^bm
"InWithout
Figure 4. Charles M. Russell,
Photo courtesy of Amon Carter Museum,
if only
to prospective
to appeal
wild," an Air Canada
place
A
silent wilderness
That
place
It's part
Stampede
the
air
to where
"Come
x 29-7/8
is still
the West
urged readers of the New York Times
in.
in 1971:
is clean
and
cool
and
smells
sweet.
the only sound you hear is your own sigh.
western
is in
Canada. And Air Canada can take you there.
where
of our Canadian
You'll begin
20-1/8
in this world that is still untouched.
A
where
(1909). Oil on canvas,
Texas-1961.201.
tourists.
American
advertisement
is a place
There
Knocking"
Fort Worth,
Rockies
in Calgary, where
takes
tour.
every year the wild and woolly Calgary
place.52
some years since become
"I wish to inform the visitors to my Gallery
that, having
Gallery:
of the numerous
convinced
of the rapid decline and certain extinction
tribes of the North
fully
and value which a full pictorial history of
Indians; and seeing also the vast importance
set out alone, unaided and unad
but dying people might be to future ages?I
vised, resolved, (if my life should be spared), by the aid of my brush and my pen, to rescue from
so much of their primitive
looks and customs as the industry and ardent enthusiasm
of
oblivion
American
these
interesting
could accomplish,
and set them up in a Gallery unique and imperishable, for the use
came to stress the fact that he formed his
of future ages" (p. 3). Subsequently,
Catlin
or individual
Indian Gallery
"without any assistance, Governmental
(but, on the contrary, dis
Indians. Catalogue Descriptive
and
countenanced
3). North and South American
by both)"(p.
one
lifetime
and benefit
Instructive
(New York, 1871), Remarks.
of Catlin s Indian Cartoons
52
in the New York Times,
Advertisement
for Air Canada
23 May
1971.
26
SPRING
2004
The
Western
in welcome.
his hat
waving
awaits
you
The
in Canada,
cover
art
and
for
this
a cartoon
showed
illustration
accompanying
Experience
in dreams
Historical
towards
racing
cowboy
the Wild?and
Quarterly
the
viewer,
firsthand.
woolly?West
It
everywhere.
year's Western
History
Association's
program
reproduces
InWithout Knocking. It is a classic western image that
to
be updated. Perhaps Emily Carr and Georgia O'Keeffe should be riding with
needs
those cowboys. But as it stands, it is a vivid take on the geography of hope. A recent
poll declared it the best painting of cowboys ever done.53 They are not at work, note.
a detail from Charles Russell's
They
solution
are not tending cows. But they are boys, and the sap is running. At hand
to western
Leave the hangovers
aridity,
one
drink
at a time.
for tomorrow. Now
53
"The Greatest
Cowboy
Paintings
The
quest
is the moment
Ever," True West
is over,
to celebrate.
48 (June 2001):
Elysium
is the
attained.
[See Figure 4J
15-7.