Textbook Transnational Frontiers The American West in France Emily C Burns Ebook All Chapter PDF

Transnational Frontiers The American
West in France Emily C. Burns

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/transnational-frontiers-the-american-west-in-france-e
mily-c-burns/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
The American West And The World Transnational And

Comparative Perspectives Janne Lahti
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-american-west-and-the-world-
transnational-and-comparative-perspectives-janne-lahti/
Dark Tourism in the American West Jennifer Dawes
https://textbookfull.com/product/dark-tourism-in-the-american-
west-jennifer-dawes/
Marketing Research 9th Edition Alvin C. Burns
https://textbookfull.com/product/marketing-research-9th-edition-
alvin-c-burns/
The Invented State: Policy Misperceptions in the

American Public 1st Edition Emily Thorson
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-invented-state-policy-
misperceptions-in-the-american-public-1st-edition-emily-thorson/
Philosophy In The American West A Geography of Thought
1st Edition Hayes
https://textbookfull.com/product/philosophy-in-the-american-west-
a-geography-of-thought-1st-edition-hayes/
American Imperialism: The Territorial Expansion of the

United States, 1783-2013 1st Edition Adam Burns
https://textbookfull.com/product/american-imperialism-the-
territorial-expansion-of-the-united-states-1783-2013-1st-edition-
adam-burns/
American Imperialism: The Territorial Expansion of the

United States, 1783-2013 1st Edition Adam Burns
https://textbookfull.com/product/american-imperialism-the-
territorial-expansion-of-the-united-states-1783-2013-1st-edition-
adam-burns-2/
The American West A New Interpretive History Robert V.

Hine
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-american-west-a-new-
interpretive-history-robert-v-hine/
Making the White Man s West Whiteness and the Creation

of the American West 1st Edition Jason E. Pierce
https://textbookfull.com/product/making-the-white-man-s-west-
whiteness-and-the-creation-of-the-american-west-1st-edition-
jason-e-pierce/
T R A N S NAT IONA L F RON T I E R S
The American West in France

E M I LY C . B U R N S
T R A N S NAT I O NA L F RO N T I E R S
T H E C H A R L E S M . R U S S EL L C EN T ER S ER IE S O N A R T
A N D P H OTO G R A P H Y O F T H E A M ER I C A N W E S T
B. Byron Price, General Editor
Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 1 1/29/18 10:03 AM

TR A NS NATIONA L F RON TI E R S
The American West in France
E M I LY C. B U R N S
U NI V ER SI T Y O F O K L A H O M A P RE SS : N O R M A N

This publication has been made possible through support from the Terra
Foundation for American Art International Publication Program of the
College Art Association.
An earlier version of part of chapter 1 appeared as “Fata Morgana: Jean-André Castaigne, the
American Indian, and Artistic Aspirations in France,” Panorama 2, no. 1 (2016).
An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared as “Taming a ‘Savage’ Paris: The Visual Culture of Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West and France as a New American Frontier,” in The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture, edited by Frank Christianson (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2017), 129–54.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Burns, Emily C., author.
The following images appear Title: Transnational frontiers : the American West in France / Emily C. Burns.
uncaptioned on the pages noted: Description: Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. | Series: The Charles M. Russell Center Series on
Art and Photography of the American West ; Volume 29 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Page i: (detail) Sam Mathó̌ Išnála Identifiers: LCCN 2017035329 | ISBN 978-0-8061-6003-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show Subjects: LCSH: West (U.S.)—In art. | Indians of North America—Material culture—West (U.S.) | France—
in Paris, 1905. See figure 1.8, Civilization—1830–1900. | France—Civilization—1901–1945. | France—Civilization—American
page 41. influences. | United States—Relations—France. | France—Relations—United States.
Classification: LCC NX653.W47 B87 2018 | DDC 700/.45878—dc23
Pages ii–iii: (detail) Plains Indian
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017035329
buckskin tunic given to Rosa
Bonheur in 1889. See figure 2.18b,
Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France is Volume 29 in The Charles M. Russell Center Series
page 77.
on Art and Photography of the American West.
Page vi: (inset) Postcard of Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West performers, 1906. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production
See figure 4.1, page 118. Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources, Inc. ∞
Pages vi–vii: (background, detail)
Copyright © 2018 by Emily C. Burns. The University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the
Souvenir map of the official route
University of Oklahoma. Manufactured in China.
of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West 1905–6
French tour. See figure 5.14,
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmit-
page 156.
ted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—except
Page 1: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the United States Copyright Act—without the prior written
performers painting a tipi within a permission of the University of Oklahoma Press. To request permission to reproduce selections from this
vignette of scenes, 1905. book, write to Permissions, University of Oklahoma Press, 2800 Venture Drive, Norman, OK 73069, or
See figure 2.15, page 72. e-mail rights.oupress@ou.edu.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

For David Anderson,
who inspired my curiosity about books, art, and travel

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
ONE Composite Characters 25
TWO Native Soil 57
THREE (Im)Mobilities 87
FOUR Mita Kola 119
FIVE Imperial Cowboys 143
Epilogue 165
Notes 171
Selected Bibliography 211
Index 223

Acknowledgments
THIS PROJECT HAS BENEFITED FROM THE INVOLVEMENT of many institutions and
individuals. The Terra Foundation for American Art generously supported the project from its
inception, in a conversation at the Terra Summer Residency fellowship in Giverny in 2010 where
it was initiated as a chapter of my dissertation, to its conclusion in this form with a College Art
Association International Publication Grant. Along the way, it funded a postdoctoral research
fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in spring 2014 and a teaching postdoctoral
fellowship hosted at the Institut National d’histoire de l’art in Paris in 2015–16. The analysis
and questions raised have been enriched by extended conversations with Veerle Thielemans,
Katherine Bourguignon, and John Davis, Terra-hosted visiting scholars, and partners in the INHA
fellowship, including François Brunet, France Nerlich, Johanne Lamoureux, Larisa Dryansky,
and Christian Joschke. Organizing an international symposium, “The American West: A French
Appropriation,” in March 2015 at the INHA with support from several French research groups
expanded my understanding of the broader implications of this research.
I am grateful for support from the Department of Art and Art History and the College of
Liberal Arts at Auburn University that enabled research and related conference presentations.
With funds from the Honors College and a Level-1 Intramural Research grant (2014), I have
benefited from research support from four undergraduate assistants, Chloë Courtney, Anna
Dobbins, Michelle Mandarino, and Jordan Philson. Department of Art and Art History
administrative assistant Nita Robertson has also provided research support.
The project has been bolstered by the Douglass Foundation predoctoral fellowship in
American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2011–12), dissertation funding from the
Department of Art History and Archaeology and the Lynne Harvey Cooper fellowship from
American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis (2010–11), the Walter Read
Hovey Memorial Fund Award (2011), the Baird Society Resident Scholar program (2013), the
Buffalo Bill Center of the West (2013), the International Fellowship program at the University of
Nottingham (2014), the Tyson Scholars program at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
(2014), a Davidson Family Fellowship at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (2017), and
the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (2017). These research environments gave me
a myriad of formal and informal opportunities to present work in progress and exchange ideas. I
have also benefited from feedback from many generous colleagues when presenting related work
in progress at conferences or lectures sponsored by the Association of Historians of American
Art; the Bibliothèque américaine de Nancy; the Buffalo Bill Center of the West; the College Art
ix

Association; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Native American Art Studies Association;
“Re-thinking Regionalism: Art and the American Midwest,” University of Nottingham; the
Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery/Archives of American Art; Salem
State University; the Southwest Art History Conference, Taos; the Southwest/Texas Popular
Culture and American Culture Association (with support from the Heldrich-Dvorak Travel
Fellowship); the Transatlantic Studies Association; Union College; University of Sussex; “Voix et
silence dans les arts,” Université de Lorrain; and the Western Society for French History.
Many colleagues have given feedback on all or parts of this project. Angela Miller, my
dissertation advisor at Washington University in St. Louis, has forever shaped the questions I
bring to aesthetics and cultural discourse. I am grateful to my earlier academic mentors in art
history, especially Lorraine Cox, Louisa Matthew, and David Ogawa at Union College, and David
Bjelajac, Melvin Lader, and Lilien Robinson at George Washington University. I received astute,
detailed and productive feedback of two anonymous peer reviewers. Noelle Paulson read much
of this manuscript in-process and offered helpful feedback, especially with regard to anthropology
and racist ideology in late nineteenth-century France. Emily Voelker offered productive comments
on parts of the manuscript in its final stages, as well as helpful dialogue throughout the research
and writing process. I also received constructive responses to individual chapters or sections
of chapters from Juliet Bellow, Betsy Boone, Emilie Boone, Tom Cunningham, Corey Dzenko,
Peter Hassrick, Jessica Horton, Natalie Hume, Galina Mardilovich, Erika Schneider, Adrienne
Spinozzi, and Allison Stagg. Generous brief and extended conversations with Maggie Adler,
Claudine Armand, Julie Aronson, Lacey Baradel, Christine Barthe, Sarah Beetham, Gloria Bell,
Martin Berger, Layla Bermeo, Mindy Besaw, Susanneh Bieber, Ewa Bobrowska, Barb Bondy,
Julie Boulage, Alexis Boylan, Lucy Bradnock, Chase Bringardner, Agathe Cabau, Colin Calloway,
Tessa Carr, David Carter, Sarah Cash, Ting Chang, Elizabeth C. Childs, Frank Christianson, Maura
Coughlin, Melissa Dabakis, Venita Datta, Michelle Delaney, Jennifer Donnelly, Anita Ellis, Betsy
Fahlman, Kate Fama, Christopher Ferguson, Wayne Fields, Kathryn Floyd, François Fontaine,
Miranda Fontaine, Steve Friesen, Vincent Froehly, Jennifer Greenhill, Micheala Haffener, Daniel
Harkett, Medill Harvey, Stephanie Herdrich, Erica Hirshler, Catherine Holochwost, Elizabeth
Hutchinson, Laura Turner Igoe, Mayken Jonkman, Kelly Kennington, Joni Kinsey, Shana Klein,
Betsy Kornhauser, Daryl Lee, Tony Lee, Karen Lemmey, Laura Karp Lugo, Nancy Mowll Mathews,
Micki McElya, Eden McLean, Karen McWhorter, Nick Miller, Emily Moore, Jacques Nissou,
Chantal Nissou, Annick Notter, Chris Oliver, Rebecca Park, Carine Peltier-Caroff, Beverly Perkins,
Joe Perry, Aurélie Petiot, Katie Pfohl, Nele Putz, Mark Rawlinson, Shirley Reece-Hughes, Akim
Reinhardt, Alexsandra Remorenko, Monica Rico, John Rohrbach, Kristine Ronan, Francesca Rose,
John Rumm, Mathilde Schneider, Vanessa Schwartz, Sascha Scott, Tanya Sheehan, Mark Sheftall,
Janice Simon, Naomi Slipp, James Swensen, Mark Thistlewaite, Thayer Tolles, William Truettner,
Karen Turman, Rémi Venture, Foteini Vlachou, Joyce de Vries, Jonathan Frederick Walz, Melissa
Warak, Marie Watkins, Beth Wees, Richard Wrigley, Hilary Wyss, and Greg Zinman have also
shaped the project through the exchange of ideas and suggestion of readings. Archivists and
librarians have provided invaluable suggestions and research support, especially Alain Barnicaud,
Paul Carnahan, Linda Clark, Tawa Ducheneaux, Sam Duncan, Geoff Edwards, Anne Evenhaugen,
Evelyne Fazilleau, Jon Frembling, Jim Gerencser, Andrea Gibbs, Maud Guichané, Jennifer Hardin,
Jeremy Johnston, Kasia Leousis, Rachel Panella, Karen Precis, Mary Robinson, Erin Rushing, Jean-
Yves Sarazin, Greg Schmidt, Marjorie Strong, Malinda Triller-Doran, and Pambanisha Whaley. I
am also grateful to Éliane Foulquié and Mireille Orceau of the Société des amis de Rosa Bonheur
for their dialogue about Bonheur’s life and work and for introducing me to Paris-based collector
x AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

Didier Lévêque, whose passion for objects related to the American West and depth of knowledge
of this material greatly enhanced this book. Thanks to Agathe Cabau for her review of the French
and translations, which, unless otherwise noted, are my own. I am grateful for the collaboration,
and any errors are my own.
I feel infinite gratitude to Nassim Tekaya for showing me that love need not be incompatible
with academic life. I am also grateful to family and friends for their constant moral support,
especially Deborah Anderson, Matthew Burns, my brother and his family, Robbin Anderson,
Maureen Baker, Sally Ann Cruikshank, Jennie Durocher, Erica Harmon, Chelsi Hoey, Bill Hooper,
Barrie Sueskind, and Bob Thurmond. I have also benefited from an extended group of supportive
friends who have helped to make this work possible.
My thanks to the University of Oklahoma Press, especially my editor Kathleen Kelly, who
guided me from the submission process to completion; Stephanie Evans, my in-house editor;
John Thomas for his detailed copyedits; Julie Rushing for her book design; Sherry Smith for
her indexing; Bethany Mowry for her editorial assistance; and Anna María Rodríguez for her
assistance with production. Many thanks as well to Byron Price and the Charles M. Russell Center
for including the project in the Charles M. Russell Center Series on Art and Photography of the
American West, which gave extra support for the book’s production.
AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S xi

T R A N S NAT I O NA L F RO N T I E R S

Introduction
THE AMERICAN WEST IS A SLIPPERY CONCEPT, particularly in international settings.1 This

book analyzes the circulation of the visual and material culture of the American West in France
between 1865 and 1914. The production and reception of visual representations of American
western landscapes, cowboys, and in particular American Indians reveal that the American
West was not a fixed concept but rather a transnational discourse. As a cultural medium, the
American West permeated every mode of creative production in France, including illustration,
painting, sculpture, photography, literature, posters, caricature, toys, ceramics, metalwork, film,
cartography, collecting, and live performance. Because of an increased circulation of this imagery
in France and its appropriation by French artists and writers, by the end of the nineteenth century
the American West had come to serve as a metonym for American culture as a whole. This
stereotype presented a culture that was rugged and untamed, yet paradoxically modern.
A tripartite dialogue occurred through the visual culture of the American West in France.
Three generally distinct communities participated in this exchange: French artists, travelers, and
observers; U.S. artists, writers, and travelers; and members of American Indian communities.
Varying levels of mobility and access within these exchanges reveal the power dynamics of these
transnational and intercultural relationships. Ideas about the American West were performed on
all sides, with varied goals and results. An engraving of Charles Stanley Reinhart’s “Sketches from
the Paris Exposition,” printed in Harper’s Weekly in the summer of 1889, suggests the complexi-
ties of these relationships (fig. 0.1). Accompanied by a short article titled “American Types at the
Paris Exposition,” this collage renders stereotypes of characters who visited the world’s fair—U.S.
women and a businessman, an Indian, but also French figures including a waiter, cab driver, and
visitors to the encampment in the background.2 This image serves as a point of entry into the
methodological interventions raised in this introduction and the nature of character constructions
within this exchange.
Through performance and visual representation, the iconography and aesthetics associated
with the American West in France constructed national, cultural, and regional identities for FIG. 0.1
these various constituents. In spite of oft-divergent aims, these groups shared one central goal Charles Stanley Reinhart, “Sketches
in appropriating and performing the mythologies of the American West—the possibility of from the Paris Exposition,” 1889.
cultural renewal. For French observers, the rejuvenation offered by images of the American West Printed in Harper’s Weekly, June 22,
could reignite a civilization seen by some late nineteenth-century critics as falling into decline.3 1889, 492. Research Library, Amon
For U.S. travelers and artists in France who were concerned that Europeans might perceive Carter Museum of American Art,
American culture as vapid and derivative, the American West seemed to offer energy and cultural Fort Worth, Tex.

distinctiveness in ways that shaped iconography and aesthetics in fine arts displays in Paris.4
Members of the Lakota nation, the most represented American Indian community abroad,
invented spaces for their own cultural renewal on the international terrain of France at a time
when U.S. reservation policies and assimilation threatened their survival.5
The constructed characters of the American West who circulated in France—in person,
performance, and image—did so within complex political, social, and artistic dynamics. These
grew out of French colonial history in what became the United States and Canada, as well as con-
temporaneous French and U.S. colonial structures.6 Regional identities created tensions between
the local and the national that inflected appropriations of the American West.7 Asymmetrical
Franco-U.S. artistic exchange in the context of the thousands of art students who studied in Paris
during this period shaped constructions of the American West around debates about cultural
character within larger competition between the United States and France.8 Representations of
the American West in France also intersected with contentious U.S.–American Indian relations at
the end of the so-called Indian Wars.
This book takes as its premise the contingent and context-driven nature of national, cultural,
and individual identities. It asks how the imagery of the American West participated in building
individual and collective mythologies.9 It considers how material and visual culture functioned
as performances that narrated, reinforced, and at times challenged these identities. This intro-
duction charts the key methodological frameworks of my analysis and offers details about the
interwoven tripartite historical relationships between France, the United States, and American
Indians during this period. The book engages with both dialectical and nondialectical models
for understanding the relationships between visual representation and cultural exchange. Ideas
of nationalism and cultural politics are central to this study but do not account for all of the
intricacies of individual identity politics and other agents beyond the nation. The project thus
engages with queries raised by transnationalism, cultural transfer, and crossed history that have
increasingly shaped the fields of American studies, U.S. history, art history, and cultural studies;
gender studies methodologies to analyze how material culture and performance participate
in identity constructions; and concern with understanding spaces for indigenous agency and
survivance raised by Native studies and postcolonial theory. The project interweaves models of
nationalism and transnationalism, suggesting that no one single framework enables a complete
theorization of the displays, appropriations, and dynamic complexities of meaning raised in this
study. As an art historian, I primarily seek to consider how objects and images participate in
larger discursive conversations. To show how meanings of the American West were constructed
through production and reception, my methodology draws from art historical models that
emphasize the connections between aesthetics and social discourse and the multiplicity of visual
culture’s meanings in different contexts.10
Nationalism and Cultural Politics

in the Age of Empire
Unprecedented international contact characterized the late nineteenth century, but cosmopolitan
mixing often created starker distinctions between identities in the context of U.S. Reconstruction,
the French Third Republic, and the reservation era. Ideas of national and cultural characters
became particularly rooted and were avidly performed.11 The starting date for this project, at the
end of the American Civil War in 1865 and the Exposition Universelle of 1867, marks the beginning
4 T R A NSNAT IONA L F RON T I E R S

of a period of mass travel from the United States to France. In 1865 the New York Times reported,
“The continent of Europe is just now flooded with American tourists.”12 By the turn of the century,
there were so many U.S. art students in Paris that one critic defined them as their own “genus.”13
Many referred to the American community in Paris as its own “colony.” It was variously termed
“Little America,” the “Parisian-American World,” the “American Colony,” the “American Corner,”
“Americanized Paris,” or simply “American-Paris.”14 Because Americans in Paris formed a tight-
knit community, journalists on both sides of the Atlantic frequently commented about how they
revealed U.S. national character.
In the midst of a consistent influx of travel from the United States abroad, these transitory
visitors were central actors in constructing ideas of U.S. culture. The movement of people and
objects between the continental United States and France invited comparative constructions of
both nations. Cosmopolitan mixing between France and the United States did not necessarily
lead to seamless cultural convergence. Critics voiced parallel fears about the Americanization
of France and the Gallicization of the Americans living in France. In the midst of these politics,
each society expressed anxieties about becoming enmeshed in the other, and, in reaction, each
amplified claims to its cultural distinctiveness. In the midst of efforts to fix national identity, the
American West—at home and abroad—became fodder for constructions of cultural nationalism.
Art study and tourism by Americans in France were at their zenith when these activities ground
to a halt with the start of World War I, which marks the end point for this study, as treated in the
epilogue.15
Though the United States and France are two central national actors in this international
exchange, this project also treats the Lakota nation as an active participant within constructions
of the American West in France.16 American Indians were another traveling constituent to France,
and many French observers conflated the United States and Native America. The United States
was far from established as a complete nation during this period. The frontier and borderlands
were sites of continued negotiation and interaction with sovereign tribal nations that were
invested in their own cultural and political autonomy. Indians did not exist as mere free-floating
representations between French and U.S. cultural exchange; rather, indigenous people were active
participants in negotiating these stereotypes. Although unequal in international recognition, Lako-
tas and other American Indian groups also undertook community and nation building, as well as
cultural survival. They responded to settler colonialism in unique ways that took shape in France
through travelers and the circulation of material culture. Furthermore, many American Indians in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries identified more with their tribal community than
with an occupying U.S. government.17 The idea of a multinational American West functions as a
lens through which to interpret the political and cultural relationships between the United States,
France, and indigenous communities in their uses of the American West.
Interpretation of this tripartite international dialogue draws on theoretical ideas of the rela-
tionships between nation and culture. As Benedict Anderson has argued, nations are “cultural
artefacts” that are built through “imagined political communities,” or connections between its
constituents.18 Understood in this way, nations are dynamic historical constructions with origins
and cultural characters. As Homi K. Bhabha has argued, in spite of attempts to build coherent
national character, there is an “impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force.” Instead of see-
ing the nation as a stable entity, Bhabha treats it as constantly undergoing formation. He focuses
on the margins of the national community to see spaces of contestation, contingency, and coun-
ternarrative—in short, how national character is written. Bhabha explains that the “ambivalent,
antagonistic perspective of nation as narration will establish the cultural boundaries of the nation
IN T RODUCTION 5

so that they may be acknowledged as ‘containing’ thresholds of meaning that must be crossed,
erased and translated in the process of cultural production.”19 Whereas for Anderson nation is
built from the center, for Bhabha ideas of nation are constructed from its peripheries.
This project puts these two constructions into dialogue. It interprets how depictions of the
American West participated in the master narratives built by national constructions. It uncovers
how the imagery of the American West revealed alternate narratives presented by American
Indian individuals and communities. It also considers how both dominant narratives and counter-
narratives were shaped by their French context. This understanding of nation as process through
dialogues between communities of unequal power informs this book’s interpretation of the dis-
cursive role of the American West within French, U.S., and American Indian exchange. As Bhabha
suggests, national consciousness is most clearly defined in an international context; he centers on
“this international dimension both within the margins of the nation-space and in the boundaries
in-between nations and peoples” to define constructions of the nation.20
Cultural politics is another useful framework for analyzing constructions of national identities
and mythologies within the exchanges between the United States, France, and the Lakotas.
As art historian Martin Powers writes, “Cultural politics is by nature dialectical; it arises when
an intellectual from one tradition interprets, or re-interprets, another tradition.”21 U.S. travelers
to Paris performed ideas of the American West that were refracted back and reinterpreted by
French observers. This exchange resulted in continual nationalistic redefinition. Likewise, many
American Indians functioned as “cultural brokers” in dialogue between their communities and
broader U.S. and French cultures, such as the American Indian intellectuals who had studied
at the boarding schools.22 These constructions of culture are fluid; as Powers observes, cultural
politics “is often strategic and opportunistic rather than the product of deeply held beliefs.” For
example, he argues that cultural politics “is often defensive, devised in response to a challenge
from some other.”23 This framework also invites consideration of how Native peoples participated
in constructions of national character in this international context, albeit within uneven power
relationships. France became a site of dialogue and disruptive narratives.
Power relationships between the United States and France were also in transition during this
period, and cultural politics frames how art and material culture participated in this shift. U.S.
businessman James Hazen Hyde published a lecture he gave in Paris about the history of Franco-
American relations from the colonial period to 1912. The graph he included offers an example
of cultural politics (fig. 0.2). It charted, “without any scientific pretention,” the historical degrees
of “warmth in Franco-American relationships.”24 The line, with distinct patterns to demarcate
different forms of government, reaches its maximums with the American Revolution, the height
of Napoléon Bonaparte’s reign, and Hyde’s current moment of 1913; it lags during the American
Civil War, the Franco-Mexican War (1863–67), and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Symbols
such as crossed sabers to mark wars, Phrygian caps to mark the pursuit of liberty in revolutions,
and miniature Eiffel Towers to denote world’s fairs extend the visual argument.25 Declared as a
summary of his argument, Hyde, in his chart, attempts to illustrate a dynamic political relation-
ship over time. In the period analyzed in this book, 1867–1914, one can find a consistent increase
in the number and variety of images of the American West, though with shifting meanings within
their cultural moments.
As highlighted in Hyde’s chart, world’s fairs were key sites of cultural politics.26 In the immedi-
ate post–Civil War era, the United States seemed far behind European nations in industrial prow-
ess, military might, and global colonial presence. The meager national buildings constructed by
the United States at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867—a log cabin, a two-story farmhouse,

and a small schoolhouse—were placed near the pavilions of Morocco, Tunisia, Mexico, and FIG. 0.2
Egypt, with the structures representing their former colonizer Great Britain on their other side.27 Graph of historical Franco-
Because of their small scale and location in this geography, one U.S. observer complained that American relations by G. Huré.
the American buildings were found on the “Rue d’Afrique.”28 French observers critiqued the Printed in James H. Hyde, Les
U.S. submissions as inappropriately modest, and even “parsimonious,” for the space allotted.29 États-Unis et la France: Les
According to French writer A. Malespine, whose article included an image of the cabin as though relations historiques franco-
in a forested wilderness, these unadorned edifices stood out: “Among all the splendors to see in américaines (1776–1912) (Paris:
the Exposition park: Egyptian palaces, Chinese houses, . . . [and] Hindu pagodas, the public pass F. Alcan, ca. 1913), interleaf
almost indifferently before two unfinished structures, simple architecture that does not attract between 32–33.
their dazzled eyes.”30 These buildings seemed small scale and understated, especially compared
with the nearby replicas of a Turkish mosque, a Tunisian palace, and an Egyptian temple.
The idea of a nation unfinished, still under exploration, and under (re)construction carried
through these architectural spaces and reinforced the reception of the American paintings on
display. Critic Ernest Chesneau complained of a formulaic quality to the American landscapes
that he found “surprising among a people who are supposed to be freed from so many other
conventions.”31 M. D. Conway, a viewer of the American galleries, was disappointed not to see
more “distinctive characters of American scenery,” which he proposed as “a prairie, a sierra, and
some views of New England home life and pioneer life.”32 These comments stated France’s cen-
trality, modernity, and industry in comparison with the United States. This moment also marked a
turning point in French interest in the American West, however; one of the first extended French
articles about the “American Far West” appeared in 1868.33
The planning committee for the 1867 fair discussed including American Indian material
culture or even live performers in the hopes of appealing to international and anthropological
interest. On November 8, 1865, Paris-based commissioner general of the United States N. M.
Beckwith wrote to the New York planning agent, J. C. Derby, to request American Indian
IN T RODUCTION 7

decorative arts for the American exhibits. “No industry will be out of place, even to a group of
red Indians making pipes, bows, wampum, feathers or baskets,” he observed, and then pressed,
“These last, indeed, would be among the most unique and interesting objects you could send.
They would add a valuable feature to the ethnological elements which the many nationalities
assembled, with their peculiar habits, manners, industries, and character, are expected to display,
and which subject the French Scientific Commission has been particularly directed to study. How-
ever uninteresting a group of red men may be in America, few objects would be thought more
interesting in Europe.”34 Beckwith also thought that indigenous peoples would prove compelling
“objects” of anthropological study in Paris.35 These attempts to export
American Indian people and goods appear not to have materialized at this
fair, but this conversation set the stage for later use of American Indian
culture to claim a distinctive U.S. character in France.
Power relations between France and the United States had shifted
by the early twentieth century as the latter attained greater industrial
prowess and undertook its own colonial projects.36 Some critics expressed
apprehension about the decline of French civilization, in part through its
diminishing birth rate; one U.S. journal printed in 1891 that the birth rate
was down across Europe but that “the rate of decrease is increasing more
rapidly in France than in any other country” and soon the “death rate will
exceed the birth rate.”37 The United States forged an identity equivalent to
that of Great Britain and France by implying a colonization of the American
Indian through settler colonialism. Coupled with industrial growth and, in
1898, overseas colonies, the United States asserted itself an equal player
with European nations on the global scene.
In images of charging cowboys and wild animals on view at the Paris
Exposition of 1900 or in the technological marvel of the train journey
of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West across France in 1905–6, a distinct image
of the United States on the rise countered the impressions of 1867. Yet
the characters associated with the American West, paradoxically, were
rugged, uncouth, natural, native, and the inverse of civilization. By the
early twentieth century, the constructed artlessness of the American West
was disseminated through the mechanisms of mass culture, deflecting
attention away from colonial ambitions.38 In the midst of the transitions in
power dynamics, ideas of the American West and metaphors of relative
youth and age were tossed back and forth between the nations as a form
of cultural politics.
Reinhart’s “Sketches from the Paris Exposition” visualizes these
cultural politics. At the right side of the image, a tripartite grouping
FIG. 0.3 creates a triangle of Franco-American-Lakota interaction (fig. 0.3). A large
Reinhart, “Sketches from the Paris man wearing a suit and top hat stands with his legs splayed, looking down as he smokes. A label
Exposition” (detail of fig. 0.1). declares, “The American Gulliver, well, I’ll be darned!” The figure is oversized compared with
the Eiffel Tower beside him and Paris skyline visible behind him; he literally dominates the stage.
The accompanying article describes him: “With his nervous energy, though expansive enough,
he still refuses to be astonished.” This man, “doubtless, a New Yorker . . . declines being
overtopped by the Eiffel Tower.” His imagined response: “Yes . . . fairly lofty, but lay it flat, and
it would not span the East River. As to height, well, take any elevator in any of the new buildings

in New York, and if you want to be dizzy, you can have quite enough of that kind of thing.”39 The
reference to Jonathan Swift’s iconic character suggests that the man is a traveler to Paris, as out
of scale with his surroundings as Gulliver was to Lilliput. But it also implies his guilelessness,
which is mocked by the Parisian waiter who hands out a flier offering “a suggestion” with a
“warning placard” on his back: “beware of pickpockets.” The hieratic scale elevates the American
man compared with the Frenchman, however, and the echo of the apron wrapped around the
Frenchman’s waist in the women’s dresses at left feminizes him. Placed below them both is an
Indian, whose gesture in smoking echoes in the American man above. Despite being labeled
“the most popular American in Paris,” this figure is smaller in scale and placed in a subservient
position to the other figures. The American Gulliver’s gaze extends beyond the Eiffel Tower and
down upon this man. In subtle ways, Reinhart’s image speaks to the cultural politics at work in
this multinational relationship and suggests how visual culture reinforced these international
power dynamics.
Cultural Circulation:
Transnationalism, Cultural Transfer,
and Crossed History
Many of the objects analyzed in this book underscore international cultural politics, but the
availability of nondialectical models offers spaces for interpretation beyond the discourses of
the nation. Thinking about circulation, rather than dialectical relationships, reveals more of
the multivalent cultural issues at stake. The movements of objects and people related to the
American West signify larger cultural conversations at work. As François Brunet interprets it,
“Circulation is not only motion; it is also currency, and, at least to a certain extent, circularity,
recirculation, or recurrence of signs and objects within a given cultural territory; reproduction,
reuse, re-mediation, repurposing, and return of the same are components of circulation just as
essential as physical transportation, as are noncirculation, suppressed circulation, and delayed
circulation.”40 Levels of mobility and access to controlling representations and stereotypes of
the American West in France are larger cultural indicators of power hierarchies and identity
politics.
As a concept that crosses national borders and shifts meanings in new contexts, the Amer-
ican West is a transnational concept. The lens of transnationalism encourages analysis of the
histories of individual interaction, to draw from historian Patricia Clavin, “the social space that
they inhabit, the networks they form and the ideas they exchange,” which come to stand in for
communities or nations.41 In its origins, transnationalism highlighted “contacts, coalitions and
interactions across state boundaries that are not controlled by the central foreign policy organs
of government.”42 At times engaged as U.S. government-sponsored propaganda, icons of the
American West were often used in France for individual ends, such as artistic self-promotion and
the celebration of regional identities. Other entities, such as businesses, art academies, and other
artists’ organizations, also toyed with the mythologies around the American West.
Transnationalism and related inquiries decenter the nation-state and challenge center-periph-
ery models.43 The frameworks of cultural transfer and crossed history supplement transnation-
alism by focusing on cultural exchange and the multiple registers of meaning that objects and
peoples take on in their international contexts. Cultural transfer focuses on overlap—rather than
dialectical opposition, insider-outsider relationships, and center-periphery models—and allows
IN T RODUCTION 9

for a more synthetic understanding of layers of contact than transnationalism. Michel Espagne
has argued that cultural transfer focuses “less on the circulation of cultural property than on
its reinterpretation” in new contexts. This model challenges oppositional thinking invited by
direct comparison and favors appropriation over influence. Rather than dialectical relationships,
Espagne observes that “vectors” of cultural transfer rarely reveal the opposition of two cultures,
but rather “complex interactions among several poles.”44
Like cultural transfer, the framework of crossed history seeks to move beyond binaries and
to consider the dynamic nature of referents and the frames of contact. As a result, the histories
of individuals and of nations can be more dynamically intersected with a lens that encourages
“multidimensional” and “pluralist” interpretations.45 Crossed history permits multiple divergent
meanings operating simultaneously and more fully sheds the structures of influence implied
by the notion of “transfer.” These concepts offer space for diverse points of view that are not
necessarily dialectically constructed. For example, in addition to being shaped by exchange and
encounter with non-Native and Native Americans, French ideas of the American West were also
filtered through other international contexts, including Great Britain and Germany, which engaged
with the concept on its own terms.46 These frameworks unmoor the American West from the
discourse of exceptionalism and reveal the mechanisms of cultural nationalism. The American
West in France was not merely the export of claims of a uniquely U.S. culture; rather, its peoples
and objects were more free-form and flexible for selective performance and appropriation. This
emphasis on microhistories highlights the centrality of objects of visual and material culture in
enacting exchange.
In interpretations of constructions of the American West at the individual level, identity poli-
tics become central. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler creates a dichotomy between performance,
which is worn “on the surface of the body,” and the self within. She writes that identity plays
or masquerades “are performative in the sense that the essence of identity that they otherwise
purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and
other discursive means.”47 Many individuals analyzed in this book performed ideas of the Amer-
ican West in France. Often their displays—whether playing Indian or cowboy—were identifiable
as performance or mimicry.48 Butler suggests that there is no original authentic source from
which individuals draw the structure of their performance; rather, performance is marked as an
imagined identity. The individuals discussed create their performances from an often recognizably
inauthentic arrangement of material culture and behaviors. Such display recognizably “postures
as an imitation.”49 None of these acts of playing Indian or cowboy can claim authenticity; instead
their creators act as performance artists designing their displays and acknowledging the borders
of their performance to forward both personal and communal agendas. These constructions
emphasize the spectacular nature of modern France, both within and outside of official perfor-
mance spaces.50 These displays comment on the mythologies from which they draw; as Kwame
Anthony Appiah writes, “Our social lives endow us with the full richness of resources available for
self-creation: for even when we are constructing new and counternormative identities, it is the old
and the normative that provide the language and the background.” As a result, “new identity is
always post-some-old-identity.”51 Identity performances in France thus can be read as multilayered
constructions that engage with both the current space of display and the individual histories of
the performers. The case studies in this book explore both the dominant narratives and counter-
narratives at work in these acts of costuming as cowboy or Indian. Analyzing these examples at
the individual level reveals the discursive nature of the American West and complicates construc-
tions of national and cultural identities.

The Politics of Assimilation in the Reservation Period
The shadow of U.S. settler colonialism shaped many of the experiences of American Indians
in France. The second half of the nineteenth century in America was characterized by violence
incited by the U.S. government, the repression of Native sovereignty, confinement of Native
communities onto reservations, and large-scale government-sponsored projects of assimilation.52
American Indians faced deliberate attempts to absorb their cultures into dominant society with
the establishment of military-style boarding schools in the 1870s that sought to assimilate indige-
nous youth by discouraging the transmission of traditional tribal practices.53 In this context, which
historians have called the “reservation era” and the “era of assimilation,” culture building was
especially crucial in the face of attempted annihilation and genocide.
For Lakotas in particular, the U.S. government reduced the scale of tribal territories over
this period through treaty making and breaking and the so-called Sioux Wars of 1850–91.54 The
decimation of the bison, traditionally hunted by nomadic Lakotas, enabled the U.S. government
to construct a system of annuities, or rations, to encourage Lakota dependency. In 1851 the
Fort Laramie Treaty marked a large-scale attempt to limit American Indians’ movements by
establishing geographic boundaries and assigning set hunting grounds for individual tribal
nations.55 After the Great Sioux Reservation was formed in 1868, the U.S. government shifted
from making treaties with sovereign Native nations to employing congressional plenary power
to dictate shifting boundaries through legislation.56 For example, after gold was discovered in
the Black Hills, the Great Sioux Reservation was reduced in 1877, though that land had been
promised to the Lakotas, Dakotas, and Arapahos in 1868.57 The Dawes Act of 1887, also known
as the General Allotment Act, sought to transition American Indian communities into settlement
society by partitioning land for farming to individuals who would obtain formal ownership along-
side citizenship after twenty-five years.58 Unallotted land was then sold to white settlers. In 1889
the Great Sioux Reservation was cut in half, and the remaining reservation lands were divided
between six Lakota and Dakota tribal groups.59 Through the Office of Indian Affairs (renamed
the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1947), the U.S. government expanded a bureaucratic structure of
surveillance by installing boss farmers to oversee land use and to distribute rations.60 In their
desperation and to seek a solution to white incursion, many Lakotas embraced the Ghost Dance
in early 1890, and within the anxiety about possible revolt the massacre at Wounded Knee took
place on December 29, 1890.61 This attack marked the last of the “Sioux Wars” and the firm
entrenchment of reservation and assimilation policies. Material culture signifiers marked assimi-
lation; jobs and even the delivery of rations were often tied with the adoption of Anglo-American
dress and, for men, by cutting their hair.62
Though these histories of settler colonialism occurred far from the French capital, master
narratives of manifest destiny were performed in France. Reinhart’s label under the smoking Indian
(see fig. 0.3) labeled him “the most popular American in Paris.” The cohesion of Native and non-
Native identities implies the politics of Indian removal and attempts to assimilate American
Indian communities. Many U.S. artists who sought to cultivate distinctiveness in the international
city performed associations with Indians for ready audiences. But, as scholars have shown,
such performances of Native America were predicated on political suppression. As Shari M.
Huhndorf has argued, as more American Indian communities were subjugated by systems of
government control, their images were liberated for cultural appropriation.63 Representations such
as Reinhart’s carry the weight of that political legacy, with the Indian presented as an archetypal
American. Literary scholar Susan Schekel analyzes the “the deep ambivalence of a nation founded
IN T RODUCTION 11

on the conceptual assertion of natural right and the actual denial of Indians’ natural rights.”
According to Schekel, the consistent resurgence of images of American Indians enacted by white
artists, writers, and actors reveals a return of a repressed population haunting dominant U.S.
society.64
Art historians have suggested that depictions of Indians often rationalized U.S. expansion.65
This discourse engages with cultural anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, who argues that non-Native
Americans exhibit “imperialist nostalgia” to deflect culpability within settler colonialism. He
writes, “When the so-called civilizing process destabilizes forms of life, the agents of change
experience transformations of other cultures as if they were personal losses.” He elaborates on
the resulting paradox: “Under imperialism . . . people mourn the passing of what they themselves
have transformed.”66 Through this lens, the appropriation of American Indian culture can indicate
Native erasure; a large body of scholarship has been devoted to parsing out the performed
Indian as an “obvious simulation and ruse of colonial dominance.”67 In other words, the fantasy
of the Indian followed the domination of American Indian communities by the U.S. government.
Reinhart’s Indian sketch adopts these stereotypes, containing the sitter on the ground below
the other figures, smoking tobacco, and leaning against a tipi, with additional painted tipis in the
background. Representations of Indians in France often bear out this history, though at times they
reveal interventions opposing the treatment of American Indian communities from both artists
and sitters.68
French Primitivism and Colonialism:

Echoes in the Settler Colonies
Reinhart’s label, “the most popular American in Paris,” also alludes to the French populace’s
admiration of American Indian performers in 1889. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which narrated
the so-called taming of the West through performances in an arena with costumed cowboys
and American Indians, set up in Neuilly near Paris for seven months during the Exposition
Universelle.69 Such fascination was not mere innocent curiosity. The Harper’s Weekly article that
accompanied Reinhart’s sketch suggested, “Around the teepee the Frenchmen swarm, and gaze
enraptured at the hired Indians.”70 The author’s note that the performers were “hired” breaks
through assumptions of the authenticity of the performance but suggests that French observers
were fooled. The background of the image includes a few figures inspecting the decorated tipis.
The Indian registered with the long-standing discourse of the “noble savage,” which had
developed from the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century. Rousseau
elevated the primitive characteristics of humanity—such as “pure instinct” and authentic sight
and sensation—by noting a division between natural and civil societies.71 French observers often
imagined the Indian as connected with nature. This theme was established by French novels that
imagined the American Indian after Rousseau’s image, such as François-René de Chateaubriand’s
Atala (1801) and the visual culture that drew from its story.72 This image was reinforced by early
visits of American Indians, such as an Osage group who visited in 1827 and George Catlin’s tour
to Paris in 1845 with Ojibwe and Iowa individuals.73 Catlin’s display fortified romantic notions of
the “noble savage” and set the stage for the display and performance of indigenous people. After
a purported visit with an American Indian at the Exposition Universelle of 1867, French critic L. G.
Jacques recalled the language of Rousseau when he explained, “The homeland of the Indian is the
world. He transplants himself like a tree. All over the earth that is covered with greenery or with

forests, all over where the rivers roll like vagabonds, the Indian is at home. Nature has no secrets
for him; he is its eldest son.”74 This lingering conception shaped the reception of American Indi-
ans in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This interest in the imagined primitive nature of Native America reinforced French primitivist
ideologies. As cultural geographer Jean-François Staszak has explained, “Primitivism was
characterized by a rejection of canonic Western art, perceived as inauthentic, and by its quest for
regenerative inspiration in alternative expressions, perceived as being truer because simpler and
free.”75 Primitivist thinking drew from the discourses of Orientalism; as Staszak has argued, “The
Orient, as a Western construction of a spatial otherness, assembles all ‘elsewheres,’ all exoticisms.”
“Primitive” America was linked with so-called primitive cultures globally, as what Staszak has
described as “archetypes of Otherness.”76 Contemporaries employed a narrative of “vanishing
races” that appeared in the commentary about American Indians and about the communities
that were targeted by the European primitivist imaginary.77 Yet as art historian Sascha T. Scott has
shown in her study of representations of Pueblo peoples in the early twentieth century, the concept
of primitivism is muddied by the multiplicity of meanings and might be more productively under-
stood through specific examples located in place and time, resulting in an array of primitivisms.78
Some French artists who adopted primitivist viewpoints also expressed an interest in
American Indians. For example, when Paul Gauguin visited Paris from Pont-Aven in 1889, he saw
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West multiple times. Gauguin’s letters to Émile Bernard celebrate the spectacle
in the context of the other anthropological exhibitions at the Exposition of 1889, including the “vil-
lage at Java where there are Hindu dances, all the art of India one finds here, and the photographs
that I have of Cambodia one can find here verbatim.” Gauguin wrote to Bernard that he would
return to the Exposition the following Saturday to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, an activity that
would require arrival at least three and a half hours in advance to secure a seat. After seeing the
show, Gauguin wrote again to Bernard: “I was at the Buffalo Bill show. You absolutely must come
to see this. It is of grand interest.”79 Gauguin’s visit to the show occurred between his visits to
Martinique and Brittany and his voyages abroad to Tahiti. The exposure to American Indians “act-
ing out their own history” contributed to his expectations for tribal cultures that he sought in the
South Seas. Gauguin’s primitivism opens up larger questions about modes of seeing that affect
the reception of American Indian performers in France. The French public perhaps responded so
fervently to images and portrayals of American Indians because they served as another example
of allegedly exotic, primitive people who reinforced European supremacy.
As many scholars have considered, primitivist thinking reinforced colonialism, which sought
to civilize so-called savagery worldwide.80 When the discourse of French primitivism engaged with
Indians, it drew indigenous Americans into a colonialist context by reaffirming French contempo-
rary colonial prowess. In discussing Reinhart’s illustration, for example, the reporter for Harper’s
Weekly wrote, “The Frenchman . . . gazes at the peau rouge with wonder, and tries to compare
him with his own Arab, and finds no similarity.”81 This flippant comment teasingly associates
U.S. settler colonialism with French colonialism in North Africa and then undercuts the link.
Because they were not French colonial subjects, American Indians were understood as politically
separate from French colonial authority in its current form in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Senegal,
Gabon, Tahiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Cambodia, and elsewhere.82 Yet connections between
the reception of American Indians in Paris and French colonialism resonated for contemporaries.
As though hinting at imperial relationships, the figures standing to the left of the background
tipis seem to be wearing military costume and stand upright with hands on hips. In this posture,
Reinhart’s sketch subtly implies colonial power.
IN T RODUCTION 13

Overlapping spaces of display in France that hosted Amer-
ican Indians and French colonial subjects reveal the similar
conditions of viewing that encouraged viewers to approach
both groups through a similar lens. In France, the exhibition
of so-called primitive peoples functioned both as public
entertainment and site for anthropological investigation.83
For example, the Jardin d’Acclimatation brought in rotating
“ethnographic exhibitions” of tribal groups from around the
globe between 1877 and the early twentieth century.84 A group
of Omahas visited in the autumn of 1883, living in the same
space that hosted other indigenous people who were more
directly affected by French colonial efforts.85 Articles about the
Omaha visitors in L’Illustration shared the issue with articles
about French colonial conquests, including recent military
campaigns in Senegal. These pairings connected the Senega-
lese and American Indians by treating both as savages.86
Amateur anthropologist Prince Roland Bonaparte made
a set of thirty-five photographs of the Omaha visitors as part
of his “sample of the human race.”87 He constructed frontal
and profile views of individual Indians, emphasizing their
clothing and physiognomic traits in conformity with dictates
of contemporary anthropology in France.88 In his display in the
anthropology section of the Exposition Universelle of 1889, he
combined his prints of Omaha sitters with individuals from
other African tribes at the Jardin d’Acclimatation (fig. 0.4). In a
FIG. 0.4 rectangular case that created seven rows of eight photographs each, Bonaparte invited viewers to
Photograph collection of Prince make connections between his American Indian and African sitters. At the same time, the structure
Roland Bonaparte, anthropology supported theories of scientific racism that created hierarchies among the world’s races; he placed
section of the Exposition his clothed Omaha sitters literally higher on the wall than his nude and seminude African subjects.
Universelle of 1889. Albumin The primitivizing gaze on the American Indian may also have been shaped by France’s
silver print. Société de Géographie previous role as a colonizer in North America. The celebration of French history in North America
Archives, Bibliothèque Nationale resonated within French reactions to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Paris in 1889; as historian Jill
de France, Département des Jonnes has described, the French public was “thrilled to find a few French-speaking Canadian
Cartes et plans, Paris, SG W63(5). trappers in the troupe, reminders of the old days of French empire in America.”89 An illustration
from the 1889 Exposition specifically labeled a tipi “Peaux-Rouges de Canada.”90 Many French
novels that imagined the American Indian made reference to that history, keeping it alive in the
late nineteenth-century French imagination.91 Ignoring the historical ceding of New France to the
British in 1763 and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, French historians interpreted this history as
evidence of French power abroad.
Viewers approached the American Indians at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West encampments in 1889
and 1905–6 with an anthropological perspective shaped by displays like the Jardin d’Acclimata-
tion.92 Narratives performed by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1889 and 1905–6 enhanced colonial
appropriations of tropes of American Indian character in a French context. As historian Robert W.
Rydell has observed, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West abroad was carefully calculated “to make the story
of the American West merge with the story of European expansion at a time when European
colonization reached the far frontiers of its own empires.”93 The format of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West

allegorized a broader triumph of civilization over the “savage” that resonated with European colo-
nization around the globe.94 For example, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was scripted to present Indian
performers acting out their own defeat. Meanwhile, in French exhibition spaces, as historian
Fanny Robles has pointed out, “West African exhibitions . . . reenacted colonial battles, staging
the native’s defeat on a daily basis.”95 The use of ethnographic exhibitions to restage colonial
defeat reveals the overlapping discourses between U.S. settler colonialism and French colonial-
ism. Some French articles described U.S. expansion as “colonization.”96
Militaristic acts of U.S. settler colonialism received some criticism in the French press. Articles
often shared the concerns of the progressive American Indian reform movement of the 1880s
and 1890s, which questioned the establishment of reservations and the cruel treatment of Native
communities.97 Charles de Varigny, a frequent commentator on American culture and politics,
published a scathing article in the cosmopolitan magazine Revue des deux-mondes in 1892 titled
“The End of a Race: The Sioux Insurrection” that lambasted the U.S. government and military
treatment of the Lakotas. His lengthy exposé traces the history
of U.S.-Lakota relations from the 1860s to the massacre at
Wounded Knee. Varigny quoted at length from the Democratic
senator from Indiana, Daniel Wolsey Voorhees, who spoke out
in Washington about the reduction of promised rations to the
Lakotas and declared the U.S. government behavior “a shame
for humanity, and a crime before God.” In a similar vein, he
cited important Indian reform activist Helen Hunt Jackson.
Varigny wondered why U.S. expansion did not end at the Rocky
Mountains so as to leave space for American Indian popu-
lations.98 This article suggests that the politics of U.S. settler
colonialism did not escape French attention. At the same time,
these critiques of U.S. treatment of American Indians justified
claims of relative French benevolence in engaging with their
colonial subjects.99
Though complicated and contradictory in their political
registers, comments of contestation were coupled with visual
imagery that drew attention to the spectacle of violence and
the plight of American Indian communities. For example, a
cover of the illustrated supplement of Le Petit Journal from
December 13, 1890, imagined the escalating tensions at Pine
Ridge Reservation that culminated in the Wounded Knee
massacre on December 29 (fig. 0.5). The illustration reveals
how the memory of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West blurred the lines
between the performed spectacle of violence and current
historical events. A representation of William F. Cody on
horseback takes center stage; he holds a gun toward the face
of a warrior in regalia who stands next to his horse, with a tomahawk in his belt and rifle held in FIG. 0.5
his hand. The pairing of scout on horseback with the Plains figure standing on the ground sug- Cover of Le Petit Journal illustrated
gests the asymmetrical tone of the battle, reiterated in the explanatory article that assumes that supplement, December 13, 1890,
“the cause of civilization will triumph.”100 The Lakota warrior leans back, his left arm outstretched Ville d’Avignon, Palais du Roure,
as he is shot in the face. A long, pointedly red-white-and-blue garment flows behind him. In the Fondation Flandrysey-Espérandieu.
context of the mass-market press, the image glorified violence as spectacle.
IN T RODUCTION 15

The article is not without questioning, however. Suggesting that soon “the Sioux will be no
longer . . . except an object for collection,” the writer wonders if a so-called insurrection was more
of a government excuse for violence than a reality. “Is it the truth, is it a pre-text for new killing? It
is difficult to know,” the author muses.101 Printed two days before the murder of Húŋkpaph ̌a chief
Thath
̌ ̌áŋka Íyotake (Sitting Bull), this haunting image in the French popular press sensationalized
violence against American Indians. Even as the text questions the U.S. government’s “long
pursuit of the extinction of the Indians,” the illustration invites the viewer to excitement more than
the sorrow and shame demanded by Varigny.102 The image complicates Cody’s role in the history
of U.S.-Native relations by casting him as an aggressor and civilizer, following the role he played in
his spectacle. But in late November 1890, the performer had been at Pine Ridge Agency trying to
alleviate the tense standoff between the Lakotas and the government.103 This article highlights the
presence of U.S. expansion in French political conversations as well as spaces of challenge to the
colonial project abroad.
American Indian Cosmopolitanism:

Survivance, Transculturation, and
Autoethnography in France
Although often victimized by racism and colonialist policies, American Indians were not silent
victims of U.S. or French colonial might. Dominant society did not permit them equal mobility,
but the historical record reveals creative challenges to colonial authority and cultural appropriation
rather than defeat or acquiescence.104 Compared with the histories of many French artists and
U.S. artists in France, the archives are scarcer on American Indian travelers and would-be travel-
ers to France. In spite of a fragmentary archive and more limited registers of mobility, representa-
tions of the American West in France complicate and intervene in simple stereotypes of American
Indian submission. American Indian performers who traveled to France were agents who partici-
pated within, resisted, and functioned outside of the Euro-American frames of expectation.
Native literary critic Jace Weaver has coined the term “Red Atlantic” to draw on the compli-
cated doubled identities revealed by Paul Gilroy’s study The Black Atlantic in considering the
circulations of American Indians. He has written, “The Red Atlantic constrained, but it also pro-
vided opportunities.”105 Maximilian C. Forte has challenged the tendency of scholars on cosmo-
politanism to exclude indigenous peoples: “The dominant notion of real indigeneity is that it must
be racially unmixed, culturally undiluted, geographically remote, and materially impoverished.”106
This book engages with these calls to scholarship to rethink the mobility and cosmopolitanism of
indigenous peoples.
An analysis of the travels, comments, records, and material culture of several Oglala perform-
ers in France shows that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West enabled not only travel, funds, and access to
cosmopolitan culture but also opportunities for critique and contestation of U.S.-Native relations
from afar.107 In addition, this project highlights the work of American Indian artists whose work
traveled to France—in the form of material culture, oil painting, and music—even when the mak-
ers did not complete the journey. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West performers and other Native individuals
discussed in this book participated in international and cosmopolitan networks that belie the
expectations of indigenous peoples as disappearing or as frozen in space and time.108 It supports
Forte’s conclusion that “indigenous cosmopolitans can be both rooted and routed, nonelite yet
nonparochical, provincial without being isolated, internationalized without being delocalized.”109

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
And islands that were the Hesperides
Of all my boyish dreams.
And the burden of that old song,
It murmurs and whispers still:
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”
I remember the black wharves and the slips,

And the sea-tides tossing free;
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.
And the voice of that wayward song
Is singing and saying still:
I remember the bulwarks by the shore,

And the fort upon the hill;
The sunrise gun, with its hollow roar,
The drum-beat repeated o’er and o’er,
And the bugle wild and shrill.
And the music of that old song
Throbs in my memory still:
I remember the sea-fight far away,

How it thundered o’er the tide!
And the dead captains, as they lay
In their graves, o’erlooking the tranquil bay,
Where they in battle died.
And the sound of that mournful song
Goes through me with a thrill:
I can see the breezy dome of groves,

The shadows of Deering’s Woods;
And the friendships old and the early loves
Come back with a sabbath sound, as of doves
In quiet neighborhoods.
And the verse of that sweet old song,
It flutters and murmurs still:
I remember the gleams and glooms that dart

Across the school-boy’s brain;
The song and the silence in the heart,
That in part are prophecies, and in part
Are longings wild and vain.
And the voice of that fitful song
Sings on, and is never still:
There are things of which I may not speak;

There are dreams that cannot die;
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,
And bring a pallor into the cheek,
And a mist before the eye.
And the words of that fatal song
Come over me like a chill:
Strange to me now are the forms I meet

When I visit the dear old town;
But the native air is pure and sweet,
And the trees that o’ershadow each well-known street,
As they balance up and down,
Are singing the beautiful song,
Are sighing and whispering still:
And Deering’s Woods are fresh and fair,

And with joy that is almost pain
My heart goes back to wander there,
And among the dreams of the days that were
I find my lost youth again.
And the strange and beautiful song,
The groves are repeating it still:
SUBLIME SELECTIONS IN POETRY
SONG OF THE MYSTIC

By Abram J. Ryan
I walk down the Valley of Silence—

Down the dim, voiceless valley—alone!
And I hear not the fall of a footstep
Around me, save God’s and my own;
And the hush of my heart is as holy
As hovers where angels have flown!
Long ago was I weary of voices

Whose music my heart could not win;
Long ago was I weary of noises
That fretted my soul with their din;
Long ago was I weary of places
Where I met but the human—and sin.
I walked in the world with the worldly;

I craved what the world never gave;
And I said: “In the world each Ideal,
That shines like a star on life’s wave,
Is wrecked on the shores of the Real,
And sleeps like a dream in a grave.”
And still did I pine for the Perfect,

And still found the False with the True;
I sought ’mid the Human for Heaven,
But caught a mere glimpse of its Blue:
And I wept when the clouds of the Mortal
Veiled even that glimpse from my view.
And I toiled on, heart-tired of the Human,

And I moaned ’mid the mazes of men,
Till I knelt, long ago, at an altar
And I heard a voice call me. Since then
I walk down the Valley of Silence
That lies far beyond mortal ken.
Do you ask what I found in the Valley?

’Tis my Trysting-Place with the Divine.
And I fell at the feet of the Holy,
And above me a voice said: “Be mine.”
And there rose from the depths of my spirit
An echo—“My heart shall be thine.”
Do you ask how I live in the Valley?

I weep—and I dream—and I pray.
But my tears are as sweet as the dew-drops
That fall on the roses in May;
And my prayer, like a perfume from Censers,
Ascendeth to God night and day.
In the hush of the Valley of Silence

I dream all the songs that I sing;
And the music floats down the dim Valley,
Till each finds a word for a wing,
That to hearts, like the Dove of the Deluge,
A message of Peace they may bring.
But far on the deep there are billows

That never shall break on the beach;
And I have heard songs in the Silence
That never shall float into speech;
And I have had dreams in the Valley
Too lofty for language to reach.
And I have seen Thoughts in the Valley—

Ah me! how my spirit was stirred!
And they wear holy veils on their faces,
Their footsteps can scarcely be heard;
They pass through the Valley like Virgins,
Too pure for the touch of a word!
Do you ask me the place of the Valley,

Ye hearts that are harrowed by Care?
It lieth afar between mountains,
And God and His angels are there:
And one is the dark mount of Sorrow,
And one the bright mountain of Prayer.
THE SEA
By Barry Cornwall
The sea! the sea! the open sea!

The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
Without a mark, without a bound,
It runneth the earth’s wide regions round;
It plays with the clouds, it mocks the skies,
Or like a cradled creature lies.
I’m on the sea, I’m on the sea,

I am where I would ever be,
With the blue above and the blue below,
And silence wheresoe’er I go.
If a storm should come and awake the deep,
What matter? I shall ride and sleep.
I love, oh! how I love to ride

On the fierce, foaming, bursting tide,
Where every mad wave drowns the moon,
And whistles aloft its tempest tune,
And tells how goeth the world below,
And why the southwest wind doth blow!
I never was on the dull, tame shore

But I loved the great sea more and more,
And backward flew to her billowy breast,
Like a bird that seeketh her mother’s nest,—
And a mother she was and is to me,
For I was born on the open sea.
The waves were white, and red the morn,

In the noisy hour when I was born;
The whale it whistled, the porpoise rolled,
And the dolphins bared their backs of gold;
And never was heard such an outcry wild,
As welcomed to life the ocean child.
I have lived since then, in calm and strife,

Full fifty summers a rover’s life,
With wealth to spend, and a power to range,
But never have sought or sighed for change,
And death, whenever he comes to me,
Shall come on the wide, unbounded sea!
THE GREAT ADVANCE

By Thomas Walsh
In my heart is the sound of drums

And the sweep of the bugles calling;
The day of the Great Adventure comes,
And the tramp of feet is falling, falling,
Ominous falling, everywhere,
By street and lane, by field and square—
To answer the Voice appealing!
One by one they have put down

The tool, the pen, and the racquet;
One by one they have donned the brown
And the blue, the knapsack and jacket;
With a smile for the friend of a happier day,
With a kiss for the love that would bid them stay—
They are off by the train and packet.
What fate, what star, what sun, what field,

What sea shall know their daring?
Shall the battle reek or the dead calm yield
Their wreaths that are preparing?
Shall they merely stand and wait the call?
Shall they hear it, rush and slay and fall?—
What matter?—their swords are baring!
We stand in the crowds that see them go—

We who are old and weak, unready;
We see the red blood destined to flow
Flushing their cheeks, as with footstep steady
With a tramp and a tramp, they file along,
Our brave, our true, our young, our strong—
And the fever burns us fierce and heady.
With God, then forth, by sea and land,

To your Adventure beyond story,
No Argonaut, no Crusader band
Ere passed with such exceeding glory!
Though ye seek fields both strange and far,
Ye are at home where heroes are!
Such is the prayer we send your star—
We who are weak and old and hoary.
WHEN THE GRASS SHALL COVER ME

By Ina Coolbrith
When the grass shall cover me,

Head to foot where I am lying,—
When not any wind that blows,
Summer-blooms nor winter-snows,
Shall awake me to your sighing:
Close above me as you pass,
You will say, “How kind she was,”
You will say, “How true she was,”
When the grass grows over me.
When the grass shall cover me,
Holden close to earth’s warm bosom,—
While I laugh, or weep, or sing,
Nevermore for anything,
You will find in blade and blossom,
Sweet small voices, odorous,
Tender pleaders in my cause,
That shall speak me as I was—
When the grass grows over me.
When the grass shall cover me!

Ah, beloved, in my sorrow
Very patient, I can wait,
Knowing that, or soon or late,
There will dawn a clearer morrow:
When your heart will moan: “Alas!
Now I know how true she was;
Now I know how dear she was”—
When the grass grows over me!
—Copyright by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, Mass., and used

by kind permission of author and publisher.
RIGHTEOUS WRATH
By Henry Van Dyke
There are many kinds of hate, as many kinds of fire;

And some are fierce and fatal with murderous desire;
And some are mean and craven, revengeful, selfish, slow,
They hurt the man that holds them more than they hurt his foe.
And yet there is a hatred that purifies the heart.

The anger of the better against the baser part,
Against the false and wicked, against the tyrant’s sword,
Against the enemies of love, and all that hate the Lord.
O cleansing indignation, O flame of righteous wrath,

Give me a soul to see thee and follow in thy path!
Save me from selfish virtue, arm me for fearless fight,
And give me strength to carry on, a soldier of the Right!
—Outlook.
APOSTROPHE TO THE OCEAN

By Lord Byron
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin,—his control
Stops with the shore: upon the watery plain,
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,
When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown.
TO THE SIERRAS
By J. J. Owen
Ye snow-capped mountains, basking in the sun,

Like fleecy clouds that deck the summer skies,
On you I gaze, when day’s dull task is done,
Till night shuts out your glories from my eyes.
For stormy turmoil, and ambition’s strife,

I find in you a solace and a balm,—
Derive a higher purpose, truer life,
From your pale splendor, passionless and calm.
Mellowed by distance, all your rugged cliffs,

And deep ravines, in graceful outlines lie;
Each giant form in silent grandeur lifts
Its hoary summit to the evening sky.
I reck not of the wealth untold, concealed

Beneath your glorious coronal of snows,
Whose budding treasure yet but scarce revealed,
Shall blossom into trade—a golden rose.
A mighty realm is waking at your feet

To life and beauty, from the lap of Time,
With cities vast, where millions yet shall meet,
And Peace shall reign in majesty sublime.
Rock-ribbed Sierras, with your crests of snow,

A type of manhood, ever strong and true,
Whose heart with golden wealth should ever glow,
Whose thoughts in purity should symbol you.
SUNSET
By Ina Coolbrith
Along yon purple rim of hills,

How bright the sunset glory lies!
Its radiance spans the western skies,
And all the slumbrous valley fills:
Broad shafts of lurid crimson, blent

With lustrous pearl in massed white;
And one great spear of amber light
That flames o’er half the firmament!
Vague, murmurous sounds the breezes bear;

A thousand subtle breaths of balm,
From some far isle of tropic calm,
Are borne upon the tranced air.
And, muffling all its giant-roar,

The restless waste of waters, rolled
To one broad sea of liquid gold,
Goes singing up the shining shore!
SOMETHING TO LOVE
By William Bansman
There are beautiful thoughts in the day-dreams of life,

When youth and ambition join hands for the strife;
There are joys for the gay, which come crowding apace,
And hang out the rainbow of hope for the race;
There are prizes to gain, which ascend as we climb,
But the struggle to win them makes effort sublime.
Each cloud that arises has fingers of gold,
Inviting the timid and nerving the bold;
Each sorrow is tempered with something of sweet,
And the crag, while it frowns, shows a niche for the feet.
There are charms in the verdure which nature has spread,
And the sky shows a glory of stars overhead,
And the zephyrs of summer have voices to woo,
As well as to bear the perfumes from the dew;
There are gushes of transport in dreams of the night,
When memory garners its thoughts of delight,
And the soul seeks its kindred, and noiselessly speaks,
In the smiles and the blushes of health-blooming cheeks.
There are rapturous melodies filling the heart,
With emotions which nothing beside could impart;
And yet, though this cumulous picture may show
The brightest of joys which ambition would know—
Though the heaven it opens is one of surprise,
All gorgeous with hope, and prismatic with dyes,
Satiety follows these transports of bliss,
And the heart asks a lodgment more real than this;
Like the dove, it will wander, and still, like the dove,
Come back, till it rests upon something to love.
OUT IN THE FIELDS WITH GOD

By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The little cares that fretted me,

I lost them yesterday
Among the fields above the sea,
Among the winds at play,
Among the lowing of the herds,
The rustling of the trees,
Among the singing of the birds,
The humming of the bees.
The foolish fears of what may happen,
I cast them all away
Among the clover-scented grass,
Among the new-mown hay,
Among the husking of the corn
Where drowsy poppies nod,
Where ill thoughts die and good are born,
Out in the fields with God.
BROTHERHOOD
By Edwin Markham
The crest and crowning of all good,

Life’s final star, is Brotherhood;
For it will bring again to Earth
Her long-lost Poesy and Mirth;
Will send new light on every face,
A kingly power upon the race.
And till it come, we men are slaves,
And travel downward to the dust of graves.
Come, clear the way, then, clear the way:

Blind creeds and kings have had their day.
Break the dead branches from the path:
Our hope is in the aftermath—
Our hope is in heroic men,
Star-led to build the world again.
To this Event the ages ran:
Make way for Brotherhood—make way for Man.
—Copyright by Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, and used by

kind permission of author and publisher.
MORNING
By Edward Rowland Sill
I entered once, at break of day,

A chapel, lichen-stained and gray,
Where a congregation dozed and heard
An old monk read from a written Word.
No light through the window-panes could pass,
For shutters were closed on the rich stained glass,
And in a gloom like the nether night,
The monk read on by a taper’s light,
Ghostly with shadows that shrunk and grew
As the dim light flared on aisle and pew;
And the congregation that dozed around
Listened without a stir or sound—
Save one, who rose with wistful face,
And shifted a shutter from its place.
Then light flashed in like a flashing gem—
For dawn had come unknown to them—
And a slender beam, like a lance of gold,
Shot to the crimson curtain-fold,
Over the bended head of him
Who pored and pored by the taper dim;
And I wondered that, under the morning ray,
When night and shadow were scattered away,
The monk should bow his locks of white
By a taper’s feebly flickering light—
Should pore and pore, and never seem
To notice the golden morning beam.
THE PETRIFIED FERN

Anonymous
In a valley, centuries ago,

Grew a little fern leaf, green and slender,
Veining delicate and fibers tender;
Waving when the wind crept down so low.
Rushes tall, and moss, and grass grew ’round it,
Playful sunbeams darted in and found it,
Drops of dew stole in by night, and crown’d it;
But no foot of man e’er trod that way;
Earth was young and keeping holiday.
Monster fishes swam the silent main,

Stately forests waved their giant branches,
Mountains hurled their snowy avalanches,
Mammoth creatures stalked across the plain;
Nature reveled in grand mysteries:
But the little fern was not of these,
Did not number with the hills and trees;
Only grew and waved its wild sweet way,
None ever came to note it day by day.
Earth one time put on a frolic mood,

Heaved the rocks and changed the mighty motion
Of the deep, strong currents of the ocean,
Moved the plain and shook the haughty wood,
Crushed the little fern in soft moist clay,—
Covered it, and hid it safe away.
Oh, the long, long centuries since that day!
Oh, the agony! Oh, life’s bitter cost,
Since that useless little fern was lost!
Useless? Lost? There came a thoughtful man,

Searching Nature’s secrets, far and deep;
From a fissure in a rocky steep
He withdrew a stone, o’er which there ran
Fairy pencilings, a quaint design,
Veinings, leafage, fibers clear and fine!
So, I think God hides some souls away,
Sweetly to surprise us, the last day.
SLEEP
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Of all the thoughts of God that are

Borne inward unto souls afar,
Among the Psalmist’s music deep,
Now tell me if that any is
For gift or grace surpassing this,—
“He giveth his beloved sleep”?
What would we give to our beloved?

The hero’s heart, to be unmoved,—
The poet’s star-tuned harp, to sweep,—
The patriot’s voice, to teach and rouse,—
The monarch’s crown, to light the brows?
“He giveth his beloved sleep.”
What do we give to our beloved?

A little faith, all undisproved,—
A little dust to over weep,—
And bitter memories, to make
The whole earth blasted for our sake,
“Sleep soft, beloved!” we sometimes say,

But have no tune to charm away
Sad dreams that through the eyelids creep;
But never doleful dream again
Shall break the happy slumber when
O earth so full of dreary noises!

O men with wailing in your voices!
O delved gold the wailers heap!
O strife, O curse, that o’er it fall!
God strikes a silence through you all,
And “giveth his beloved sleep.”
His dews drop mutely on the hill,

His cloud above it saileth still,
Though on its slope men sow and reap;
More softly than the dew is shed,
Or cloud is floated over head,
For me, my heart, that erst did go

Most like a tired child at a show,
That sees through tears the mummers leap,
Would now its wearied vision close,
Would child-like on His love repose
Who “giveth his beloved sleep.”
LABOR
By Frank Soule
Despise not labor! God did not despise
The handicraft which wrought this gorgeous globe,
That crowned its glories with yon jeweled skies,
And clad the earth in nature’s queenly robe.
He dug the first canal—the river’s bed,
Built the first fountain in the gushing spring,
Wove the first carpet for man’s haughty tread,
The warp and woof of his first covering.
He made the pictures painters imitate,
The statuary’s first grand model made,
Taught human intellect to re-create,
And human ingenuity its trade.
Ere great Daguerre had harnessed up the sun,
Apprenticeship at his new art to serve,
A greater artist greater things had done,
The wondrous pictures of the optic nerve.
There is no deed of honest labor born
That is not Godlike; in the toiling limbs
Howe’er the lazy scoff, the brainless scorn,
God labored first; toil likens us to Him.
Ashamed of work! mechanic, with thy tools,
The tree thy ax cut from its native sod,
And turns to useful things—go tell to fools,
Was fashioned in the factory of God.
Go build your ships, go build your lofty dome,
Your granite temple, that through time endures,
Your humble cot, or that proud pile of Rome,
His arm has toiled there in advance of yours.
He made the flowers your learned florists scan,
And crystallized the atoms of each gem,
Ennobled labor in great nature’s plan,
And made it virtue’s brightest diadem.
Whatever thing is worthy to be had,
Is worthy of the toil by which ’tis won,
Just as the grain by which the field is clad
Pays back the warming labor of the sun.
’Tis not profession that ennobles men,
’Tis not the calling that can e’er degrade,
The trowel is as worthy as the pen,
The pen more mighty than the hero’s blade.
The merchant, with his ledger and his wares,
The lawyer with his cases and his books,
The toiling farmer, with his wheat and tares,
The poet by the shaded streams and nooks,
The man, whate’er his work, wherever done,
If intellect and honor guide his hand,
Is peer to him who greatest state has won,
And rich as any Rothschild of the land.
All mere distinctions based upon pretense,
Are merely laughing themes for manly hearts.
The miner’s cradle claims from men of sense
More honor than the youngling Bonaparte’s.
Let fops and fools the sons of toil deride,
On false pretensions brainless dunces live;
Let carpet heroes strut with parlor pride,
Supreme in all that indolence can give,
But be not like them, and pray envy not
These fancy tom-tit burlesques of mankind,
The witless snobs in idleness who rot,
Hermaphrodite ’twixt vanity and mind.
O son of toil, be proud, look up, arise,
And disregard opinion’s hollow test,
A false society’s decrees despise,
He is most worthy who has labored best.
The scepter is less royal than the hoe,
The sword, beneath whose rule whole nations writhe,
And curse the wearer, while they fear the blow,
Is far less noble than the plow and scythe.
There’s more true honor on one tan-browned hand,
Rough with the honest work of busy men,
Than all the soft-skinned punies of the land,
The nice, white-kiddery of upper ten.
Blow bright the forge—the sturdy anvil ring,
It sings the anthem of king Labor’s courts,
And sweeter sounds the clattering hammers bring,
Than half a thousand thumped piano-fortes.
Fair are the ribbons from the rabbet-plane,
As those which grace my lady’s hat or cape,
Nor does the joiner’s honor blush or wane
Beside the lawyer, with his brief and tape.
Pride thee, mechanic, on thine honest trade,
’Tis nobler than the snob’s much vaunted pelf.
Man’s soulless pride his test of worth has made,
But thine is based on that of God himself.
LINCOLN, THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE

By Edwin Markham
When the Norn-Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour,

Greatening and darkening as it hurried on,
She bent the strenuous Heavens and came down
To make a man to meet the mortal need.
She took the tried clay of the common road—
Clay warm yet with the genial heat of Earth,
Dashed through it all a strain of prophecy;
Then mixed a laughter with the serious stuff.
It was a stuff to wear for centuries,
A man that matched the mountains, and compelled
The stars to look our way and honor us.
The color of the ground was in him, the red earth;

The tang and odor of the primal things—
The rectitude and patience of the rocks;
The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn;
The courage of the bird that dares the sea;
The justice of the rain that loves all leaves;
The pity of the snow that hides all scars;
The loving-kindness of the wayside well;
The tolerance and equity of light
That gives as freely to the shrinking weed

Textbook Transnational Frontiers The American West in France Emily C Burns Ebook All Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Textbook Transnational Frontiers The American West in France Emily C Burns Ebook All Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Transnational Frontiers The American

West in France Emily C. Burns

The American West And The World Transnational And

Dark Tourism in the American West Jennifer Dawes

Marketing Research 9th Edition Alvin C. Burns

The Invented State: Policy Misperceptions in the

American Imperialism: The Territorial Expansion of the

American Imperialism: The Territorial Expansion of the

The American West A New Interpretive History Robert V.

Making the White Man s West Whiteness and the Creation

The American West in France

B. Byron Price, General Editor

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 1 1/29/18 10:03 AM

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 3 1/29/18 10:03 AM

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 4 1/29/18 10:03 AM

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 5 1/29/18 10:03 AM

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 7 1/29/18 10:04 AM

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 9 1/29/18 10:04 AM

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 10 1/29/18 10:04 AM

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 11 1/29/18 10:04 AM

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 1 1/29/18 10:04 AM

THE AMERICAN WEST IS A SLIPPERY CONCEPT, particularly in international settings.1 This

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 3 1/29/18 10:04 AM

Nationalism and Cultural Politics

4 T R A NSNAT IONA L F RON T I E R S

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 4 1/29/18 10:04 AM

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 5 1/29/18 10:04 AM

6 T R A NSNAT IONA L F RON T I E R S

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 6 1/29/18 10:04 AM

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 7 1/29/18 10:04 AM

8 T R A NSNAT IONA L F RON T I E R S

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 8 1/29/18 10:04 AM

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 9 1/29/18 10:04 AM

10 T R A NSNAT IONA L F RON T I E R S

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 10 1/29/18 10:04 AM

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 11 1/29/18 10:04 AM

French Primitivism and Colonialism:

12 T R A NSNAT IONA L F RON T I E R S

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 12 1/29/18 10:04 AM

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 13 1/29/18 10:04 AM

14 T R A NSNAT IONA L F RON T I E R S

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 14 1/29/18 10:04 AM

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 15 1/29/18 10:04 AM

American Indian Cosmopolitanism:

16 T R A NSNAT IONA L F RON T I E R S

Burns TRANSNATIONAL FRONTIERS.indb 16 1/29/18 10:04 AM

I remember the black wharves and the slips,

I remember the bulwarks by the shore,

I remember the sea-fight far away,

I can see the breezy dome of groves,

I remember the gleams and glooms that dart

There are things of which I may not speak;

Strange to me now are the forms I meet

And Deering’s Woods are fresh and fair,

SONG OF THE MYSTIC

I walk down the Valley of Silence—

Long ago was I weary of voices

I walked in the world with the worldly;

And still did I pine for the Perfect,

And I toiled on, heart-tired of the Human,

Do you ask what I found in the Valley?

Do you ask how I live in the Valley?