"Noble Savage in the Courthouse Square: Patronage and Legacy in Sherry Edmundson Fry's Mahaska."
-
- (As read at the 1998 Iowa Expo in Des Moines)
- By definition, works of public art are commissioned and erected with the
- intention that they will express certain social values, traditions, and
- legacies that are shared by all. However, because the "public" is comprised
- of so many various constituencies, a single work of art can easily embody
- diverse and often contradictory messages.
- This paper presents a case study of one such work, Sherry Edmundson
- Fry's 1908 sculpture of Mahaska, the Ioway chief who lived from about 1784
- until 1834. A native of Creston, Iowa, Fry was a young student in Paris
- when he met a retired Des Moines businessman, James Depew Edmundson.
- Edmundson hired him to create a memorial to honor his father, William, who
- had been one of the first white settlers and government officials in Mahaska
- County, Iowa.
- Fry created the sculpture in Paris, where it appeared in the Salon
- of 1907 and again in 1908 where it won the Prix de Rome. The artist shipped
- a bronze cast of the sculpture to Iowa where in May of 1909, it was unveiled
- in Oskaloosa's courthouse square before a crowd of 12,000 rain-soaked
- spectators in a dedication ceremony that was sponsored by Oskaloosa Tribe
- number 4 of the Improved Order of Red Men.
- On the day of the dedication, the Oskaloosa Herald astutely
- observed; "The Statue will stand for more than the inscription show[n].
- There will be wrapped up in it all the romance and tragedy of the almost
- extinct red man, the story of pioneer days and pioneer men, the struggles
- and achievements of an artist and the filial devotion of a son." During
- each step of the process by which this work of art was commissioned,
- sculpted and dedicated, competing layers of texts and subtexts were laid
- upon it. Subject, patron, artist, and local boosters all brought differing
- historical legacies and perspectives to this single monument.
- Born near Burlington, Iowa in 1838, James Depew Edmundson
- (1838-1933) was six when his family moved to Oskaloosa in the newly opened
- Indian lands of southeast Iowa. His was a classic rags-to-riches story
- that began when he was an assistant at a grist mill at the age of fifteen.
- A somewhat diminutive and delicate young man, Edmundson gave up manual labor
- to study law in a local law office. He served as a page for the Eighth
- General Assembly in Des Moines and eventually set up a law practice in
- Glenwood, Iowa.
- In 1866, at the age of twenty-eight, he moved to Council Bluffs and
- became the law partner of the husband of women's suffrage leader Amelia
- Jenks Bloomer. It was in the boom of the western Iowa real estate market
- that Edmundson began to amass his fortune. He eventually left his law
- practice to concentrate on real estate investment and banking. He helped
- establish one bank and later, became the president and controlling
- shareholder of another, the First National Bank of Council Bluffs. By the
- turn of the century Edmundson undertook a well-financed retirement, moving
- to Des Moines with his second wife, Laura Barlcay Kirby. The couple
- traveled extensively through Europe and Edmundson, a voracious reader and
- scholar of culture, initiated several philanthropic endeavors. It was on
- one of his trips to Europe in 1906 that he contacted George Bissel, an
- American sculptor living in the French capital, about creating a memorial in
- honor of Edmundson's late father, William.
- William Edmundson seemed to be the embodiment of the pioneer spirit.
- Born in 1805 in Harrison County, Kentucky, he spent much of his life
- actively pursuing frontier adventure. He arrived in Des Moines County, Iowa
- with his wife Priscilla Depew in 1836. After the birth of James, the family
- moved to Fairfield where a second son, William Jr. was born. In 1843, the
- family stayed in Fairfield while William ventured on to the site of
- present-day Oskaloosa to investigate land which had recently been ceded by
- the Sauk and Fox Indians.
- Legend has it that William Edmundson plowed the first furrow in the
- region that was to become Mahaska County. The territorial Legislative
- Assembly commissioned him to serve as the first sheriff of the unorganized
- county. A year later, he was elected to that office when the county
- government was organized. In 1848 he represented Mahaska County in the
- special session of the First General Assembly. In 1850, Edmundson caught
- gold fever and spent five years in the west before finally returning to his
- family in Oskaloosa.
- It is not known who chose the figure of Chief Mahaska (c. 1784-1834)
- to be the subject for the William Edmundson memorial. The choice was a
- provocative one though, for as F. R. Aumann has pointed out, "the story of
- Mahaska is not lacking in the dramatic requirements of an old Greek
- Tragedy." Born near the Iowa River around 1784, Mahaska, or White Cloud,
- spent much of his youth living near the Des Moines River in what is now the
- county that bears his name. At an early age, he displayed skill and
- bravery by killing several enemy Sioux to avenge the death of his father,
- Chief Mauhamgaw, or Wounding Arrow. In that battle, one of eighteen in
- which Mahaska claimed to have taken part, he proved his worthiness to
- succeed his father as chief.
- At age twenty-four, Mahaska was imprisoned in St. Louis for killing
- Joseph Tebeau, a French trader, in a gun battle on the Missouri River.
- While prison seems to have altered the young brave's attitude toward
- violence, he escaped a year later to lead one more raid against the Osage.
- Though he was wounded in the battle and narrowly escaped with his life,
- Mahaska felt that the death of his father had finally been avenged. "My
- heart is at rest." He declared. Perhaps remembering a promise he had made
- to William Clark while in prison, Mahaska refused to take up arms ever
- again.
- Mahaska is probably best remembered for an 1824 trip he made with a
- delegation of seventeen Ioway, Fox, Sac and Piankishaw to Washington D.C.
- During the trip, the delegation met with President Monroe and approved a
- treaty ceding Indian land in what is now northern Missouri. While the
- Indians were treated to tours of New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia,
- Mahaska and his wife, Rantchewaime, or Female Flying Pigeon, each sat to
- have their portraits painted by the renown American painter, Charles Bird
- King.
- Returning to his home in the region of the Missouri and Nodaway
- Rivers on the border of present day Iowa and Missouri, and perhaps sensing
- the inevitability of the encroachment of the whites, Mahaska vowed to adopt
- the life style of his white neighbors. He built a log home and began
- farming. It is said that he greatly regretted his part in the murder of
- Tebeau and took solace only in the fact that he had never killed a white
- American.
- In 1833, a group of Omaha Indians killed an Ioway Chief named Crane.
- Mahaska refused to allow his braves to raise a war party to avenge this
- murder, instead appealing to the federal government for justice in the
- matter. When several Ioway killed six Omaha, Mahaska assisted General
- Hughes, the Ioway agent, in arresting them. The next year one of the Ioway
- braves escaped from Fort Leavenworth, tracked Mahaska to his camp along the
- Nodaway River and killed him.
- His vow of peace and his martyr's death made Mahaska a figure with
- whom whites could readily identify. Many tended to see his life as proof of
- the red man's potential for rehabilitation. Here was a savage who lived an
- "uncivilized" existence as a young man, but who adopted aspects of a
- European lifestyle as he grew older. While his legacy seemed to vindicate
- the hopes and expectations of white pioneers, like William Edmundson, his
- image was also appealing to later generations of whites who, like James
- Depew Edmundson, tended to mythologize the image of Mahaska in their
- nostalgia for the vanishing frontier. It is ironic that this man, who in
- life was forced by the white establishment to abandon his native lifestyle,
- became, in death, a symbol extolling the virtues of that lifestyle.
-
- The man who created the image of Mahaska, Sherry Edmundson Fry
- (1879-1966), was a twenty-five-year-old living in Paris when George Bissell
- introduced him to James Depew Edmundson in 1906. Born and raised in
- Creston, Iowa, Fry had already worked with two of the great sculptors of his
- time; Lorado Taft in Chicago and Frederick MacMonnies in Paris. He had won
- an honorable mention at the Paris Salon of 1902 and was looking for an
- opportunity to create his first large scale work. James Edmundson had just
- awarded Bissell the commission to create the memorial to his father. As the
- two men began to discuss the project, they jointly agreed that this young
- artist from Iowa might be better suited to execute the sculpture and that it
- might present him with the opportunity to enhance his reputation
- In preparation for the Edmundson project, Fry returned to America in
- the summer of 1907. As the Ioway population had been greatly reduced and
- had been removed to Kansas and Oklahoma, he traveled to the Mesquakie
- settlement in Tama, Iowa to sketch the people whose ancestors had been
- Mahaska's allies. While in America, Fry most surely either sought out the
- 1824 Charles Bird King portrait of the Ioway chief or studied one of the
- engraved copies of the portrait that appeared in various editions of
- McKenney and Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of North America, beginning
- in 1844. Before returning to France to begin the sculpture, Fry collected a
- trunk-full of guns, clothing and Indian artifacts to take with him for
- reference.
- Fry first displayed a model of his new work in the 1907 Paris Salon.
- The next year he exhibited the completed Mahaska and was awarded the Prix de
- Rome for which he received $1,200 a year and the opportunity to study in
- Rome at the American Academy for three years.
- Mahaska is unlike the Archaistic style of sculpture for which Fry
- would become known later in his career. Instead, it is similar in many ways
- to the work of his teacher Frederick MacMonnies. Like MacMonnies' Portrait
- of Nathan Hale, Fry's Mahaska is rich in naturalistic and expressive detail.
- Just over life size, Mahaska towers above the viewer from atop an eight foot
- granite pedestal. Dressed in richly modeled furs, the Ioway chief stands
- with his right foot slightly forward, his left hand clutching his garment,
- his right hand holding some sort of fowl. His posture is graceful, his arms
- muscular, and his expression is proud. During much of his life Mahaska was
- known for his courage and skill as a hunter. Fry, however, portrayed him in
- a moment of repose and reflection. He faces the west, toward the setting
- sun and toward the direction in which his people were forced to move in
- order to avoid the encroachment of white settlers.
- While the sculptor's views concerning the decline of American Indian
- culture and the opening of the American west to white settlement are not
- known, it is possible to draw a comparison between Mahaska and an
- allegorical figure Fry sculpted for the Missouri State Capitol Dome twelve
- years later. Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain, stands in stark contrast to
- the portrait of the Ioway chief. Wearing the refined robes of antiquity,
- she leads the migration of civilization to the lands ceded by the Indians.
- While the hunter Mahaska, clad in rustic furs, gazes westward to contemplate
- the death of his culture, Ceres, whose streamline modeling strives to embody
- pure spirit, also faces west from her perch on the capitol dome. Bare to
- the waist she holds a sheave of grain, promising fertility and abundance to
- all who follow. For her these lands are ripe with the promise of
- opportunity. Viewed as a pair, Mahaska and Ceres are bookends to the story
- of the American West; on one end, the vanquished savage contemplating the
- death of his nomadic lifestyle and symbolizing the loss of the pristine
- forests and prairies in which he hunted and gathered; and on the other end,
- the victor holds the rewards of cultivation and ingenuity, heralding the
- arrival of Western civilization. In retrospect, it seems that perhaps Ceres
- might have better captured the optimism of the pioneer spirit embodied by
- the elder Edmundson.
- The bronze likeness of Mahaska arrived in Oskaloosa via the Rock
- Island Rail Road in September of 1908. Almost immediately a group of local
- boosters, which included members of the Oskaloosa City Council, Commercial
- Club and Tribe Number 4 of the Improved Order of Red Men, joined with James
- Depew Edmundson in planning a formal dedication ceremony. The Red Men, a
- secret fraternal organization with some 400 members in Oskaloosa, took
- special pride in participating in the unveiling ceremony.
- Nationally, the IORM claimed to have begun in 1763 as the Sons of Liberty.
- They were established in their latter form in Baltimore in 1834 and were
- perhaps, the oldest secret society of purely American origin in existence at
- that time. The Red Men, who were in fact not red at all-membership was open
- only to whites until 1974-boasted half a million members in 1922. In 1924,
- Arther Pruess reported; "Its ceremonies, nomenclature and legends aim at
- conserving the history, customs and virtues of the aboriginal Americans."
- Initiation ceremonies for new members were based on acts of "pretended
- savagery" and officers in the organization used the titles Senior Sagamore,
- Junior Sagamore, Prophet, Chief of Records, and Keeper of Wampum.
- Oskaloosa Tribe number 4 of the Red Men was organized in 1883. Dr. Frank
- Whitehill of Oskaloosa and Frank Day of Des Moines arranged to hold the
- dedication of Mahaska in conjunction with one of the largest initiations of
- new members ever to be held in the state. Edmundson apparently liked the
- idea of a dedication sponsored by the Improved Order of Red Men and was
- intrigued by the prospect of enlarging the ceremony to include lodge members
- from the entire district, or reservation. May 12 was selected as the date
- for the ceremony because it marked the Red Men's annual Flower Day festival.
- A steady rain failed to keep an estimated crowd of 12,000 people from
- attending the dedication festivities, which began at 11:30 in the morning
- and continued into the evening. The day began with an old settler's picnic
- and an automobile parade. Later, in the courthouse square two friends and
- contemporaries of William Edmundson, Semira Ann Hobbs Phillips, the first
- school teacher in Mahaska County, and Amanda Martin, one of the County's
- earliest settlers, unveiled the statue. Fifty boys in Indian costumes sang
- an ode to Chief Mahaska that had been especially composed for the occasion.
- Major Samuel H. M. Byers, renown solider and diplomat, author of the
- Official Iowa State Song, and a childhood friend of James Depew Edmundson,
- read a poem he had written in honor of the chief. Wilson Brooks of Chicago
- then addressed the crowd with a speech entitled "Chief Mahaska and His
- Allied Interest as Represented by the Improved Order of Red Men." The
- festivities continued with an Indian Sun dance, apparently performed by
- whites, and the mass initiation of Red Men. A band concert at the gazebo
- concluded the program.
- Major Bryers captured the tone of the event in his poem, "Chief Mahaska:"
- "Great Chief, brave heart, / This shaft we raise, / The semblance of thy
- form; / That children's children long may see / And keep thy memory warm. /
- That down the vista of the years / This sculptured bronze may tell / Of one
- who loved his tribe, his kind, / And died for them as well.
- While the portrait of Mahaska professed to honor the great chief of the
- Ioway, friend of the white man, it carried within its cast bronze shell,
- associations to the legacies and perspectives of all who participated in its
- creation and dedication. If these legacies sometimes conflicted, it was
- because they reflected larger uncertainties in the relationship between
- whites and American Indians during the period of westward expansion.
- Mahaska, the statue, bears testament to the story of a man who tried to cope
- with the loss of his cultural identity and of his homeland. But it also
- tells the story of a pioneer whose hunger for new land pulled him further
- westward, in the wake the retreating natives, and of his son, the investor,
- who turned this hunger for land into a financial bonanza.
- A member of a persecuted race, Mahaska was pursued, imprisoned, and reformed
- by whites only to be murdered by a member of his own tribe. There is irony
- in the fact that his efforts to live peacefully with the whites led to his
- death. In his recent study of Iowa regionalism, E. Bradford Burns has noted
- that there is also irony in the fact that whites "looked to the vanquished
- [Indians] for lessons and/or for inspiration after having expelled them."
- Mahaska was only one of many statues of American Indians (Thomas Crawford,
- The Dying Indian Chief Contemplating the Progress of Civilization, 1856)
- that were erected in public parks during the late nineteenth and early
- twentieth century. Most of these sculptures played upon a widespread
- nostalgia for the once-proud race that had come to the "end of the trail."
- They tended to idealize American Indians as being stoically graceful,
- picturesque in dress and folkways, and in peaceful co-existence with the
- earth.
- Fry's image represents an attempt to portray the Chief at the peak of his
- power. It only hints at the inevitable fall of the native culture and the
- legacy of death, disease, and genocide that accompanied it. While we admire
- the image because it is strong and beautiful, we are comfortable with it
- because it is not threatening. Here is a friend of the white man whose
- death came at the hands of his own people. Mahaska the sculpture allows us
- wash ourselves in the sentiment and romance of Mahaska's fate, while sparing
- us any sense of guilt or responsibility.
- For the whites of post-frontier America, it might have been more comfortable
- to pay ceremonial homage to Native Americans than to confront the reality of
- the survivors of the race who had been herded off to reservations. By
- placing images of Indians on pedestals in city parks, displaying their tools
- and artifacts in museum cases, and re-enacting Anglicized versions of their
- customs and ceremonies in dark lodge halls, whites were able to satisfy
- their romantic curiosities while atoning for their sentimental sense of
- responsibility.
- These acts, however, had little to do with memorializing Native American
- culture. Instead, they were memorials to our own cultural achievements and
- our own pioneer past. Not only had whites spread their civilization from
- sea to sea, they had succeeded in domesticating the continent by
- identifying, categorizing, and exploiting nearly every element of it, Indian
- culture included.
- The memory of which Major Bryers spoke so eloquently, to be kept warm for
- our children's children, was not the memory of Mahaska, or of the Ioway, but
- of our own European ancestors who settled this state and made it into the
- place we know and understand today. Sherry Fry's Mahsaka is an image that
- is completely of our own cultural making that fits neatly within our own
- system of cultural values. Of all of the legacies and values that came
- together in its creation, it is our own that are portrayed most strongly.
- Vachel Lindsay, poet and native of Illinois, published a poem in 1915
- entitled "The Black Hawk War of the Artists." He could have been describing
- Mahaska, its creators, and boosters when he wrote; " All the young men /
- Chanting your cause that day, / Red men-new made / Out of the Saxon clay, /
- Strong and redeemed, / Bold in your war-array!"
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