This is possibly one of the best known images associated with the American west, having been used on T-shirts, belt buckles, posters and many other items. It is also an image which has been interpreted many times and which has a number of myths now associated with it. In the course of our travels around the country I have been told, among other things, that it originated as a bronze statue in Nebraska, a marble statue in the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Nevada, that it was created by an 18 year old Indian in the 1930's, that it symbolises the Trail of Tears, that it commemorates Chief Joseph's flight and many more. I became intrigued as to its true origins so became determined to find out the truth about this powerful image.
Let's first establish who actually created the original image. The sculptor was James Earle Fraser, who was born in 1876 in Winona, Minnesota but who grew up in Dakota surrounded by images of the Old West and immersed in stories of Native American lore. At age 14 his family moved to Chicago and an exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 inspired him to take sculpture classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. He became an assistant in a studio in Chicago before going to Paris at the age of 20 to study further. In 1902 he opened his own studio in New York.
The first model for The End of the Trail was created in 1894 when Fraser was 18 and reflected the tragedy of the dispossession of the American Indian that he could see around him in Dakota. Twenty-one years later Fraser created an 18-foot high plaster version for San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and he received the exposition's Gold Medal for sculpture. Fraser had hoped that a monumental version of his masterpiece would be cast in bronze but as the First Word War was underway there were restrictions that made the acquisition of materials impossible. Sadly, at the end of the Exposition, the plaster work was cut up and discarded. Fraser did however produce a limited number of small bronzes many of which today are in museum collections. These are often confused with the works of Frederick Remington, an artist with whom bronzes depicting the West are most associated. The image was also widely reproduced in postcard, print, curio and miniature form at the time of the Exposition.
Fraser's vision was that the monumental bronze version be placed overlooking San Francisco Bay but the closest it came was when, in 1920, the city of Visalia, California, obtained the discarded pieces of the plaster work and reassembled the statue in Mooney Park. There it remained for the next 48 years gradually becoming the worse for wear.
Fraser never saw his dream of a monumental bronze come true but in 1968, The National Cowboy Hall of Fame acquired this original plaster statue and placed it as the centrepiece of the Fraser Memorial Studio building on the Museum grounds. They painstakingly restored it and had moulds made so that a bronze could be cast - in Italy - for display in Visalia. In 1971, eighteen years after Fraser's death his vision had become a reality.To see this awe-inspiring piece in reality must be truly
inspiring and those lucky enough to be able to visit Oklahoma can see it
in a magnificent setting at The
National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Most of us will have to be content with
a visit to their Web site.If you want to learn more about The End of the Trail try and hunt down the book by Dean Krakel - End of the Trail: The Odyssey of a Statue published by University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. Unfortunately it is currently out of print but a hunt around the Web might produce results.
Although I have not found any reference of Fraser's own account of the thoughts and emotions that brought this powerful image into being, it surely represents what he must have seen as a great sadness in the closing years of the nineteenth century - the subjugation and final defeat of a proud nation. The end of the trail for many proud warriors who fought until exhaustion to preserve their way of life and to protect their people. Perhaps nowadays it stands in most people's minds - those of us who care - as the ultimate symbolisation of what the white man did to the original and true inhabitants of North America.
