The Call of the Mountains
The Artists of Glacier National Park
June 27 to October 12, 2002
|
Crown
of the Continent
The
explorers of the Northern Rocky Mountains, and the men
who brought the railroad to the Flathead Valley and the
magical region we now call Glacier National Park. George
Bird Grinnell, Dr. Lyman Sperry,
Albert Sperry, Louis Hill, Bill Kenny
& the Great Northern Goat (graphically designed by Joe
Scheuerle), homesteader Lee Kerr, and
longtime educator Robert Scriver. Other great painters
traveled through the area, like Carl Rungius, Guy Wiggins,
and Clayton Staples.
|
George Bird Grinnell (1849
- 1938) Born on September 20, 1849 in Brooklyn, Grinnell spent
his early years growing up on a former estate of naturalist John
James Audubon. Here, he developed an interest in ornithology
while peering from Audubon's very window.
As he grew older, Grinnell suffered from neurasthenia, a trendy
malady common among men of the upper class. Characterized by
headaches and sleeplessness, neurasthenia was attributed to
excessive study and nervous strain. Grinnell's treatment was to
explore the American West. His frontier adventures began in
1870. Through his travels, he found himself irresistibly drawn
to everything the West had to offer, including Native
Americans.
Grinnell viewed Native People as instructors. In one article he
wrote for Forest and Stream titled "What We May
Learn from the Indian," he described how they protected the
game on which they survived by practicing proven methods of
conservation in hunting. In later trips he witnessed the
senseless slaughter of wildlife. Due to his growing reputation
as a sportsman who enjoyed hunting but loathed the wanton
killing of wildlife.
Forest and Stream hired Grinnell as its natural history
editor in the spring of 1876. For $10 a week, he wrote book
reviews and several pages of copy while still working on his
doctorate at Yale in Osteology and Vertebrate Paleontology. From
his earliest days at Forest and Stream, Grinnell bought
stock in the company. By 1880 he owned almost one third of the
magazine and eventually became its president and editor. For
years Grinnell championed the formation of a private
organization to protect the rapidly changing West.
In May 1884, he wrote in Forest and Stream about the need
for an "association of men bound together by their interest
in game and fish, to take active charge of all matters
pertaining to the enactment and carrying out of laws on the
subject." The Boone and Crockett Club was established in
1887. Its members shared an enthusiasm for big game hunting
while loathing the disastrous effects both market hunters and
settlers had on the wildlife population. Grinnell remained the
group's most influential member. He embodied the principles the
club stood for, wrote most of the Boone and Crockett book series
on hunting and conservation, and advocated as one of its
objectives to explore the only "wild and unknown…
portions of the country" that still existed - including the
St. Mary region in northwestern Montana.
Grinnell's first visit to the St. Mary Region
George Bird Grinnell is considered by most to be the father of
Glacier National Park. It was through much of his efforts that
the "Crown of The Continent" became designated a
National Park on May 11, 1910. Grinnell first visited the St
Mary region in northwestern Montana in September 1885. His
interest in this area was peaked after reading James Willard
Schultz's poignant description in a Forest and Stream
article entitled To Chief Mountain.
Grinnell wrote Schultz and asked if he would guide him on a
hunt. As the men reached a mountain ridge overlooking a
valley, heavy clouds moved in. They began their descent in
falling snow. Grinnell's enthusiasm was not diminished and he
wrote these words to describe the experience:
"An artist's palette, splashed with all the hues of his
color box, would not have shown more varied contrasts. The rocks
were of all shades, from pale gray, through green and pink, to
dark red, purple and black, and against them stood out the pale
foliage of the willows, the bright gold of the aspens and
cottonwoods, the vivid red of the mountain maples and ash, and
the black of the pines. In the valley were …lakes, turbid and
darkly blue, somber evergreens; on the mountain side foaming
cascades, with their white whirling mist wreathes, gray blue ice
masses, and fields of gleaming snow. Over all arched a leaden
sky, whose shadows might dull, but could never efface, the
bewildering beauty of this mass of color."
Blackfoot Lodge Tales
In 1889, Grinnell wrote his first book on Indian life, Pawnee
Hero Stories and Folk-Tales with Notes on the Origin, Customs,
and Character of the Pawnee People. It received critical and
popular acclaim. Encouraged by the public's acceptance of a work
on Native Americans, Grinnell urged his friend James Willard
Schultz to write a book on the Blackfeet. Though he had already
written Life Among the Blackfeet for Forest and Stream,
Schultz desired someone else to write the first major book about
these people. Schultz sincerely believed Grinnell should be the
author and provided him with insightful notes.
Grinnell wanted to finish mapping the St. Mary and Swiftcurrent
regions and further explore the glacier above Upper St. Mary
Lake. In 1891, on his sixth trip to the St. Mary area, Grinnell
brought along William H. Seward, Jr. and Henry L. Stimson,
fellow classmates from Yale. Schultz was the party's guide, and
asked Billy Jackson, an Indian scout to join the group. Grinnell
named mountains in honor of these friends: Stimson, Jackson, and
Charles E. Reynolds, managing editor of Forest and Stream.
After the trip, Grinnell stayed on at the Blackfeet Reservation,
gathering information for his book. Published in 1892 by Charles
Scribner's Sons, Blackfoot Lodge Tales: The Story of a
Prairie People, stands as one of the most remarkable works
ever published on native people. Grinnell's sincere empathy for
the plight of all American Indians was in direct opposition to
the popular doctrine of manifest destiny where nature and
"nature's people" were but minor irritants to the
spread of progress.
His words, written over one hundred years ago said in part: "The
most shameful chapter of American history is that in which is
recorded in the account of dealings with the Indians. The story
of our government's intercourse with this race is an unbroken
narrative of injustice, fraud, and robbery. Our people have
disregarded honesty and truth whenever they have come in contact
with the Indian..."
The Great Northern Railway
Goat
Retold from the National
Editorial Association Outing on board the Great Northern
Railway's N. E. A. Special July 27, 1922: In the cosmopolitan sixth ward of South
Minneapolis, there was a newsboy, Billy Kenny. To keep pace with
the volume of his business he established the first corner
newspaper stand in his hometown. The Sunday morning papers
furnished too great a load for little Billy to carry, so he got
a Billy goat from another kid. He hitched up his companion for
real business, and transported his heavy load of Sunday editions
from "Newspaper Alley" to his street corner stand. One
day particular neighbors complained of the personal odor in the
block where Billy kept his goat. They got Billy's goat. He
couldn't keep it out in the woodshed any more. He sold the
animal to a rancher living near Midvale, Montana, who advertised
that he had some young mountain goats he had captured and wanted
a distinctive type of long-whiskered domesticated goat to
cross-breed with the wild Rocky Mountain Goat. Billy's goat
answered the description -- he had the longest goatee of any
Billy goat in South Minneapolis. Billy Kenny had been learning
telegraphy, and it was not long before he was on the payroll of
Hill's railway system. Twenty-five years later he was on the top
rung of the ladder. One day while traveling the Great Northern
system in his private car, business necessitated a stop-over at
the town of Midvale, Montana, which had changed its name to
Glacier Park Station. Vice President Kenny wondered if the old
rancher who bought newsboy Kenny's Billy goat was still in that
community. He was not. The railway official made inquiry and
learned the man had died. "Well, what became of the goats
he was raising?" Mr. Kenny inquired. "The country up
there is full of 'em -- way to the Canadian boundary, "
replied Tom Dawson* who remembered the goat ranch well.
"They all got out one night about 20 years ago and answered
the call of the wild." The first day out on a mountain
trail in the Many Glacier country Kenny saw goats galore. He
trained his binoculars upon a high-up ledge, and there he was, a
veritable reincarnation of the goat that used to haul his
newspapers for him in his boyhood days. "There," said
Kenny to Louis W. Hill, who was in the party, "There is a
grandson of my Billy goat. I couldn't mistake that goatee. He
couldn't have that unless he inherited it from my goat."
That settled right there and then the problem that had been
perplexing Mr. Hill, chairman of the Great Northern Railway, for
a couple of years. "He's our trademark, Bill," Mr.
Hill said to Kenny. "No other animal of these mountains
deserves more respect and fame than this great-great-grandson of
your hometown Billy goat. He certainly had a life of romance and
adventure." * Tom Dawson's portrait by Reinold Weiss is in
the gallery near the elevator.
Waterton - Glacier International Peace Park Montana's
Glacier National Park and Alberta's Waterton Lakes National Park
meet at the border between the United States and Canada. The
parks have been jointly designated a World Heritage Site by
UNESCO. The International Peace Park symbolizes the peace and
goodwill between the United States and Canada as exemplified by
the world's longest undefended border (8,892 km/ 5,525 miles).
It is the world's first such park. John "Kootenai"
Brown, Waterton Lakes' first park official, and Henry Reynolds,
a Glacier National Park ranger (colorfully referred to as
"Death-on-the-trail" because he was such a fast hiker)
first proposed the idea for the park in the early 1900s.
The following is a brief overview of it's evolution:
In 1783, peacemakers had
the difficult task of deciding where the boundary between the
British colonies and the new American republic would be. They
drew lines on paper over lands with which they were unfamiliar.
In western North America. The British and Americans agreed to
divide the countries along the 49th parallel across the prairie
from Lake of the Woods in the east to the Rocky Mountains. The
area on the west side of the mountains was still under dispute.
This long standing border dispute was finally settled peacefully
with the signing of the Oregon Treaty on June 15, 1846. The
boundary was extended west along the 49th parallel, with Canada
retaining Vancouver Island. As it turned out the lines drawn on
paper were all skewed on the land and no one was quite sure
where the 49th parallel was.
Between 1857 and 1861, a British
party lead by J.S. Hawkins and an American party lead by A.
Campbell surveyed the border from the Pacific coast to Upper
Waterton Lake. Between 1872 and 1874 a second British survey
lead by Major D. R. Cameron and another by Campbell mapped out
the boundary from Lake of the Woods westward to Upper Waterton
Lake.
Many features in the park today were named after the men
involved with these surveys. Kootenay Lakes Forest Park (Waterton
Lakes National Park) was established in 1895 and by 1910 Glacier
had become a National Park as well.
Henry Reynolds and John
Brown felt the lake and valley could not and should not be
divided. The parks shared the same geology, climate and ecology.
Animal populations and local people continued to use the area in
the same manner (although the Kootenay began calling Upper
Waterton Lake "Lake Split In Two").
"The Geology
recognizes no boundaries, and as the lake lay ... no man-made
boundary could cleave the waters apart."
Henry
"Death-on-the-Trail" Reynolds
"It seems advisable
to greatly enlarge this park ... it might be well to have a
preserve and breeding grounds in conjunction with the United
States Glacier Park."
John "Kootenai" Brown
The
idea for an International Peace Park (IPP) was taken a step
further by the Cardston Rotary Club who initiated a meeting of
several regional clubs from Alberta and Montana. In 1931, at the
Prince of Wales Hotel, the first "annual goodwill
meeting" convened to discuss the desire to foster "a
worldwide International Peace Movement". The idea of
establishing an International Peace Park in the Waterton/Glacier
area was unanimously endorsed. Following petitions from their
respective Rotary clubs, local governments approached the two
federal governments on the establishment of a peace park.
Everyone's hard work was finally rewarded with the passing of
the American bill on April 25, 1932 and shortly after with the
Canadian bill on June 16, 1932. Designation and celebration of
the International Peace Park took place during two ceremonies.
The first was held at Glacier Park Hotel, East Glacier, Mt., on
June 18, 1932. The second, after some organizational problems
and delays, was held at the Prince of Wales Hotel, Waterton
Park, on July 4, 1936.
Today, the International Peace Park Association (IPPA) continues
its activities by promoting international goodwill through
annual assemblies and promoting the idea of international peace
parks elsewhere. Other examples of International Peace Parks
are: Peace Arch (Blaine, Washington - Douglas, British
Columbia), International Peace Garden (North Dakota - Manitoba),
Campobello (New Brunswick - Maine) and Gold Rush International
Park (Yukon -Alaska).
The united parks represent the need for
cooperation and stewardship in a world of shared resources. As
visitors look down the Upper Waterton Valley or glance across
Cameron Lake, their thoughts of awe and inspiration move freely
from one mountain peak to another, and just as their thoughts
move freely across the 49th -- so do the waters, the fish, the
pollen, the seeds, the birds, the deer and the bears.
Robert Macfie Scriver (1914 - 1999)
Robert Macfie Scriver was born in Browning Montana, August 15,
1914. Bob grew up hearing stories of the Indian wars -- still
fresh in the minds of those that told them in his father's den.
Browning is in the heart of Blackfeet country, and the culture
and the essence of the West was in every breath he took. Bob
Scriver lived most of his life in Browning, with the exception
of post-graduate studies in Chicago, Illinois in 1941, and his
military service where he was a Sergeant in the U.S. Army Air
Corps, Alaskan Division. He was honorably discharged on Nov. 7,
1945. Scriver taught in Browning Public Schools during the
1930's. When he returned to Montana, he was Music Supervisor,
and a teacher of social studies from 1946-1950. Scriver began
his taxidermy career in 1951. In 1956 he began construction on
Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife. Working as a taxidermist led
to a great understanding of animal anatomy, and sparked his
interest in sculpting. He began his art career in 1956. Scriver
found his inspiration on the land he loved, in air he breathed,
and the friends he made -- both Cowboys and Indians. He
researched his projects in depth, and he studied many aspects of
his subjects before composing in clay and bronze. He was a three
dimensional historian for a place and time that is no more. His
pieces depicting the life style of the Blackfeet Indians, and
cowboys are in some of the finest private collections and
Museums in the world. Scriver's bronzes are next to Russell's
and Remington's in prestigious museums like the C.M. Russell,
The Cowboy Hall of Fame, the Whitney Gallery, and Buffalo Bill
Historical Center, to name just a few. Bob Scriver's works were
printed in magazines like National Geographic, and LaRevue
Moderne in Paris, France. He exhibited in Monte Carlo, Monaco,
and had a one man show of his Rodeo Series at the Calgary
Stampede. Scriver was an avid collector of the major works of
the Glacier National Park artists, and amassed an impressive
assemblage of paintings, sculptures, and Native American
artifacts which has been generously redistributed since his
death in 1999. Lorrain Scriver, Bob's widow, gave the Montana
Historical Society Museum his artist's copy collection. The
Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation in Missoula is building a new
visitors center that will house mounts that were previously at
Scriver's Montana Wildlife Museum in Browning. The Provincial
Museum of Alberta is also expanding its exhibit space for
Scriver's Blackfeet series and other bronzes. Scriver was a
member of the National Sculpting Society, The National Academy
of Western Artists (NAWA), The Cowboy Artists of America (CA),
The Society of Animal Artists, The Salamagundi Club, and The
International Art Guild.
Lee Kerr (1863
- 1939) Lee Kerr was born in Freeport, Ohio in 1863. He lived in
Helena, Montana in 1885 for awhile, and then moved to the
Flathead Valley, establishing a homestead twelve miles northwest
of present-day Kalispell. He worked as a carpenter in Columbia
Falls and Kalispell, and organized the Kalispell-Kelvin Oil
Company. He was an amateur artist in the best sense of the word;
"painting wholly for his own amusement, effectively placing
his lingering vision of the old west on canvas" according
to a contemporary article from a Kalispell newspaper. "he
has in his home on the west side, many western pictures that
might have been the product of a well trained artist, so
outstanding and realistic is his work." The Montana
Historical Society recognized Lee Kerr's talent when it received
his painting The Bull Team into it's collection. Harry Stanford,
an associate of Charlie Russell, finally overcame Kerr's
retiring disposition, and convinced him to present it at a Fish
and Game Commission meeting in 1932. The Montana Historical
Society's Librarian, David Hilger, wrote a thank you note to
Kerr: "...not only for it's value as a painting, but also
for representing a scene which has passed out of our history. I
crossed the plains as a lad in such an outfit. The details are
all correct, which is of importance in representing a thing of
the past, and everyone who has viewed the picture has been
favorably impressed." Lee Kerr passed away seven years
later in Kalispell, Montana in 1939.
Carl Rungius
(1869-1959) During his lifetime, artist Carl
Rungius enjoyed a reputation similar to that of Frederic
Remington. Interest in his depictions of the wildlife and
landscapes of the West declined following his death. Rungius
was the first career wildlife artist on this continent. He
spent his life studying and depicting North America's
wide-open spaces and the creatures that inhabit them. He
created the images that often come to mind when we think of
"wilderness." Well-known wildlife artists such as
Robert Bateman acknowledge his influence. Born in Berlin,
Germany in 1869, Carl Rungius took a serious interest in
drawing, the outdoors, and animals at an early age. Rungius
was trained at the Berlin Art School, the Academy of Fine
Arts, and the School of Applied Arts in Berlin. Invited by an
uncle to take a hunting trip to Maine in 1894, he got his
first look at America and stayed on to spend the following
summer hunting in Wyoming. After a brief return to Germany,
where realizing that his enthusiasm for the wilder landscape
and big game in America was too powerful to ignore, Carl
moved to Long Island, New York in 1897. The artist maintained
a studio there until 1910, though he spent his summers
hunting and drawing, primarily in New Brunswick and Wyoming.
One summer was spent in the Yukon. Rungius moved his studio
into New York City, interacting extensively for the first
time with well-known artists of the day. He also made his
first visit to Alberta that year. He returned annually to
Alberta, and he and his wife built a studio in Banff in 1921.
He lived and painted in Banff every summer thereafter until
1958. Rungius was a great naturalist, a fine draftsman and an
anatomist with thorough knowledge of musculature and bone
structure. In many of his paintings he achieved the feeling
of rotating movement so common to animals in a herd. His
sense of color was also well developed and he used it boldly
or with much subtlety, as the situation warranted. Rungius
received many honors and prizes. One of his admirers was
Theodore Roosevelt, who was also a personal friend. He
traveled from Arizona to Alaska, hunting, sketching and
painting. During these extensive travels, he also became
friends with many frontier people and did a series of oil
paintings depicting their life. These works, of which not
many were completed, are much sought after, for their
accuracy and sense of spontaneity. The Glenbow Foundation in
Calgary, Alberta maintains his Rockies' studio as a museum
and as a tribute to the work of this fine artist. The
National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming serves as
the greatest depository of his works outside of Canada.
Guy Wiggins
(1883-1962) Guy Carleton Wiggins was born in
Lyme, Connecticut, in 1883, and started his education there
at his father's art school. Wiggins initially took a job with
the government, working with the Foreign Service, and
painting wherever he was stationed. Retiring early from his
post, Wiggins entered the Art Students League in New York,
and spent time studying in the artist's colony of Old Lyme.
Wiggins is best remembered for his pure Impressionist
paintings featuring snow falling in New York City, and for
his delicate landscapes. He received early training as an
architectural draftsman at the Polytechnic Institute in
Brooklyn, New York, but eventually studied art at the
National Academy of Design under William Merritt Chase and
Robert Henri. At age twenty, he was the youngest American
artist to have a work accepted for the permanent collection
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Prior to the onset of
World War I, Wiggins painted the local scenery of the English
countryside. It was there he met his wife Dorothy Stuart
Johnson. The couple returned to the States and set up their
home in Connecticut. He established a year-round art school,
the Guy Wiggins Art School, in Essex. Included among the many
awards that Wiggins received was the prestigious Norman Waite
Harris Bronze Medal from the Art Institute of Chicago. He won
a prize from the Rhode Island School of Design, and received
awards from the Salamagundi Club in New York.
The Wiggins name is associated with three generations of
artists, his father Carleton Wiggins and his son Guy A
Wiggins were both well-regarded artists. Guy developed a
style that incorporated the color and techniques of French
Impressionism along with emerging American concepts. Wiggins'
unique style and abilities brought him early acclaim, and
throughout his life he strove to maintain the integrity and
independence of his style. According to Adrienne L. Walt from
American Art Review, in a 1977 article, "his resolution
was to constantly emphasize color, elevating it above all
else and achieving luminosity through it ." Wiggins died
in 1962 while on vacation in Florida and was buried in Old
Lyme, Connecticut. His paintings are in the collections of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art,
the Brooklyn Institute of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago,
the Reading Museum of Fine Arts, the Wadsworth Athenaeum, and
two of his works hang in the White House. He painted a vivid
"Snow Capped Mountains -- Lake Josephine" while on
vacation that hangs in our exhibit.
Leonard Lopp
Leonard Lopp
(1888 - 1974) Henry Leonard Lopp was born May
1, 1888, near Highmore, South Dakota. Lopp was raised on a
cattle ranch and attended nearby Canton and Elk Point schools
where he showed early signs of artistic talent by drawing
everything around him. Later he studied art under Prof. P.J.
Rennings at Union College, Lincoln, Nebraska, and privately
with Prof. John Updyke and Robert Wood. On July 1, 1918, he
was married to Margaret Booth of Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Together they painted and traveled over much of the U.S.,
Canada and Alaska. During much of the '20's Lopp was staff
artist for the Hudson's Bay Company of Canada and exhibited
from Winnipeg west to Vancouver. Contracts with the Elks and
Moose Lodges took them north to Alaska for several summers.
In 1928 they established art studios and a home for his
parents at Seaside and Portland, Oregon. The depression
forced the closing of the galleries and a move to Great
Falls, Montana, in 1936. Lopp was appointed staff artist for
the Glacier National Park Company, exhibiting every summer at
Many Glacier Hotel until 1941 and again in 1960. In 1944,
Lopp designed and built the lodge on the west shore of
Flathead Lake. He handpicked every log in the chalet from
standing timber. This home became a center for the arts and a
favorite stopping place for their many friends and fellow
artists such as Roland Gissing of Canada, Red Skelton, and
Dave Rubinoff, a musician. National art recognition was
achieved in 1941 when Lopp was invited to New York for the
one-man show at the Milch Gallery and a concurrent showing at
the Metropolitan. During their two-month stay in New York,
they were the guests of geologist and glacier specialist Dr.
and Mrs. Jim Dyson of Yale University with whom the Lopps had
spent many days hiking on the trails in Glacier Park.
Additional showings followed at the Pressmen's club in
Spokane in 1951, and the Premier Award, Fine Arts Department
of the Montana State Fair at Great Falls in 1961. Major
commissions were from former President Harry S. Truman for
the Museum at Independence, Missouri; FBI Chief J. Edgar
Hoover; the Lions International President; the restoration of
several C.M. Russell paintings in Great Falls; and
collections for the Conrad National Bank of Kalispell and the
Bank of Idaho at Boise. Failing health and age forced a move
to Kalispell where he passed away in 1974. His passion for
the beauty of Glacier Park and his ability to record it on
canvas has secured a permanent position as one of the great
artists of Montana and the West.
|