Image-Making

Image-Making

By Matthew Clarke

The Newberry is not the first place one would expect to find a cache of fine art. Yet amid the vellum-bound incunables and illuminated prayer books in the library’s vault is one of the country’s richest small collections of American Indian portraiture: 25 oil paintings created by early 20thcentury painter and illustrator Elbridge Ayer Burbank.

Intimately scaled yet meticulously detailed, the portraits feature Native men and women Burbank encountered during his travels through the Southwest in the late 1890s.

Most of Burbank’s subjects—men like White-Swan, Rain-in-the- Face, and Black-Coyote—were unknown outside of their tribal communities. Others, like Naiche, chief of the Nde (also known as the Chiricahua Apache), would have been recognized by a limited white audience.

Yet one of the artist’s subjects had been a household name for years when Burbank first painted him in 1897 and was on the verge of transforming into something more mythic. This was the Nde war chief Goyaałé—or Geronimo, as he was by then known.

Geronimo, Fort Sill, O.T., 1897. Elbridge Burbank. Oil on panel.

Burbank painted seven portraits of Geronimo, and the Newberry holds two of them. Both are small, measuring about 8 by 10 inches, and both show Geronimo in a red head scarf and robe. While one features the war chief in a frontal pose, facing the viewer head-on, the other—on view now in our new permanent exhibit, From the Stacks— depicts him in profile, a pose reminiscent of Italian Renaissance portraiture.

Like his other portraits, Burbank’s paintings of Geronimo show a striking attention to detail; as the painter explained in his 1944 memoir Burbank Among the Indians, he strove to depict “every wrinkle in his face and even a mole on his cheek.” Such detail stood out to contemporary audiences, as suggested by a reviewer for the Chicago Inter-Ocean, who concluded that “they are, from the manner of their painting, and the skill of Mr. Burbank, of genuine artistic value as well as high ethnological interest.”

It’s this intersection—of “genuine artistic value” and “ethnological interest”— that is most perplexing, and most problematic, about Burbank’s portraits. Like Burbank, many artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries specialized in ethnologically oriented paintings of American Indians, depicting their subjects in traditional garb—known as regalia—and placing them in idyllic, ahistorical settings.

Geronimo. Elbridge Burbank. Oil on panel.

Yet to many scholars and others today, these paintings perpetuated an insidious idea—that American Indians were a “Vanishing Race.”

Deriving from the caption of a well-known Edward Curtis photograph, the Vanishing Race motif construed American Indians as a people weakened by disease and overrun by soldiers and settlers, whose traces should be preserved for posterity by artists, scholars, and ethnographers.

Yet given that many tribes were still vibrant, the Vanishing Race myth was a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” according to historian Brian Dippie. In this sense, “[t]he myth of the Vanishing American accounted for the Indian’s future by denying them one, and stained the policy debate with fatalism.” Artists like Burbank created exquisite work, Dippie and others conclude, but only at the cost of reinforcing an idea used to justify the imposition of federal policies—like the General Allotment Act of 1887, which broke communally controlled tribal land into private allotments for individual ownership—now seen as destructive to Native communities.

Few would deny the “genuine artistic value” of Burbank’s masterful portraits of Geronimo, but what are we to make of their “ethnological” significance?

Burbank himself hinted at his aims in a 1904 letter, writing that “[i]t won’t be many years before this Indian work will be a thing of the past. They are dying off so fast, the older ones and genuine Indians…. Now is the chance to get types of every Indian tribe in America.”

Regardless of the painter’s intentions, it’s difficult, and probably impossible, to avoid the conclusion that Burbank’s portraits strengthened the Vanishing Race myth.

But even if Burbank’s portraits appropriated Geronimo as a “type,” evidence suggests that Geronimo also sought to use Burbank’s portraits for his own purposes.

A collection of Newberry-held letters sent by Burbank to his uncle Edward E. Ayer (the early Newberry benefactor who had commissioned Burbank’s American Indian portraits) gives a detailed account of the painter’s experience working with Geronimo. These letters, which shed light on the complex relationship between the two men, suggest that rather than serving as a passive subject, Geronimo exerted active control over Burbank’s work when he could—most likely for the purpose of advancing his own personal agenda.

Born in Harvard, Illinois, in 1858, Elbridge Ayer Burbank moved to Chicago in 1874 to study art at the Academy of Design. He spent the following two decades in a variety of pursuits, opening a portrait studio in St. Paul in 1880, illustrating life along the Northern Pacific Railroad during 1885, and moving to Munich in 1888 to work with the artists Paul Nauen and Toby Rosenthal.

His career would probably have continued in this fashion had he not been the nephew of one of Chicago’s most successful businessmen: Field Museum President—and future Newberry donor and trustee—Edward Everett Ayer.

Like Burbank, Ayer was from Harvard, and like Burbank, he had begun travelling early. Yet whereas Burbank had wandered east to Europe, Ayer had set out west, arriving at the age of 19 in San Francisco, where he worked in a lumberyard until enlisting with the First California Cavalry Company E and then the First New Mexican Infantry during the Civil War.

Stationed in New Mexico and Arizona, where he was responsible for defending the Southwest from Confederate advance, he came into contact with Navajo and Pueblo Indians, whom he recruited for service in the Union Army, and became fascinated by their rituals, dances, and artwork.

When the war ended, Ayer began selling lumber to railroads and was soon providing rail ties to major lines like the Union Pacific, the Santa Fe, and the Mexican Central. His commercial career made him fabulously wealthy and allowed him to travel extensively through the West, where he further explored his interest in American Indian cultures, amassing an ever-growing collection of Native American regalia, jewelry, and tomahawks, as well as a large library of books, manuscripts, paintings, and drawings focused on Native life.

As time went on, Ayer became more and more convinced that the American Indian cultures of the West were on the verge of disappearance, and his early impulse to collect transformed into a desire to preserve.

When it was reported that the Chiricahua Apache Geronimo—perhaps the best-known symbol of Indigenous resistance to American expansion—had been captured and imprisoned at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, Ayer decided to seize the opportunity to create a visual record of the shaman and war chief. He turned to his nephew Elbridge to do so, agreeing to fund a trip to Fort Sill and support Burbank’s work there.

The “Vanishing Race” myth derived its name from the caption of EdwardCurtis’s photograph of Navajo riders disappearing into the distance.

Burbank arrived at Fort Sill on March 12, 1897, and penned his first letter to Ayer that night. [Ed. note: Here and elsewhere, the text of Burbank’s letters has been left unedited.]

"The first thing after Dinner I hunted up Chief Geronimo he lives two miles from the Fort in a house. I found his house…but no one was in but an Indian nearby who spoke pretty good English told me Geronimo was out getting some ponies. I saw him way off in the distance and waited for him. Pretty soon he came on horse back (he can ride free) when he came up to me I said How do you do Chief Geronimo he looked at me in a surprised way and held out his hand and we shook hands."

Burbank was struck by Geronimo’s appearance, recounting later in his memoir that “[h]is keen, shrewd face was deeply furrowed with strong lines” and that “[h]is small black eyes were watery, but in them there burned a fierce light.”

The two men set to talking with the help of a translator. According to his March 12 letter, Burbank gave Geronimo “a box of cigarettes. He smoked and offered me one motioned for me to sit down and we smoked the cigarette of Peace.” By the end of the conversation, Burbank had arranged with Geronimo to paint the chief’s portrait: “He says he will sit for me any time and that I can use his house for a studio which am going to do so will commence his picture Tomorrow and he is going to dress up for me with a war bonnet on and an Indian blanket on also.” Geronimo’s willingness “to dress up” may have given Burbank some relief, for the painter later reported that “Geronimo goes around with Soldiers clothes on.”

As it turned out, the sitting had to wait several days. Burbank visited Geronimo’s house the following day but found him away, only locating him later that night at an officer’s house. There, the two seem to have agreed on the particulars of the paintings: as Burbank explained, “I am to start the Geronimo picture in the morning and will work in house I will paint two of him a front view and a profile he has a fine head.”

When Burbank arrived at Fort Sill, he found that “Geronimo goes around with Soldier’s clothes on,” as he reported in a letter dated March 12.

In a letter dated March 14, Burbank informed his uncle that he had arranged to paint Geronimo “in his native dress.”

As if to reassure his uncle that he would succeed in his mission, Burbank once again reported to Ayer that “Geronimo is to fix him self up in his native dress.”

A week and a half later, on March 21, Burbank was able to announce the completion of his assignment: “I finished with Chief Geronimo Today I have painted two fine likenesses of him one a full front view and the other a profile and I have painted him with his correct costume on.”

According to Burbank, Geronimo was pleased with the work, for Burbank related that Geronimo had “the different Indians come in and…they all like the picture when I got through Geronimo patted me on the back and says good man, good man.”

The resulting portraits were promising contributions to Ayer’s ethnographic project. They satisfied the requirements of existing ethnographic conventions—Burbank adopted the profiles, frontals, and three-quarter views frequently used in so-called “physical type photography,” the preferred style of ethnographers during the period—and, in addition to adding place information to one of the portraits, the painter even convinced his subject to sign his name to the paintings.

They were also unique: drawings of Geronimo had been published in the press beginning in 1886, and numerous photographs had been produced, but with the exception of a single painting by Henry Francois Farny, Burbank’s were the first oil portraits of the Apache war chief.

Yet while Geronimo agreed to sit for Burbank in his “native dress,” he was anything but passive in the process.

Geronimo seems almost to have courted the artist. During down time, Burbank writes in his memoir, “Geronimo would lie on his back on the bed and sing Apache songs to me. He had a deep, rich voice and these songs, sung in the Apache dialect, were of great beauty.”

He also presented Burbank with gifts—the artist reported in a March 25 letter that “Geronimo has made me a fine bow and fine arrows”—and he even taught Burbank the art of massage, though Burbank suspected ulterior motives. (“[A]fter he had shown me how it should be done, he frequently would lie face down and ask me to massage his back, which I did,” Burbank writes in his memoir.) Burbank hinted at the emergence of a genuine friendship in a March 28 letter, relating how on a free day he went “to see my friend Geronimo he was glad to see me wondered why I didn’t come to see him oftener.”

At the same time, Geronimo pushed back repeatedly against the painter’s requests.

Though Burbank reported that Geronimo “has signed his name to both of the pictures I painted of him,” he also admitted that he “had a hard time to get him to do it.” And while Geronimo ultimately agreed to sit for Burbank in regalia, he also drew a line: after finishing the first two portraits, Burbank reported that “I was going to paint a third profile of him in war paint he promised to paint his face up, but he backed out.”

Finally, though Burbank’s assignment was to depict the war chief in regalia, Geronimo seems to have convinced Burbank to let him sit for one of the portraits in the soldier’s uniform he then commonly wore. (This portrait is now held at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio.)

Geronimo was thus willing to collaborate in Burbank’s ethnographic project—but only to an extent. Rather than submitting wholly to the painter’s desire to typecast him as an instance of a vanishing race, Geronimo seems to have sought to manage the image Burbank produced. What was his intention?

Nothing more than speculation is possible, of course, yet evidence provides grounds for a hypothesis.

Driven by his desire to escape indefinite imprisonment at Fort Sill, Geronimo may have seen his work with Burbank as an opportunity to refashion his public image along less threatening lines. By doing so, he may have believed, he could convince his captors that he and his followers could be safely released without any renewed threat of resistance. Proving this would have required a delicate balancing act: Geronimo had to demonstrate his willingness to comply with the artist’s wishes, while ensuring that the resulting portraits didn’t reinforce the already widespread public image of the war chief as a dangerous “savage.”

Early images of Geronimo—like this 1887 photograph by Frank Randall—often depicted him as a warrior.

(Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.)

Without a doubt, Geronimo was aware of the enormous power of his public image and was intent on harnessing it.

From around the time of his encounter with Burbank in 1897 until his death in 1909, Geronimo took every opportunity to put himself in the spotlight. Still under arrest, he participated in the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898, the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, and the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. He joined Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show. He sat for numerous photographs. He even managed to appear in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in 1905.

Geronimo seems to have used the attention to exert control over his image. Early photographic representations— like A. Frank Randall’s famous shot of the war chief kneeling, rifle in hand, and glowering darkly at the camera—tended to depict Geronimo as a merciless warrior. He continued to be willing to play this part until his death, but he also participated more and more in “Americanizing” photo shoots as time went on. One well-known photo—taken by Frank Rinehart at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition—shows Geronimo in American clothing, staring at the camera calmly, while another, shot by Walter Ferguson in 1904, featured the war chief in a top hat and at the wheel of an automobile.

This change in focus may have been the result of a general effort on Geronimo’s part to temper his earlier reputation by altering his public persona. Other actions—like his notorious conversion to Christianity in 1903—seem to have been undertaken with the purpose of influencing opinion, especially that of the authorities. In converting to Christianity, for example, Geronimo chose to join the Dutch Reformed Church (to which Roosevelt also belonged) with the hope, according to many, of winning the president to his cause.

The nature of this cause is indicated by how Geronimo chose to use his one meeting with Roosevelt, which occurred after the inaugural parade in 1905. According to the New York Tribune, Geronimo petitioned the president directly to “take the ropes from our hands” and let him and his fellow Apaches return to Arizona. When he was angrily rebuked by Roosevelt—the war chief had a “bad heart,” the president is reputed to have said—Geronimo reacted emotionally, the meeting was cancelled, and Geronimo was sent back to Fort Sill.

Geronimo’s petition to Roosevelt makes clear that his abiding desire was to liberate himself and his fellow Chiricahuas from imprisonment and return to the Southwest. In all likelihood, he understood that convincing the authorities to grant his request meant demonstrating that he was no longer a threat, an aim that would be furthered by softening his public image. In working with Burbank, Geronimo may well have been motivated by this goal.

A 1904 photograph featured Geronimo in a top hat and at the wheel of anautomobile.

(Image courtesy of the Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Ferguson 745.)

In Indian Country, Martin Padget adopts this position, arguing that Geronimo “used the opportunities made available to him to broaden his sphere of influence, earn money, and petition the president for the return of the Chiricahuas to their Arizona homeland.”

Along similar lines, William Clement proposes in Imagining Geronmio that the war chief saw in Burbank an early opportunity to refashion his public image, and asserts that the humanizing “avuncularity” of Burbank’s portraits would have appealed to Geronimo, given his aims.

Burbank’s letters, however, suggest that Geronimo not only accepted but actively encouraged the artist’s “avuncular” depiction. By agreeing to appear in regalia while refusing to wear war paint, Geronimo may have sought and found a middle ground, complying with the artist’s ethnographic goals while still managing to project a friendlier image.

Likewise, Burbank’s apparent willingness to ignore his uncle’s instructions and paint Geronimo in uniform indicates the war chief’s success in using Burbank’s visit to begin the project of altering his reputation.

Even with all his efforts, Geronimo never managed to escape Fort Sill. He died there in February 1909, from pneumonia contracted after spending an entire night exposed to the cold in the wake of a riding accident. “I should never have surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive,” he is said to have told his nephew from his deathbed.

Burbank’s portraits offer a unique chance to reflect on the struggles of this extraordinary man, the nature of his legend, and the ever-dynamic relationship of art and power.