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- [00:00]
Brent
Brent here and any hunter will tell you the field's unpredictable, but back home folks like things simple and steady like T Mobile 5G Home Internet. Get set up and online in under 15 minutes with their fast speeds, a price for any budget and a five year price guarantee. Visit t mobile.com homeinternet to check availability guarantees monthly price of fixed wireless 5G Internet data. Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. Service delivered via 5G network speeds vary due to factors affecting cellular networks. To check guaranteed details@t mobile.com homeinternet I'm not joking man.
- [00:36]
Josh Smith
I use Montana Knife Company knives in my garage where I handle furs and wild game. I use them out in the field. I use them in my kitchen. They are manufactured locally in Montana. They are designed, tested and built by hunters. Montana Knife Company is a hunting knife company first and foremost and if you ever need your knives sharpened, just send them back and they will sharpen them for you. Free. Montana Knife Co. Working knives for Working People MKC knives sell out within minutes of being released. So head over to Montana knifecompany.com to see what's available now. Man, I'm telling you what. When I need auto parts, I go to O'Reilly Auto Parts here in my hometown of Bozen, Montana. Love those guys. Always nice, always helpful. They are in the business of keeping your car on the road. O'Reilly Auto Parts offers friendly, helpful service and the parts knowledge you need for all your maintenance and repairs. They They've got thousands of parts and accessories in stock, in store or online so you never have to worry if you're in a jam. Need your battery tested, windshield wipers replaced, a brake light fix or a quick service. They'll help you find the right part or point you to the nearest local repair shop for help. Last time I was in there it was for wiper blades and a brake light bulb. Whether you're a car aficionado or an auto novice, you'll find the employees at O'Reilly Auto Parts are knowledgeable, helpful and best of all, friendly. The professional parts people at O'Reilly Auto Parts are your one stop shop for all things auto. Do it yourself and you can find what you need in store or online. Stop by O'Reilly Auto Parts today or visit O'ReillyAuto.com me eater that's O'ReillyAuto.com me.
- [02:24]
Dan Flores
Eater as indicated by the work of painters and photographers, nostalgia and honesty about the west do with one another as the frontier ended and the modern west began. I'm Dan Flores and this is the American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available@veletbuckvineards.com Enjoy responsibly. Shadows of the Frontier. For many Americans, the west occupies a mental space similar to how we imagine phases in our history, like the Confederacy, say, or World War II. It had a beginning, and in the arc of time it had an end. And the best one can do with it now is to read about it or watch movies. Because the real thing, the beating heart, flesh and blood of it, has now receded into the past. While that may work for wars or the Great Depression or the societal upheaval that was the 1960s for the west, not so much. And there's a simple reason the west is different. The west was never just a phase, but a place, a remarkable region of the country that still exists and whose present story is intertwined with its past. The way morning emerges from sunrise when the U.S. census announced in 1890 that the west by then had been so broken up by bodies of settlement that a frontier line no longer existed. The west did not end the way the Confederacy did when Grant accepted Lee's surrender in 1865. My point is that the end of the so called frontier was hardly a black line across history, the way Appomattox courthouse or Hiroshima, Nagasaki were as wild as the Western past had been as a part of history, the the region's future looked just as exciting and just as troublesome. Of course, we all know there were Americans upset by the end of the frontier. Maybe some still are. Some people in the early 20th century experienced a psychological alarm historians have labeled frontier anxiety. After all, if the so called frontier thesis was true, that Darwinian argument that the wilderness had selected out traits that created the American character, and then how are we going to preserve American ness without a frontier? A remarkable thing in itself is that nostalgia for the Old west lasted for at least 80 years after the 1890 census announced the frontier was over. It was nostalgia that made Bill Cody's Wild west show legendary, made the careers of painters Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell of filmmaker John Ford. And of course, it was Old west nostalgia that made Tom Mix, John Wayne, Audie Murphy and Roy Rogers cinema stars and got Clint Eastwood his start. Maybe writer Zane Gray captured the magic best. The Old west, he once wrote, was the last time in the history of Earth humans got to live a sensuous life in a state of nature. The Old west virus infected all of us As a five year old, I once found myself in an Oklahoma City elevator looking up at a fellow passenger I realized was film star Randolph Scott. The excitement almost took me out. I've never been without a pair of cowboy boots since. American country music centered in the south, had little beyond a regional appeal until it rebranded itself Country Western and affected cowboy hats and jeans. Now not even Beyonce can resist it, even in the 21st century. The writer David Milch's HBO series Deadwood, or as I like to call it, Back to the Fucking West Cocksuckers, proved just how resilient the Old west could be as a compelling subject. More of Milch and Deadwood in another episode What I want to argue now and across the remaining episodes in this podcast, is that the 20th and 21st century west has maybe been an even more thrilling place for history to play out. Nostalgia for the Old west, as I'm about to demonstrate here with the careers of two famous artists, the photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis and the painter Vinald Rice, could be pretty much a drag on understanding the possibilities of modern life in the West. We've not yet entirely escaped the pull of the Western past, but the odyssey of someone like Vino Rice painting the Blackfeet Indians of Montana from roughly 1920 to 1950 helps show us the way towards the west we actually live in or visit. No one remotely interested in American Indians or merely the beauty and dignity of humanity ever forgets their first reaction standing before an Edward Sheriff Curtis photograph. After the initial shock of seeing what appears to be pre modern people preserved by a modern medium. I had no idea cameras existed that long ago, a friend said to me. Once you start looking more closely, becoming aware that the sense of age here is in part due to the sepia tones of Curtis's prints? Mostly you're stunned by the depth of character in Curtis's human subjects. As George Horsecaptor of Montana's Fort Belknap Reservation said of his first sight of of a Curtis portrait, the world stopped for several moments. That was a special case, since the portrait was of Horse Capture's great grandfather. But he speaks for most of us, whether we encounter Curtis's images in books, on calendars or on postcards. And these days his sepia photos do seem to be everywhere. We're spellbound, as if deposited in the past by a time machine. But why? What is it we see in Curtis's photographs? Who was this shadow catcher, as some of his subjects called him, who in a good piece of one lifetime, managed to befriend some 80 tribes of Indians and shoot more than 40,000 photographs of them. How was someone like this on the scene in the Old west with a camera? Well, that's the first fantasy about the shadow catcher. To brush aside. Curtis was not photographing 80 indigenous tribes while the frontier raged on. The census had declared the frontier over a full decade before Curtis set about his project. As for who he was, there's the simple characterization of the kind we'd all reject if it were applied to us. Then there's the more complex sin of flesh biography. The simple version is that he was an almost uneducated Seattle mountaineer who in the 20th century became consumed with romantic notions about how Indians once lived. He had some talent, got lucky with influential friends and so obsessively pursued his goal that he sacrificed his marriage and money to consummate it and died virtually forgotten. The longer version is more interesting and gets us a lot closer to being able to answer the kinds of questions people mouth silently when they stand wrapped before the photographs. Like so many first generation Americans who grew up in the Northwest, Curtis family roots were in the Midwest. In his case, Wisconsin. His father sold their farm to become an itinerant preacher by the time Edward was 12, but he had briefly gotten to attend a one room school that seems to have been his only formal education. Photography was in the air in the late 1800s and both the technology and the possibilities entranced him. Somewhere Curtis acquired a how to manual and unable to afford the real thing, built his first camera from a wooden box and a stereoscopic lens his father brought home from the Civil War. In 1887, when Curtis was 19, his father moved the family west to Washington state where they homesteaded a farm just across Puget Sound from Seattle. With income he brought in from commercial fishing and small scale logging, young Edward finally managed to buy a 14 by 17 view camera. Then, in a capitalization strategy he'd rely on most of his life, he mortgaged the Curtis farm to buy into a partnership and a photographic studio in bustling, growing Seattle. At 24, his future beginning to open before him in what turned out to be an ill fated move, he married a young neighbor named Clara Phillips. For most photographers, making a living largely involves capturing images of two rather mundane subjects, weddings and families. For four years, Curtis refined his abilities in these fields and paid the mortgage lien. But he also dreamed of being a fine arts photographer in a new movement that saw photography as a kind of technologically assisted field form of painting and the photographer as an artist. What he needed most of all, Curtis decided, were A subject matter and a style he could make his own. These were savvy insights on his mountain climbing and fishing trips. Curtis kept coming across local native people still engaged in their ancient subsistence even as the Post Frontier west whirled around them. Fortuitously, one of these turned out to be Princess Angeline, the elderly daughter of Chief Seattle, namesake of the burgeoning city. Curtis befriended her, and she allowed him to shoot a few soft, focused photos of her as she engaged in a timeless indigenous pursuit, digging for clams along the Pacific shore. In a true epiphany, it struck Curtis that he should put the finished print through a sepia wash so the image looked browned, aged, so viewers would feel a timelessness about it. Entered in the 1896 National Photographic Exhibit, it took first prize in portraiture. Overnight, Curtis became one of Seattle's best known photographers. Now he had his subject and his leitmotif. Like toppling dominoes, the brakes came in rapid succession. Two years later, high up on the shoulders of one of his favorite peaks, Mount Rainier, Curtis encountered a lost climbing party that he guided to safety. It was the kind of group any ambitious young man might want to run into, let alone rescue. The party included Gifford Pinchot of the U.S. forestry Division C. Hart Merriam, head of the U.S. biological Survey, and most importantly for Curtis, the famous author George Bird Grinnell. He was a photographer, Curtis told them, and back in Seattle, when he showed them some of his photographs, including his early Indian works, they were impressed. Grinnell and Miriam both had already signed on for an upcoming grand expedition financed by railroad tycoon E.H. harriman to Alaska the next summer. Might young Curtis be interested in accompanying the party as photographer? This was the domino that collapsed the table. The Harriman expedition included three dozen of America's most famous scientists, writers, artist, a kind of Camelot afloat on the Alaskan seas. Curtis got to rub shoulders with the natural history writers John Muir and John Burroughs, the geologist Grove Carl Gilbert, biologists William Dahl, Frederick Dellenbaugh and William Brewer, even Mr. Harriman himself. They were the core of Washington's prestigious Cosmos Club. For Curtis, the trip served as passport to the whole American scientific and conservation community. And the ship, the George W. Elder, was, in John Muir's words, a floating university, providing Curtis the education he'd never gotten. He was 31 years old. The trip particularly made Grinnell a good friend, and the writer now invited Curtis Curtis along in the summer of 1900 to a Plains Indian Sundance among the Blackfeet on their reservation in Montana. All of Curtis's life had been preparation for this moment. As he wrote later, he was intensely affected. It was the start of my effort to learn about the Plains Indians and to photograph their lives. He would preserve the Indian world before Indianness, as Curtis and all his new friends firmly believed would happen, would vanish for all time. What Curtis had in mind was a monumental undertaking. But it wasn't until 1906 that J.P. morgan finally bankrolled him with $75,000 for his grand project. Morgan's deal wasn't much of a bargain. He wanted Curtis to do the field and print work, plus, in the manner of John James Audubon, to publish and even market the finished books himself. Curtis called the books in question the North American Indian, and they came near to being stillborn at the outset. When the anthropological community got word of what Curtis was proposing, a photographic record of traditional traditional Indian life three decades after most tribes had settled on the reservations, it ran up a red flag. Professor Franz Boas at Columbia expressed what still is the most obvious objection in the 20th century. What Curtis was proposing was impossible. Despite widespread nostalgia for the Old west, By the early 1900s, most tribes had already already endured decades of systematic policy driven acculturation. To show traditional Indian life as it was lived in the 1800s, Curtis would have to fake the details and most of the context of his project. Boas objections did lead to President Roosevelt appointing a committee to investigate those arguments. But the committee included William Hill Homes of the Bureau of Ethnology, who despised Boas and who knew Roosevelt wanted Curtis to succeed. Roosevelt, in fact, wrote the foreword to volume one, and it's easy to conclude that the President was as caught up in the romance of the undertaking as Curtis. Nonetheless, a reputation as the Great Fabricator has been Curtis's albatross ever since. Curtis was in over his head anyway. He was young, energetic and inspired and thought he could wrap up the entire project in five years. But if dated from that 1900 Sundance in Montana where he got the idea, it actually took up 30 years of his life. With offices both in New York for marketing and Seattle for the photographic, he embarked on years and years of one whirlwind trip after another. Volume one on the Navajos in the Southwest came out in 1907, and it was led off by a photo whose title, the Vanishing Race, captured the whole underlying premise. Over the next seven years, ten more volumes appeared. By this time, Curtis had gone through Morgan's initial investment and was barely past halfway to his goal. His novel Solution for Money was to turn into an indie filmmaker, but his silent film, in the Land of the Headhunters, a quacky oodle Romeo and Juliet story, was a box office flop. By taking out a second mortgage on his house, this one without his wife's knowledge, and appealing to the Morgan family for continued finances, Curtis was finally able to turn out the last nine volumes of his grand project. While all this was happening, the last volume, 20, finally appeared in 1930. Much of the rest of Curtis's world was imploding. Clara filed for divorce from her absentee husband in 1916. Curtis was convicted of failure to pay alimony in 1918, and when the divorce was settled in 1920, Clara got possession not only of his studio but of all the negatives he'd shot so far. The subsequent disappearance of Curtis's studio materials dating before 1920 has led to one of the great treasure hunts in Western art so far to no avail. Clara wasn't through, though, having him arrested one more time. As he passed through Seattle en route home from his last photo shoot for the North American Indian in 1927, Curtis lived for another quarter century without ever producing another significant work, so the meaning of his life is largely synonymous with what we think about his great project. There's no question today of Curtis status as an artist, but the mesmerizing quality of his images is largely a consequence of his understanding of the nostalgic allure of Native America. Other photographers and painters certainly attempted this, but no one else pulled it off with the elan that Curtis did. On the other hand, there's also always the question of whether you can entirely trust a Curtis image. The text of the North American Indian, edited by Frederick Webb Hodge of the Bureau of Ethnology, presents a straightforward ethnography of the tribes as Curtis found them. But of course, hardly anyone reads the text anymore, so we're back to the fact that rarely do his photos show Indian life as it actually was in the Post Frontier. Instead, Curtis went to extraordinary lengths to exercise the whole 20th century. He provided his Indian subjects with outfits and props from a half century earlier. He airbrushed away power lines in his photos. Once even used darkroom tricks to erase an alarm clock he found to his horror, and beside the right elbow of his Blackfeet subject in the stunning 1870s looking photo in a pagan lodge. Of the more than 22,000 photographs in the North American Indian, a few can't be trusted or are questionable today for other reasons. Sometimes Indians duped Curtis. Some of the Navajos did their ceremonies backwards for his camera, as one of the only white men ever to participate in the nine day Hopi snake dance. Curtis even photographed that sacred ritual. Today the Hopi's don't even allow non Indians to see this ceremony. It's not easy then to know what to think about Curtis. Listening to George Horse Capture helps though a defender of Curtis was Horse Capture remains awestruck at Curtis's dedication to his project and at the stunning quality of the resulting imagery. Most importantly, he believes that Curtis's work strengthens Native confidence. What Curtis's images show is that what Indians suspected about the depth and beauty of their ancestors culture in the Old west was true.
- [24:39]
Brent
Brent here and as any hunter will tell you, the field's unpredictable busted gear, surprise storms, you name it. But back home folks like things simple and steady like t mobile 5G home Internet set up in only 15 minutes or less plus they got their fast speeds of price for any budget and a five year price guarantee. It's solid, easy and perfect for uploading trail cam pics or downloading wild game recipes. T Mobile Home Internet gets set up and online in under 15 minutes with their fast speeds, budget, friendly pricing and 5 year price guarantee. Visit t mobile.com homeinternet to check. Availability guarantees monthly price of fixed wireless 5G Internet data exclusions like taxes and fees apply. Service delivered via 5G network speeds vary due to factors affecting sailor networks. Check guaranteed details@t mobile.com HomeInternet Montana Knife.
- [25:35]
Josh Smith
Company was founded by one of the most experienced master blade smiths in the world, Josh Smith. He's been making knives for 30 years. He made his first hunting knife when he was 11 years old and gained his Master Bladesmith accreditation at age 19. I got a whole slew of Montana Knife Company knives. In fact in a couple minutes, literally in a couple minutes I will be in the other room using my Montana Knife Company slicer to clean up a handful of ducks. You'll be able to watch the video and I can prove it when you see it. They are the sharpest knives out of the box in the easiest knives to sharpen. I use them all the time in my kitchen because these are some of the sharpest knives you will ever touch. The best part is all of MKC's knives are backed by a multi generational guarantee promise. Meaning you leave these knives to your kids. Your kids are backed by the guarantee. If you ever need your knife sharpened, just send them back and they will sharpen them for free. Talk about customer service. Montana Knife Company These are working knives for working people. MKC knives sell out within minutes of being released. So head over to montanaknifecompany.com to see what is available now. Man, I'm telling you what, When I need auto parts, I go to O'Reilly Auto Parts here in my hometown of Bozeman, Montana. Love those guys. Always nice, always helpful. They are in the business of keeping your car on the road. O'Reilly Auto Parts offers friendly, helpful service and the parts knowledge you need for all your maintenance and repairs. They've got thousands of parts and accessories in stock, in store or online, so you never have to worry if you're in a jam. Need your battery tested, windshield wipers replaced, a brake light fix or a quick service? They'll help you find the right part or point you to the nearest local repair shop for help. Last time I was in there it was for wiper blades and a brake light bulb. Whether you're a car aficionado or an auto novice, you'll find the employees at O'Reilly Auto Parts are knowledgeable, helpful and best of all, friendly. The professional parts people at O'Reilly Auto Parts are your one stop shop for all things auto. Do it yourself and you can find what you need in store or online. Stop by O'Reilly Auto Parts today or visit O'ReillyAuto.com Meater that's O'ReillyAuto.com MeATER As.
- [28:04]
Dan Flores
Curtis was journeying to tribe after tribe, then disappearing into his dark room, all over the west, painters were fixing images of Native people and the Old west as rapidly as they could work. Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell became the most famous and successful. The artists captivated by Indians believed their subjects were vanishing, so artists like Joseph Henry Sharp, who particularly focused on the Crows and Taos and Santa Fe based painters like E. Irving Kaust, Ernest Blumenshine and John Sloan captured the pueblos of the Southwest at a frantic pace at a time when railroads were one of the biggest businesses in the country. Tourism seemed the future, and nothing advertised a Western adventure in a strange land like images of exotic natives. Vinald Rice, who immersed himself in the northern west between roughly 1920 and 1950, was one of the painters who attracted the attention of a Western railroad. Rice's mission began very much in the genre that Curtis, Remington, Blumenshine and others had already laid out. Yet the more Rice learned, the more experience he had, the more he thought it critical to portray the post frontier world of his Indian subjects as opposed to Old west nostalgia. For Curtis, the arrow of time flew backwards into a retreating path past. For Rice, that projectile flew into an open ended future where neither the west nor his subjects had vanished. Rice hardly started out immune to Western romance. Like all of us, he was a product of time and place. And in his case, the place was Germany and the time, the late 19th century, when, perhaps more so than anywhere, Rice's countrymen were intoxicated with the idea of people living in nature. Like other German boys, Rice grew up reading Carl Mai, who mesmerized generations of German readers with a kind of fantasy American West. Mai remains so crucial to European ideas about America that Der Shu de Monitou, an Austin Powers like send up of a 1962 Carl Mai movie, is the most popular film in Germany right now. In 2025, it wasn't Cowboys or miners or buffalo hunters who entranced Germans though. It was Western Indians like Mai's heroic Apache chief Venitou, who mesmerized them. Actually, Mai never visited the American west, knew nothing about it beyond reading a few dubious books and entirely confused geography and tribes. None of that mattered. Mai's novels made the west appear the only place on earth one could really be alive. Vinald Rice was one of his converts, prepared for a version of the west hardly more real than a galaxy far, far away. A 27 year old rice arrived in New York in 1913 expecting to see Indians on Fifth Avenue or living in tepee villages outside New York or Boston. Eventually he stumbled across a homeless ex Wild west performer named Yellow Elk, who was Blackfeet and told the young German if his heart's desire was to paint real Indians, the best place to go was to newly created Glacier national park and its adjacent black reservation in Montana. There, Yellow Elk said, were the Indians of Rice's imagination. The great war years obviously were not the time for a painter from America's enemy nation to travel the US in search of subjects from the margins of American life. So a 1913, 1914 trip to the west didn't happen. But as quickly following the war's end as he could make it happen, in the absolute dead of winter of December, January 1919 and 1920, Rice took the Great Northern Railroad west to Montana. As soon as he stepped off the train, the Germans spotted a group of blanket draped Indians and to the profound shock of the group, strolled up to them, clapped one on the back, held up his hand and in a recreation of scenes in Carl My novels, blurted out, how lucky for Vinald Rice, lucky for all of us, the Blackfeet by this time in their history had learned to be amused and tolerant of the unfathomable antics of White people. Maybe the innocence of how was downright endearing in 1919. So recognizing a fallible fellow human when he saw one, one of the Blackfeet men whose name was Turtle, motioned for his friends to choke off their laughter and to welcome this strange individual. As the Blackfeet had done with empathetic whites for decades. The Blackfeet had experiences with artists and photographers that went back at least 20 years. And after a few minutes of translated but good spirited conversation, some of the group Rice approached with how agreed to sit for him. Rice had taken the first big step. He was on his way to a long and celebrated career as one of the best 20th century portraitists of American Indians. A few years ago I toured a first rate Blackfoot exhibit in the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. The tribal name in Canada is rendered Blackfoot. That had been assembled and interpreted by the elders of the Canadian Blackfoot bands and the Southern Pagans, the Montana Blackfeet. What caught my attention were panels claiming the Blackfoot and Southern Pagan people remembered the artists and photographers from a century ago as people they especially liked and admired. One exhibit panel put it this way, these artists had a profound respect for us as human beings. Their respect shows in the images they created. Adjacent to those very words were several portraits of their ancestors done in brilliantly colored pastels by Vinald Rice. Rice became the most successful successful of all the Great Northern railroads finds as a painter, promoter of Glacier national park and the railroad's ticket sales to western tourists. Just as the Southwestern railroads had done with the art of the Southwest. The Great Northern, led by Louis Hill, son of founder James J. Hill, hoped to use artists to help establish Glacier as a premier American vacation destination. Urged on by George Byrd Grinnell In 1910, Congress had created Glacier out of pieces of the Flathead National Forest and the Blackfeet reservation. For the next half century, the national park acted like some deep space singularity that bent the railroad around it. As part of the Great Northerns See America first came campaign in 1915 it built many Glacier Hotel along with several of the park's Swiss chalets and hired local Blackfeet to entertain tourists. Then it advertised Glacier as the American version of the Swiss Alps, except with Indians. The year the park opened, Hill hired Austrian John Ferry as the first sponsored artist to help with this promotion. And between 1910 and 1913 Ferry produced 347 pieces for which Hill paid by the square foot of canvas at a price that worked out to roughly $30 a painting. The railroad's publicity department used Ferry's work in ads, pamphlets, even on menus. Other artists followed in a whirlwind of of promotional notions. In 1913 and 1914, Hill invited the German modernist Julius Seiler to the park, then Indian genre painter Edwin Deming. By 1917, Hill placed his hopes on one of the West's most famous illustrator painters, San Francisco artist Maynard Dixon. With a plan for Dixon to produce a set of large oils for Glacier's lodges and as advertising posters on the West Coast, Dixon came and painted and sent a dozen finished oils to St. Paul in 1918. They disappeared and have never been found. As for the Blackfeet, they had reasons of their own for posing and performing for the railroad. Getting to dress in their traditional clothing, going on excursions into their old haunts, now deep in the park, were among those reasons. And yes, there was cash to be earned. All these made the Blackfeet for a time among the most willing Indian subjects in the West. All these elements set the table perfectly for Vinald Rice's arrival in Blackfeet country in 1919. I once was privileged to have lunch with Renate Rice, Vino Rice's engaging daughter in law in Santa Fe. She told me that Rice came to Montana with outstanding training at the Munich Royal Academy of Fine Arts when arts instruction was fascinated with the lives and art of so called primitive people think Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso. Rice was exposed to all those currents, including modern art like Fauvism and Cubism. Borrowing his love of pure chromatic colors and a fascination with exotic people from modern art, Rice translated those into a completely fresh take on the Blackfeet of the West. The paintings then became commercial work in the form of the Great Northern Railroad's calendars and menus. He just loved people, Rice's daughter in law told me. He loved the way people looked. But as Rice's son Jacques always said, the real reason Rice came to America was always to paint the Indians. Over a few weeks on that first visit to the Blackfeet, Rice churned out a remarkable 336 portraits exhibited back East. The entire cache quickly sold. Already one of the most celebrated modernist portrait painters in New York, Rice had finally painted Indians. But he was still living in New York. And what he really wanted was to be George Catlin Redux, a 20th century biographer of Indians who everyone in New York believed at the time were vanishing. As with Curtis, sometimes life requires a lucky break. In early 1927, Rice's sculptor brother Hans was guiding climbers in Glacier park when he happened to meet Louis Hill of the Great Northern. When he showed Hill a portfolio of his brother's portraits, Hill did not hesitate. Could Veno come out that summer at the invitation of the Great Northern, which would fund his trip and lodging in return for rights of first refusal on whatever art resulted? Being old was past ready, he'd remarked to friends in the east the previous year. How beautiful the west is. You people in New York don't realize. I've lived in New York, but now I can't stand it any longer. I feel I must break away, get among the Indians, live with them in their simple way, and study and paint them. The relationship that now formed between an artist, a railroad, a national park, and several score western Indians lasted for the next quarter century. It had something for everybody. The painter got to fulfill a lifelong ambition and leave an enduring legacy. The railroad ended up with beautiful portraits it would use to advertise the the line to tourists. Glacier Park's identity was forged by the arrangement. And as for the Blackfeet, early on it was a chance to hold onto and showcase clothing and other elements of their traditional culture. Later, at least as much as the railroad would allow, Rice's relationship with the Blackfeet showed something more honest than Curtis ever did. He produced an un portrait of a generation of native people who were no longer buffalo hunters, but ranchers who lived in clapboard houses or federal employees who drove pickups. In other words, modern Indians surviving in a West different from the old frontier. Summer after summer, 10 of them between 1927 and 1948, Rice returned to Glacier and gathered black feet and occasionally Kootenay sitters, and from his studio on St. Mary's Lake, faithfully recorded their changing circumstances. With his chromatic modernist colors. Rice painted Indians with a skill a George Catlin could never have imagined possible. Their faces, evoking the ancient and the exotic, were rendered into great art. Increasingly, he sought to paint the black feet as they appeared daily to one another. The way they dressed and looked not in the 1870s, but in the 1930s and 1940s. To his managers in the railroad offices, however, showing exotic and nostalgic images to tourists was the moneymaker. Portraying the Blackfeet in jeans and cowboy hats and checkered shirts. How was that going to sell train tickets? So alarmed at Blackfeet intermarriage with non Indians and with what appeared to be their growing assimilation into the modern west, which of course had been the whole point of American Indian policy for 100 years, the great Northern began to waffle about lodging Rice for the summers. Rice's last visit to Glacier came in 1948, and this time something happened that the railroad interpreted as certain evidence that the world had turned upside down. Eileen Schilt, a Blackfeet woman whose portrait Rice painted that summer, ended up bringing a lawsuit against the railroad for using her image in advertising without paying her a royalty. What buffalo hunting Indian would ever do such a thing? Following a stroke, Vinol Rice passed away in 1953. But what a life he had had. He left marvelous pictorial evidence of just the kind of existence he had hoped for. Even the ending was straight out of a Carl my novel. In 1954, Jart shipped his father's ashes to Bullchild, one of Rice's Blackfeet friends in Montana. As the chinooks ate away the st that spring, Bull Child climbed Red Blanket Hill and spread Rice's ashes across the Blackfeet country. Just as he had daydreamed in Germany as a boy, Vinald Rice had finally merged with the west and the Indian.
- [44:43]
Brent
Brent here and as any hunter will tell you, the field's unpredictable busted gear, surprise storms, you name it. But back home, folks like things simple and steady like t mobile 5G home Internet set up in only 15 minutes or less. Plus they got their fast speeds of price for any budget and a five year price guarantee. It's solid, easy and perfect for uploading trail cam pics or downloading wild game recipes. T Mobile Home Internet gets set up and online in under 15 minutes with their fast speeds, budget friendly pricing and 5 year price guarantee. Visit t mobile.com homeinternet to check. Availability guarantees monthly price of fixed wireless 5G Internet data exclusions like taxes and fees apply. Service delivered via 5G network speeds vary due to factors affecting sailor networks. Check guaranteed details@t mobile.com Home Internet Montana.
- [45:38]
Josh Smith
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- [48:08]
Randall
Dan, I think one of the first things that stood out to me in this episode is the idea that these photographs from Curtis are sepia toned.
- [48:22]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [48:22]
Randall
And we wouldn't really, I don't think very many Americans would be familiar with that prior to the age of Instagram. But in telling the story, you sort of peel back what's behind the image, which up until recently with digital manipulation, it was more obscure to the viewer. Right. Or to the audience.
- [48:45]
Dan Flores
Yeah, I think those sepia images that, I mean, and that's, that's how Curtis photographed, you know, his 200,000 photographs that he shot of native people. That's how he did it. That's how he processed them. I mean, they were black and white photographs, but he processed them in a chemical mix in his dark room in order to turn them brown. And the idea of course, was to make these look aged. And that was kind of one of his epiphanies when, as a young man, he found himself in a position to produce a kind of a photography that could be considered art and that other people would think of him as an artist. That was one of the insights he had. The second insight, of course, was, I'm going to make Native people my focus, and I'm particularly going to photograph them as if we were still in the 1840s, the 1850s, the 1860s. And one of the ways to make all this work is to make the images is to do a sepia wash on them so they look like they're 100 years old or something, you know? And as I said early on, and. And the script for this episode, I had a friend one time who we had. His wife had bought him a book of Curtis photographs for Christmas one year. And we were going through them, and he said, I gotta say, I just. I had no idea there were cameras back then. And I said, well, back then is. That's the rub. Because back then was actually as late as 1927. Right. 1930. So, yeah, there were cameras. But what he's doing is he's attempting to make these images look like they're 100 years old.
- [50:48]
Randall
Yeah. And I think, at least when it comes to this style of art.
- [50:54]
Josh Smith
Right.
- [50:57]
Randall
Portraits of Native people.
- [50:59]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [51:01]
Randall
I always have, I guess, conflicting thoughts or emotions when it comes to it, because there's this question of authenticity. Is this objectifying Native people or is this a celebratory representation? In this case, you have two artists who, you know, some. There's some commercial motivation, obviously, but they do seem to have sort of an authentic calling to do this. And they have good, motivate, pure motivations, for lack of a better term. But, yeah, to historicize Native people in that way, it's. It's problematic for a lot of reasons. And I wonder if you can just sort of talk about some of the conversations around that.
- [51:57]
Dan Flores
Well, when. When the world discovered that Curtis was going to do this, when JP Morgan gave him $75,000 to do it, and. And Teddy Roosevelt, who was still president at the time, announced that he was writing the forward for this. Anthropologists of the day were stunned and shocked. And Franz Boaz at Columbia in particular, said, I mean, this. This is fake. You're gonna have to fake it all. Because, I mean, we've had an Indian policy in place for a century to try to assimilate Native people, and many a great many of. Of the world's native people, including in the west, have been fully assimilated. So how are you going to do this? So the, the sort of label the great fabricator was, was placed on Curtis early on in the project. And it's been a hard thing for him to live down. I think most of the people who see these images now who buy Curtis calendars or postcards or, or buy books of Curtis's work probably don't understand that that at one time was that this was. This project was very controversial for that reason. And one of the reasons I wanted to pair him in this episode with Vino Rice is because Rice is. He's a contemporary. He's a painter rather than a photographer. He's a very wonderfully trained, academically trained portraitist in modern art. And so he's really, really skilled. And he's got the same sort of romantic nostalgia about the west operating from a different perspective. Not, not the frontier for an American, but from the Carl my novels.
- [53:52]
Randall
And it's a clumsy. It's a clumsy and awkward nostalgia.
- [53:56]
Dan Flores
It's a very clumsy because Carl my. The guy who, who made so many Germans fascinated with the west and with native people never visited the west, knew very little about it. So sort of botched the names of tribes and I mean he was. He was really kind of awful at it. I lived at one time taught at a university on the Llano Estacado. And Carl Maya evidently made the Yano Estacado into a real focus, a geographic focus. And in Carl Mize books the Anoest Caro is a mountain range. Well, the Anoestacado in truth is actually a dead flat surface, a plateau, the top of a plateau. And when I was at Texas Tech back in my early career, a bunch of the Carl My society came to Texas Tech to hold their annual conference. And they all got off the plane and were stunned to find themselves rather than in snow capped mountains standing out on a bald ass open plane full of cotton plants. And so, I mean it was a very. I got the. To do a talk for them and it was very funny to talk to these Germans who had a completely erroneous idea. As I say in the, in the episode, it's a. They had the sort of in a galaxy far, far away idea about the American West. And so. And that's what my. I mean that's what Vino Rice came to America with. But he ended up at this moment that, that he and Curtis were both working. The frontier had come to an end. Many Americans were confronting the whole idea of what historians call frontier anxiety. I mean, what are we going to do without a frontier? This is what has made America what it is. And so you're confronted with, do you do the Curtis thing where you act as if the frontier is not over and you continue to portray the Old west as if it still exists? Or you do what Vino Rice did, which was he began portraying the Blackfeet. He was painting in cowboy hats and jeans and checkered shirts and driving pickups. And of course, the railroad that employed him was not happy at that, but he was honest about it. And one of the things that I think is important about that is that from the Curtis perspective and many of the people who bought Curtis's books, native people, were a vanishing race.
- [56:33]
Josh Smith
Right.
- [56:33]
Dan Flores
And for Vino Rice, they weren't vanishing at all. They were simply segueing into 20th century America. Right.
- [56:42]
Randall
And I think that's. You get into that, that there's serious. I mean, serious thinkers believe that native people will go extinct, they'll go extinct, they'll disappear. And that had been the case since, you know, even back to Jefferson and before. But then there's this question of, again, authenticity and Indianness. But they're people driving pickups.
- [57:07]
Dan Flores
Right.
- [57:07]
Randall
And there are people working jobs. And it's fascinating that it takes an outsider to recognize that.
- [57:13]
Dan Flores
Yeah, it takes a German coming over. And I think because he was very sympathetic, and he treated his subjects, the people he was painting, as real human beings, which, of course, they reciprocated with him. I mean, it became important to him to portray them realistically and honestly, rather than to try to do what the Great Northern Railroad wanted, which was to keep putting bonnets on them and acting as if they were still buffalo hunters. Because, of course, that was what worked for tourism, right. On the rail line. Yeah. So it's a. It's an interesting time in the story of the west because this magical thing of the frontier is over. But the west is, as I tried to say in the beginning, the west is not like, say, you know, the Civil War, which comes to an end. The west is a place. And so it continues to have a story and a history forward into time. And that becomes to me as fascinating as the. The time in the previous century.
- [58:27]
Randall
Well, thanks, Dan.
- [58:28]
Dan Flores
You bet, Randall. Thanks. It's been.
- [58:49]
Josh Smith
Man, I'm telling you what, when I need auto parts, I go to O'Reilly Auto Parts here in my hometown of Bozen, Montana. Love those guys. Always nice, always helpful. They are in the business of keeping your car on the road. O'Reilly Auto Parts offers friendly, helpful service and the parts knowledge you need for all your maintenance and repairs. They've got thousands of parts and accessories in stock, in store or online so you never have to worry if you're in a jam. Need your battery tested windshield wipers replaced? The brake light fix or a quick service? They'll help you find the right part or point you to the nearest local repair shop for help. Last time I was in there it was for wiper blades and a brake light bulb. Whether you're a car aficionado or an auto novice, you'll find the employees at O'Reilly Auto Parts are knowledgeable, helpful and best of all, friendly. The professional parts people at O'Reilly Auto Parts are your one stop shop for all things auto. Do it yourself and you can find what you need in store or online. Stop by O'Reilly Auto Parts today or visit O'ReillyAuto.com Meater that's O'ReillyAuto.com MeATER when you're in the backcountry, don't forget your own backcountry. Keep it pristine and confidently clean by bringing along Wet Extra Large Dude Wipes. Just like your truck gets muddy out in the wild soaking your butt. You 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 can get them at Walmart nationwide. Fantastic product. Proud to be doing ads for these boys at Dude Wipes.
- [60:36]
Dan Flores
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