The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (46 page)

100
    Letter from J. H. Sherburne to Old Settlers’ editor, 20 Sept. 1937, Univ. of Montana Library (cited hereafter as UM), K. Ross Toole Archives (cited hereafter as KRTA), Sherburne Family Papers (cited hereafter as SFP), box 1, folder 14.

101
    Schultz,
The Starving Blackfeet Indians.

102
    Letter from Helen P. Clarke to J. H. Sherburne, 1 Dec. 1910, UM, KRTA, SFP, box 10, folder 3.

103
    Letter from Helen P. Clarke to J. H. Sherburne, 11 Jan. 1916, UM, KRTA, SFP, box 33, folder 24.

104
    Letter from Helen P. Clarke to commissioner of Indian affairs, 4 Oct. 1913, NARA, BIA, RG 75, CCF, 1907–39, PI-163, E-121, Blackfeet, box 132, file 12004-1913-312.

105
    Letter from C. F. Hanke to S. B. Hege, 16 Jan. 1914, NARA, BIA, RG 75, CCF, 1907–39, PI-163, E-121, Blackfeet, box 132, file 12004-1913-312.

106
    Letter from Helen P. Clarke, application for a patent in fee, 2 Dec. 1913, NARA, BIA, RG 75, CCF, 1907–39, PI-163, E-121, Blackfeet, box 132, file 12004-1913-312; letter from Helen P. Clarke to commissioner of Indian affairs, 4 Oct. 1913, NARA, ibid.

107
    Letter from [unknown] to Helen P. Clarke, 31 May 1922, UM, KRTA, SFP, box 40, folder 7; letter from J. L. Sherburne to Helen P. Clarke, 7 Feb. 1919, ibid., box 38, folder 6.

108
    Letter from Mary O’Neill to Helen P. Clarke, 28 May 1910, MTHS, HPC, SC 1153, folder 2.

109
    Helen Fitzgerald Sanders,
The White Quiver
(New York: Duffield, 1913).

110
    
Great Falls Tribune,
15 May 1932; Warren L. Hanna,
Stars over Montana: Men Who Made Glacier National Park History
(West Glacier, Mont.: Glacier Natural History Association, 1988), 184.

111
    Transcript of eulogy for Helen Clarke given by Father Halligan, 7 March 1923, MTHS, HPC, SC 1153, folder 4.

112
    Undated reminiscence by Bessie C. Wells, MTHS, HPC, SC 1153, folder 1.

113
    James Willard Schultz,
Signposts of Adventure: Glacier National Park as the Indians Know It
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 155.

114
    Glacier National Park History: http://www.glacierparkinformation.com/his tory (accessed 7 Oct. 2010).

Chapter 5: The Man Who Talks Not

1
    The quote is attributed to the western artist J. K. Ralston. See Loren Pinski, “John L. Clarke, ‘The Man Who Talks Not,’ Blackfeet Woodcarver”: http:// johnclarke.lppcarver.com/clarkearticle.pdf (accessed 11 Jan. 2011).

2
    For a history of the panel’s travels, see author correspondence with Kirby Lambert, 4 Jan. 2011.

3
    Woody Kipp offers a vivid description of such prejudice in his memoir,
Viet Cong at Wounded Knee: The Trail of a Blackfeet Activist
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2004).

4
    Information on the disease from a nineteenth-century perspective can be found in William Osler and Thomas McCrae,
The Principles and Practice of Medicine
(1892; New York: D. Appleton, 1921), 337–48.

5
    Joyce Clarke Turvey, “Clarke History,” in
Trails and Tales of the Highwoods, ed. Highwood Woman’s Club
(Highwood, Mont.: Highwood Woman’s Club, 1988), 84. Contrary to Turvey’s assertion, Ned did not perish from scarlet fever before the family’s move to Midvale in 1889.

6
    Osler and McCrae,
The Principles and Practice of Medicine,
343.

7
    Letter from Helene Dawson Edkins to K. Ross Toole, 10 Oct. 1952, Overholser Historical Research Center, Fort Benton, Mont. My thanks to Ken Robison for help in locating this document. The piano is now on display at the Fort Benton Museum.

8
    Judy Clayton Cornell, “An Artist’s Vision,”
Whitefish: The Magazine of Northwest Montana
6, no. 2 (Winter and Spring, 1993–94), 28; Dale A. Burk,
New Interpretations
(Stevensville, Mont.: Stoneydale Press, 1982), 165.

9
    Multiple sources state that Clarke attended the Fort Shaw Indian School, though his name appears nowhere in that institution’s register of pupils, available at the National Archives and Records Administration–Rocky Mountain Regional Archives, Denver, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Fort Shaw Indian School, vol. 1, 1892–1908, entry 1358. My thanks to Renee Meade for assistance with this research.

10
    The institution was originally called the Connecticut Asylum (at Hartford) for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons. Robert L. Osgood,
The History of Special Education: A Struggle for Equality in American Public Schools
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008), 28–30.

11
    For information on the NDSD, see “North Dakota School for the Deaf History: Early Pioneers and the
Banner
,” available at http://www.nd.gov/ndsd (accessed 14 Jan. 2011).

12
    Robert M. Buchanan,
Illusions of Equality: Deaf Americans in School and Factory, 1850–1950
(Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet Univ. Press, 1999), 52–68. See also Susan Burch,
Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II
(New York: New York Univ. Press, 2002).

13
    Osgood,
The History of Special Education,
28–30. For more on the battle between manualists and oralists, see Douglas C. Baynton,
Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996).

14
    For more on the relationship between the two sign languages, see Jeffrey E. Davis,
Hand Talk: Sign Language among American Indian Nations
(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 99–132.

15
    Lilia Bakken,
North Dakota School for the Deaf Chronological History: The Early Years, 1890–1895
(Devil’s Lake, N.D.: North Dakota School for the Deaf, 2010), 46. My thanks to Dana Turvey for alerting me to this correspondence.

16
    
Daily Missoulian,
24 March 1912, available at http://fortbenton.blogspot .com/2008/12/john-l-clarkes-first-oil-painting.html (accessed 20 Jan. 2011). Three letters from Hill to Clarke (dated 17 Oct. 1911 and 21 and 28 Feb. 1912) confirm the particulars of the story. All are available in Minnesota Historical Society, Louis W. Hill Papers, letterpress books, outgoing correspondence, 67.C.2.3. My thanks to Eileen McCormack for assistance in locating these items. For another version of this story, which does not identify Hill by name and suggests that Clarke’s carving (not painting) attracted notice, see “What Deaf Men Do: Indian Artist,” undated typescript, Gallaudet Univ. Library, Deaf Collections and Archives (cited hereafter as GUA), International Exhibition of Fine Applied Arts by Deaf Artists (cited hereafter as IEFAA), MSS 91, box 2, folder 10.

17
    Brochure from the Arts Club of Chicago, “Catalogue of our Exhibition of Sculpture in Wood by John L. Clarke (Cutapuis), 3 to 26 April, 1934,” GUA, IEFAA, MSS 91, box 2, folder 10.

18
    For more on this concept, see Shepard Krech III,
The Ecological Indian: Myth and History
(New York: Norton, 1999); and Michael E. Harkin and David Rich Lewis, eds.,
Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2007).

19
    Cornell, “An Artist’s Vision,” 28.

20
    The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 10 May 1985, after a strenuous effort to forestall its demolition. John Westenberg, “Montana Deaf and Dumb Asylum,” National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, Montana State Historic Preservation Office, Helena, Mont., 1980; Chere Jiusto, “Trustees for Those Who Come after Us,”
Drumlummon Views
1, nos. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 2006): 177–83, available at http://www.drumlummon.org/images/PDF-Spr-Sum06/DV_1-2_Jiusto .pdf (accessed 24 Jan. 2011), quote p. 180. In 1937 the school moved to Great Falls, where it is still in operation today. Thanks to Kate Hampton for help with this information.

21
    Cornell, “An Artist’s Vision,” 28; notes on life of John L. Clarke [undated], GAU, IEFAA, MSS 91, box 2, folder 11.

22
    For more on the woodworking class (including photos) at Fort Shaw Indian School, see John C. Ewers,
Plains Indian Sculpture: A Traditional Art from America’s Homeland
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), 214–15.

23
    The facility closed in 1983, and has since become Deer Creek Intermediate School in the township of St. Francis, Wisc. For more on the history of St. John’s School, see
Milwaukee Sentinel,
26 March 2006.

24
    For more on the demographics of late-nineteenth-century Milwaukee, see Robert Nesbit and William F. Thompson,
Wisconsin: A History
, 2nd ed. (1973; Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 341–61.

25
    Cornell, “An Artist’s Vision,” 28.

26
    I have found only one exception to this. Cornell claims that on the day of their marriage, John and his fiancée, Mamie Peters Simon, traveled to the nearby town of Whitefish for the ceremony, as “they desired a Catholic wedding.” This is the only reference to John’s religious observance I have discovered. See ibid., 29.

27
    For information on Clarke’s attendance at St. John’s see author correspondence with Shelly Solberg (archivist of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee), 28 Jan. 2011. Burk,
New Interpretations,
166.

28
    John Taliaferro,
Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 12–28.

29
    Ibid., 9.

30
    For a photographic reproduction of the letter itself, see Brian W. Dippie, ed.,
Charles M. Russell, Word Painter: Letters, 1887–1926
(Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum, 1993), 253.

31
    Debate lingers about Russell’s attitude toward Indians. For instance, Taliaferro notes in
Charles M. Russell
(p. 79) that the only surviving erotica produced by the artist involves cowboys having intercourse with native women. Still, the historian Brian W. Dippie, a leading Russell scholar, asserts that “the man known as the ‘Cowboy Artist’ was a sympathetic student of the Indian and a vigorous champion of native rights.” See Dippie, ed.,
Charles M. Russell,
6.

32
    “‘So Understanding,’ Says Wife of the Indian Sculptor John L. Clarke,”
Federal Illustrator 9
(Winter 1926–27): 23. Curiously, in an interview not long before his death, Horace Clarke insisted that the only Montana artist who had true “genius” was Charlie Russell. Whether this was intended as an insult directed at his son is uncertain. See Martha E. Plassmann, notes taken in an interview with Horace Clarke [n.d.], Montana Historical Society (cited hereafter as MTHS), Horace Clarke Reminiscence, SC 540.

33
    Larry Len Petersen,
The Call of the Mountains: The Artists of Glacier National Park
(Tucson: Settlers West Galleries, 2002), 138. Prices come from Bob Morgan, “Reminiscences of John L. Clarke,” 29 Oct. 1993, courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey (copy in author’s possession).

34
    Extensive email correspondence (courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey, in author’s possession) between the editor of
Deaf Life Magazine
and several members of the Great Northern Railway Historical Society from Feb. 2007 to July 2008 produced no conclusive answer on the matter, establishing only that the artist who designed “Rocky” (as the logo came to be known) was either John Clarke or Joe Scheurele, an Austrian-born painter who was part of Charlie Russell’s circle. But the cover of the railroad’s journal,
The Great Northern Goat
2, no. 3 (May 1927), convinced Clarke’s daughter that her father deserves the credit, an opinion shared by the author. For the changing design of the company logo, see Charles R. Wood,
Lines West: A Pictorial History of the Great Northern Railway Operations and Motive Power from 1887 to 1967
(Seattle: Superior Books, 1967), 8.

35
    
Rocky Mountain Leader
26, no. 5 (Feb. 1927): 2–3. Although the awarding institution is listed in the story as the “American Art Galleries of Philadelphia,” I can find no record of such a place and thus assume that the author meant the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which exhibited several of Clarke’s pieces in the teens and twenties.

36
    The
Red Man
3, no. 5 (Dec. 1910): 179. It is worth noting that Malcolm Clarke and his wife Ella were part of the delegation of mixed-bloods that discovered Spopee at St. Elizabeth’s hospital and secured his release (see chapter 4, note 19). Farr,
Blackfeet Redemption,
169–96.

37
    Cornell, “An Artist’s Vision,” 29.

38
    For a thorough history of the ranch (including its complex relationship to Blackfeet land claims), see Charles M. Stone, “What Does It Mean to Be at Hillhouse? Resolve to Understand,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession.

39
    Cornell, “An Artist’s Vision,” 29. See also author interview with Joyce Clarke Turvey, Oct. 2006.

40
    Cornell, “An Artist’s Vision,” 29.

41
    
Rocky Mountain Leader
26, no. 5 (Feb. 1927), 2.

42
    See Erika Marie Bsumek,
Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868–1940
(Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2008); and Elizabeth Hutchinson,
The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915
(Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2009).

43
    Quoted in Ewers,
Plains Indian Sculpture,
p. 216.