TWO VIEWS OF THE AMERICAN WEST

Prizes are useful for getting people to read what they ought to and also for encouraging good writers to do their best.  But the work itself must be published.  Montana, The Magazine of Western History, published by the Montana Historical Society, had two award winning essays in the Spring, 2018 issue.  One was by Peter H. Hassrich, a traditional writer about Western art, discussing the classic artist Albert Bierstadt.  The other was by Rodger C. Henderson, Associate Professor of History Emeritus at Penn State University, about what we used to call the Baker Massacre of a Blackfeet band in 1870.  I'm not entirely sure what the politically correct name of it is now.

When I came to Browning in 1961, I was walking into decades of centennial anniversaries of Blackfeet tragedies.  1884-1885 was the Starvation Winter.  In those years I was back in Montana as a Unitarian minister, but not on the Blackfeet Rez only in touch as a Unitarian Universalist graduate of seminary confronting morality.  In the Sixties people were barely beginning to speak of the massacre -- by the Eighties people could talk about the 600 people who starved to death at the hands of the Agency.  It was like reliving everything that happened in waves of sorrow and rage. and I was only white.  People remembered their elders talking about what they had witnessed.  We had known people who were born in 1870 and 1880.  Henderson's essay about the massacre does an efficient job of describing the circumstances, so far as they can be known, despite confused accounts and deliberate lies to save careers.

Bob Scriver was born in Brownng in 1914 and raised there, an early part of the Western art cowboys and Indians period.  He grew up accepting as natural the white man's supremacy.  "We killed the Indians," he said wryly, "But they refused to fall down."  His friends were all "Indians." (Jimmy Welch's father was his best childhood friend.)  Gradually and emotionally he moved over to the Blackfeet side, in spite of having friends who belonged to the ultra-right John Birch Society. I shared this shift with him as well as watching my students gradually realize that no longer did they need to feel either powerless victims or guilty of letting tragedies happen.  By now they began to see a future.  The work is not finished. Even in the apocalpyse much survived.

I'm interested in Hassrick's essay, which is also a book with the same name and other presentations using the same material.  https://gilcrease.org/exhibitions/bierstadt/ and a series of Youtube Lectures, exhibits and lectures.  

Hassrick's VITA:  

Now at "Lone Star Ranch".  

Summers, 1960-63:  Elizabeth, CO, rancher and assistant foreman,

1963-67:  high school teacher of history, Spanish, and art history, Steamboat Springs, CO

1969-75: Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX, curator of collections, 

1976-96: Whitney Gallery of Western Art, Cody, WY, curator and director of Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 

1996-97:  Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, director, 

1998—.    University of Oklahoma, Norman, Charles Marion Russell Professor of Art History and director of Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West,(This last is a sinecure funded by the estate of the widow of Charlie Russell.)

Consider the sources of these opinions.  Born in 1951 in Philadelphia, Hassrick is clearly an authentic member of the academic/museum community that circulates around the nation from one major establishment to another.  These institutions rely on population density in cities.  For comparison, consider Scriver was 27 years older than Hassrick and even I am two years older.  Scriver was a man of the West, a white "rez boy", as close to the bone as it's possible to get unless genetically indigenous.  What qualifies me to comment on this essay is my education at the U of Chicago Div School and years as clergy in the West, reflecting on the sacrality of the land.

Bierstadt (1830-1903) was born in Prussia and brought to the US aged one.  He studied painting in Germany in 1853.  His view of life is much influenced by the German  Romantic school of nature philosophy.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Romanticism . His works of art are physically large, theatrical in their vistas, and religious in their claims for what is grand and adventurous.  He lived the life that Charlie Russell (1864 - 1936) and James Willard Schultz (1859 - 1947) wished they had lived, pretended they had, but really only imagined, arriving in Montana too late. 

The usefulness of these two essays is that they stake out the miserable and still undigested treatment of the original people of this land at one end, while at the other end Hassrick uses his essay to help Bierstadt mythologize and elevate the land itself.  Both are popular points of view -- neither is the whole truth nor entirely honorable.  Rich white men loom over both points of view, the kind of men who found major museums memorializing the looting of natural resources that made their fortunes.

The aspect of the natural world, as found by whites, is illustrated in their treatment of Indians.  The governmental military pictured them as devils, inhuman, to be eliminated.  But Bierstadt took the romantic German view.  Hassrick says that "in the painting called "Wolf River, Kansas" Bierstadt pictured a Kansa encampment enveloped in glorious suffused light, with the grand cottonwoods serving as the divine sanctuary of nature's fondest embrace."

I was disconcerted recently to read somewhere that Joe Campbell (1904-1987), revered author of "Hero with a Thousand Faces", was now outdated.  The idea of the superior and mystical adventure of climbing a mountain is no longer a valid metaphor.  Certainly the tourists in the national parks still consider them God's natural cathedrals and proof of national grandeur.  They stand on the cement path, leaning on the railing protecting them, gazing at the vistas and muttering, "Oh, how beautiful!"  They have become interested in Bierstadt and his cohort with their aesthetic position and still support, even recover, the art.  

But the locus of the mysterium tremendum outlook has moved to outer space.  The consequence has been the death of God and a moral sense of the consequences of the rich moguls who made their money by looting the planet and now try to redeem themselves with art institutions.  What we share most with Bierstadt is the sense of loss of the 19th century, verging on despair.  We can take a little refuge in his vision.