Monuments to a Lost Nation

<Reprinted from Chicago History, Spring 2004>

Public art such as the "Fort Dearborn Massacre" and "The Alarm" played a major role in transforming the very real image of the "vanishing Indian" of the turn of the century into an enduring symbol of regional identity. But twodimensional art also had a resounding effect. In 1907, the Chicago Tribune published a pair of sketches titled "Injun Summer." These newspaper cartoons also distorted the realities of the Native American experience to tell a story that became an evocative contribution to public memory and resonated among Midwesterners for generations.

"Injun Summer" began on an early fall afternoon in the office of Chicago Tribune cartoonist ,John T McCutcheon. Years later, McCutcheon remembered gazing out his window in the Fine Arts Building while his mind wandered to scenes of his boyhood in rural Indiana. During the 1870s, stories of the Sioux War out west mixed in his young imagination with local tales of the Fort Ouitenon trading post and the legendary Tippecanoe battlefield. McCutcheon caught glimpses of his childhood past in the omnipresent fields of corn. "The early fall," he recalled, "saw the tasseled rows of corn like waving spears of Indians, and a little later came the corn shocks, much like the tepees in the haze of Indian summer. Undoubtedly in my boyish imagination, all these things were registering. Then, when I was hard up for an idea, they came out."

Cartoonist John McCutcheon (above) was inspired by his rural roots to create "Injun Summer". After the cartoon's debut in 1907, it became an annual--though controversial--tradition.

The resulting cartoon consisted of two sketches. The first depicted an old man and a young boy burning a pile of dead leaves beside a harvested field enclosed by a rail fence. In the second sketch, the stacked shocks of corn are transformed by the harvest moon into a village of tepees and the smoke of the smoldering leaves into the forms of dancing Indians. A folksy narrative accompanied the sketches ("Yep, sonny, this is sure enough Injun summer. Don't know what that is, I reckon, do you?") as the old timer explains to the young boy the meaning of the term "Indian summer": the last warm days of a Midwestern October, when the leaves turn bright red and one by one float down from their trees and the ghosts of the long departed Indians return to their old campgrounds. There is nothing to fear from this fleeting return, as the oldtimer assures the boy: "Don't be skeered hain't none around here now, leastways no live ones. They been gone this many a year." The tone of the piece is wistful, not identifying the Indians with a living dynamic culture but imaginatively rooting them in the landscape, similar to the trees, hills, and streams.

Click here to view McCutcheon's "Injun Summer" and make your own decisions about it.

Forward to the next page of this essay

Back to the previous page

Back to Online Essays