The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (34 page)

An Artist to the Core

By the time he died, in March 1934, John Two Guns White Calf could claim status as perhaps the most famous Indian in America. Known far and wide for his travels on behalf of the Great Northern Railway in promoting Glacier National Park, he also became a Shriner as well as a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and counted several U.S. presidents among his personal acquaintances.
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Most of all, Two Guns achieved renown because of the debatable assertion—supported by legions of Piegan friends—that he was the model for the buffalo nickel minted in 1913, which featured an Indian head on the obverse.
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Many daily newspapers and even
Time
magazine printed his obituary.
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Two Guns, however, had another side, one less visible to those who held him up as the apotheosis of the “white man’s Indian.”
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After all, many of his trips to Washington, D.C., culminated with an “oratorical onslaught” regarding the matter of the $1.5 million he believed the government still owed the Piegans for the acquisition of the ceded strip. This was a deeply personal matter for him, because his father, White Calf, had spoken for the Indians in the contentious negotiations in 1895. One correspondent dubbed him the “W[illiam] J[ennings] Bryan of the red race.”
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And though Two Guns passed away before the Piegans debated the Indian Reorganization Act, his half brother, James, was one of the chief opponents of that 1934 legislation, believing that it disadvantaged full-blooded people like the White Calf family.
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Still, in his later years, Two Guns commanded enormous respect from native and non-Indian people alike. On the one hand, he thrilled white guests staying at the Glacier Park Lodge by greeting them each morning at the main entrance, accompanied by a group of fellow tribesmen who entertained with song and dance in the hopes of earning an extra dollar or two.
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Piegans, meanwhile, revered Two Guns for his dedication to the old ways, seen in his traditional dress, his preference for the mother tongue, and his active participation in ceremonial life.

One such admirer was John Clarke, who, as his daughter recalled, held Two Guns in higher esteem than any of the prominent visitors who dropped in at his studio, even John D. Rockefeller Jr. As a tribute to the man, sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, Clarke molded a clay bust of Two Guns, for which the Indian almost surely sat, and later cast it in bronze. The sculpture captures the elderly Piegan with uncanny precision: creased face, distinctive nose, set lips, and braided hair. It is one of Clarke’s finest pieces, and certainly among the most keenly felt, as is suggested by a picture taken shortly after its completion. In the photo Clarke beholds his creation, so that he and the bronze cast appear to be looking directly at each other, with his right hand resting gently on Two Guns’ left shoulder.
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John L. Clarke with bust of Two Guns White Calf, ca. 1930s. Clarke began to explore native themes more explicitly in his midcareer and afterward, as in this sculpture, which depicts a Piegan chief celebrated for his dedication to the tribe’s traditional ways. Courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey.

Clarke’s bust of Two Guns came at a transitional moment in his artistic development, as he began to carve pieces with more explicit native motifs. To be sure, he had portrayed Indian subjects since the earliest days of his career; a photo of his studio from the early twentieth century says as much, revealing a profile sketch of a Piegan warrior tacked to the bottom of his easel. And, of course, he continued to carve animal figures, his stock-in-trade, until the end of his life. Nevertheless, starting in the 1930s Clarke’s work clearly reflected a subtle but significant reorientation toward Indian themes.

Several factors help account for this shift. For one thing, some of these new pieces were commissions, which required Clarke to craft works according to the wishes of his patrons, who were often state or federal sponsors. But this alone is insufficient explanation, for in some sense he needed money less than before, especially after 1947, when he lost both of his dependents: Mamie died after a prolonged battle with heart disease, and Joyce graduated from high school and moved to California a few years later to study photography. Thus what little he earned from selling carved goats and bears to guests visiting Glacier Park was probably enough to sustain him, especially considering that his skill with rod and rifle kept food on the table.

It is also possible that by taking up Indian subjects, particularly in the spectacular friezes of his later years, Clarke was looking to secure his legacy as a master sculptor. Even if by the early 1940s one art publication had dubbed him “the best portrayer of western wildlife in the world,” he probably understood that a reputation resting mostly on the mass production of animal carvings was unlikely to endure.
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Conversely, memorializing the native past in grand fashion, especially the romantic and much happier buffalo days before 1880, held the promise of some form of immortality. This was surely the same sort of thinking that led Charlie Russell to choose cowboys, Indians, bison, and gunfights as the narrative subjects for his epic canvases.

Moreover, by midcentury there was a small but growing shift in the broader culture of white America that celebrated native self-determination and social revival. To be sure, overshadowing these gains at the time were the harsh polices of the Termination Era (1945–60), a period in which the federal government ended its supervision and subsidization of many Indian tribes, hoping that such austere measures would speed the assimilation process.
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Still, even in the depths of that catastrophe can be found the first faint stir-rings of a movement that blossomed in the 1960s, in which artists, actors, musicians, and political activists took up the Indian cause and joined forces with native peoples to advance their interests.
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And yet perhaps the key reason Clarke embraced Indian themes in his midcareer involves a profound awakening to his own native identity. Because nothing in his small collection of personal papers offers conclusive proof of such a transformation, one must look for hints of a more subtle nature. For instance, in older age he often wore a handsome headdress when posing for photographs with his artwork. While a cynic might insist that this was just another affectation meant to appeal to prospective buyers, such a reading seems implausible, or at least incomplete, given that the Indian craze of the early twentieth century was muted during the early years of the Termination Era.

John L. Clarke with carvings, ca. 1950s. In another explicit nod to his native ancestry, Clarke in later years often wore a headdress when posing with pieces of his artwork. Courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey.

Even more telling were Clarke’s efforts to train younger Piegan woodcarvers, among them Albert Racine (1908–84) and especially Willie Weatherwax (1922–98), who loved communicating with Clarke in PISL. Years later Willie’s son Marvin recalled accompanying his father to Clarke’s studio when he was a small child. On one such visit, the boy picked up an extraneous piece of wood and carved a horse head. Clarke was so impressed that he urged Willie to instruct his son, and even worked informally with the boy himself. Marvin remembers, “John would take the special time to teach me how to measure with the different joints on my fingers and my hands in order to make sure everything was the right size.”
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In his own quiet way, then, Clarke strove to ensure that Piegan crafts—made by Piegans—would endure even after his own tools fell silent.

F
OR MOST
A
MERICANS
at that time and ever since, the human face of the Great Depression belonged to the countless white migrants who fled the Dust Bowl of the central Plains for California, and whose haunted visages are captured in the iconic photographs of Dorothea Lange.
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Another group of rural people, reservation-bound Indians, suffered at least as much from the economic downturn of the 1930s. In order to alleviate their misery but also to end the disastrous federal polices of the allotment era, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier, implemented the “Indian New Deal.” Essential to the plan was the restoration of some degree of native self-governance, but Collier aimed also to raise the standard of living among native peoples, and he thus oversaw the construction of new schools and medical facilities.
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Few groups embraced the Wheeler-Howard Act of 1934 with the zeal of the Blackfeet, who saw the tangible results of these federal measures when a new hospital for the reservation opened at Browning in 1937.
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Though backed by federal dollars, the facility was constructed by Indian hands, a reality underscored by three grand friezes carved by John Clarke that flanked the main entrance to the building. Sculpted from Philippine mahogany (which is not mahogany at all, but rather a wood called lauan, prized for its workability and endurance), the pieces depicted Piegan life in the days before Montana’s incorporation into the United States.

Clarke’s carvings for the Blackfeet Community Hospital were almost surely the result of another New Deal program, the Treasury Section of Fine Arts (TSFA). This initiative, which lasted from 1934 to 1938, drew its inspiration from the Mexican muralists project of the 1920s and early 1930s, in which that nation’s federal government paid a variety of painters—most famously José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—to decorate public buildings with epic frescoes depicting Mexican history and culture. In the same vein, U.S. officials in Washington, D.C., awarded more than fourteen hundred commissions to American painters and sculptors to produce artworks for government structures, primarily post offices and courthouses but also buildings on Indian reservations, which fell under the purview of federal administration.
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Like the Mexican muralists, much of whose work celebrated their nation’s indigenous past, many Native American artists who received commissions from the TSFA used their brushes and chisels to celebrate the richness of the country’s Indian heritage. Surely such a perspective informed John Clarke’s plans for his own award, although the project he executed for the new Blackfeet health facility had been underway for more than a decade prior to the hospital’s construction, further evidence of his midcareer embrace of explicitly native themes.

In its loosest form, Clarke’s project for the Blackfeet Community Hospital tells the story of the Piegans from the precontact era to the period of U.S. expansion during the nineteenth century, all in a sequence of three eight- by four-foot panels. The first section, which presumably served as a pilaster to the left of the doorway, depicted a Blackfeet
piskun
, or buffalo jump, which many Plains tribes used to kill bison. The sculpture is a swirl of relentless motion: at the top, two Indians drive the doomed beasts toward the edge of a cliff; on the ground below, two other men armed with spears finish off the dying animals. Clarke’s scene is a testament to native ingenuity: in the absence of many horses or advanced weaponry, the Indians nevertheless manage to reap a bounty that will yield food, tools, clothing, and shelter.

Located above and to the right of this panel was a horizontal scene, occupying the lintel position over the doorway. This tableau indicates the changes in Piegan life wrought by the widespread acquisition of horses by the Blackfeet in the later eighteenth century. With more and better mounts, the Piegans could pursue game on the open prairie instead of relying on the buffalo jump. Dominating the panorama is an Indian on horseback, bow drawn, racing alongside an enormous and terrified bull. In the distance another rider chases a small group of bison running headlong in the opposite direction, seeking refuge from the human threat. From the sweeping vista of the hill country east of the Rockies to the exquisite features of the desperate action in the foreground, the frieze is arresting.