Few groups embraced the Wheeler-Howard Act of 1934 with the zeal of the Blackfeet, who saw the tangible results of these federal measures when a new hospital for the reservation opened at Browning in 1937.70 Though backed by federal dollars, the facility was constructed by Indian hands, a reality underscored by three grand friezes carved by John Clarke that flanked the main entrance to the building. Sculpted from Philippine mahogany (which is not mahogany at all, but rather a wood called lauan, prized for its workability and endurance), the pieces depicted Piegan life in the days before Montana’s incorporation into the United States.
Clarke’s carvings for the Blackfeet Community Hospital were almost surely the result of another New Deal program, the Treasury Section of Fine Arts (TSFA). This initiative, which lasted from 1934 to 1938, drew its inspiration from the Mexican muralists project of the 1920s and early 1930s, in which that nation’s federal government paid a variety of painters—most famously José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—to decorate public buildings with epic frescoes depicting Mexican history and culture. In the same vein, U.S. officials in Washington, D.C., awarded more than fourteen hundred commissions to American painters and sculptors to produce artworks for government structures, primarily post offices and courthouses but also buildings on Indian reservations, which fell under the purview of federal administration.71
Like the Mexican muralists, much of whose work celebrated their nation’s indigenous past, many Native American artists who received commissions from the TSFA used their brushes and chisels to celebrate the richness of the country’s Indian heritage. Surely such a perspective informed John Clarke’s plans for his own award, although the project he executed for the new Blackfeet health facility had been underway for more than a decade prior to the hospital’s construction, further evidence of his midcareer embrace of explicitly native themes.
In its loosest form, Clarke’s project for the Blackfeet Community Hospital tells the story of the Piegans from the precontact era to the period of U.S. expansion during the nineteenth century, all in a sequence of three eight- by four-foot panels. The first section, which presumably served as a pilaster to the left of the doorway, depicted a Blackfeet piskun, or buffalo jump, which many Plains tribes used to kill bison. The sculpture is a swirl of relentless motion: at the top, two Indians drive the doomed beasts toward the edge of a cliff; on the ground below, two other men armed with spears finish off the dying animals. Clarke’s scene is a testament to native ingenuity: in the absence of many horses or advanced weaponry, the Indians nevertheless manage to reap a bounty that will yield food, tools, clothing, and shelter.
Located above and to the right of this panel was a horizontal scene, occupying the lintel position over the doorway. This tableau indicates the changes in Piegan life wrought by the widespread acquisition of horses by the Blackfeet in the later eighteenth century. With more and better mounts, the Piegans could pursue game on the open prairie instead of relying on the buffalo jump. Dominating the panorama is an Indian on horseback, bow drawn, racing alongside an enormous and terrified bull. In the distance another rider chases a small group of bison running headlong in the opposite direction, seeking refuge from the human threat. From the sweeping vista of the hill country east of the Rockies to the exquisite features of the desperate action in the foreground, the frieze is arresting.
Completing this narrative arc was a panel on the right side of the entryway portraying what, as it turned out, marked the beginning of the end for the Piegans’ traditional lifeways. The frieze shows an Indian encampment—clearly a favorite subject for Clarke—in the Rocky Mountain foothills, with a stand of teepees in the foreground and some grazing horses in the distance. Clarke draws the viewers’ eyes to the center-bottom, where two Americans have arrived at the camp. One of the men peers over the shoulders of four Indian women who are preparing a meal, while the other—identified as a soldier by the sword dangling from his belt—accepts what looks to be a pipe from a Piegan warrior bedecked in a flowing headdress. The scene is friendly enough, absent any hint of the future violence that resulted from the collision of these two disparate cultures.
Resplendent as they were to the casual viewer, the panels did not exactly enrich the Clarkes. As Mamie put it ruefully in a letter to Eleanor Sherman, “They [the friezes] are grand … but he received only a pittance for the job.”72 It seems doubtful, however, that John was too disappointed. After all, the commission was a prestigious one, and given the widespread hardships of the Depression, some income was better than none.
John L. Clarke, frieze for the Blackfeet Community Hospital, ca. 1940. This frieze, one of Clarke’s finest, depicts Piegans slaughtering bison in the old way—by running them over a cliff and then piercing the wounded creatures with arrows and spears. Courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey.
Sadly, not everyone on the reservation held the pieces in such high regard. After several incidents of vandalism, hospital staff removed the friezes around 1965, at which point they were warehoused at an off-site location. Years later, Clarke’s former student Albert Racine lovingly restored the pieces and returned them to the Blackfeet Community Hospital in 1986 on the occasion of the facility’s grand reopening after a nearly two-decade (and $9.2 million) effort to improve healthcare on the reservation. At that time the two vertical panels were installed in the hospital’s waiting room (though with the sequencing reversed), with the horizontal frieze placed above the receptionist’s desk in the main office.73
CLARKE HAD SCARCELY put the last touches on his friezes for the Blackfeet Community Hospital when he secured another commission for a federal project. In the late 1930s the Works Progress Administration sponsored the construction of two tribally run native arts facilities that would showcase indigenous artifacts and promote craft cooperatives for local artists. First to open was the Sioux Indian Museum in Rapid City, South Dakota, followed shortly by the Museum of the Plains Indian at Browning, Montana, on the Blackfeet Reservation. A third facility, focused on the southern Plains, was established nearly a decade later at Anadarko, Oklahoma.74 These institutions owed their existence to the work of people like John Collier, who strove to reorient government policy from forced acculturation to cultural self-determination. The embers of such efforts survived the repressive measures of the Termination Era and caught fire in the 1960s.75
For the Museum of the Plains Indian, Clarke executed two five- by three-foot wood relief panels, once again in lauan and capturing scenes from the bygone buffalo days. Placed above the two entry-ways leading into the building, the frieze on the left depicts a group of three Blackfeet men gesturing toward a herd of bison just visible in the distance. Above the opposite door is a domestic counterpart to the hunting party: a mounted warrior in headdress riding into camp trailed by his wife, also on horseback and pulling a travois, as well as the family dog, all looking fatigued from their voyage but heartened by the sight of the teepees up ahead.
John L. Clarke, frieze for the Blackfeet Community Hospital, ca. 1940. Paired with the other frieze (page 230), this carving hints at the transformations wrought in the Piegan world by the arrival of white outsiders. Courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey.
While the panels were his most public contributions to the museum, Clarke executed a second project there in the autumn of 1941 that had a different significance. At the close of the tourist season that year, he regularly made the twenty-mile trip between East Glacier and Browning, where he created a series of plaster casts demonstrating the successive steps by which Blackfeet women prepared bison hides in the nineteenth century and before. Each between twelve and eighteen inches high, the monochrome molds showed native women at their labors, whether tanning skins by applying a mixture of brains, liver, and grease or softening the hides by pulling them through a hole in the shoulder blade or against a rope fashioned from animal sinew.76 Perhaps Clarke was struck by the circularity of his endeavor; a century earlier, his grandmother Coth-co-no-na employed those same time-honored techniques
, transforming scores of animal carcasses into goods for use or commodities for exchange.
Clarke’s plaster molds were the idea of John C. Ewers, the founding director of the Museum of the Plains Indian. On a superficial level, the two men made an unlikely pair, as Ewers—who was white and more than two decades Clarke’s junior—hailed from Cleveland and had studied at Dartmouth College before enrolling in Yale’s graduate program in anthropology, where he worked with the famed ethnographer Clark Wissler. After completing his master’s degree, Ewers left New Haven to take a curatorial job with the National Park Service, stationed first at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and then in California at Yosemite National Park. Early in 1941 he and his family moved to northwestern Montana, where in time Ewers would become the world’s foremost non-native authority on the Blackfeet.77
John L. Clarke, frieze for the Museum of the Plains Indian, ca. 1940s. Besides wildlife, among Clarke’s favorite subjects were the buffalo days of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey.
Whatever the stark differences in their backgrounds and expertise, Clarke and Ewers bridged such gaps through their mutual fascination with Blackfeet history and culture. Ewers came to Browning already primed with a deep interest in the tribe, kindled in graduate seminars led by Wissler, who himself had undertaken extensive fieldwork among the Blackfeet and other northern Plains groups in the early twentieth century. Thus, almost from the moment he arrived on the reservation, Ewers began cultivating what he called his “Indian informants,” members of the tribe in their eighties and nineties who had distinct memories of the buffalo days that so fascinated the young anthropologist. Years later he drew upon these oral histories as he wrote The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains, published in 1958 and still considered the standard academic monograph on the tribe.78
Ewers undoubtedly looked to Clarke as an expert on tribal history, even if Clarke was of a slightly later generation than men like Makes Cold Weather (b. 1867) or Chewing Black Bones (b. 1868), both of whom provided Ewers with extensive information about the lifeways of their people. Clarke had gifts the others did not—namely, the ability to shape with his hands what Ewers’s elderly informants could only describe with their tongues. Though published years after he had left Browning for an administrative post at the Smithsonian Institution, The Blackfeet reveals Ewers’s urgency to record the tribe’s ancient ways before they slipped into extinction, much as Edward S. Curtis had sought to do with camera and tripod earlier in the century (although Ewers traded much less in the “noble savage” mystique that suffuses Curtis’s work).79 Clarke’s carvings and molds fit squarely with Ewers’s mission for the Museum of the Plains Indian.
Through it all and up to the very end of his life, Clarke never abandoned his chief artistic pursuit, drawing and sculpting western fauna. In fact, Ewers recalled with poignancy the last time he saw him, in 1969, a little more than a year before the artist’s death. Passing through the lobby of the majestic Glacier Park Lodge, Ewers spotted Clarke seated quietly near a stuffed mountain goat on display in a glass case, sketching the creature on a piece of paper. The anthropologist recalled, “I knew that Clarke must have carved scores of mountain goats—perhaps even hundreds—during his long career. But there he was—ever the perfectionist—keeping his hand in drawing that familiar animal from the model.”80 As his daughter put it, Clarke was “an artist to the core.”
ERECTED AT THE turn of the twentieth century, the Montana State Capitol is a formidable edifice, built of granite and sandstone and capped by a copper-topped dome that soars 165 feet into the thin alpine sky above Helena. The interior is no less majestic, with beautiful paintings and sculptures that line the quiet marble hallways and preside over formal chambers and meeting rooms. Visitors who follow one of these corridors into the west wing of the building come eventually upon the Gallery of Outstanding Montanans, established in 1979 by the legislature “to pay homage to citizens of the Treasure State who made contributions of state or national significance to their selected fields of endeavor.”
On a cold spring day in 2003, officials and assorted guests assembled at the capitol for the induction of John Clarke, who took his place among such illustrious members as the actor Gary Cooper, journalist Chet Huntley, and Clarke’s old friend Charlie Russell, all of whom were in the first cohort of honorees. The citation for Clarke recognized not only his professional success but also his triumph over disability; it read in part, “Facing odds that would have deterred lesser men, he crafted a career as a renowned Blackfeet artist. His legacy survives as a worthy inspiration for all Montanans.” Kirby Lambert, spokesman for the nominating committee, emphasized the dual nature of Clarke’s achievement, adding that of the three dozen individuals so enshrined, “[Clarke] is one of my personal favorites.”81
That a Clarke should enjoy such recognition seems fitting, in view of the outsize role the family played in the state’s history. Moreover, in 1865, Malcolm Clarke, John’s paternal grandfather, was among the twelve men who founded the Montana Historical Society, the body that selects new inductees for the hall of fame. And yet the elder Clarke and his associates never intended to honor individuals like his grandson. Rather, they established their organization to celebrate men just like themselves, white pioneers who, in conquering their own set of formidable obstacles—an unyielding physical environment, hostile native peoples—had prepared Montana for its eventual absorption into the United States. Their idol was perhaps Granville Stuart, a miner and rancher as well as a charter member of the MHS, who by the time he died in 1918 was acclaimed as “Mr. Montana” for his lasting contributions to the development of his adopted state, and as such was inducted into the Gallery of Outstanding Montanans in 1985.
It is poignant and not a little ironic that John Clarke and Granville Stuart should share space in the Montana Hall of Fame, given that Stuart effectively renounced his own mixed-blood family in the late nineteenth century. Stuart had long worried that his interracial marriage would hold him back from material and social success, especially after the seismic demographic shift in Montana following the Civil War. Thus in 1890, less than a year and a half after the death of his Shoshone wife, Awbonnie, Stuart married a much younger white woman and four years later secured a prestigious diplomatic appointment as U.S. minister to Uruguay and Paraguay, an unthinkable development had Awbonnie lived, as his biographers note.
His abandoned children did not manage as well, especially two of his sons, who like Horace and Helen Clarke tried to keep their footing in both white and native worlds. Tom Stuart, Granville’s oldest boy, worked for a time on his father’s ranch, but incurred the older man’s wrath in his twenties when he forged Granville’s signature on checks and ran up expenses in his father’s name. In 1897 a Helena judge ordered Tom confined to the state asylum in Warm Springs, the result of a “threatening and uncontrollable temper” (stemming perhaps from epilepsy). He died there in 1905, just shy of his fortieth birthday. Tom’s younger brother Sam fared better, at least for a time, securing a job as a railroad engineer in the mid-1890s and marrying a Swedish woman. In the end he, too, ran afoul of the law and did several stints in prison before dying indigent at the state hospital in 1960.82
It is possible, of course, to argue that John Clarke endured his own form of isolation, living on the Blackfeet Reservation during one of the bleakest periods in the history of Native America, when reservations across the country suffered grievously from scarcity and disease. So it was for Clarke, who as one visitor recalled spent his last years in relative poverty, living downstairs in his studio after the roof had burned off in a house fire, “napping on an iron cot, halfway under a tangle of old quilts and accompanied by a puppy or two, while an electric heater buzzed along too close for safety.”83 Evidently, such marginal conditions failed to move everyone who passed by his home; in 1968 some teenagers visiting East Glacier Park broke into his studio and destroyed his tools and sculptures.84
John L. Clarke, blocking
out a bear, ca. 1961. Clarke carved almost until the day he died, in November 1970, at the age of eighty-nine, even after his eyes were clouded by cataracts and his hands gnarled by arthritis.
John Clarke made little attempt to accommodate himself to the new world forged by Malcolm Clarke and Granville Stuart. He found contentment in the rhythms of his daily life and work. Time and again, close friends and even casual acquaintances remarked on his equanimity, seen in his radiant smile, his unflappable patience, and his humbling generosity. Such was the judgment of Bob Morgan, the curator of the museum at the Montana Historical Society, when he stopped in at Clarke’s studio in 1969, shortly before Clarke died. The men had first met nearly three decades earlier, when Clarke had hocked small wood figurines during the Christmas season at the same upscale department store where Morgan, nearly fifty years younger, worked in the advertising and display department, sharing cups of coffee to stave off the bitter winter chill and passing notes back and forth.
On the occasion of their final visit, Morgan was unsurprised to find Clarke hard at work, absorbed in carving a small mountain goat. Clarke looked up and, recognizing his friend, smiled widely and extended his arm. “What a wonderful, gnarled hand to grasp,” Morgan recalled, “still strong and resolute.” They communicated in the old way, scribbling on a notepad; at one point Morgan, who was an aspiring artist himself, drew a deer head and passed it to John. Clarke replied with his own sketch of a rifle and wrote beneath it “no shells.” Stirred, it seems, by the elderly man’s circumstances, Morgan slipped him a few dollars, an act of charity that Clarke did not refuse, and wrote “you owe me a steak.” Clarke smiled, and they moved on to other subjects before Morgan bought a small bear for five dollars and headed out the door.85
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