Monuments to a Lost Nation

by Theodore J. Karamanski

<Reprinted from Chicago History, Spring 2004>

 

The connection between urban labor unrest and the last gasps of formal Native American resistance to the United States was both ironic and disquieting to men such as Pullman. Art critics praised Carl Rohl Smith's sculpture for the realism of its figures. The artist obtained his models by visiting Fort Sheridan, the United States Army base established in Chicago's northern suburbs after Haymarket to maintain urban order. At the fort, Rohl Smith encountered survivors of Wounded Knee, whom he described as "Indians of the most untamed sort." The men who fought what was perhaps the last organized effort against American continental expansion served as the fierce models for the Fort Dearborn Massacre, making the figures an unstated tribute to Native American resistance.

Some Americans compared newly arrived, working-class immigrants to the land's first inhabitants. The New York State Sun, writing in the wake of Haymarket, intoned, "Such foreign savages, with their dynamite bombs and anarchic purposes, are as much apart from the rest of the people of this country as the Apaches of the plains." The association became even more apparent a year after the statue's dedication when the Seventh Cavalry, which had fought Indians so fiercely at Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee, came to Chicago to quell the Pullman riots of 1894.

For all of its unsettling symbolism, the Fort Dearborn Massacre stemmed from a fictionalized account of the past. Some historians regard the incident as the product of romantic imagination instead of eyewitness testimony, stating that Margaret Helm was not the beneficiary of Black Partridge's dramatic rescue. In fact, before the battle turned into a massacre, Mrs. Helm rode her horse to the shore of Lake Michigan where she found refuge. The legend of Black Partridge's rescue, however, excited the statue's admirers by bringing them in the midst of savage war. Rohl Smith's figures may have owed more to Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show than to actual research.
<<<Insert Fort Sheridan pic>>>

Fort Sheridan caption
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show colored many Chicagoans' perceptions about Native Americans
William F Cody brought his famed Wild West Show to Chicago for the world's fair. Denied a space within the White City, he situated his spectacle near the Midway and drew millions of customers. Cody's show featured furious fake Indian attacks, with a last minute rescue of beleaguered white men and women by Buffalo Bill himself.

The show, like Cody's entire career, transformed fading nuggets of historical reality into archetypal stories. The show's program book described the Indian as "The Former Foe / Present Friend" of the American. Rohl Smith's statue captured this formula in his representations of the fierce attacking warrior and Black Partridge as protector. The violence of the scene, similar to the staged violence of the Wild West Show, became the heritage of the frontier, an integral element in the American character. A reporter for the Chicago Inter-Ocean felt that watching Cody's troupe reenact Little Big Horn made him sensible to "the aboriginal ancestor" that lingered "in us after the long generations of attempted civilization and education."

A typical program for Buffalo Bill's Wild West show


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