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Sacagawea Imagery, part 2
by Brian W. Dippie
The Indian princess is a key to understanding
Sacagawea imagery. Long before she was born Europeans had settled
on the figure of an Indian woman to represent America ("The
Fourth Continent")--an allegorical convention adopted in
the late eighteenth century by the newly-established United States
of America. Cigar store Indians--carved figures that were a popular
form of outdoor advertising for tobacconists in the nineteenth-century--also
included a few Indian women extending a clutch of cigars and sometimes
soliciting attention with a supplicating gesture associated with
Pocahontas, the original inspiration for the whole tribe of Indian
princesses. The Indian princess, as Rayna Green has observed,
"must save or give aid to white men." In rescuing Captain
John Smith from certain execution Pocahontas became the prototype;
Sacagawea's services to the Lewis and Clark Expedition qualified
her as well. The Indian Princess must also be pretty--Eva Dye,
relying entirely on her imagination, described Sacagawea as "beautiful"
and (making the link explicit) save for Pocahontas "the most
traveled Indian Princess in our history." Subsequently a
novelist would embroider Dye's description, adding to Sacagawea's
"neatly braided" hair, "fine and straight"
nose, and skin of "pure copper like the statue in some old
Florentine gallery," a catalog of Caucasian traits: head
shape, features, ears, nose, mouth, teeth, dark auburn hair, gray
eyes, thick lashes, and skin "a tigerish color, so light
in tone that each blush was to be seen . . . as vividly as in
the face of the fairest French or American girl."
An advertising image for the Oriental
Dyeing and Cleaning Works published about 1920 indicates how readily
Sacagawea could be plugged into the generic tradition of Indian
princesses. Titled Sakaka-wea (Bird Woman), the print shows "a
shapely Indian princess with perfect caucasian features,"
Gail Guthrie Valaskakis commented, "dressed in a tight-fitting
red tunic, spearing fish with a bow and arrow from a birch-bark
canoe suspended on a mountain-rimmed, moonlit lake."
Fig 4: Advertising
printing, Oriental Dyeing and Cleaning Works, ca. 1920
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The Indian princess is a Miss America
in the making, and Sacagawea retained her "perfect caucasian
features" whether played by an established star in a Hollywood
movie or by a beauty queen in a local historical pageant. Donna
Reed, herself a former beauty queen to whom the word "wholesome"
stuck like glue during her career as a leading lady in the 1940s
and '50s, starred as Sacagawea in The Far Horizons (1955). Publicity
stills show her posed in her buckskin costume more vamp than madonna,
and firmly within the Indian princess tradition.
Fig 5: Donna Reed
as Sacagawea
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A postcard made in 1945 shows a pretty
young white woman in a feather headdress impersonating Sacajawea,
Girl Indian Guide. It is as much a tribute to Cooper's statue
unveiled forty years before as it is to the historical Sacagawea.
It clearly demonstrates how the Portland monument had set the
standard in Sacagawea imagery, literally pointing the way for
later artists.
Fig 6: Sacajawea
postcard, 1945
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Montana's peerless "Cowboy Artist," for one, incorporated
a pointing Sacagawea in his 1917 watercolor design for a monument,
Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea.
Fig 7: Lewis and
Clark and Sacajawea, 1917
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He was responding to a proposal by the
Society of Montana Pioneers in 1916 calling for "the erection
of heroic bronze statues at the Great Falls and at the Three Forks
of the Missouri to commemorate the arrival at these sites during
the summer of 1805 of the Lewis and Clark expedition." Russell's
design was reproduced in the Society's program for its 1917 meeting,
and approval requested of the membership for a "large and
costly monument to be erected at Great Falls in honor of the memory
and achievements of Lewis & Clark .... It is proposed by the
Chamber of Commerce of Great Falls, who inaugurated the movement,
to make the dedication of the monument a National affair . . .
The conception of the idea enlisted at once the services of the
most celebrated of the western artists, Mr. Chas. M. Russell .
. . The clay models of the proposed work is now being prepared
by one of the most celebrated sculptors in the United States,
Mr. Paul Fjelde, whose studio is in New York."
The original plan called for two monuments,
"one to be placed at the City of Great Falls, the other at
the confluence of the three rivers forming the Missouri, the design
of both to be alike." Great Falls objected: it wanted a monument
all its own. Perhaps this disagreement was enough to derail plans.
At any rate, Russell's design would not be rendered into sculptural
form until 1929, three years after his death, and the artist chosen
would be not Paul Fjelde but Henry Lion, a young Los Angeles sculptor
hand-picked by Russell's widow. The net effect was that the intended
monument was never erected in Great Falls, and Lion's sculpture,
intended for placement in Fort Benton instead, was not cast until
years later. Eventually a monument to Lewis and Clark loosely
based on Russell's design would be sculpted by Robert Scriver
and erected in Fort Benton, at the head of navigation on the Missouri,
in 1976. Called Explorers at the Marias, Scriver's group shows
Sacagawea seated at the feet of Lewis and Clark, gazing into the
distance as they attempt to determine the true source of the Missouri
at a fork in the river. Interestingly, she no longer points the
way west.
Fig 8: Explorers
and the Marias, 1976
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