"COUSIN CLARE" by Anita Leslie

If you’re a Downton Abbey fan, you’re going to love this story.  It begins with Winston Churchill and my version ends on the Blackfeet Reservation.  Clementine Churchill, Winston’s wife, was one of the Jerome sisters who were so American that they had Native American -- or as they put it, “Red Indian” -- blood in them.   The grand-daughter of another of the Jerome sisters was Clare Sheridan, whose natural energy was freed and driven by the early death of a beloved husband, an officer in WWI, and developed by a lifetime of devotion to art and writing.  Her niece, Anita Leslie (1914-1984), wrote a book about her:  “Cousin Clare, The Tempestuous Career of Clare Sheridan,” which was recently sent to me by Joyce Thomas, whose aunt was a close friend of Anita Leslie.  Joyce’s aunt was Norma Smith, who grew up on a homestead near Great Falls, graduated from the University of Great Falls, and became an early Blackfeet reservation teacher in the Two Medicine area.  Among other things she taught the locals how to go on picnics, driving a team and wagon to some picturesque spot.  They must have thought it a curious practice, but anything involving food was welcome.  Later she trained to be an occupational therapist and in late life was an artist.  At her death in 2011, she was 98 and living in Green Valley, CA.

In the early days of Glacier National Park many Europeans and Brits saw its potential as the “American Switzerland,” luring a steady trickle of visitors with fancy titles.  One attraction was Winold Reiss’ school of art on the east shore of St. Mary.  He and his brother came from Manhattan for the summers.  In 1937 one of the residents in the school was Clare.  If you have visited the “Big Hotel” in East Glacier and walked past the tall carved Indian figure, you have seen the work of Winold’s brother and undoubtedly the inspiration for Clare’s work in her late years: wood carvings hewn from single logs.  Her iconography was religious, Catholic.  Her life was anything but.  She had done busts of the Russian monsters Lenin and Trotsky, which did her no political good but became the foundation of a journalism career.  A bust of Charlie Chaplin touched off wild rumors. She portrayed both Gandhi and Churchill, who were enemies but both certainly friends of hers.  “Winston” had to save her more than once, but he could not save her son who died of appendicitis leading to peritonitis.  This was the motive for coming to Montana to grieve.

Clare wrote:  “How strange that through losing one child [a very young one] I discovered myself as a modeller, through losing another I found myself a carver.  It seemed to me I hadn’t been a sculptor until now, for modelling is not sculpting.  To tackle wood is a great sensation.  Wood lives, comes to life under one’s hand, one wrestles with it, humours it, coaxes it, argues with it.  The grain gives fight.”  

I’d bet money that she knew John Clarke, the Blackfeet wood carver.   Probably also Bob Scriver, Charlie Beil and Adrian Voisin, other sculptors in the area at the time.  But it was another Blackfeet whom she added to her life of intimacies with men:  Levi Burd, descendant of Jemmy Jock Burd, who a century earlier had lived a life not unlike her own, moving among nations and making narrow escapes.  [I never found a documented account of Levi’s descent.  I’m going by the name.]  In fact, Burd -- described in Paul C. Rosier’s “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954” as “the patrician half-blood who profited handsomely from Blackfeet oil leases throughout the 1940’s,” was deeply involved in state and reservation politics.  He was quite a bit older than Clare, married, had held offices from judge to tribal chair, and knew the world well.  Just Clare’s type!  She wrote a book about that summer:  “Redskin Interlude,” which I found on the used book dealer websites and will review when it comes from England.  (Estimated to arrive before December 13.)  I suspect that a magpie’s eye view of the relationship would be about lively conversation rather than physical intimacy.  In any case Anita Leslie knew all about it and named her own son “Tarka Dick” possibly after Winold Reiss’ son Tjark and certainly after Clare’s lost son, Richard.  Tactfully, she claimed Tarka merely meant “otter” and the boy was like an otter.

Clare Sheridan was one of those women liberated by the social shifts that war imposes, partly by killing a generation of the best men and partly by pressing women into new roles.  Anita Leslie drove an ambulance for France in WWII.  “Once you’ve seen Paree . . .”  But, rather oddly, this wandering woman’s greatest affection was for the Sahara desert and she loved nothing better than to consort with Bedouin chiefs.  The only truly brutish top leader Clare confronted in the course of her career was Mussolini.

The sense of entitlement these women felt, alongside an acute awareness of being “other” and therefore outside the rules, gave them common cause with Communists, Indians, rebels, and other oppressed and suffering peoples.  But also they felt themselves equal to the biggest names and risked going into dicey situations all the time, partly because of having friends and relatives (Winston) who could and would save them.  Their currency is not money -- they spend it as fast as they get it -- but skill and reputation, the same as it was for Jemmy Jock Burd among the fur traders or the early Kipps and Browns or the other middle-class mixed-bloods of the Blackfeet.

Montana life is not so different.  We are confronting another oil boom, wondering whether this time it will take out the diminishing reservation pure water supply that comes from shrinking glaciers.  Levi Burd wanted to cut off enrollment at the half-blood point, but now some are arguing for a  quarter-quantum cut off.  This time around, the Blackfeet politicians are sometimes women and they are keenly aware that reservations can help to swing national elections, as just happened.  The books that trace the genealogies and forces have only just begun to follow the trail cut by Paul C. Rosier (no relation to the DesRosier family, I think.)

On top of everything else, Clare Sheridan was beautiful.  The last words of the book about her describe the simple funeral in the presence of a sad but serene madonna she had carved as a memorial to her son.  It stood in the fourteenth-century church of Brede village where she had often lived.  Anita Leslie tells us:  “I began to grasp a reality which the passionate exuberant Clare had always sought to express -- beauty outlasts pain -- beauty does not age.”   Surely an artist’s sentiment.  There are other realities.  Beauty was not Clare Sheridan’s only value.  Or maybe there are many kinds of beauty.