Pod Insights Gunfighters Ep. 19: Shadows of the Frontier | The American West About this episode When the U. S. Census announced in 1890 that the Frontier was over, America was plunged into a period of anxiety. As evidenced by the grand Indian photographs of Edward Sheriff Curtis, western nostalgia became a dominant theme of art, film, and pop culture. Another artist of the age, though, showed that the West endures into the modern age.
Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck https://www.instagram.com/velvetbuckwine.
Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west.
MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips
Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US"
Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork
Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
0:30 Speaker 01 You guys are always hearing me talk about Montana Knife Company. I love these guys, hands down, favorite knives. The blades are incredibly solid. These are high-quality tools that put in the work. Well, you asked for it, and I've been asking for it, and MKC finally did it. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It'll be dropping soon. Go to MKC.com right now and sign up for email and text alerts, so you don't miss the drop. MKC.com. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Again, MKC.com.
1:07 Speaker 02 As indicated by the work of painters and photographers, nostalgia and honesty about the West duelled 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 at velvetbuckvines.com. Enjoy responsibly.
1:54 Speaker 02 Shadows of the Frontier.
2:02 Speaker 02 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.
2:44 Speaker 02 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 US 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
3:25 Speaker 02 the way Appomattox Courthouse or Hiroshima-Nagasaki were. As wild as the Western past had been as a part of history, 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, then how are we going to preserve Americanness without a frontier?
4:12 Speaker 02 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 Shirley 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 Grey captured the magic best. "The Old West," he once wrote, "was the last time in the history of Earth humans got to
4:57 Speaker 02 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 Beyoncé can resist it.
5:38 Speaker 02 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, Cock-Suckers," 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 Vinol Rice,
6:21 Speaker 02 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 honesty of someone like Vinol 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.
6:57 Speaker 02 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.
7:39 Speaker 02 As George Horse Capture of Montana's Fort Belknap Reservation said of his first sight 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.
8:14 Speaker 02 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 eighty tribes of Indians and shoot more than forty thousand photographs of them? How was someone like this on the scene in the Old West with a camera?
8:43 Speaker 02 Well, that's the first fantasy about the "shadow catcher" to brush aside. Curtis was not photographing eighty 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 scent 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.
9:27 Speaker 02 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 rapt before the photographs. Like so many first-generation Americans who grew up in the Northwest, Curtis's 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,
10:11 Speaker 02 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.
10:51 Speaker 02 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.
11:36 Speaker 02 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 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.
12:17 Speaker 02 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-focus photos of her as she engaged in a timeless indigenous pursuit: digging for clams along the Pacific shore.
12:41 Speaker 02 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 lead motif. Like toppling dominoes, the breaks came in rapid succession.
13:21 Speaker 02 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 Pincho of the U.S. Forestry Division, Seehart Miriam, 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."
14:02 Speaker 02 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, artists, a kind of Camelot afloat on the Alaskan seas. Curtis got to rub shoulders with the natural history writers John Muir and John Burroughs,
14:41 Speaker 02 the geologist Grove Carl Gilbert, biologist 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
15:22 Speaker 02 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 "Indian-ness," 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.
16:07 Speaker 02 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 Audman, 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 Indian life, three decades after most tribes had settled on their reservations, it ran up a red flag.
16:49 Speaker 02 Professor Franz Boaz 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 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. Boaz's objections did lead to President Roosevelt appointing a committee to investigate those arguments. But the committee included William H.
17:33 Speaker 02 Holmes of the Bureau of Ethnology, who despised Boaz, 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
18:17 Speaker 02 30 years of his life. With offices both in New York for marketing and Seattle for the photographic end, 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.
18:48 Speaker 02 Over the next seven years, ten more volumes appeared. By this time Curtis had gone through Morgan's initial investment and was barely passed 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 Quackyoodle 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 financing, Curtis was finally able to turn out the last nine volumes of his grand project.
19:31 Speaker 02 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.
20:16 Speaker 02 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's 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.
21:00 Speaker 02 Other photographers and painters certainly attempted this, but no one else pulled it off with the alon that Curtis did. On the other hand, there's 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 exorcise the whole 20th century.
21:45 Speaker 02 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, 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 do Curtis. Some of the Navajos did their ceremonies backwards for his camera.
22:28 Speaker 02 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 Hopis 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, 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.
23:07 Speaker 02 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.
23:20 Speaker 00 OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
23:50 Speaker 01 You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on the podcast. Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high-performance, durable tool that you can rely on, whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to MKC.com right now.
24:33 Speaker 01 Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications so you get the alert the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders.
24:53 Speaker 03 With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans. Develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule. So you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.
25:21 Speaker 02 As Curtis was journeying to tribe after tribe, then disappearing into his darkroom, 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 Tauss and Santa Fei-based painters like E. Irving Causse, Ernest Blumentzschain, and John Sloan, captured the Pueblos of the Southwest at a frantic pace.
26:03 Speaker 02 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. Vinod 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, Blumentzschain, and others had already laid out. Yet the more Rice learned, the more experience he had, the more he thought it critical to
26:46 Speaker 02 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 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.
27:31 Speaker 02 Like other German boys, Rice grew up reading Carl May, who mesmerized generations of German readers with a kind of fantasy American West. May remains so crucial to European ideas about America that Der Schuh de Montu, an Austin Powers-like send-up of a 1962 Carl May 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 May's heroic Apache chief Vinatou, who mesmerized them.
28:13 Speaker 02 Actually, May 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. May's novels made the West appear the only place on Earth one could really be alive. Vinod 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 teepee villages outside New York or Boston.
28:54 Speaker 02 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 Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. "There," Yellow Elk said, "were the Indians of Rice's imagination."
29:22 Speaker 02 The Great War years, obviously, were not the time for a painter from America's enemy nation to travel the U.S. 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.
29:55 Speaker 02 As soon as he stepped off the train, the German 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 Vinole 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,
30:37 Speaker 02 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.
31:16 Speaker 02 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
32:00 Speaker 02 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 Vinole Rice.
32:17 Speaker 02 Rice became the most successful of all the Great Northern Railroad's 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 Bird Grenell, in 1910, Congress had created Glacier out of pieces of the Flathead National Forest and the Blackfeet Reservation.
32:58 Speaker 02 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 Northern's "See America First" campaign, in 1915, it built many Glacier hotels, 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.
33:38 Speaker 02 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 promotional notions. In 1913 and 1914, Hill invited the German modernist Julius Seiler to the park, then-Indian genre painter Edwin Demming. By 1917, Hill placed his hopes on one of the West's most famous illustrator painters,
34:21 Speaker 02 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.
34:47 Speaker 02 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 Vinol Rice's arrival in Blackfeet country in 1919. I once was privileged to have lunch with Renate Rice, Vinol Rice's engaging daughter-in-law in Santa Fe.
35:29 Speaker 02 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.
36:14 Speaker 02 "He just loved people," Rice's daughter-in-law told me. "He loved the way people looked." But as Rice's son, Jark, 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 36 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
36:54 Speaker 02 Redux, a 20th-century biographer of Indians who everyone in New York believed at the time were vanishing.
37:03 Speaker 02 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 Vino 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? Vino 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.
37:48 Speaker 02 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 again, live with them in their simple way, and study and paint them."
38:01 Speaker 02 The relationship that now formed between an artist, a railroad, a national park, and several score of 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 he would use to advertise 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 on to 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.
38:45 Speaker 02 He produced an unmatched 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.
39:07 Speaker 02 Summer after summer, ten of them between 1927 and 1948, Rice returned to Glacier, gathered Blackfeet 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 Blackfeet as they appeared daily to one another, the way they dressed and looked not in the 1870s but in the 1930s and 1940s.
39:50 Speaker 02 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
40:32 Speaker 02 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.
41:13 Speaker 02 Even the ending was straight out of a Carl My novel. In 1954, Jark shipped his father's ashes to Bullchild, one of Rice's Blackfeet friends in Montana. As the Chinooks ate away the snow that spring, Bullchild climbed Red Blanket Hill and spread Rice's ashes across the Blackfeet country. Just as he had daydreamed in Germany as a boy, Vinol Rice had finally merged with the West and the Indians.
42:01 Speaker 00 Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
42:31 Speaker 01 I'm holding in my hot little hand here the first ever folding knife from Montana Knife Company. Dude, this thing is sweet. They like reimagined folding knives. You touch this thing and you know you are holding a quality product. Montana Knife Company founded by Josh Smith, one of the most experienced master bladesmiths in the world. The Montana is the first folder Josh has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists who could match what he does on the bench. G10 scales with a 3D milled micro texture, titanium hardware, a custom deep carry clip with flathead screws set flush. This is a rock solid clip.
43:16 Speaker 01 It's not the kind of clip that you're going to use a couple of times and it bends and get all loose. The blade goes back into the mill after heat treatment for its most critical surfaces. That's the kind of step nobody else takes. That same standard applies to every part of the Montana. That's the name of the folder, the Montana, from start to finish. The wait is over and I've been waiting a long time to get one of these suckers. MKC launching their first folding knife. It's dropping extremely soon, so make sure you sign up for email and SMS to be the first to know. These are going to sell out quick. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com.
43:52 Speaker 03 With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans, develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule, so you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.
44:19 Speaker 04 Dan, I think one of the first things that stood out to me in this, in this episode is the idea that these photographs from Curtis are sepia toned.
44:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
44:37 Speaker 04 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 this story, you sort of peel back what's behind the image, which up until recently, you know, with digital manipulation, it was more obscured to the viewer, right, or to the audience.
45:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think those sepia images that, I mean, and 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 darkroom 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
45:45 Speaker 02 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 in the script for this episode, I had a friend one time who, he had, his wife had bought him
46:30 Speaker 02 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, 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.
47:03 Speaker 04 Yeah.
47:05 Speaker 04 I think, at least when it comes to this style of art, right?
47:12 Speaker 04 Portraits of Native people.
47:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:15 Speaker 04 I always have, I guess, conflicting thoughts or emotions when it comes to it because there's, there's this question of authenticity. You know, is this objectifying Native people? Is this, or is this like a celebratory representation?
47:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:35 Speaker 04 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
47:53 Speaker 04 good motive, pure motivations, for lack of a better term. But yeah, to historicize Native people in that way, 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.
48:12 Speaker 02 Well, when, when the world discovered that Curtis was going to do this, when JP Morgan gave him $75,000 to do it, and Teddy Roosevelt, who was still president at the time, announced that he was writing the foreword for this. Anthropologists of the day were stunned and shocked. And Franz Boas at Columbia in particular said, I mean, this, this is fake. You're going to 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 the world's
48:56 Speaker 02 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 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
49:33 Speaker 02 in this episode with Vinal 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. 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 Mye novels.
50:07 Speaker 04 And it's a clumsy, a clumsy and awkward nostalgia.
50:10 Speaker 02 It's a very clumsy, because Carl Mye, the guy who, who made so many Germans fascinated with the West and with native people, never visited the West.
50:21 Speaker 04 Right.
50:21 Speaker 02 Knew very little about it, 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 Yano Estacado, and Carl Mye evidently made the Yano Estacado into a real focus, a geographic focus. And in Carl Mye's books, the Yano Estacado is a mountain range. Well, Yano Estacado, 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 Mye Society came to Texas
51:02 Speaker 02 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 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 Vinal Rice came to America with. But he ended up, at this moment that he and Curtis were both working,
51:47 Speaker 02 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 gonna 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 Vinole 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.
52:31 Speaker 02 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.
52:47 Speaker 04 Right.
52:48 Speaker 02 And for Vinole Rice, they weren't vanishing at all. They were simply segueing into 20th century America.
52:57 Speaker 04 Right, and I think that's, you get into that, that there's serious, I mean, serious thinkers believe that Native people will go extinct.
53:08 Speaker 02 They'll go extinct, they'll disappear.
53:09 Speaker 04 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 Indian-ness. But they're people driving pickups, right? And they're people working jobs. And it's fascinating that it takes an outsider to recognize that.
53:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, it takes a German coming over. And because, 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 on the rail line.
54:07 Speaker 02 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. Well, thanks, Dan. You bet, Randall. Thanks. It's been fun.
55:03 Speaker 01 You ever get that feeling, the walls closing in, the concrete jungle suffocating you? You crave some wide open spaces, the chance to connect with nature, maybe in a spot all your own. Well, head over to land.com. They've got ranches, forests, mountains, streams, you name it. Search by acreage. You can search by location. You can search by the kind of hunting and fishing you're dreaming of. Land.com. It is where the adventure begins.
55:31 Speaker 05 Whether you're hiking in before first light, or crawling back into camp after a long day of field, a hot meal, or a strong cup of coffee can make the difference. The Jetboil Flash boils water in minutes and packs down small, making it an easy addition to your hunting kit. A lot of times on a hard hunt, I'll take a Jetboil with me even if I'm not staying overnight, just because I want to have a midday coffee break, or have a midday hot meal when I bring some dehydrated food. Fast, compact, efficient. Jetboil helps you stay fueled for whatever the day brings. Use code GREECE at jetboil.com for 15% off your order. Some exclusions apply.
56:14 Speaker 06 When the moments in your life are too important to miss, you can trust O'Reilly Auto Parts to keep you and your plans on the road. Our professional parts people can test your vehicle's battery and even give it a charge if needed. In most cases, we can install your new battery for free. It's just one of the many services we provide at O'Reilly Auto Parts to ensure life's best moments don't find you stranded.
56:37 Speaker 02 (O'Reilly Auto Parts) Auto Parts.
Previous Ep. 18: From Safari American-Style to the Boone & Crockett Club | The American West Next Ep. 20: Coyote - America’s Jackal and Its Roller-Coaster Ride Through History | The American West Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated