Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1994
Abstract
Last spring, as we cleared several generations worth of household goods and memorabilia from the Ridington family home in Westminster, Maryland, we came upon a framed print of "Appeal to the Great Spirit." In it, an Indian "brave" sits astride his horse, his head flung back, his arms beseechingly out at his sides, his palms up. The body language tells of grief and supplication, and of one last desperate hope. The colors are brown, yellow, and orange, the tones of sunset. When we read Brian Dippie's The Vanishing American, we realized that "Appeal to the Great Spirit," or works similar to it, must be in a lot of attics. It was created as a statue by Cyrus E. Dallin in 1908 and copied many times. It was widely distributed on postcards, prints, and plaster replicas. It was one of the most popular of many works of art that portrayed the "Vanishing American." Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, poets and artists used images from nature to sum up the fate of America's aboriginal people: sunsets, melting snowflakes, morning dew, and other ephemeral phenomena were used to signify the transitory nature of the Indian. The popularity of these works demonstrated the pervasiveness of the idea that Indians were a dying race-and the recent success of the latest film version of The Last of the Mohicans demonstrates its persistence. Brian Dippie's book demonstrates how that idea has affected the U.S. government's Indian policy.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:1 (Winter 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.