This exhibition considers the evolving notion of the American West through more than 250 paintings, sculpture, photographs and Native American artifacts dating from 1830 to 1930.
Past Exhibition
Go West! Art of the American Frontier from the Buffalo Bill Center of the West
November 3, 2013 – April 13, 2014
Coosa-Tustunnuggee (Creek), ca. 1831-1834
Henry Inman
American, 1801-1846
Coosa-Tustunnuggee (Creek), ca. 1831-1834
Oil on canvas
Collection of Ann and Tom Cousins, Atlanta, Georgia
308.2005Between 1821 and 1828, Thomas McKenney, Superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, commissioned portraits of Native American leaders on their visits to Washington, DC, to negotiate for tribal sovereignty. These twenty-four portraits of mostly southern leaders originally were hung en masse with dozens of other paintings as the Indian Gallery. Many of the tribes represented by the leaders pictured here were relocated in the wake of the Indian Removal Act (1830) that forced the western migration of southeastern tribes.
Bear Claw Necklace, ca. 1830
Chahiksichahiks (Pawnee)
Central Plains
Bear Claw Necklace, ca. 1830
Otter fur and hide, bear claws, glass beads, abalone shells, tanned hide, and wool cloth
Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming, U.S.A., The Paul Dyck Plains Indian Buffalo Culture Collection, acquired through the generosity of the Dyck Family and additional gifts of the Nielson Family and the Estate of Margaret S. Coe
NA.203.1413Distinguished Pawnee men wore necklaces made from otters and the long, broad claws of grizzly bears that once roamed the Central and Eastern Plains. The necklaces were emblems of their honors and roles as leaders. Plains Indian people held grizzly bears in high esteem because of their power and fighting abilities. The claws on the necklace represent the bear’s strength and courage, and the otter hide signifies power over both land and water. Both animals’ qualities guided the wearer during warfare, treaty negotiations, and ceremonies.
Golden Gate, Yellowstone National Park, 1893
Thomas Moran
American, born England, 1837-1926
Golden Gate, Yellowstone National Park, 1893
Oil on canvas
Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming, U.S.A., Museum purchase, 4.75Twenty years after the dedication of America’s first national park, Thomas “Yellowstone” Moran revisited and painted the landscape that had made him famous. This view of the passage known as the Golden Gate also highlights another development – the rise of tourism in the park, signaled by a new trestle engineered to bolster a perilous though increasingly travelled road through the park. The route of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which employed Moran to paint scenes of the Yellowstone to drum up business, passed nearby.
The Last of the Buffalo, ca. 1888
Albert Bierstadt
American, born Germany, 1830-1902
The Last of the Buffalo, ca. 1888
Oil on canvas
Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming, U.S.A., Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney Trust Fund Purchase, 2.60This episodic work chronicles a controversial history of the American West. The Last of the Buffalo draws attention to two endangered icons of the West – the buffalo and the Plains Indian, who relied upon the animal for survival. Buffalo populate the landscape into the distance, though a collection of dying buffalo lies prominently in the foreground; the bodies of an Indian and his horse lie among them. The Indian and buffalo are in combat, yet they are physically united by their struggle, underscoring what most believed to be their shared fate in the face of westward expansion.
View Down the Valley, Yosemite, 1865-1866
Carleton E. Watkins
American, 1829-1916
View Down the Valley, Yosemite, 1865-1866
Albumen silver print on paper
High Museum of Art, Gift of Life Insurance Company of Georgia
1980.119Lured to California during the Gold Rush, Carleton Watkins learned photography as an apprentice in San Francisco. He traveled to the Yosemite Valley in 1861, taking what would become the first of hundreds of mammoth-plate prints (or large-scale images made from glass plate negatives of the same size) of the region – some of which would be used to sway President Lincoln to designate the region as the first state park in 1864. This view, which features Cathedral Rock, is typical of Watkins’s selection of recognizable landmarks to anchor his compositions.
The Broncho Buster, 1895
Frederic Remington
American, 1861-1909
The Broncho Buster, 1895
Bronze
Cast number 21, Roman Bronze Works
Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming, U.S.A.
Gift of G. J. Guthrie Nicholson Jr. and son in memory of their father/grandfather G. J. Guthrie Nicholson, rancher at Four Bear, Meeteetse, WY, 7.74A uniquely American subject, the cowboy taming the wild horse was a metaphor for the ultimate conquest of the Wild West. Remington’s first experiment in bronze, this innovative sculpture won him immediate recognition as a sculptor and earned him a higher status among American artists of his day. The sculpture’s cantilevered balance was unconventional and challenged American artistic practice. Between 1895 and 1903, nearly eighty of The Broncho Buster sculptures had been cast and sold primarily through Tiffany & Co., attesting to its popularity.
Col. W. F. Cody, “Buffalo Bill,” ca. 1908
The Strobridge Lithograph Company
Cincinnati, Ohio, active 1847-1961
Col. W. F. Cody, “Buffalo Bill,” ca. 1908
Poster, four-color lithograph
Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming, U.S.A.
Gift of The Coe Foundation, 1.69.113Buffalo Bill’s Wild West toured ten countries during its thirty-year run, including six stops in Atlanta. When the show arrived in Piedmont Park to perform at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, crowds streamed in for performances including staged buffalo hunts, Indian War reenactments, and horsemanship demonstrations, and to see the markswoman phenomenon Annie Oakley. This Wild West poster shows Cody in his trademark look of fringed buckskins, flowing hair, upturned mustache, and goatee.
End of the Trail, ca. 1918-1923
James Earle Fraser
American, 1876-1953
End of the Trail, ca. 1918-1923
Bronze
Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming, U.S.A.
Clara Peck Purchase Fund, 112.67A monumental version of this sculpture won a gold medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. It was widely popular at the Exposition, and the silhouetted horse and rider decorated bookends, ashtrays, postcards, and other collectibles. The power of visual imagery cannot be underestimated, and although Native Americans had never vanished, James Earle Fraser’s image perpetuated a stereotype that had a lasting impact on American perception of Native Americans as a disappearing race.
Painted Hide, ca. 1900
Codsiogo (Cadzi Cody)
1866–1912, So soreh (Eastern Shoshone), Wind River Reservation, Wyoming
Painted Hide, ca. 1900
Tanned hide and pigments
Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming, U.S.A.
Museum purchase, Mary Jester Allen Collection, NA.702.31From about 1885 to the early 1900s, Shoshone artist Codsiogo, working under the name Cadzi Cody, produced nostalgic pre-reservation scenes of buffalo hunting, warfare, and ceremonies. Codsiogo sold numerous hide paintings to tourists who visited the Wind River Reservation as they traveled to Yellowstone National Park. Although he produced the hide paintings for sale, they also served as historical documents of Eastern Shoshone cultural traditions. In this painting, Codsiogo depicts a Sun Dance scene in the center surrounded by several men on horseback chasing buffalo.
Overview
The dust of the Civil War had barely settled when Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, famously urged America’s youth to turn from the rubble and go west. America’s future was anchored in the frontier. Between 1800 and 1900, the nation more than tripled in physical size. With the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from the French in 1803, American land holdings doubled with the stroke of a pen. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, less than seven percent of the American population lived west of states that bordered the Atlantic Ocean; at the century’s end, those regions hosted more than fifty percent. Americans were going west.
Few aspects of American history have been more decisive in shaping this nation than the exploration and settling of the western frontier. This exhibition considers the evolving notion of the American West through more than 250 artworks and artifacts dating from 1830 to 1930, outlining a West of popular imagination that continues to inform American values of independence, innovation, and individualism today.
About the BBCW
One of the finest institutions devoted to the American West, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming, U.S.A., includes five distinguished museums and a renowned research library.
The Buffalo Bill Museum, dedicated in 1927, examines both the personal and public lives of W.F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and seeks to interpret his story in the context of the history and myth of the American West.
The Whitney Gallery of Western Art, dedicated in 1959, presents an outstanding collection of masterworks of the American West. Original paintings, sculptures, and prints trace artistic interpretations of the West from the early 19th century to today.
The Plains Indian Museum, dedicated in 1979, features one of the country’s largest and finest collections of Plains Indian art and artifacts. It explores the cultural histories, artistry, and living traditions of Plains Indian peoples.
The Cody Firearms Museum, dedicated in 1991, contains the world’s most comprehensive collection of American and European arms dating back to the sixteenth century.
The Draper Museum of Natural History, dedicated in 2002, integrates Humanities with natural science to explore, document, and interpret the Greater Yellowstone region and adjacent landscapes.
The McCracken Research Library, dedicated in 1980, advances the study of the American West by the collection, preservation, and use of manuscript collection, books, and photographs.