A BRONZE FOR CHRISTMAS?

"Return of the Blackfeet Raiders"

"Paywindow"

It’s a little late to be giving advice for Christmas presents, but maybe the people who buy Scriver bronzes for gifts are able to expedite delivery. Certainly they can buy by phone or maybe even online. So here’s an overview of what Scriver bronzes are auctioning for these days. That’s not the same as buying from a gallery or private owner which is probably the way most important Scriver bronzes change hands, usually when the previous owner dies and the inheritors sell.

I don’t have enough money to subscribe to the AskArt.com database, which keeps track of an avalanche of information, but the list below is free from www.robertscriver.com which appears to be based in Taos/Santa Fe. I don’t know more than that about the website, but I will add notes about the bronzes.

I should also add another thing. One of the problems when buying bronzes is avoiding recasts and illegal casts. On the other end, casts made by Scriver at the Bighorn Foundry are MORE valuable, especially the ones from the Sixties. They were all cast using the “Roman block” investment method, which preserves much more surface quality and were patined in a traditional French way. We learned to do this together and it was not easy. If it makes you feel better, the crew was all Blackfeet.

But the new thing to be added is that it is now possible to discover the “DNA” of bronze. Bronze is an alloy, a mix of metals. By analyzing what molecules were combined in what proportions, it is possible to determine the casting “pedigree” of a bronze. Ours were usually Herculoy, a patented silicon bronze alloy.


Lewis, Clark, and Sacajawea
Bronze
25" x 15" x 18"
$23,000
03/18/2003

This sculpture would be a version of the heroic-sized statue in Fort Benton that was dedicated on the Fourth of July, 1976. It would have been cast after that, possibly in New York at John Spring’s Modern Art Foundry, who cast the monument. Look for a foundry mark on it.


Pay Window
Bronze
26"x 25" x 14"
$18,400
07/25/2009
Scriver’s rodeo series, a spectacular breakthrough in 1970, shows a bareback bronc leaping so that only one rear hoof is touching the ground. Bob created one large piece for each event plus a portrait of each animal or contestant involved. I do not know of anyone recasting these, so this is likely to be a Bighorn Foundry casting. Many artists have created their own version of the pose.


The White Flags
Bronze
16"
$16,800
07/30/2005

A later sculpture, this is a graceful animal group, probably cast via ceramic shell casting. One can tell by looking inside the bronze. If you are buying a bronze with a wooden or stone base attached, ask for the base to be removed so you can look inside. Ceramic shell material is hard to get off the metal, which is why it destroys subtle surface detail, and the underside will show vestiges of it.



Return of the Blackfoot Riders
Bronze
c. 1960
16"
$15,680
07/26/2003

Created in the early days of Bob’s career, the four warriors on horseback make a complex group with a lot of detail, all of which was authenticated by Claude Schaffer, then curator at the Museum of the Plains Indian, across the road from the Scriver Studio. George Montgomery bought a hydrocal (hard plaster) version of this in 1961 and sent it to a foundry to be translated to bronze. In the process, of course, it had to be broken apart and he gave the pieces to the CMR Museum. I don’t know what they did with them. I’ve never seen that bronze, so I don’t know how well it was done, but I’d be skeptical. It would be considerably less valuable than a Bighorn Foundry casting unless you’re a big George Montgomery fan and want the story.


Tall Tales to Tell
Bronze
c. 1992
13.25"
$15,280
04/11/2005

I don’t know this piece. I only know it exists.


The Winchester Rider
Bronze
c. 1979
15.5"
$14,560
07/30/2005

This was a promotional commission, much pushed by B. Byron Price in his role at the time. The idea was to associate the rider with “Yellow Boy,” the famous Winchester rifle with brass butt plate and so on. That long gun is often in Westerns and features in paintings.


Explorers at the Portage
Bronze
25.5" x 29" x 16"
$14,000
03/17/2006

A second Lewis & Clark monument was commissioned for Great Falls where it stands near the giant American flag. York and the Newfoundland were included with the two expedition leaders. This would be a smaller version of that heroic-sized statue or possibly just a few of the figures there. A one-off fiberglas casting of the two monuments combined was given to the Lewis & Clark Interpretative Center in Great Falls.


Layin’ the Trap #4
Bronze
20"
$11,500
04/05/2008

This is the major rodeo series portrayal of team roping. The only one I know of that has been auctioned is the one Asgar Mikkelson accepted as payment for the photos he took for Bob’s book, “An Honest Try,” which shows all the rodeo bronzes plus descriptions of the events. If it’s Asgar’s casting (he is deceased), the dedication to him is written on it and would increase the value. Story always increases value.


Buffalo Bill
Bronze
c. 1975
17" x 11" x 8"
$11,400
10/11/2005

Judging from the dimensions, this is a smaller version of the portrait of Buffalo Bill that stands in the foyer of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. Many times photographed, the statue is familiar to many and would have special meaning to fans of Buffalo Bill.


The Moon of the Yellow Leaves
Bronze
14"
$8,400
07/30/2005

Another of the smaller graceful groups of deer that Bob loved to do. Though the market was for Western bronzes, Bob’s heart was with the animals and his first affiliation was with the Society of Animal Artists. But this is a later piece and probably ceramic shell cast.


AskArt.com shows 326 Scriver bronzes passing through auctions. It makes a big difference to know WHICH auctions, since some are just threshing floors cleaning out the sweepings in a hurry while others showcase and urge sales far more. Of course, the whole thing about auctions is that it depends on who is there and bidding, though that’s now distorted by people able to bid online. They need to know what they’re doing as bronze is a medium hard to evaluate via a photo. Probably they will have someone on the scene who gives them a inspection report or they will know the source of the bronze. There’s a public/private split in the knowledge of what is auctioned.

Scriver bronzes are also complicated by his late-in-life practice of selling casting rights for small commissioned sculptures. Entrepreneurs cast editions of a hundred, which seriously diminishes value (twenty-four is considered a lot), and they were almost all locally cast in small ceramic shell foundries. Some are tastelessly patined with gaudy color, and those are often illegal. Also, incredibly, some people with early plaster tourist trade figurines have cast them. The best Scriver bronzes are not likely to show up in auctions, but these smaller, lesser-value pieces circulate constantly as little more than gambling tokens for those who use art as though it were the stock market. To get a realistic idea of fair prices, it would be necessary to separate the two levels.

CM RUSSELL MUSEUM BENEFIT AUCTION: 2009

Go to www.greatfallstribune.com/westernart if you’re a visual person who craves video.

Think of this as a three-act play, except that though I experienced it in sequence yesterday and you’ll have to read it in sequence, it was really happening all at the same time as though it were staged on three sides of the audience.

First is the main stage, which is at the Heritage Motel in Great Falls as it has been for many years. It’s the kind of huge motel with an indoor swimming pool in the middle and glass slider doors onto that space. All the furniture comes out for storage in trucks and the artists put up false walls to convert each room into a gallery. Or the less affluent just rent a regular motel room and spread their display out on the bed. There were fewer people this year -- I found a parking place right off. But there were more people eating breakfast and more of them had white hair. Some were missing. Every year more are missing. Every year the management has everything even more smoothly organized. The Ad Club, who has always sponsored this, is VERY sharp and energetic. No detail is neglected.

This year I was on the programme for the book-signing, which in this context also means signing cowboy hats, signing buckskin vests -- not just signing but also drawing a little picture. I wasn’t quite so creative, struggling hard to think of something meaningful to say in one sentence. The lawyer who destroyed Bob Scriver’s estate came on his belly to buy a book. Trying to be nice for the sake of Norma Ashby, the best I could come up with was “best wishes.” I didn’t say for what. The last time I heard from him was years ago when he sent me a letter forbidding me to ever enter his office because I told someone I wanted to punch him out.

Eric Newhouse mentioned me by name in the calendar, though there were more important people signing books. I sat next to Joan Stauffer, who wrote “Behind Every Man: The Story of Nancy Cooper Russell.” That’s Charlie Russell’s wife, whom everyone agrees put him on the map. She arranged his shows, set the prices, and ran off the little kids and loafers who kept him from working. Joan used to dress up and deliver a monologue as Nancy Russell, whose elegant portrait is on the front of her book.

I asked Joan if she thought Nancy had any regrets. She said yes, that Nancy regretted that she hadn’t shown more warmth to Jack, the couple’s adopted son. He was a little bitter and didn’t visit. Joan lives in Tulsa and is active with the Gilcrease, which has the largest and “best” Russell collection, the one that “got away” from Montana, leaving them determined never to let that happen again. Tom Gilcrease was a Native American who got rich on oil and used it to educate himself by touring Europe (a classic alternative to university) and returned to celebrate American history.

When I asked Joan if she knew Tellefero, author of a controversial tell-all bio of Charlie and Nancy Russell, she looked off into the distance and went silent.

I did sell all the books I had left and could have sold more. Hastings and the CM Russell Museum should have sold out as well. One of the most charming book buyers was Ron Ukrainetz, an artist whose saloon-keeper/hustler father sort of tricked Bob into his early career. The story is in the book, but Ron and will have to get together to tell stories. He says they have a cache of Bob Scriver letters with little sketches left from the negotiations (before I came to Montana) and have framed some, might print others, and will never let anyone read a few. I have a unique document: the letter Bob wrote in the middle of the night, consumed by panic that he had done the wrong thing and breaking off. The only paper he could find was an adding machine tape and the only pen was red. Ron and I are about the same age and he exhibits his good work in Jack Smith’s gallery down the street from me in Valier, but we’ve never met before.

The three people I always seek out are old Bob Scriver friends. One is Joyce Clarke Turvey, whose wood carver father, John Clarke, is an historic figure. I used him in what I hoped was the symphonic chord at the end of “Bronze Inside and Out:” an imagined interaction among a fine sculptor educated at Beaux Arts in Paris, named Voisin; John, who both learned from Voisin and was the subject of one of the busts the sculptor was there to do; Charlie Beil, a protegee of Russell and mentor to Bob Scriver; and Bob himself, fourteen years old.

Then there was Rex Rieke, whose wife is my self-declared most devoted blog fan. We have a lot of jokes about that. Rex is another of those fine artists who excels at both paint and music, which he plays at many venues around the state. He brought his so-fine Maynard Dixon-type mountainscapes, not his abstract work. While I was talking to him, his hired man called to say they had just had another lamb out at the ranch. Rex said that Dick Flood, one of the first of the art higglers, used to find Russells in the early days by simply walking down Montana streets after dark, early in the evening before the shades were drawn. He could spot them through the windows and return the next day to buy them.

Always I check out David Powell, son of Ace Powell, who in the earliest days was at the heart of Western art on the northern prairies. David and Sasha’s autistic little boy is making good progress in a special school program; their college-aged son is getting straight A’s and wants to go into airplane crash investigation as a profession. I would love to hear what Ace would say about that! There weren’t even airplanes when he started out.

This event is a niche within a niche, maybe within another niche or on another layer. First of all, this event is a friendship circle and the people who experience it that way see it as an annual reunion, like a high school class coming together. They are not a university crowd, not inclined to analyze, not sophisticated about much of anything and not defensive about it, but good-natured and generous. Good spenders! Good friends -- aging.

They interface through the Ad Club with two other groups mainly. One is the artists themselves, which can be grouped in a lot of different ways, but who address exclusively the American West and mostly the 19th century American West that white folks have made legendary. They love art that has been called illustration or calendar art, but some are pretty good impressionists. This show does not attract the big names, though long ago when they were little names, they weren’t too proud to come. There are bronzes everywhere, some of them pretty obvious copies of Scriver works. I don’t fuss about it. I DO fuss about the many illegal castings, but the entity that has the power and obligation to do something about it is the Montana Historical Society -- not me.

The other group interfacing through the Ad Club is dealers, a mixed lot. Some are honorable and fair, some are true predators, looking for weak people to exploit, whether artists or buyers. The Ad Club keeps them somewhat in check, though Montana art law is nearly nonexistent.


Besides the centerpiece auction there are six other events, at least: what they called “March in Montana” is really the same wheeler/dealers out from under the thumb of the Ad Club in a more downscale motel; the Native American Show in the Civic Center; the Western Heritage Artists Association and March Antiques Show at the Holiday Inn; Jay Contway and Friends at the Expo Center, specializing in yarning as much as sales; Studio 706, a local collective selling through their own gallery; and Western Collectibles with all the paraphenalia. There was also an auction at the Pacific Antique Mall. Maybe some action at the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center.

I only have the stamina to attend two. The Native American Show and “March in Montana.” The Native American Show was the best experience of the day for me. First, the work was vibrant, new, jumping and alive. Valentina LaPier, whose work grows constantly, really impressed me. Deborah Magee, whose family has many ties to me and Bob Scriver (Deborah's father Merle was Bob's hunting partner and on the school board that hired me.), won best of the miniature category with a “bead painting” that was a small portrait of an historic Indian woman, all done with solid beads and framed in painted rawhide. It tickles me that the newest and most intellectual art is done by the Native Americans. But it puzzles me (maybe it doesn’t really) that there is such a wall between the White Triumphalist Western Art (Kevin Red Star was the only Indian over there at the main auction.) and the Native American highly sophisticated and often hilarious work. Few whites even come over to look.

It was a great pleasure to see Carl Cree Medicine Sr. receive an award for his long-standing attendance (25 years) and work on behalf of artists. When I came to Browning, the average annual income for Indian men was $500 a YEAR and their average life-span was 47 years, or about as long as a person can live with chronic alcoholism. Carl wrestled demon rum (or rather demon Thunderbird) for a long time. He looked at his plaque and said, “Pretty good. Ought to be able to get a couple of jugs out of pawning it!” But he was only joking. One of his sculptures was called “Alley Preaching” and showed two winoes being scolded by a guy in dark glasses. For years Carl ran a centre where street people could take shelter. The place was blue with tobacco smoke and their coffee was about like battery acid.

The politically correct crowd will ask me, when I say I know some Blackfeet person, “Have you ever invited them to your house for dinner? Have they ever invited you over for dinner?” Suburban culture and corporate culture both organize around dinner parties. When I say I know Carl, I mean that we ate many a coffee break donut and long john (maple bar) at the bakery lunch counter with our elbows bumping, and I had many an argument with him drunk while Bob hid, and we risked our lives together in the foundry pouring molten bronze. The boy who posed for the bust of a child in Bob’s group of Blackfeet portraits was there with Carl. His name is Tim. He’s one big dude these days. I suppose he’s about forty and looks healthy. Carl is my age. His life shows.

I’ll post more about Carl later. And also about Terrance Guardipee, about whom I’ve been asking people for years and who turns out to be Darrell Kipp’s NEPHEW! His mother was Geraldine Kipp, who was my student once, and who keeps the Piegan Institute organized and on time now, ever quietly and gracefully as she always does everything.

Then I went, sighing, over to the “other” auction, where there were no pretty ladies in evening gowns to carry the paintings, and the auctioneer was running the art and NA artifacts through the process as fast and hard as he could. A small audience, mostly dealers, sat in front; probably a hundred more were invisibly streaming and bidding online, another double-dozen were perched alongside the upstairs balcony railings, and some were watching from inside dealer rooms, both on laptops and by craning their necks. Conversations were often interrupted as some choice item looked momentarily promising. This was where the economy and the general down-curve of nineteenth-century American West enthusiasm was being felt. There weren’t as many white heads as dyed heads, mostly male. The rooms had not been emptied, so the beds were covered with tomahawks and rare books. These are the last of the “higglers,” though they call themselves “antiquarians.” This is where you can find out the real truth of things.

I checked in with Adolf Hungry-Wolf who was not glad to see me because “nineteenth century Blackfeet braves” are never glad to see white women, and said hello to his best friend, Paul Raczka, who keeps a low profile over in Choteau. They know more about the Blackfeet than the Blackfeet know about themselves.

By then my back ached, my head swam, I could barely pronounce words -- much less remember names --so I went home. It was a gray day, mixed clouds moving slowly in a high stratus sheet and patterns of cumulus over the mountains. Not too cold and not too hot. No green yet. The question I pondered as I drove was the one we were all asking ourselves and each other: “what about twenty years from now? Will there be an auction? Will anyone care about Charlie Russell?”

More later.

TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH OF BOB SCRIVER

Today, January 29, 2009, is the tenth anniversary of the death of Robert MacFie Scriver. I jogged the Great Falls Tribune to see if they might note that fact, but they didn’t. They are absorbed in their struggle to prevent their own death as a newspaper. The actual paper has been shrinking in measurement, the ad revenue is down as it is in all media, “headquarters” is busy trying to decide what to axe next (they aren’t in Montana), reporters are over-loaded, and no one knows exactly what counts as news or whom to believe anyway. The Lee-owned newspapers are consolidating services, turning back towards the good old Anaconda-coiled world. Why gone those times? Maybe they’re circling back, just temporarily out of sight.

The positive notch about Bob Scriver is that his biography is written and was published in Canada by the University of Calgary Press. “Bronze Inside and Out.” I’ve been asked to sign copies at the CM Russell Museum benefit auction in mid-January. The Ad Club-organized soiree is also a plus, constantly re-energized and consistently growing in spite of being nearly a half-century old.

However, the Montana Historical Society refuses to speak to me, even as they unsuccessfully try to raise money for a new building. They told me bluntly that everything belongs to THEM now and they will do what they please with it. Montana Humanities has struck me from their list of authors invited to the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula, evidently because I’m uncontrollable.

The only entity that appears to appreciate Bob’s actual estate is the Royal Alberta Museum, the institution that Bob wanted to have everything. However, the artifact collection that caused so much contention (including the curse put on Phil Stepney, their director, that may or may not have resulted in his death from a rare cancer) has been at least partially dispersed, the Sacred Materials going back to the elders of the tribe, who sold at least some of them to tribal individuals on the Montana side of the line. I’m not sure I object to that. The Royal Alberta Museum did mount an exhibit of the Blackfeet bronzes and did invite Bob’s sister-in-law, Helene DeVicq, an integral part of his work who lives in Edmonton, to attend their opening.

The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which was given custody of all the full-mounts from the Scriver museum, and who for a while provided employment for Arnold Olsen, the dismissed MHS director who made the transaction for the Scriver estate, will not respond to my visits, phone calls or emails.

Bob divorced me forty years ago and as his “third wife of four,” I have no legal claims. In Montana, which lags a bit in social assumptions, people believe that all former wives are predators who hate their former spouses and crave money. In this case the description better fits the fourth wife. But as the only surviving wife, a year younger than Bob’s daughter, I have rather slipped over into a daughter-like role. This is recognized by Bob’s Quebec cousin, Margaret Meeks, gracefully aging in a retirement home.

Bob’s children, produced by his first marriage, died in his lifetime. The five grandchildren are in their forties now, solidly middle-aged. One is a contractor, one is a beverage distributor, one is a testing lab administrator, one is a CPA, and one has had a warrant issued for her arrest because of a forgery charge. The great-grandchildren are college-aged. None is married yet as far as I know: they don’t keep in touch. One is an international fencing athlete (Ariel DeSmet). None are artists. None carry the Scriver name.

Siyeh, the wholly-owned business subsidiary of the Blackfeet Tribe, is running the Blackfeet Heritage Center in the former Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife. Siyeh also accepted custody of the two major fiberglass monumental rodeo sculptures. David Cree Medicine, Bob’s foundry foreman, is doing well, working for Siyeh. His father, Carl, continues to create art and shows at the Indian Art show that runs parallel to the CM Russell Museum benefit auction. Flatiron Ranch is in the joint-custody of Nature Conservancy and the Blackfeet Land Trust. I know nothing about it except that Googling is complicated by a housing development near Hamilton also called “Flatiron Ranch.”

These observations are only about the local and smallest circle of Bob’s world. I figure there are three circles where Scriver’s work have significance. The local is based in large part on people who actually knew Bob and visited the museum or dealt with him in some way. This is the least significant in terms of his work, though it includes a few people who have tried to get rich from what they could siphon off, including Flathead entrepreneurs producing illegal copies.

The second “circle” is the world of Western art, kind of a double-yolked egg that is half “cowboy” artists and half historical recorders of the West as a place. Cowboy Artists of America, which began explicitly as a friendship group, was so successful that as soon as the founders had been removed by Father Time, the second generation has worked hard to make it a profit-aimed group. The controversies and power-struggles among them have interfered with that goal.

The other “yolk,” the Morans, Bierstadts, Catlins, and Russells, are a bridge to a larger art world, currently beset with some of the same problems as the other humanities spheres, such as dance, music, and publishing. Over the years institutions have been gifted or have acquired works of art as “investments” worth tax credits as well as prestige and scholarly value. Now the dark side of the equation has come to the fore as the institutions, much diminished by investment collapse, try to get the money back out of the art. The most recent, perhaps wishing to avoid the struggles over trying to market a beloved piece of art, is Brandeis University, which proposes to simply close down their Rose Museum and auction ALL the art. Which goes to show that the executors of Bob’s will were ahead of their times when they closed down his museum and auctioned his collections: his Russells, his Remingtons, his Rungiuses, and so on while trucking his own works down to Helena to be locked up, not even unpacked. As the former director said to me, “I don’t much care about art. I like the saddles and wagons, the paraphenalia.”

The wheel continues to turn. The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.

BOB'S BODY

Photo courtesy of Laurel Scriver. Bob's name and dates are not as worn as the light makes it seem.

Not long ago Bob Scriver’s niece stopped by the cemetery in Cut Bank. She got a surprise. During WWII Thad Scriver, her grandfather, bought four graves which was how he thought of his family: mom, pop, two sons. No provision for daughters-in-law or descendants. This made more sense when both sons were in the army and men from Browning were being killed. The graves were in Cut Bank because that was the “white town.” Of course, now that has less meaning that it did then.

By the time Bob Scriver died, his mom, pop, brother and sister-in-law were occupying the original four graves, so two more were bought, head-to-head with the four originals. The four graves had been marked with modest flat stones for ease when mowing. When Thad died, his wife (Bob’s mom) installed a “family stone,” which simply had “Scriver” on it, at the head of the four graves. While nice enough, it is hardly elaborate.

Bob Scriver’s wish was that he be buried next to his beloved horse out at the Doane ranch and he’d made Boyd Evans promise to come back with his backhoe to bury Bob there. Bob’s fourth wife, Lorraine, would have none of that! (I was the third wife. Lorraine was a common-law wife as nearly as I can tell, if that makes any difference. She was with him longer that any of us.) Lorraine, having had a dubious and outlier background, was determined to capture respectability and inclusion, so she insisted on the Cut Bank cemetery.

The only other people involved in the decision were Bob’s remaining three grandchildren by his daughter, who had died much earlier. She is buried in Anacortes, Washington, where she died, and her mother, Bob’s first wife, is interred in the same grave. There are two headstones on that grave, one for each woman. The only time the grandchildren saw their mother’s casket was when the grave was opened to bury their grandmother. Bob’s two granddaughters by his son don’t appear to have been consulted. Bob’s contemporaries, his cousins, were not even told he had died until I contacted them in the course of writing his biography.

The grandkid’s and Lorraine’s solution to the problem of markers was to cut Bob’s name in the Scriver family stone and add a “foot stone,” though Lorraine in particular had visions of a statue. One thing they never thought of was noting that Bob was a WWII veteran, since that was long before they were born. The consequence of that oversight is that every Memorial Day when the Veterans of Foreign Wars mark every veteran’s grave with a small United States flag, they put one on Harold’s grave according to the information of his service on his stone, but never put one on Bob’s grave. For a few years I drove out early on Memorial Day and reminded them. I threatened to tape a photocopy of his portrait in uniform onto the headstone.

When Bob died, I decided not to come to the funeral or be involved. The grandkids plainly wanted me excluded and, as for Lorraine, need you ask? In Spring I came to find his grave and though “Crown Hill Cemetery” is small, I stopped at Bob’s lawyer’s to see where I should look. The lawyer was clearly not happy to see me -- had rather forgotten that I existed -- and went into a long explanation of how Bob had chosen to be buried near the lawyer’s family plot because his family and the Scrivers had been such wonderful friends. News to me.

Within a year a second lawyer had captured the attention of Lorraine, eliminated the first one, and was re-arranging things to suit himself and his bank account. He paid no attention to Bob’s grave. The family stone is at the head of both Bob’s grave and the space next to it, which is empty. It’s unclear who has ownership of it. (The niece believes she does.)

My idea was that when they cleaned out the taxidermy walk-in freezer under the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, which contained the bodies of more than a few of Bob’s beloved pet animals so that “someday” he could make their portraits in bronze, they ought to bury the pets in the grave next to him. Since he couldn’t be next to his horse, maybe he could be next to his springer spaniel, his bobcats, his fox, his badger, and his ground squirrel. One of my friends advised me that he thought others would consider this blasphemy, since cemeteries are hallowed ground. He was rather confusing a cemetery, which is simply a burial ground, with a graveyard, which is part of church property.

The surprise Bob’s niece got was that Lorraine’s name had suddenly appeared on the gravestone. She died in 2002 in Vancouver, B.C., where she was born (she was always a Canadian citizen as was her first husband), was cremated and cast into the Pacific Ocean. (So was Bob’s second wife. An interesting fantasy about what the two sets of ashes might say if they met.) Maybe her family sent or brought some of her ashes to be buried here, but they never came to visit while she was alive so I don’t know why they could come five years after her death. I suspect this was the work of the lawyer attempting to strengthen his ties to the estate. Bob paid him in bronze castings and he rents a room at the Russell Auction every year to try to sell them. So the memorial for a common-law wife is an empty grave. Maybe the lawyer dances on it -- I don’t.

The symbolism of grave locations and styles is still strong among us in theory, but not always well thought-out in fact, not least because when people have just died, the survivors are stunned. No one can enforce their wishes beyond the grave. Multiple marriages make it even more problematic. Bob’s first wife’s parents are buried in Conrad, where the cemetery is in a cool forest of evergreens (shelter belt trees, really) watered by a special ditch. Her brother is also buried there as well as his two wives. As far as I know, no family members go to visit.

When my own mother was close to death, we asked her what she wanted. She had buried my father’s ashes in the grave of his parents in Portland, Oregon. We knew her own father was buried in one of a double plot in Roseburg, OR, bumped out of the marital double plot by his daughter who was killed in a car crash as a teenager. The other grave is empty, and we asked if she would like to be there. “NO!” she said with some vehemence. “Just put me somewhere that there’s an evergreen tree and a lot of daffodils!” In the end her ashes were interred next to my father’s and both their names were added to the grandparents' headstone. Later I went to visit the graves in Roseburg and saw that her father’s grave is near an evergreen tree and daffodils bloomed nearby.

In the end graves are not for the dead but for the living: avaricious, yearning, indignant, or whatever else they might be. Unless it’s wartime, the symbolism of graves fades for most people. Everyone moves all the time now and many families have totally lost track of where graves might be.

My own instructions are cremation and dispersal without interment -- just let the wind take me wherever it goes. I find that a comforting idea. But I do occasionally go by the Scriver graves -- in fact, as far as I know, no one else did until that niece paid her recent visit. Not even the Montana Historical Society who grabbed Bob’s estate and has kept it warehoused ever since, a kind of interment. And I suspect that lawyer doesn’t put flowers on either Bob’s grave or the empty grave.

THE SCRIVER THUNDER BUNDLE

Recently a gallery owner told me he had acquired a framed “invitation to a Bundle Opening” and wanted to know whether I would be willing to accept it in trade for copies of my biography of Bob Scriver. This person was not aware of many factors. First of all, he does not understand Bundle Openings, which do not send out formal invitations as if they were a Debutante Ball! The word comes quietly from friends, neighbors and relatives when this event will happen -- in theory when the first thunderstorms come in the spring. Bundle Openings precede the Western written invitation and because of religious persecution the ceremony was quietly underground for nearly a century. It is not a spectator event, as some of the SW reservation festivals have become, but rather an act of participation by a believing community. They know who they are and they know who should be there.

So what is this? Even more confusingly, it’s a Christmas card sent by Bob Scriver and I for the 1970 Christmas, even though he had divorced me in November. It was an act of reassurance to ourselves and our friends (not customers) that we were still friendly and still -- outside Montana law -- acting as a pair. In fact, the next summer I helped open the Bundle again as well as helping to create the Badger Tipi, an act recorded in a photo in the catalogue of the Scriver artifact collection Bob called, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains.”

After that ceremony Molly Kicking Woman said that by Blackfeet custom, I was still Bob’s wife. This was agreeable to Bob, whose idea of divorce was simply to sever any entitlement to money or restrictions on his behavior with other women. (Blackfeet had nothing against polygamy.) When Lorraine was named by him, “Badger Woman,” and acted as his wife in ceremonies, she did not displace me. Now that both Bob and Lorraine are dead, from a certain point of view, I remain the owner of the Bundle. The only trouble is that it has disappeared. Lorraine had threatened to destroy it, so it may not even exist. On the other hand, Sacred Objects often seem to have some plan of their own, so it may be biding its time in some quiet place, until it surfaces again.


Here’s the fine photo that Marshall Noice took of the Bundle with its accoutrements for the artifact book. The copy alongside tells about how Bob acquired the Bundle and its “provenance” -- all the owners it had had from the time Shorty Whitegrass captured it from the Gros Ventre.

Of course, this is a studio portrait arranged in a still-life and properly lit.

Below is a home photo of the way the Bundle “lived” in our studio-home.

People laugh at the juxtaposition of the television with the Bundle and don’t really recognize that the tripod is set up on the hearth of the massive stone fireplace at one end of the living space. What they are thinking is that television is mundane and even debased, but that sacred objects in the Euro tradition are meant to be sequestered, protected, put on an altar. In Blackfeet thinking the Bundle is meant to participate almost as though it were a person and it honors whatever space it is in. The first I ever knew about Bundles was when Clifford Kicking Woman, as my high school English student, wrote about it hanging on the wall next to his bed.

Anyway, Bob liked to watch television in the evening when he was exhausted, with the Bundle in his line of sight -- a different sort of vision. He hadn’t “collected” it as a precious object, but had made it part of his life.

I’m bemused by the sudden rush to value what people think is small art by Bob Scriver. I guess their pattern is Charlie Russell who left so many place markers, little Marblex Arabs and elephants and pigs, walking stick tops, and so on. But this is the third time that Christmas greetings made by me -- both the linoleum block prints that I made (see an earlier post) and this page have been mistaken for Bob's work,in hopes of a profit. The circumstances were that I was living out on our small ranch on the Two Medicine River after the divorce because Bob’s mother thought it was improper for me to stay on in the studio. She probably suspected but chose not to know that Bob often came out to bring groceries and to stay the night. To her, appearances were what counted.

Anyway, while I tried to get my bearings and sort things out, I wrote and drew. This little drawing was made on a mimeo stencil -- you remember those bright blue greasy-seeming sheets? Then I ran the drawing onto a pack of buckskin-colored paper I found, and hand-colored them as though in a coloring book. The Blackfeet prayer was the one Bob and I were taught in order to qualify as Bundle Keepers at the same time that we acquired our Blackfeet names. It’s hardly great art, but it means something to me and I keep it hanging in my bedroom next to the crucifix Bob made.

I’ve been making Christmas cards since college (1957-1961) -- actually, family greetings for birthdays and so on since grade school days, as we were taught to do. One of my first efforts in college was a torn piece of brown paper bag, crinkled and rubbed to look like parchment and scorched around the edges. Then I wrote “the Astonishment of Living” and spray-painted in gold an overlay of weed skeletons. Again, some people were puzzled because it was kind of an inside joke. I’ve never seen an example show up on eBay, though plenty of other bits of Scriver trivia are there. Because I had made cards, Lorraine also made the Scriver Christmas cards for a while, but as Bob became more upscale, he went to printed photos from the Noice-illustrated book. Marshall Noice is now an artist whose striking Fauvist paintings sell very well.

Bob was astonished at my homemade cards, because in his Victorian mercantile family it was “boughten” cards that were valued: the Hallmark syndrome. The first cards I made in Browning were Valentines made on 3X5 cards with cut-out red satin and velvet hearts of different sizes pasted onto the card with red-and-white beading over the top. I only made two: one for Bob and one for Jim, who was living with him at the time.