The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West Page 22

  His work from this period appealed to the antimodern aesthetic then in vogue, in form if not necessarily in theme. In the late teens and throughout the twenties, he carved almost exclusively figures of animals encountered in Glacier National Park, often using his favorite medium, cottonwood, which he preferred for its relative softness. If not explicitly “Indian” in terms of their motifs, the lifelike attributes with which Clarke endowed these creations seemed to suggest his distinctive ability, as a person of native ancestry, to commune with such creatures. One reviewer observed in 1926, “[His] cottonwood bears and deer … seem to live and have personality. Many a carver has given us realistic textures, but only occasionally does one underlay them with such knowledge of his subject and such life.”43 What Clarke thought about this sort of essentialism remains a mystery, although if it helped sell his carvings, so much the better.

  ONE OF THE MOST PROMINENT Americans swept up in the Indian craze of the early twentieth century was John D. Rockefeller Jr., the only son of the Standard Oil tycoon. Junior, as he was known (in order to distinguish him from his father), and his family made four trips to the West between 1920 and 1930, traveling in their own private railcar, valued at $125,000 and costing $50,000 a year to maintain, as well as by automobile and on horseback.44 On these sojourns Rockefeller and his wife, Abby, became avid collectors of Indian art, and in time their collection boasted pieces by a variety of indigenous peoples, among them the Apaches, the Nez Perces, and the Sioux, not to mention the obligatory Navajo blankets and silver jewelry.

  If each of the trips had its special marvels—Mesa Verde, Yellowstone, Grand Teton—Rockefeller’s son David insisted that the family’s 1924 trip to Glacier National Park stood out in their collective memory because of the time they spent at a Blackfeet encampment. The group loved the painted teepees, and Junior, though nearly fifty, expressed childish delight when a tribal leader bestowed upon him an honorary Indian name, Imata-Koan (Little Dog). After two weeks spent camping and riding in the rolling countryside east of the park, members of the Rockefeller party retired to the more comfortable accommodations of the Glacier Park Lodge, where they were surprised to find many of the same Indians they had met in the field now providing “local color” for the arriving guests.45

  Sometime during his stay at the lodge, Rockefeller wandered up the road to John Clarke’s studio to have a look. To the young mogul, it was quite a sight. Sitting on the front porch were carvings of a bighorn sheep and a Rocky Mountain goat large enough to serve as visitor seating. It was the inside, however—described years later by one newspaper reporter as “a scene from the animal kingdom”—that really impressed, with its cluttered array of carving tools and works in progress. On the occasion of Rockefeller’s visit, Clarke may have hung back at first, as he usually took the measure of his guests’ interest—if they seemed truly curious, he would then eagerly show them the best pieces.46

  Junior did not disappoint that summer day; he purchased eight items, including a standing grizzly bear nearly three feet tall, as well as one of the finest carvings Clarke ever executed, Fighting Buffaloes, a cottonwood sculpture measuring 11 × 19 × 11 inches that depicts two bison bulls locked in the type of head-to-head combat typical during mating season. Crafted with hammer and chisel, the sculpture exudes an almost tangible power, seen in the animals’ twisted bodies and straining legs. The features were so impressive that they led one critic to liken the piece to the Laocoön Group from ancient Greece, in which three human figures writhe in agony from strangulation by sea serpents.47 Today the carving is a prized part of the David and Peggy Rockefeller Collection, where it resides along with masterpieces by luminaries like Manet, Picasso, and Renoir.48

  If it was a thrill for Clarke to sell pieces to such a famous collector, Rockefeller’s purchases marked merely one of Clarke’s many triumphs during the 1920s and 1930s. For instance, in 1922 he earned $275, to that point his highest commission for a single piece, from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for Bear in a Trap. Six years later he won a silver medal from the Spokane Art Association. And in 1932, at a time when Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers’ Party were waiting in the wings to seize power, a group of sculptors from the village of Oberammergau, a world-renowned woodcarving center in Bavaria, spent part of the summer studying with Clarke at East Glacier Park.

  Clarke’s personal life continued to trump any professional successes. In 1931 he and Mamie traveled to Helena to adopt a two-year-old white girl, whom they named Joyce Marie. Pleased as John was, Mamie might have been even more elated, because she had lost a child during her brief first marriage, and at fifty despaired of ever becoming a mother. Joyce remembers her father as an especially doting parent, which photographs from her youth also suggest. Though he rarely smiled for pictures, many of the images of father and daughter show John beaming, the most touching of which captures the two holding cherished objects: a carved deer in his hand, a rag doll in hers. Like her mother, Joyce became a skilled communicator in sign language.

  John and Joyce Clarke, ca. 1930s. Like her mother, Joyce—who was adopted at the age of two—could communicate easily with John in sign language. Here the two pose with treasured objects. Courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey.

  Despite John’s domestic contentment and artistic accomplishments, times were hardly flush at the Clarke household. Big paydays like the commission from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts or the windfall from the Rockefeller visit were rare; indeed, the economic climate of the time was dire, affecting artists of the 1930s quite profoundly, and he got by mostly selling smaller pieces one at a time. Years later a friend recalled his first encounter with Clarke, during the Christmas season of 1943. That winter John set up a card table in a Helena department store, where he whittled on site and peddled small pieces for “dirt cheap” prices: one dollar for tiny figurines; fifteen to twenty dollars for exquisite six-inch mountain goats and bears.49 Joyce explained, “Looking back … we were poor, but I didn’t realize it,” in part because she could ride horses every day.50 Still, as a little girl Joyce treasured visits from a wealthy family friend who lived in Tacoma, because on those occasions she got to dine at the Glacier Park Lodge, an extravagance her parents could never afford.51

  The challenges facing the Clarkes during the 1930s are underscored in a series of letters between Mamie and Eleanor Sherman, the great-granddaughter of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, founder of the American School for the Deaf as well as the namesake of the national college for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington, D.C. Sherman was the curator of the Hispanic Society of America in New York, but as a deaf person herself, she did extensive volunteer work within the deaf community.52 In this capacity she wrote to John in June 1934 with an invitation to participate in that summer’s International Exhibition of Fine and Applied Arts by Deaf Artists, which she was helping to organize. In her pitch to him, Sherman made a nationalist appeal, informed perhaps by the growing tensions on the other side of the Atlantic: “Europe is sending works of art by 53 artists. … We Americans can sustain the high standard only through the exhibition of paintings, engravings, and carvings by acknowledged leaders such as yourself.”53

  Mamie wrote back immediately to confirm John’s interest, thus initiating a relationship with Sherman that lasted into the next decade. Mamie explained that she would arrange for a number of her husband’s pieces to be shipped from Chicago, where they were on loan to another museum. And while she expressed delight that John’s work would show alongside the likes of the celebrated etcher Cadwallader Washburn, it was neither fame nor patriotism that held the greatest appeal. Rather, as she observed in a later note, “I am so anxious to sell something; we need money, & that is why I priced [the pieces] so very low.”54

  Though some forty items sold during the three-week exhibition, John’s works were not among them. Ever resourceful, Mamie asked that Sherman keep John’s entries on hand in New York, in the hope that Sherman might find a display space or even a gallery to e
xhibit them. In an act of great kindness, Sherman agreed and spent much of the next seven years serving the Clarkes informally as John’s agent. Understanding their perilous financial situation, she refused to accept any commission, which could amount to over 50 percent of the sale price. Mamie, however, insisted that Sherman take 20 percent.

  John, Joyce, and Mamie Clarke, ca. 1930s. While John achieved professional renown (if not financial security) in the 1920s and 1930s, he found even greater satisfaction in his home life. Courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey.

  Sherman worked doggedly on the Clarkes’ behalf, exploring multiple sales opportunities, including the submission of a bear carving as a raffle prize and the installation of some pieces in a display at the Abercrombie and Fitch flagship store, then at Madison Avenue and Forty-Fifth Street in Manhattan. The return on her efforts was negligible, however. That led to plaintive letters from Mamie stressing the family’s indigence. Consider this typical missive from July 1939: “We need money at present very much. … I’ve been ill all spring & summer.”55 In order to augment his meager income, John offered a carving class at Browning High School during the 1936–37 school year, and starting in the 1940s he, Mamie, and Joyce spent several winters in Great Falls, where John taught at the Montana School for the Deaf and Dumb, which, with a slightly amended name, had relocated from Boulder in 1937.

  Sherman’s relationship with the Clarkes ended amicably but abruptly during the winter of 1940–41, for reasons that are unclear. Perhaps she became too busy at the Hispanic Society or wanted to focus on her recent marriage to Juan Font, a Puerto Rican who served as the art director at various Spanish-language publications. In any event, the rupture surely disappointed John and especially Mamie, who fretted even more about money as her health began to deteriorate. Though praise for John’s work was abundant, sales were poor, a contradiction in terms that Charlie Russell observed in his letter to John in 1918: “Your worke is like mine maney people like to look at it but there are few buyers.” John could only take cold comfort from that message; admiration was nice, but financial stability was better yet.

  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.56 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.57 Many daily newspapers and even Time magazine printed his obituary.58

  Two Guns, however, had another side, one less visible to those who held him up as the apotheosis of the “white man’s Indian.”59 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.”60 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.61

  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.62 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.63

  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.64 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.65 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.66

  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 p
osing 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.”67 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.

  FOR MOST AMERICANS 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.68 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.69