A LIFE TRAJECTORY

Note the expression on my mother's face.

In 1961 I came to the Blackfeet Reservation to teach high school English and fell in love with Bob Scriver.  In 1966 we married, in 1973 he divorced me (at my request), in 1999 he died, and in 2006 the book I wrote about him was published:  “Bronze Inside and Out” by the University of Calgary Press.  By 2010 the book had been pirated and was for sale in one place for $3 and another for $166.

This is not an orderly nor predictable world.  Nor are any of its life trajectories.  

I did a lot of research on Bob’s genealogy, which was made easy by one of his relatives, head of Clan MacFie in Canada, who accumulates and documents everything he can find.  In 1879 Bob’s father, Thaddeus, was born on a dairy farm in Clarenceville, Quebec, so premature that his mother’s wedding ring could be put over his little fist.  She was a little bird of a woman, much beloved.  She had lost several babies.  Thad was the last.  The gap meant that the older boys grew up and found their way in easier times.  The oldest did very well indeed since he bought land on the site that became Minneapolis.  The second worked for the first at a pleasant salary.

Thad roamed the West through the turn of the 19^th century into the 20^th -- tried newspapers, made contacts in Seattle and Minneapolis, and finally settled in Browning, MT, in 1901, founded the Browning Mercantile Store in 1907, and there he was when he died in 1971.

Wessie and Thad "on television"

By 1911 he had become prosperous enough to start a family.  He was 34 and his new wife, Ellison Westgarth Macfie from the next farm over, was 23, b.1887.  They had not spent any length of time together in the previous decade.  He, quite small but tough, chose her because she was big, healthy, and popular and would have healthy children.  She had two sons, the oldest to be the heir, English style, and the other to be a spare and his mother’s comfort.  After the first she was so miserable that she threatened to go back across the continent to Quebec.  After the second she saw the impossibility of that and had a circle of friends.  She was entirely shut out of the Merc so devoted herself to the second son.

This is the background of Bob’s life, which I see as explanatory.  Born in 1914 at the beginning of WWI.  Dependence on a vigorous mother, a need to invent a career that will satisfy her, and a strong drive to show his value in the world, but never to leave.  He was no good at being married, though he was terrific in bed.  Somehow, that seems to have always been public knowledge. 

So his jobs began with music, which his parents thought of as brass bands, taught music so he could stay in Browning, played Big Band and jazz in small dance bands through WWII which took him to Edmonton, blew up as a teacher because he was so strict and passionate about it which also meant the music program he drove was stellar.  He was far too anti-authoritarian to tolerate school administrators.

By this time he was on his second wife who helped him leave teaching to build a taxidermy studio that grew into a natural history museum, and then helped him develop the taxidermy into a tourist figurine business and finally into a high class bronze sculptor career.  When he built his foundry, I was part of that.  When he became a major success, I was part of that.  But I always think in terms of genius and art.  He just wanted to make money and be respected.

Success is a bitch.  After Bob's death a local old woman, a prosperous ranch wife, announced to me, “He wasn’t that famous.”  She meant that he wasn’t famous enough to balance the scales for all the shortfalls she knew about.  She knew NOTHING about art.  In fact, nothing that didn't happen not in Montana.  Another of her type, years after his death, wanted to know “how good he really was in bed.”

Just about the time Bob was hitting his peak in the late 1970’s, the secondary feeders on cowboy art -- the wheeler-dealers -- were shifting sales from galleries to auctions which meant a drop in class and wild unpredictability in prices.  Just about the same time the sympathetic base Bob had had among Native Americans his age and a little older -- mostly his parent’s generation -- were dying (Indians die younger than whites) and the younger tribal people were in the throes of political rebellion, symbolized by AIM at one end of the spectrum and national indigenous organizations at the other.  He began to become paranoid.  His common-law alcoholic wife fanned the flames and so did local defensive whites and the racist FBI.

There were major achievements like the monument in Fort Benton, culminating in a parade in 1976.  Much photographed, the big monument was not as well-loved as his small portrait of a dog.  There were some other big pieces, some of them huge rodeo figures cast in fiberglass.  

His world was local.  He’d always been a loner except for a female sidekick, a classic Western pattern.  Now his real life was centered on his ranch and his constant yearning to be a painter.  Painting is SO much easier than sculpture.  By this time he was having heart attacks and trouble breathing.  He had long periods of being bed ridden, which his wife addressed by berating him.  

"To See Eternity"  Bob's portrait of his dying daughter.

He fell out with almost every big institution, finding them obtuse and often corrupt.  (I think they really were and are.)  His daughter had died and his son died.  It turned out that his first wife, the pretty blonde who had been his student, was carrying a genetic vulnerability for colon cancer.  It went rolling on down the generations.

This was a family with very little bonding among them, a conviction they were always on the edge of poverty, and a dedication to preserving appearances and preventing change.  The nuclear family was so small that Bob was outside of it in spite of visiting his aged parents nightly.  By the time the Browning Merc burned down in 1991, it had not changed since its founding.  His pop had a bad stroke, was bedridden and speechless at home for a couple of years before he died in 1971.  His mom had several cheerful years after that, though Bob refused to move back to live with her.  One afternoon while tacking down a new carpet in the bathroom, she died of a heart attack.

How could fame have prevented any of this?  Bob’s will gave $10,000 to each grandchild which is a threshold for legal inheritance to keep them from challenging the will.  His idea was to concentrate his estate into one entity that would be self-sustaining, a projection of himself.  His wife immediately converted everything into cash, much if not most of which was skimmed by the lawyer (rumor has it that the amount was eight or nine million dollars).  There was a brief tug of war over who got the “stuff” and it ended at the Montana Historical Society.  

"No More Buffalo"  The model was Eddie Big Beaver.

At one point, in the first Blackfeet oil boom, Bob and some of the tribal leaders had projected a series of twelve life-sized bronzes to be placed along a path at the Museum of the Plains Indian.  It didn’t happen.  Instead local Blackfeet by the turn into the 21^st century had been on relocation to cities where they were taught to weld.  When they came home, they turned to welding sculpture.  Those pieces are now everywhere.

Bob is buried in Cut Bank, “Whitetown”, though he had asked to be put to rest beside his beloved horse on his beloved ranch where grizzlies visited.  He’s not beside his mother but in a double plot, head-to-head in the next row.  The stone shows his name and the fourth wife’s name, but she’s not there.  She was cremated and thrown into the sea near Vancouver, B.C., which is where she went and built a house in the few years she lived past Bob.

Does any of that matter?  The Victorian Era thoughts of self-righteous middle-class Montanan is that Charlie Russell is the ultimate template for every artist.  (One has to look away from certain parts of Charlie.)  Bob was nothing like him and neither was his work, though those who can only see subject matter always accused him of copying.  He made a sculpture called “The Mighty and the Many,” wolves pulling down a moose that has broken through ice.  The more “famous” he was, the more he was the moose.

No fame and no fortune will prevent death.  Paranoia has no effect on enemies or changes of fortune.  Chance lays out the terrain of our times and each of us chooses our path.  With luck there are some fabulous encounters and with diligence there are excellent creations.  This is a romantic premise and will not appeal to that old ranch wife who thought the goal was Status, defined as name recognition and good sales.  Of course, even she was curious about  Charlie's sex life, which included a lot of whores.  She thought that was an entitlement of creative genius.  Actually, her model for success was a prime herd bull, worth a lot of money.