Review of \u3ci\u3eLanterns on the Prairie: The Blackfeet Photographs of Walter McClintock\u3c/i\u3e edited by Steven L. Grafe, with contributions by William E. Farr, Sherry L. Smith, and Darrell Robes Kipp

Walter McClintock (1870-1949) is principally known for two books, The Old North Trail; or Life, Legends and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians (1910) and Old Indian Trails (1923). Both are illustrated with McClintock\u27s photographs, The Old North Trail generously so. They convey an idealized vision of the traditional Blackfeet culture that captivated McClintock when, as a Yale graduate aspiring to a career in forestry, he visited the Blackfeet reservation in Montana in 1896. On subsequent visits through 1912 his collection grew to over 2,000 photographs, and he established himself as an authority on the tribe, delivering lectures in America and Europe illustrated with hand-colored lantern slides

Review of The Art of Tom Lea.

It is difficult to write objectively about a living artist, and though Tom Lea\u27s accomplishments span seven decades and a critical assessment would seem in order, this book is best considered a handsome homage. Indeed, the textual matter is limited to a brief foreword by Kathleen Hjerter, the book\u27s compiler, and an introduction by William Weber Johnson. The rest-219 pages---consists of plates, many in color, arranged in five chronological divisions but entirely lacking in commentary. The pioneer painter George Catlin in 1870 rejected an offer to publish a complete edition of his Indian outlines because no text was contemplated and he feared the critics would dismiss it with a sarcastic, What a splendid illustrated catalogue-price 100 dols. The price of The Art of Tom Lea is less than half that, but the rest of Catlin\u27s description applies. At a time when western art scholarship is coming of age, it is deflating to find a figure as interesting as Lea encased in what aspires to be nothing more than a coffee-table book

A Review of \u3ci\u3eA Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians\u3c/i\u3e by Frederick E. Hoxie

Frederick Hoxie\u27s argument in A Final Promise is that there were two distinct phases to the government\u27s assimilation program between 1880 and 1920, divided roughly at 1900. The first was an idealistic, internally consistent policy of fully incorporating the Indians into the American way of life as small landowners with citizenship rights and the equivalent of a common school education equals among equals, in short. The second phase saw a diminution of expectations and a growing perception, consistent with the segregationist forces active throughout American society, of the Indians as a permanent, backward minority in need of continuing government controls. Their land ownership would be partial, whites managing their resources through leasing arrangements. Trade schools would prepare them for a menial role in life. Even their citizenship would be different, since they would remain wards of the government. The reform vision of the 1880s had yielded to a new realism untouched by optimism

Review of \u3ci\u3eThe American West: Out of Myth, Into Reality\u3c/i\u3e By Peter H. Hassrick & \u3ci\u3eVisions of the West: Art and Artifacts from the Private Collection of J. P. Bryan, Torch Energy Advisors Incorporated and Others\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Melissa Baldridge, with an introduction by Patricia Nelson Limerick

WESTERN ART\u27S BIG TENT Western art continues on its own distinctive path: disdained and ignored by art critics, especially in the East; beloved by a huge public, especially in the West. Western art museums display their treasures, traveling exhibitions spread the word, and those with money vote with their wallets. If price is a gage of popularity, then historic and contemporary Western art has never been more popular. The American West: Out of Myth, Into Reality is the catalog of a remarkable achievement- a touring exhibition, featuring 127 works of Western art, that, from inception to realization, was mounted in just three years. The achievement is all the more remarkable because several major works are included. Its title may be a bit misleading, since Reality refers not to a more realistic vision of the Western past in all its diversity, but to the idea that the mythic substance of Western art constitutes a reality all its own. This reality encompasses the celebration of national progress, the identification of Western wilderness with a New World Eden, and the glorification of the Wild and Woolly West as a masculine domain. The proposed periodization-subdividing the nineteenth century into four phases ending with a nostalgic commemoration of the old frontier-is problematic. The fourth phase, after all, antedates the end of the frontier. This is why the short entry arguing for the noble savage as a post frontier construct cites a painting dating from 1847 as well as a bronze dating from 1898; obviously lamenting change and celebrating the uncorrupted nobleman of forest and prairie were constants in Western art. Otherwise, how could we account for the entire enterprise that brought George Catlin west in the 1830s? One inspired decision in this catalog was to use the talents of others in the program at the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West at the University of Oklahoma, where Peter Hassrick, the exhibition\u27s curator, served as director from 1998-2001. Following his extended introduction, Donna Davies, Stephanie Foster Rahill, and Bradley A. Finson contribute fifteen thematic commentaries. The seven by Rahill are sound, the seven by Finson more speculative. The phallic butte Finson detects in the foreground of Alfred Jacob Miller\u27s Trappers Saluting the Rocky Mountains is a stretch, not only because a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, but because the formation in question does not meet the classic test for a phallic symbol: anything longer than is wide. I doubt that Indians were ever regarded as an avaricious foe (124), and Henry Farny\u27s Rounded Up by God clearly shows a cowboy, not a cavalryman (142). Perhaps juggling works in the exhibition and commentaries in the catalog explains certain technical errors. The notes in the text after note 23 are misnumbered, while the painting described in the text on page 70, Albert Bierstadt\u27s El Capitan, Yosemite Valley, California, is not the painting illustrated in the catalog as figure 19. Missteps aside, it is good to find a new generation of scholars grappling with the meaning of works once regarded as boringly literal and to see that the Western art tradition still invites scrutiny by inquiring minds. Visions of the West is concerned with a different kind of reality. It showcases an unorthodox corporate collection heavy in material culture and folk art and unusually representative of diversity through its Native American, Mexican, African American, and cowgirl objects. Pluralism, according to its curator, Melissa Baldridge, is the Torch Energy collection\u27s defining feature. Housed in Houston, it bears a strong Texas stamp, reflective of the tastes of the company\u27s founder J. P. Bryan, who also collects rare Texana (unrepresented here) and firearms and spurs. The firearms are treated as the products of nineteenth- century industrial ingenuity and as works of art, while the spurs illustrate the dominance of the Hispanic tradition in shaping that supposedly most Anglo-American of cultural heroes, the cowboy. Nevertheless, guns and spurs (and cowgirl memorabilia, for that matter) challenge Baldridge\u27s disdain for cowboy art, a tradition she attributes to Frederic Remington and Charles Russell without knowing much about either evidently, since she has them converging thematically at the very point where they clearly diverge, in presenting a simple drama where red and white square off in mortal combat (x)

Review of The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America

Robert G. Athearn\u27s The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America is the capstone to a distinguished career in Western history. It is also a considerable departure from his other work. Athearn began with frontier military history, wrote extensively on railroads and the history of the High Country Empire, and delved into the exodus of blacks into Kansas at the end of the 1870s. His West, the Plains, began one tier of states west of the Mississippi and stopped one short of the Pacific

Review of \u3ci\u3eLanterns on the Prairie: The Blackfeet Photographs of Walter McClintock\u3c/i\u3e edited by Steven L. Grafe, with contributions by William E. Farr, Sherry L. Smith, and Darrell Robes Kipp

Walter McClintock (1870-1949) is principally known for two books, The Old North Trail; or Life, Legends and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians (1910) and Old Indian Trails (1923). Both are illustrated with McClintock\u27s photographs, The Old North Trail generously so. They convey an idealized vision of the traditional Blackfeet culture that captivated McClintock when, as a Yale graduate aspiring to a career in forestry, he visited the Blackfeet reservation in Montana in 1896. On subsequent visits through 1912 his collection grew to over 2,000 photographs, and he established himself as an authority on the tribe, delivering lectures in America and Europe illustrated with hand-colored lantern slides