Transcript
Dan Flores (0:00)
Talk about stepping up.
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Dan Flores (0:14)
The electricity is palpable.
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Stephen Randall (0:22)
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Stephen Randall (1:20)
When you're in the backcountry, don't forget your own backcountry. Keep it pristine and confidently clean by bringing along Wet Wet Extra Large Dude Wipes. Just like your truck gets muddy out in the wild, soaking your butt, you'd never clean your vehicle with dry paper towels, so why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper? Wetter cleans better, so ditch the itch and switch from TP to Wet Extra Large Dude Wipes Dude Wipes it is the best clean pants down. They're available at Amazon. That's where I usually order mine from, but you get them at Walmart nationwide. Fantastic product. Proud to be doing ads for these boys at dude wipes.
Dan Flores (1:58)
In the 1830s, two talented painters, George Catlin and Carl Bodmer, journeyed into the west and left the future a marvelous body of artwork. Time Machine visuals that enable us now to form an evocative sense of the early west and its primary characters. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American west, brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer just in time for the season that calls us home. A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters, and wildlife. Enjoy responsibly Catlins and Bodmers Time Machine Visuals A few years ago, when high summer burned its brief, bright flame in Montana's Glacier National Park, a friend and I loaded up our backpacks and headed off for the Northern Rockies backcountry. During that narrow window in glacier between July high water and late August snow, you can ford the rivers on sunny mornings and sleep under star spangled mountain skies. So my buddy and I spent four days backpacking across the park from its western boundary to Blackfeet lands on its eastern one. In my mind's eye, those four days still emerge in fair detail. The adrenaline surge of crossing the Flathead river with a full backpack, the thunder and spray of Nyack Falls, miles of slogging through neck high huckleberry bushes in the best grizzly habitat left on Earth, and high elevation nights with stars polished to brilliance. There was also the technicolor panorama from atop Cutbank Pass and an unintentional glissade down a snowfill which could have ended badly had I not pulled out a stand up slide into second base from a past life. No one drowned in the Flathead river, was rushed by a grizzly, toppled off a glacier, or got struck by lightning amongst the peaks beyond my memories. I preserved this adventure the way we all do now, with photographs. What still photographs lack in recreating the past, of course, is the ability to engage all the human senses. Nyack Falls is a marvel in my shots of it, but since this backpack predated smartphones, the falls stand mute in my photos, their crashing thunder now irretrievable. I have one photo from day two of fresh grizzly scat in our trail, but I only dimly recall the primary sensory effect, which naturally was the redolent earthy scent of half our old bear shed. It's fortunate that we humans evolved to be such a visual species though, because I can still conjure a sense of this boundary to boundary hike and glacier purely from images. That knowledge helps me put aside any disappointment that when we try to reach back in time and touch the early west, our best time machine for that engages just one sense, the visual record. A record left to us by artists who were adventurous and talented enough to make us believe sometimes that we're standing there beside them in the west of the 1830s or 1840s. The two time machine guys I think are the very best for setting me down in their time and in the places they saw are George Catlin and Carl Bodmer. Let me tell you a little bit about each of them and why time perusing the images they left. The future just might be hours. You don't have to deduct from your allotted span on Earth sometime in the past half century, George Catlin managed to be Modestly rediscovered. That's something of a miracle for a 19th century man whose lifetime work was once stored away in a boiler factory, then forgotten and left to nearly ruin there. But nowadays, most people interested in the west and its story know Catlin's name and might have a hazy notion of his career, even if the depth of understanding is about on a par with having heard a Van Gogh enough to know that he cut off his ear. Cocktail party conversation may not get at exactly why this Western artist was so passionate about Indians and the Dutch one so committed to slicing and dicing his anatomy. But Catlin does have name recognition. In Catlin's case, name recognition probably has more to do with his subject matter than with his life. Americans have a powerful fascination with native people. From the time of the Boston Tea Party down to the last Grateful Dead concerts, Americans have been cross dressing as Indians and sometimes even calling on the native story to help figure out our national identity. So most of us are prepared to understand Catlin's mission as a painter, which was obsessive enough to have inspired Herman Melville in developing the character of Captain Ahab. Because Catlin wrote as well as painted, we know a lot about that obsession which he described this I sat out alone, unaided and unadvised, resolved if my life should be spared by the aid of my brush and pen, to rescue from oblivion so much of the Indian's looks and customs as the industry and ardent enthusiasm of one lifetime could accomplish, he wrote that he sought to record nothing less than true and facsimile traces of individual life and historical facts. He put that phrase in italics to emphasize it. That goal seems noble, maybe more than a touch romantic. In Catlin's case, romance was so embedded that he struck his peers, fellow painters who also went west, like Alfred Jacob Miller, John James Audubon, and, yes, Carl Bodmer, as a fraud. Humbug was the favored one word put down. Miller, who'd visited some of the same tribes shortly after Catlin, used it, and so did Audubon, who was on the Missouri River a decade after Catlin. Bodmer actually advised European friends to avoid Catlin's exhibition, the Indian Gallery, which in the 1840s was the first traveling Western show ever to tour Europe. As for Audubon, he wrote of Catlin, I pity him. He could have been an honest man. What did criticism like this mean? Was George Catlin the first person to devote his life to showing the world the west, its prairies, its its great herds and their predators, its villages of graceful teepees its rivers and mesas and badlands. Truly dishonest in what he portrayed, or his competitors just expressing jealousy at the success he enjoyed with a European tour. Envy, I think, especially in the case of Audubon and Bodmer, had something to do with it, but there may have been something else going on. I believe Catlin saw the west both with his eyes and. And with his heart, by which I mean he had an empathetic sensitivity. Catlin obviously had a keen and discerning eye, but more than anything else, he was sympathetic to native people at a time when that was not a common reaction for many Americans. Nothing Catlin ever did was easy, and that may be one of the reasons he was able to empathize with others. He was born in the Wyoming Valley near Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1796, and as a young man trained as a lawyer in Connecticut, like most of us do, by his mid-20s, he changed his mind about his future and found that his true bliss lay in painting in visual representations of the world. So he attached himself to the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia, studying to become a history painter in the tradition of European academic style. At the same time, he fashioned a sort of starving artist's existence, painting miniature portraits, a skill he would fall back on many times in his life among the Indians. As he learned about art, he also absorbed the heady world of Philadelphia. At a time when America was blooming and starting to embrace a sense of America as separate from Europe, even exceptional, Catlin was lucky enough to find himself in sync with America's new view of itself, even capable of articulating a version of that Europeans could love. The United States was hungry for some way to identify itself as distinct from the Old World. And America's wild natural world, along with its indigenous inhabitants, neither of which characterized Europe, seemed to offer the best chance for them. As Catlin and other Americans studied painting, writers like William Bartram, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau already were at work on a body of literature that would wrap the story of wild nature, Indians and westering adventuring into the country's new definition of itself. What Catlin and his contemporaries were witnessing were the stirrings of American Romanticism. Romanticism had begun in Europe and was another one of its exports. But in Catlin's age, it took on an American life of its own. One element of Romanticism that landed on fertile soil here was was the new idea that wild nature wasn't the haunt of demons or hobgoblins at all, but in Fact was the freshest manifestation of God, so people living in close proximity to nature were especially graced. Thoreau, as always, was a quick study. Is not nature rightly read that for which she is commonly taken? Taken to be the symbol merely, he wrote, Isn't Nature, in other words, the deity itself? That idea's deep internalization in the American psyche explains a lot of big picture American history, like national parks and our wilderness system, both of which were global firsts. As for the idea that humans living in a state of nature were blessed or noble savages, that had a rockier trajectory in a country trying to displace the natives. When Catlin made his first great western journey up the Missouri river in his quest to become the historian of the Indian, as he put it, his eyes saw the Great Plains clearly, and his romantic heart perceived the resident natives as living in a divine state of nature. Catlin thus was willing to make two conceptualizations that set him apart from most of his American contemporaries, who were interpreting Romanticism quite differently. For one, in 1832, Catlin found the Great Plains an entirely deserving and even inspiring romantic landscape. Most of the rest of America followed the European tradition and searched for romantic culture country in the Catskills or the Rockies. Vertical terrain that reached to the divine heavens, which the horizontal Yellow Plains decidedly didn't. Catlin's painter contemporaries back east were thoroughly immersed in the mountain as the be all and end all of romantic scenery. So how interesting it was that in 1832 George Catlin painted the curvaceous shadow filled plains and as a soul melting country to my eye, like a fairyland, he wrote. Journeying up the Missouri aboard a fur company steamboat, the Yellowstone, Catlin executed one romantic landscape painting after another. Two Catlins I've always lingered over to penetrate time and visually experience the west of the 1830s are Big Bend on the upper Missouri above St. Louis and the brick kilns Clay Bluffs above St. Louis. These are horizontal romantic landscapes. Catlin's time machine visuals make abundantly clear that the three predominant characters of the 19th century west were its remarkable landscapes. The most picturesque and beautiful shapes and colors imaginable, he said. A blessing, native people and a diverse and charismatic wildlife. Finding himself among those three, but with a gnawing anxiety about what was coming in the future for all of them, led him to a logical conclusion. George Catlin was the first American to call for the creation of a western national park. Here's how he put that. And what a splendid contemplation too. When one who has traveled these realms and can duly appreciate them, imagines them as they might in future be seen by some great protecting policy of government, preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness in a magnificent park. It was Catlin's next bold step that I think shows why he suffered attacks from some of his contemporaries. He went on to argue that in such a park the world could see for ages to come. The native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse with sinewy bow and shield and lance amid the fleeting herds of elks and buffaloes. What a beautiful and thrilling specimen for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world in future ages. A nation's park containing man and beast in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty. Exactly. Here is where Catlin broke ranks with most of his contemporaries. Most Americans expected Indians to melt away, to perform a vanishing act in a civilized America. Andrew Jackson's administration was already removing Indians from the East. But if you engage Catlin's time machine visuals and study the great portraits he painted of these Missouri river peoples. The Blackfeet leader, Buffalo Bulls, Bach Fat and his wife Crystal Stone Eagle Ribs, one of the extraordinary men of the Blackfoot tribe, Catlin said, the Crow four wolves who carries himself with the most graceful and manly mien. They tell another truth of romanticism. All these people were noble children of nature. When he wrote of them in his classic book Letters and Notes on the North American Indians, Catlin compared them to the ancient Britons or to the Greeks of Homer's literature. In their wildness and romance and color. As he put it, America's native people were worthy of admiration and by all that was right and romantic, they ought to endure in America. This is where George Catlin was most exposed and his empathetic heart does not resemble Alfred Jacob Miller's or Audubon's or it seems, the un universal and not very sympathetic heart of 19th century America. The Swiss Carl Bodmer, whose time machine visuals I want to take up next, knew damn well he was a much better painter than Catlin. Yet he struggled to have his work recognized and most likely was jealous of Catlin's successes with his fellow Europeans. But the Americans, Miller and Audubon saw the same northern plains and native people Catlin did. Yet a different alchemy played out for both of them. True American noble savages weren't Indians, but Euro Americans gone native like Daniel Boone or the mountain men Miller promoted for that role. As for Audubon, who sneered at Catlin's infatuation with Indians, and he seems to have believed that the iconic American child of nature should be John James Audubon. So Ottoman toured Europe with flowing hair dressed in fringed buckskins to present the Old Worlders a non Indian American noble savage. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long?