The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West Page 20
The panel had a curious history. It was commissioned in the early 1950s for the MHS, and Clarke executed the frieze on-site, using modern tools (electric drills) as well as more traditional ones (hammer and chisel). When it was completed in 1956, however, its size—thirteen feet long and four feet high—exceeded the display space, and so the MHS lent it to the University of Montana in Missoula. There it hung in the campus field house for the next three decades, presiding over boxing matches, college basketball games, and even a concert by the Grateful Dead, before finding a second home in Great Falls at the Montana School for the Deaf and Blind. Seven years later the MHS reclaimed the panel as the centerpiece for the planned retrospective. Ever since, it has welcomed visitors from its perch just inside the building’s entrance.2
The peregrinations of Blackfeet Encampment stand in marked contrast to the permanence of its creator. Except for short stints at several boarding schools during his childhood and adolescence, John Clarke spent virtually his entire life on the Blackfeet Reservation and its immediate environs. Even as his artworks impressed American and European audiences and found homes in the personal collections of President Warren G. Harding and John D. Rockefeller Jr., Clarke himself remained rooted firmly in place.
There were, of course, compelling reasons for him to stay put. For one thing, his deafness, coupled with his sustained poverty, imposed significant limitations. For another, he was deeply attached to the environment of northern Montana, which inspired his artistry and furnished unparalleled opportunities for outdoor recreation. Indeed, one photo from his youth neatly captures these twin passions: Clarke, rifle in hand, posing proudly outside a log cabin in the dead of winter, with a landscape painting and two carved bears resting on a ledge nearby.
There was likely another reason behind Clarke’s persistence in East Glacier Park, however. It had become harder for peoples of mixed ancestry to negotiate life beyond the reservation boundaries. What had been a permeable membrane for his aunt Helen, one through which she passed often if not always easily, had thickened as the twentieth century wore on. The gulf between the races was perhaps most obvious at the edges of the Blackfeet Reservation, in places like Cut Bank, the nearly all-white town on the eastern side whose residents and shopkeepers looked upon Indian visitors with withering hostility. In time the difference between full and mixed-blood peoples held meaning primarily on the reservation itself; to whites living nearby, anyone with obvious native ancestry was simply “Indian.”3
In truth, such distinctions based on degree of blood seem to have meant little to John Clarke, who considered himself a Piegan. This is not to say that he denied his Anglo ancestry or showed antipathy toward whites; quite the contrary—he married a white woman, with whom he adopted a white daughter. And he had numerous white benefactors, patrons, and friends. Nevertheless, his life and career suggest that, in the end, he identified more with Coth-co-co-na’s people than with Malcolm Clarke’s, and thus chose to walk primarily in one world, not two.
John L. Clarke, ca. 1910s. This photo captures Clarke’s twin passions: hunting and art. The one pursuit informed the other, as his adventures in Glacier country allowed him to observe closely the wildlife he later rendered in cottonwood. Courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey.
A World of Muffled Sound
Until the twentieth-century advent of antibiotics like penicillin, scarlet fever was a childhood scourge. Parents of afflicted youngsters had little warning of the horrors about to ensue—perhaps a complaint of slight malaise or a passing chill. Yet when the disease took hold, terrifying symptoms appeared in rapid succession: convulsive vomiting, powerful spasms, and then a fever rising to 105 degrees or beyond. Usually by the second day, victims bore the telltale rash (the result of toxin released by the bacteria), a constellation of red dots emanating from the neck and chest and spreading eventually over the patient’s entire body.
Though not as lethal as smallpox, scarlet fever still exacted its own grim toll. In the late nineteenth century the Boston City Hospital reported a mortality rate of nearly 10 percent for patients afflicted with the disease, and a rate two to three times higher during especially severe outbreaks. Though adults were also susceptible, children, particularly those under the age of six, were the principal victims. In the absence of any known treatment, anguished parents could do little except alleviate the discomfort and pray for recovery, which could take weeks.4
Horace Clarke and his wife, Margaret, called First Kill by the Piegans, of whom she was a full-blooded member, knew intimately the terrors of scarlet fever. During the 1880s the sickness passed through their modest ranch in Highwood, Montana, like the angel of death. Though it spared their children Malcolm, Ned, and Maggie, it carried off four other boys all under the age of five. And it ravaged another, John, destroying his ability to hear.5
The malady seized John in the autumn of 1883, when he was two and half years old. The timing was typical of the disease, which tended to strike in spring and fall, as were its side effects. A leading medical sourcebook from the time identified scarlet fever as a chief cause of deafness in children, owing to the spread of inflammation from the throat to the middle ear, which in acute cases led to permanent hearing loss. Though it could not have seemed so at the time, John was actually among the fortunate, for he escaped other dire complications such as kidney failure and meningitis.6
Margaret must have played some role in her son’s care, which probably involved swabbing his feverish body with a wet cloth and moisturizing his skin as it began to slough off after the rash subsided, but she would have been limited by her pregnancy with Maggie, who was born on Christmas Eve 1883. Thus, responsibility for John probably fell to Horace’s mother, Coth-co-co-na, and especially to Horace’s sister Isabel, who had recently returned from her aunt Charlotte’s Minneapolis home, where she had spent the decade after their father’s murder. The siblings were close; in fact, knowing Isabel’s love of music, Horace sometime around 1880 arranged for the shipment of a piano upriver from St. Louis.7
How the family initially reacted to John’s impairment is unknown, but for the little boy with black hair and dark complexion, it must have been frightening to be suddenly unable to hear the timbre of his parents’ voices or the gentle lowing of the family cattle. Moreover, John’s deafness sharply ended his acquisition of speech at just the moment that many children experience rapid linguistic development. Supposedly, he was capable of only one sound—an alarmed yell—and as a child he was prone to violent tantrums when he could not make himself understood.8 Still, he could see with perfect clarity as adults conversed around him, as his aunt Isabel delighted visitors with her piano playing and, most poignantly, as his older brothers left with their aunt Helen for the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania.
John, by contrast, had no access to proper education until he was a teenager, because the closest Indian school at Fort Shaw, on the other side of Great Falls, made no accommodation for students with disabilities.9 Presumably, he spent the majority of his time at Horace’s side, tending the Clarke livestock and, after the family moved to Midvale around 1889, accompanying his father on hunting and fishing trips into the wilds that later became Glacier National Park. Such excursions stimulated his other senses—the smell of pine, the taste of wild berries, the sting of glacier-fed streams. But the sight of fauna left the deepest impression upon John: playful grizzly bears and sleek mountain lions, proud bighorn sheep and sure-footed mountain goats.
This idyll, if that it was, came to an abrupt conclusion in the fall of 1894 when John left for the bleak hamlet of Devil’s Lake, some seven hundred miles distant, to attend the North Dakota School for the Deaf. Why his parents chose that institution is uncertain, especially since Montana had established its own such facility just south of Helena the year before. Perhaps it was the NDSD’s strong academic reputation and its visionary superintendent that swayed them, or the handsome new schoolhouse made of brick and featuring amenities like wood-burning stoves and oil lamps. By contrast, the fle
dging Montana school operated in a leased two-story house.
If the choice of North Dakota was unusual, the timing was probably not, for John’s world began unraveling in the early 1890s, starting with the breakup of his parents’ marriage. After some fifteen years together, Horace and Margaret “quit each other,” in the parlance of the day. While in times past John might have turned to his aunts for comfort, they were largely unavailable as this family crisis unfolded: Helen was working in Indian Territory, and in 1891 Isabel had married Tom Dawson, the mixed-blood son of a prominent American Fur Company trader. His grandmother Coth-co-co-na was in failing health and died the following summer, leaving John effectively alone, at age thirteen, to confront the dissolution of his home life. Little wonder, then, that his parents chose that moment to ship him off to school.
FORMAL INSTRUCTION FOR the deaf in the United States began in 1817 with the establishment of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, the first permanent institution of its kind in the nation.10 By the end of the nineteenth century such institutions could be found across the country, although rural areas remained chronically underserved, a problem that preoccupied Anson Rudolph Spear, a twenty-nine-year-old deaf Minnesotan. Spear had studied briefly at Gallaudet College, founded in 1864 in Washington, D.C., and later worked at the Census Bureau before returning home to the Twin Cities in the early 1880s. In particular, he worried that deaf children in the new state of North Dakota—admitted to the union in 1889 and bordering Minnesota immediately to the west—would suffer from limited learning opportunities.
During North Dakota’s inaugural legislative session, Spear became a fixture in the halls of the state capital at Bismarck, lobbying members of the house and the senate to remember the most disadvantaged of their constituents. His efforts paid off when on the very last day of the session the legislature overrode the veto of the state’s parsimonious governor and endorsed a bill providing for the creation of the NDSD. Housed originally in a vacant bank building, the school opened its doors in the fall of 1890, welcoming twenty-three students. Spear became the first superintendent, thought to be the youngest leader of a state-run educational institution anywhere in the country.11
From the beginning the NDSD was a family operation. Spear’s deaf wife, Julia, a handsome woman with sandy hair worn in a bun, served as the school’s matron, handling all the cooking and cleaning and assuming her husband’s administrative duties when illness incapacitated him. Julia’s younger sister, Clara Halvorson, who could hear, accepted an appointment as the NDSD’s first teacher. And the Spears had a dog, an enormous Saint Bernard named Kent who, true to the popular image of the breed, loved to frolic in the snow, a trait that forever endeared him to the children.
This welcoming atmosphere eased the inevitable homesickness and anxiety that students experienced, which must have been particularly acute for John Clarke when he arrived just before Thanksgiving in 1894. After all, the boy was much farther from home than most of his fifty-odd classmates and stood out as perhaps the only one among them with native ancestry. Maybe the Christmas party that year, described lovingly in the school newspaper, lifted his spirits: “The pupils’ dialogues were done in sign language. The Christmas tree was prettily decorated with colored candles. … Promptly at 7:30 P.M. Santa Claus rapped on the window. What followed can only be imagined.”
John soon learned that while such merriment had its place at the NDSD, it was secondary to the academic aims promoted by Anson Spear. Photos of the bespectacled superintendent suggest that he was aptly named—thin and sharp, with dark, piercing eyes. And he was utterly devoted to his work. Central to Spear’s educational vision was his belief in manualism, which placed him on one side of a contentious and enduring debate. Advocates of this approach favored the teaching of American Sign Language (ASL), which was thought to unite the deaf by a common means of communication and, by extension, a similar set of cultural experiences.12
After the Civil War, however, another instructional method gained momentum, one that emphasized lipreading and the acquisition of speech. These oralists insisted that deafness was a handicap to be overcome on the road to inclusion in mainstream society, and that reliance upon hand signs imposed unnecessary and humiliating segregation on the deaf. Especially with the establishment in 1867 of the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, proponents of oralism made significant inroads in American deaf education, and by century’s end they had achieved rough parity with the manualists.13
Spear, however, remained doggedly committed to manualism and the larger goal of building a national deaf community. To that end, he incorporated vocational instruction into the NDSD curriculum, so that graduates emerged with self-reliance and a firm set of job skills, insulating them against potential prejudice from the hearing. Thus, in addition to instruction in basic subjects like reading, writing, and mathematics, girls learned sewing and needlework while boys like John trained as printers on a small, foot-powered press.
The two and a half years John Clarke spent at the NDSD had profound implications for the rest of his life. For one thing, Spear’s devotion to manualism meant that John never learned to lip-read, a fact that in later years surprised some of the visitors to his art studio. On the other hand, John became fluent in ASL during his time in North Dakota, which he augmented with Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL), a centuries-old form of communication that developed among the many Great Plains tribes, which shared no mutual spoken tongue (ASL and PISL are lexically similar but linguistically unrelated).14
John’s time in North Dakota helped, too, in the acquisition of the skills he needed to communicate with those inexpert in signed communication. Shortly after his arrival in the fall of 1894, John composed the first missive he ever sent, which contained the letters of the alphabet, a handful of words he had learned, and the transcription of a sentence. His father was deeply moved, and wrote in reply, “My Dear, Dear Son, How thankful I am that a kind Providence has provided you the means to make known your thoughts. I trust that by spring you will be able to write understandingly and intelligently. This letter of yours being the first, I will cherish and keep always.”15
As important as the development of literacy and communication skills was the hardy work ethic that Spear preached and modeled and that took root in John. In his adulthood, Clarke treated woodcarving as a vocation, laboring at it almost every day and using his skills to support himself and his family, precisely the self-reliance that Spear had envisioned. Clarke was so dedicated to his craft that he packed carving tools among his personal effects when he entered the hospital for what turned out to be the last time. And yet a life of such purpose and creativity was scarcely imaginable in June 1897 when he left Devil’s Lake for home and an uncertain future.
A RECURRING THEME in the legend of John L. Clarke is that he was discovered sometime before World War I by Louis W. Hill, the president of the Great Northern Railway. According to a contemporary newspaper article, after a guided hike through the backcountry of Glacier National Park, Hill noticed his Indian escort intently sketching a lovely panorama of Glacier’s Two Medicine Falls using a lead pencil and a piece of rough board. When Hill asked the young man what he was drawing, Clarke communicated that he was “just putting down what Great Spirit heap up hisself.”16
The railroad magnate was sufficiently impressed that, upon returning to his home in St. Paul, he shipped some proper materials to Clarke so that the prodigy might execute the scene in oil. Shortly after Christmas, Hill opened a package from Montana and “was suddenly taken back to ‘God’s Own Country,’ as he expressed it … clothed in all the radiance of its gorgeous, natural garb.” The tableau enjoyed prominent display in the family mansion for years thereafter.
Central to this account is the notion that Clarke “was a born artist and came into the light of things artistic with nature as his only teacher.” A catalog for one of his art exhibits many years later was even more explicit in making this point: “Nearly full blo
oded, [Clarke] takes the natural Indian’s delight in hunting and fishing and to this he adapted his early carving in wood.”17 Though it conjures up the hoary stereotype of the “ecological Indian” who lives in perfect harmony with his surroundings, there was at least some truth in this telling.18 As Clarke himself explained much later, he began experimenting with forms at a tender age: “When I was a boy I first used mud that was solid or sticky enough from any place I could find it,” including the riverbanks near his home.19
Even if John showed creative promise early in his youth, it is inaccurate to suggest that he was entirely self-taught, a claim that others, including his wife, made occasionally but that he himself never did. As it happened, two brief yet critical interventions around the turn of the twentieth century harnessed his abilities and propelled him into a career as a woodcut artist. The first of these took place just after Christmas 1898, when John left his father’s home at Midvale, where he had lived since returning from the NDSD eighteen months before, and traveled two hundred miles south to the small town of Boulder, Montana.
Established in the early 1860s as a stagecoach stop between Fort Benton and the goldfields of the territory’s southwestern corner, Boulder took its name from the huge rocks cluttering the small valley where it nestled. The settlement rose to local prominence in the 1880s, thanks to some nearby hot springs and especially its designation as the seat of Jefferson County. The town fathers capitalized on this momentum to lure a range of state institutions during the early years of the next decade, among them the Montana Deaf and Dumb Asylum.
Located originally in a rented home, the school upgraded to an extraordinary new facility on the town’s east side just months before John Clarke’s matriculation. Fashioned from vermillion-colored bricks and combining the Italianate and Renaissance Revival styles that were popular at the time, the structure boasted a gabled roof, cantilevered granite stairways, maple floors, a glazed tile fireplace, and other flourishes. One reporter who happened to be deaf and “semi-mute” himself wrote, “Anyone taking the time to visit this school will go away with the feeling that this is a mighty good world to live in, especially the section called Montana, since she treats her unfortunates in such a splendid manner.”20