Exhibits
> Sacajawea > Part 3
Sacagawea Imagery, part 3
by Brian W. Dippie
After Cooper, the pointing Sacagawea
had become something of a cliche. Inspired by Russell's design,
his Great Falls neighbor Jessie Lincoln Mitchell modeled Sacagawea
in a fringed dress, baby peering over her shoulder, right hand
pointing. Mitchell intended her figure to stand at the Gates of
the Mountains, near Helena. She took her working model to Russell
for criticism. If a Mandan or Shoshone woman "was ever caught
with her buckskin skirt up to her knees and her dress off her
shoulders like this," he told her, "the old chief wouldn't
look around for a white man to scalp!" He made other costume
suggestions, and Mitchell incorporated them in her final design,
noting that "my model of Sacajawea was to that extent guided
by Russell." Cyrus Dallin, renowned in his day as a sculptor
of Indian men--his equestrian statue Appeal to the Great Spirit
(1909) remains probably his best known work--created a model of
Sacajawea in 1914 showing her stepping forward, left arm at her
side, right arm extended, pointing.
Fig 9: Sacajawea,
Cyrus Dallin 1914
|
Lincoln Borglum subsequently proposed a huge Sacagawea monument,
530 feet high, to be made of steel, concrete and glass, that would
stand near the Mandan village north of Bismarck, North Dakota;
his model for the figure was said to be an actual descendant of
Sacagawea, who again would be portrayed pointing with her right
hand. Borglum's ambitious monument was never erected, but a marble
relief sculpture by Leo Friedlander showing a standing Sacagawea
pointing the way for the mounted explorers was dedicated at the
Oregon State Capitol in Salem. in 1938. Known as Lewis and Clark
Led by Sacajawea, its base carries the legend "Westward the
star of empire takes its way."
Fig 10: Lewis and
Clark led by Sacajawea, 1938
|
School history texts in the twentieth century routinely featured
Lewis and Clark illustrations showing Sacagawea as guide; one
can serve for the many: The Bird Woman Showing Lewis and Clark
the Way illustrated Thomas M. Marshall's American History (1935),
and serves as a direct tribute to Cooper's enduring influence.
Fig 11: The Bird
Woman Showing Lewis and Clark the Way
|
The pointing figure of Sacagawea has
become so familiar that it seems almost inevitable. Could she
have been shown any other way? In fact, it took time for Sacagawea
to be enshrined as the expedition's guide in Lewis and Clark imagery.
In many paintings from the early 1900s she was a passive witness
to events rather than an active participant in them. In Lewis
and Clark, one in a series of ten paintings on the theme "Great
Explorers" published in Collier's Weekly in 1905-06, Frederic
Remington, who rarely included women in his work, showed Sacagawea
standing behind her husband, Charbonneau, looking on as Lewis
and Clark, seated in the foreground, map out their strategy.
Fig 12: Lewis and
Clark, Frederic Remington 1906
|
His portrayal of Sacagawea resembles a sculpture by Bruno Lewis
Zimm exhibited at the St. Louis World's Fair (officially, the
Louisiana Purchase International Exposition) in 1904, where one
of Remington's celebrated cowboy groups was also on display. Zimm
showed his Sacagawea with a walking stick--a convention that was
adopted by Edgar S. Paxson, a Montana painter, in standing portraits
of Sacagawea painted in 1904 and 1914.
Fig 13: (left) Sacajawea,
Edgar S. Paxson 1904
|
It is noteworthy that the earlier of the two portraits showed
Sacagawea leaning on her stick gazing off in the distance, while
that done in 1914, after Cooper's Portland monument had attracted
considerable attention, shows her pointing with her left hand.
Old conventions died hard. But another
impressive early monument, Leonard Crunelle's Sakakawea, provided
an alternative to Alice Cooper's conception. Unveiled in 1910
on the North Dakota State Capitol Grounds in Bismarck, it marked
the beginning point of Sacagawea's journey, as the Portland monument
marked its western end. Relying on a portrait of Mink Woman, a
Hidatsa, Crunelle created a standing figure, chin raised, eyes
fixed on distant prospects, her baby boy gazing over her shoulder,
mirroring his mother's gaze.
Fig 14: Sakakawea,
Leonard Crunelle 1910
|
Though never as influential as Cooper's statue, Crunelle's Sakakawea
shared the same motivation (both were commissioned by local Women's
Clubs to honor a woman's achievements) and left its own imprint
on later depictions. D. Handsaker s textbook illustration of 1932,
Sacaiawea, an Indian Girl, is a case in point.
Fig 15: Sacajawea,
an Indian Girl, D. Handsaker, 1932
|
An interesting variation in Sacagawea imagery was introduced
in 1905 with Henry Altman's equestrian portrait. Other artists
have followed suit, but a mounted Sacagawea has never had the
obvious appeal of a standing Sacagawea pointing off in the distance.
Recent artists have mostly avoided the finger-pointing cliche,
though it was revived in two of the original designs for the Sacagawea
"gold dollar" first minted in 2000, and in a 1991 sculpture
by John M. Soderberg, Birdwoman. A new trend in Sacagawea imagery--including
the likeness on the dollar coin--recognizes that she was still
in her teens when she accompanied Lewis and Clark. Michael Haynes'
standing portrait Sacagawea shows her as round faced and small,
a girl/woman who was herself a mother, and a historian has recently
dampened the celebratory tone of Sacagawea imagery by pointing
out that she was never in control of her own destiny. She accompanied
the expedition as a hostage to the decisions of others, Albert
Furtwangler writes, not as an independent actor.
But Sacagawea has long since transcended such historical realism.
She continues to be the glamorous Indian princess in paintings
faithful to the conventions of historical romance--her blanket
flies out behind her in the cover art for Anna Lee Waldo's best-selling
novel Sacajawea (1979), an image indebted to N. C. Wyeth's famous
1909 painting Winter (Wyeth also painted a pointing Sacagawea
in 1939). If too many sentimental pictures of her festooned in
feathers, at once demure and seductive, or stroking a horse's
muzzle, all tender love, begin to cloy, there is a potent antidote
in Harry Jackson's monumental 1980 sculpture Sacajawea at the
Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming. Jackson portrays
her as an American madonna, her blanket billowing, her hair streaming
in the wind, rooted in her native soil, Powerful and permanent,
she is no hand-maiden to white ambition; she is the earth itself.
Fig 16: Sacajawes,
Harry Jackson, 1980
|
TOP
|
