WHY GONE THOSE TIMES?

fgrtv

Eddie Big Beaver

Two exceptionally honorable, handsome, and traditional Amskapi Pikuni (US Blackfeet) men I admired were very old in the Sixties:  Louis Plenty Treaty and Chewing Black Bones.  I knew them because they posed for portraits by Bob Scriver.  Eddie Big Beaver also posed for Bob’s “No More Buffalo,” but Eddie was a different sort of man who had also posed for Phimister Proctor and lived in the big cities.  He was a park ranger for years and died tragically before I was in Browning.  By that time he had become fairly assimilated.  I wrote a blog post about him and some of his children, whom I taught in Browning.  

"No More Buffalo" by Bob Scriver

All three of these men are included in Adolf Hungry Wolf’s marvelous four book series about the Pikunni that is available through the Blackfeet Heritage Center and that is now owned by the Browning Public Schools.  Adolf arrived in Browning a couple of years after me but made it a point to sit down with these old people, born at the end of the buffalo days, and to collect old photos of them.

In order to find the entry about Louis Plenty Treaty, it is necessary to know that he also went by Louis Bear Child.  Many Blackfeet had more than one name.  In 1974 Adolf took Louis up Starr School to check out his cabin where he hadn’t lived for twenty years.  By then Maggie, his wife, had gone on “over the horizon” and Louis was living in the Browning old folks’ home.  Though he had moved away from the little old-timer enclave, he had felt confident enough about the building belonging to him that he had left his Crow-Water-Society Bundle tied high in the rafters.  The goal of the trip was to get it and transfer it to Adolf, meaning to teach him the songs and movements that went with opening it.  On the way Louis was trying to find (remember) the song that accompanied the first unbinding and spreading of the skins, tobacco, rattles.

But when they got to the cabin, there was a padlock on the door and it was obvious that someone was living there.  The squatters returned but didn’t make trouble once they understood who Louis was.  The Bundle was gone.  As it turned out, a previous squatter had removed it, but no one knew what she did with it.  Probably sold it.

In those years Bob was deeply interested in these Bundles, which were being destroyed by fundamentalist Christians and simply disappearing, maybe sold though they weren’t flashy objects.  Our deepest glimpse of what they meant to the people was not about Bundles but about the Horn Society, which was meant to encourage the bison to multiply with many calves.  It was deeply secret because it included ritual coitus.  

Ceremonial staffs

The people were gathered in a big circle and we arrived a little before men holding tall staffs with a crook on end would run around the outside of the circle.  It was an arduous task and a stumble, or worse, a fall, would indicate something very bad was in the future.  Louis ran, barely balancing his tall staff.  He was not a young man, but he had done hard physical work in his youth -- cutting wood and haying with wagons.  His face was intense.  He did not stumble.

Adolf includes a photo of Louis in 1933, dressed in a black leather jacket.  His hair is cut to above his ears so that he looks very modern, even hip.  He was leaving for Washington DC to act as an interpreter and councillor for James White Calf, a much more famous man.

Louis Plenty Treaty in 1933

In William Farr’s book, “The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882-1945,” there is a photo of him standing in his field with his long braids, leaning on a shovel.

He is one of the people in Scriver’s circle of portraits called “Opening of the Thunder Pipe Bundle.”

Louis is the one with the blackened face.

Chewing Black Bones was in an earlier bronze.

"Transition"

The portrait of Chewing Black Bones is sold in two forms.  “Transition” shows him seated on the ground, Marie Williamson standing in the middle wearing her elk tooth dress, and a little boy on her other side.  No one remembers his name.

When the seated figure is sold alone, he’s called “The Last Warrior” and, indeed, he was.  On page 1021 of “The Blackfoot Papers” is a photo of him taken in 1910 in his protective hairlock shirt showing the two scalps he took in war, both long hair.  His own hair was remarkably thick and long, worn in the men’s three-braid manner when he was young.  His daughter said each braid was “thick as a pickle!”

Chewing Black Bone was an observant and meticulous man who incongruously wore glasses most of his life.  When weather allowed he lived in a lodge apart from the family ranch-house on Two Medicine, dressed in buckskin, mended his own moccasins, and despised politicians.  His daughter, Agnes MadPlume, made it possible for him to live this way and pretty much maintained old ways herself.  

Despite all this, Chewing Black Bone was a close friend of two remarkable white men:  James Willard Schultz and Keith Seele.  In a letter to his son, Hart, Schultz told about Chewing Black Bone returning an ancient horned headdress to the Yanktonais Sioux in 1939.  Winold Reiss had painted him wearing it.  His most important religious role had been as a Weather Dancer in an Okan lodge, or Sun Dance.  It was another endurance assignment, to stand in a booth blowing an eagle bone whistle for long periods of time.

Schultz, who was a bit disreputable, had a studio next to the Browning Merc, so Bob in boyhood knew him, though he was instructed to stay away from him.  Keith Seele was an eminent and entirely conscientious Egyptologist from the U of Chicago who was involved in the excavations that tried to save whatever there was that would be destroyed by the building of the Aswan Dam.  He was in Egypt when Chewing Black Bone neared his end, was notified, and came at once to Browning.  

We were close to Keith and Diedericka Seele and loved to take a picnic out to Cut Bank Creek and sit by the last of the campfire, listening to Keith tell stories about Egypt. At first Chewing Black Bone did not want to pose for Bob, but Keith helped to persuade the old man.  Keith, who had once intended on going into the ministry, had also been devoted to Schultz.  

This may be Louis in his captured headdress.

The face painting is for the Horn Society.

I think the common denominator was the love of ancient lands and times.  As Schultz’ book title asked,  “Why Gone Those Times?”  There is no answer.  In the times of flowering, the “climax cultures” as the anthros call them, it seems the natural order of the world, deeply true.  But then circumstances that can’t be controlled wipe everything out despite our best efforts to remember.  And we can't yet know what the next flowering climax will be like.

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.