Jessica Crabtree

September 16, 1785: Birth of American painter Charles Bird King

Charles Bird King (1785-1862) was one of the most important early American painters whose work included the extensive portrayal of Native Americans.

Like his contemporary George Catlin (whose life and career coincided with roughly the same period) he was the son of a Revolutionary War veteran, and had a family history of violent encounters with Native Americans. In King’s case, his father was killed by Indians in Ohio, precipitating the family’s move back east. There King received his first art training, and later moved to London to study art professionally.

Upon returning he established a distinguished clientele that helped to launch a lucrative painting career. From this period, his portraits of notable politicians, statesmen, and other prominents help to seal his reputation as one of early America’s foremost artists.

At this point, the careers of Catlin and King diverge. While Catlin left a professional career to pursue a life of overland expeditions and field research, working in relative obscurity, King took advantage of his standing to create a comfortable life among the social circles of Washington’s elite. It was his Washington studio that hosted most of his Indian subjects, primarily delegates on diplomatic missions to the capitol who agreed to pose for King’s portraits (as in the one below).

Young Omahaw, War Eagle, Little Missouri, and Pawnees, 36 1/8″ x 28″, oil (1821)

McKenney and Hall lithographs (continue reading…)

Top 10 Discoveries of 2009 – Early Irrigators – Tucson, Arizona.

Hundreds of acres of irrigation works – the earliest documented irrigation system in North America – made the Sonora Desert a thriving agricultural center thousands of years ago.

If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
(Vincent van Gogh)

NatGeo’s Wolf Wars (March 2010 Special Feature)
by Douglas Chadwick and Jeff Vanuga

The gray wolf and its subspecies – one of North America’s apex predators – coexisted with man for thousands of years until it met its match with the arrival of European-style agriculture and development. From the 1800s they were actively hunted as a menace and their numbers steadily dropped until the 1970s, when they were declared endangered, with only a handful existing in the wild in more isolated regions of the Great Lakes.

Starting in 1995, Fish & Wildlife biologists captured a few descendants of this single thriving pack and successfully released them into Yellowstone, where their population quickly exploded. Today the wolf packs of Yellowstone are a beloved national icon and a major tourist attraction worth millions. But of course not everyone was so enthusiastic. At the front line of opponents is the cattle ranching industry, who stood to lose the most from the reintroduction of a potential threatening predator.

In the past, the wolves’ largest food source was elk. The reintroduced species found an elk population that had skyrocketed in their absence, without natural predators keeping their numbers in check. In addition, the wolves found another ready food supply – free-range beef cattle. If a wolf pack kills an elk, it’s simply a dead elk and no one blinks twice – but if it kills a prize steer, or a pregnant heifer, that’s thousands of dollars to the rancher.

Of course, this is the reason the wolves were driven to near-extinction in the first place. But this time around, the cattle business takes up a lot more space in the West, making the herds easy pickings for the rapidly expanding clans. In response, Wyoming essentially declared open season on gray wolves in 2008, listing them as an invasive species and setting loose a horde of eager hunters.

Within the past couple of decades, wolf populations – and those of other animals directly linked to them in the food chain – have fluctuated wildly as nature’s checks and balances are disrupted by human intervention.

This diagram (click to enlarge) shows the comparison between the normal eco-system (with wolves) and the wolf-less habitat. I don’t think most people really appreciate how closely integrated all these natural systems are, from major apex mammals like the wolf and cougar, to smaller prey animals, down to the plant and microbial flora of a region. We can understand what happens for instance when you dam up a river, and change the entire eco-system downstream. But we can’t begin to appreciate how intricately the removal of one species – let alone our very presence – affects the whole biological makeup of a place.

The problem is that even if we leave the wolves alone, we’ve already created a chain-reaction in their habitat and with other species on down the line of the food chain. In other words the wolves have less space to hunt, and fewer prey animals. We’re like a stick in the proverbial gears of nature – our involvement means it can no longer achieve equilibrium.

The obvious solution seems to be taking the human variable out of the equation altogether and let nature take its own course (wishful thinking). But in the meantime, we hear of the recent aerial shooting of wolves in Alaska, and this from MSNBC giving a foretaste of what we’ll be hearing on the issue (no doubt this one will be getting some minor government officials major kickbacks from the ranching lobby).

MSNBC: Endangered or not, wolf killings set to expand – Proposals to control population include gassing pups in their dens

So like typical modern humans we’ve created a problem bigger than we know how to fix, and it’s a lose-lose situation. The wolves themselves can always adapt – they’ve done so in the past – but apparently modern humans can’t. It’s going to take a lot to redeem ourselves from the omnivorous, parasitic species we’ve become. Whatever happens the wolves could easily get along fine without us. But given the huge impact that each link has on all the rest of the natural chain, can we really afford to do without the wolves – or any other species for that matter?

Photo: Public domain

Click to see the full-size view – I never knew turtles had such interesting eyes.
See more of my free photos on my companion blog, Public Domain Nature Photos.

It’s finished! This is my first half-length portrait; normally I opt for a closer head and shoulders view. The original photo, as I mentioned earlier, was an old black and white taken around 1870 (public domain). As far as I can determine no one has been able to identify the photographer. However it is known that the subject’s name was Rabbit Tail and he was one of the Shoshone scouts serving in the US army under Captain Patrick Ray.

Incidentally, there is an oil painting by Joseph Henry Sharp of a Shoshone of that name, leaving many to speculate whether it is actually the same individual. The painting dates to a period when the young Rabbit Tail would have been a middle-aged man. Based on the comparison, I see some similarities, maybe even enough to make the two relatives, but I’m not convinced they’re one and the same.

JESSICA CRABTREE NATIVE AMERICAN PORTRAITS & WILDLIFE: Shoshone

Shoshone, 14×24 original pastel on suede. (click for larger view)

About the Shoshone

The Shoshone people were originally part of a very large extended family of nomadic peoples in what is today the American West. Their traditional territories centered in the arid Great Basin region, where they migrated seasonally hunting wild game and harvesting wild foods. Each of their main bands identified themselves after the staple food they followed.

Migratory bands of Shoshone were among the first Native Americans encountered by European fur traders and adventurers who ventured West in the early 1800s. Perhaps the most famous Shoshone individual of all is Sacagawea, the young woman who worked as a guide and translator for the Lewis & Clark expedition in 1804-1806.

Charles Banks Wilson (born 1918) is an Oklahoma artist famed for his Native American portraits, historical commissions, and mural art. He started drawing at an early age and received training at the Chicago Art Institute, quickly finding work as an apprentice illustrator.

His most popular works are the official commissioned portraits of Oklahoma legends such as Will Rogers and Jim Thorpe, part of the collection of the Oklahoma Capitol. One of the first pieces to earn him wide acclaim was his 1941 lithograph Freedom’s Warrior, modeled after a Comanche code talker, and later re-created as an oil painting.

Wilson’s exhibit page at the University of Arkansas, Celebrating Native America, says:

Images such as “Cherokee Matriarch,” “Katie ‘Osage’ Cheyenne,” and “Osage Orator” reveal Native Americans caught in the transition between native and white America. Wilson says this transition “was not a popular theme in anyone’s opinion” because “Americans wanted the Indian to remain a nostalgic keepsake, committed forever to chasing the buffalo across the boundless prairies.”

Wilson admits he was a bit baffled when people asked him “why I was making social comments.” He says simply, “I was just painting what my eyes saw.”

“Search for the Purebloods”

His most ambitious project was a catalog of portrait drawings of pure-blooded Native Americans. The resulting odyssey spanned fifty years of work and portrayals of over a hundred individuals, many of whom were the last individuals of their nation to have non-mixed heritage.

Wilson’s close attention to accuracy and solid, intuitive technique – combined with his good nature – earned him a strong rapport with his subjects, who willingly modeled for his portraits. In return, he promised never to sell their likenesses and instead donated the finished original collection to the Gilcrease Museum. The published edition, Search for the Native American Purebloods, was released by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1983.

Wilson was the subject of a public television documentary released in 2006 interviewing the artist and highlighting his major career achievements. (Watch an excerpt here.)

He has exhibited his work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Museum, and received countless prestigious awards for his art, historical research, and educational & cultural contributions.

University of Arkansas: Charles Banks Wilson’s Celebrating Native America Exhibit

Charles Banks Wilson exhibit at the Will Rogers Museum

Q: What was the first Indian reservation?

A: The most common answer is the Lenape reservation at Indian Mills, established by the New Jersey colonial assembly in 1758. However, the history of reservations in the colonies goes back much earlier, predating the Lenape reserve by at least a century.

Pamunkey-Mattaponi Reservation
(Virginia, 1658)

The first colonial record of an Indian reservation comes from the Virginia colony, where in 1658 – a hundred years before New Jersey’s Lenape reservation was formed – the Virginia General Assembly voted on a land reserve for the Pamunkey and Mattaponi tribes. These were among the most powerful members of the region’s Powhatan Confederacy (of Pocahontas fame).

A 1677 treaty between the English throne and the representatives of the Pamunkey and Mattaponi recognized their rights as autonomous nations. The reservation survived the transition of the American Revolution and has remained a continuously sovereign entity to this day.

Mashantucket Pequot Reservation
(Connecticut, 1666)

Another example of the earliest reservations originated just a few years later, further north in New England. There, in the aftermath of the devastating Pequot War, the Connecticut colonial assembly set aside a land reserve for the Mashantucket Pequot.

Like the Pamunkey-Mattaponi nation of Virginia, the Pequot reservation still exists today, but only narrowly escaped being dissolved on several occasions. King Philip’s War in 1680 pitted American colonists against an alliance of Wampanoag, Narraganset, and other Indian nations of New England, and nearly resulted in the extermination of several peoples, including the Pequot. In the ensuing centuries, the reservation area dwindled from 3,000 to 200 acres, and was nearly liquidated until the surviving Mashantucket band underwent a cultural revival in the 1970s.

Back to the Indian Mills Reservation
(New Jersey, 1758)

In the mid-1700s, the Lenni-Lenape people (also known as the Delaware) had lost access to most of their traditional grounds and petitioned for a land reserve on which to form a small autonomous community. Known as Brothertown, or Brotherton, it was organized largely under Christian missionary efforts and became an amalgam of members from various nations, including Pequots, Narragansets, and Mohegans, who associated on the basis of their common religious practices.

The reservation was formally dissolved in 1801, but by that time they had reorganized on land donated by the Oneida Nation of New York. Eventually they were forced to move again, resettling in Wisconsin along with much of the Oneida Nation during the Indian Removals of the 1830s. (continue reading…)