Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver (Legacies Shared)

– From the foreword by Brian W. Dippie, University of Victoria Mary Strachan Scriver lived and worked with Bob Scriver ...

Author: Mary Strachan Scriver

511 downloads 1204 Views 6MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

– From the foreword by Brian W. Dippie, University of Victoria

Mary Strachan Scriver lived and worked with Bob Scriver for over a decade and was instrumental in his rise to international acclaim. Working alongside her husband, she became intimately familiar with the man, his work, and his process. Her frank, uncensored, and highly entertaining biography reveals details that give the reader a unique picture of Scriver both as man and as artist. Bronze Inside and Out also provides a fascinating look into the practice of bronze casting, cleverly structuring the story of Bob Scriver’s life according to the steps in this complicated and temperamental process. Mary Strachan Scriver lives in Valier, Montana, near the Blackfeet reservation, where she has worked as a teacher, a writer, and a Unitarian minister. www.uofcpress.com 978-1-55238-227-1

M A RY S T R A C H A N S C R I V E R



BRONZE Inside and Out

Bronze Inside and Out is a literary biography of sculptor Bob Scriver, written by his wife, Mary Strachan Scriver. Bob Scriver is best known for his work in bronze and for his pivotal role in the rise of “cowboy art.” Living and working on the Montana Blackfeet Reservation, Scriver created a bronze foundry, a museum, and a studio – an atelier based on classical methods, but with local Blackfeet artisans. His importance in the still-developing genre of “Western Art” cannot be overstated.

SCRIVER

“More than any other book that I can think of, Bronze Inside and Out puts a human face on Western art—indeed, all art. It invites us to ponder the very nature of the creative process.”

bronze Inside and Out A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT

M A RY S T R A C H A N S C R I V E R

bronze Inside and Out A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

© 2008 Mary Strachan Scriver University of Calgary Press 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, Alberta Canada T2N 1N4 www.uofcpress.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1-800-893-5777. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION Strachan Scriver, Mary, 1939Bronze inside and out : a biographical memoir of Bob Scriver / by Mary Strachan Scriver. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55238-227-1 1. Scriver, Bob, 1914–1999. 2. Sculptors–Montana–Biography. I. Title. NB237.S39S77 2007

730.92

C2007-905742-X

The University of Calgary Press acknowledges the support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for our publications. We acknowledge the ﬁnancial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the ﬁnancial support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. This book has been published with the aid of a grant from the Alberta Lottery Fund — Community Initiatives Program.

Printed and bound in Canada by AGMV Marquis This book is printed on FSC Silva Enviro paper Cover design, page design and typesetting by Melina Cusano

This book is dedicated to the Town of Browning and the Blackfeet Reservation

Below is a paid announcement that appeared in the Glacier Reporter of January 20, 1970:

To the Town of Browning: Without your help and inspiration none of my “success” would have been possible. Every man who shed sweat in my foundry, every storekeeper who opened at odd hours, every repairman who kept my freezer or compressor going, every person who posed for sculptures or gave advice, all the kids who ride by on horses, all the singers who keep the beat going on Indian Days, all the people who come to my house or oﬀer encouragement on the street, even the people who understand when I lock the door and take the phone oﬀ the hook – all the people of Browning, my people – have helped me accomplish what I have. Browning is my birthplace and my home. This particular piece of land is a very special, unique place to me, the very lasty of the old, frontier America that we all cherish. Let’s keep it that way, My heartfelt and very humble thanks to you all!

TA B L E O F CO N T EN T S

Foreword Acknowledgments

XV XVII

PART ONE: Prelude I

GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES

1. Why we learned to cast bronze and what it was like Browning, Montana, early Sixties 2. How I got to the Blackfeet Reservation and what it was like Browning, Montana, 1961 3. History of the Blackfeet and how artists joined them High northern prairie, 1600s forward 4. “Indian Days” Browning, Montana, in the Sixties 5. The roots of American equestrian bronzes Washington, D.C., 1780s to the 1800s II

1 4 6 8 11

PROVENANCE: FAMILY HISTORY

1. The importance of story: the quick-draw guy Browning, 1968 2. Bob’s genealogical roots and how his parents got to Browning The Palatine to England to Quebec to Montana, 1600s to early 1900s 3. Bob’s childhood Browning, World War I and after 4. The white community and how Bob acquired an Indian “mother” Milk River Ridge, the Twenties 5. Artists on the scene Glacier Park, the Twenties 6. Earl Heikka, “crazy artist feller” Great Falls, Twenties and Thirties

17 18 24 25 30 36

III

INSPIRATION: FROM MUSIC TO SCULPTURE

1. First career: leading prize-winning high school bands 1934–1950 2. Second career: successful taxidermist Browning, 1950–1964 3. The Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife Browning, 1953–1999 4. The earliest sculptures and the C.M. Russell Contest Browning, the Fifties 5. Beginning to sell Browning, late Fifties IV

46 55 60

65 69 71 72 76 83 84

ARMATURE: FORMING STRUCTURE

1. About armatures 2. The armature of Bob’s inner world Browning, the Sixties 3. The Buﬀalo Roundup. We both ride Moiese, 1963 4. Organic armatures: skeletons Bynum, Sun River, Moiese, Starr School, mid-Sixties 5. Broken ribcage Browning, 1965 VIII

41

PLASTILENE: THE EARLY YEARS

1. About the material and what it demands Greenwich Village, the Forties 2. Malvina Hoﬀman’s plastilene Greenwich Village, the Forties 3. Plastilene sculptures shelved Browning, 1962 4. The miniature wildlife dioramas: a team eﬀort Browning, Spring 1962 5. Bob nearly goes blind Browning, Summer 1962 6. Evelyn Cole Chinook, Montana, 1967 7. My ﬁrst hunting trips The Rocky Mountain front, Fall 1962 V

39

87 89 94 100 105

VI

WASTE MOLD: SHARDS ON THE TABLE

1. Waste molds, made for destruction 2. Dick Flood The northern prairie, Fifties and Sixties 3. Ace Powell Hungry Horse and Browning, 1928 to 1976 4. John Clarke East Glacier, 1881–1970 5. The last full-mount: a moose Browning, 1968 6. Eegie Browning, 1962–1975 7. Electric cowboys Cut Bank Creek, 1965 8. Life in Browning The Sixties 9. Drifters Browning, mid-Sixties 10. Downhill Hudson’s Bay Divide, late Sixties VII

107 111 113 116 117 119 124 125 127 128

PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS

1. About plaster originals: the key 2. George Gray Browning, 1968 3. American Artist and Paul Juley Browning, 1964 4. True magazine Browning, 1965 5. New York Shows Manhattan, 1963 6. Glenbow Foundation Calgary, 1967 7. Christmas Browning, 1964 8. Hunting in the snow East front of the Rockies, 1968

131 132 135 137 138 139 143 144

IX

VIII

BLACK TUFFY: TROUBLES BEGIN

1. About ﬂexible molds Browning, Fifties and forward 2. The Big Flood Blackfeet Reservation, 1964 3. Animals drive a wedge 4. Bob the conservative, Mary the activist Browning, 1969 5. Keith Seele, James Willard Schultz, Lone Wolf and Paul Dyck The Reservation, 1966 6. Overwork and blow-ups Browning, 1969 7. Into the Wind, Bucky, and breaking points The reservation, late Sixties 8. Hunting again, Sweetgrass Hills IX

152 157 158 160 162 168

171 172 175 177 184 185 189

LOST WAX: CRUCIFIX, PIETA, AND MARGARET

1. Making a wax duplicate 2. Portrait of a polo player Santa Rosa, Anacortes, 1967 3. Bob’s daughter dies Anacortes, 1967 and 1968 4. Maurice poses for Jesus Browning, 1967 and 1968 5. Lost in grizzly country St. Mary’s, 1969 X

150

MOTHER MOLD: WIVES AND OTHERS

1. About mother molds 2. Ellison Westgarth Macﬁe Scriver 3. Alice the high school kid Browning and Malta 1937–1943 4. Jeanette the ﬁrebrand Edmonton and Browning, 1946–1959 5. Arlene the ideal Browning, 1959–1962 6. Mary the English teacher Browning, 1966–1970 7. Lorraine the widow Browning and Vancouver Island, 1972–2002 X

147

193 196 200 205 212

PART TWO: Crescendo XI

INVESTMENT: NEW YORK CITY

1. Old-fashioned plaster investment 2. To Tell the Truth! and Malvina Hoﬀman New York City, 1965 3. A Moose hunt Swan Hills, Alberta 1969 XII

225

CASTING BRONZE: THE BUFFALO BILL HISTORICAL CENTER

1. Casting bronze: a review Browning, Montana, 1962–1999 2. One hundred bronzes Browning and Cody, 1969 3. Harry Jackson Cody and Browning, 1969 4. A jubilant hunting trip East Front of the Rockies, 1969 XIII

217 220

227 230 240 242

MOLTEN BRONZE: COWBOY HALL OF FAME

1. Moment of truth 2. The Western art boom 3. C.M. Russell Museum Beneﬁt Auction Great Falls, Montana, 1970 to the present 4. Dean Krakel, cowboys and Indians Oklahoma City, 1965 to the end 5. Bill Linderman Denver and Browning, 1967–1970 6. The National Rodeo Finals Oklahoma City, 1970 7. Asger Mikkelson Browning, 1970–1975 8. Meltdown of a marriage

243 245 246 247 250 258 261 262

XI

PART THREE: Diminuendo XIV

CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

1. How to “chase” a bronze 2. Blackfeet religious ceremonies Browning, 1963 to 1999 3. Blackfeet ceremonial objects 4. Bob cuts the rawhide Browning, 1963 5. Cree healing ceremony, Blackfeet bundle opening Browning, 1967 to 1999 6. The Thunder Pipe Bundle transfer Browning, 1969 7. Counting coup Browning and Edmonton, 1976–1990 8. The million-dollar artifact collection Browning and Edmonton, 1990 to present 9. The Badger Lodge Browning and Two Medicine, 1971 XV

275 278 278 284 286 287 291

TORCH: THE PRINCE OF PEACE

1. Welding bronze Browning, 1963 forward 2. Losing family members 1976 forward 3. The Prince of Peace 1982 forward 4. Trying to rekindle the ﬂame Browning, 1985 forward

XII

271 273

297 298 300 305

XVI

COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK

1. The journey slows Fort Benton and Great Falls, 1974 forward 2. Lewis and Clark begin Fort Benton, 1974 forward 3. Distinguished Achievement Great Falls, 1990 4. Long quiet days in the shop Browning, 1988 forward 5. Facing death Browning, late Nineties 6. Death on Bob’s terms Browning, 1999 7. “The Man in Buckskin” Valier, 2002 XVII

309 310 315 317 319 321 324

PATINA: OVERVIEW

1. How patinas are formed 2. What is a “great artist?” 3. The artist as customer 4. The Flatiron Ranch Browning, 1980 5. The last visit and goodbye Browning, 1998 6. Four sculptors, four destinies Browning, 1929 Notes Timeline Bibliography

327 329 331 332 334 337 341 347 361

XIII

FOREWORD

Western art, as a sub-ﬁeld of American art, has been shunned, ignored, disdained – and passionately loved. Those who love it continue to look hopefully for signs on the horizon that others have come to see the light. The subject matter of historical Western art – overwhelmingly nineteenth-century frontier “types,” or “men with the bark on,” as Frederic Remington put it – deﬁnes the tradition to this day. Bob Scriver established a substantial reputation as a Western sculptor. He respected the tradition and worked creatively within it to establish his own vision of the West. He did, of course, do other subjects, but he stayed true to the legacy of masters like Remington and Charles M. Russell who endowed the twentieth century with a particular way of seeing, and understanding, the Old West. Scriver, with deep roots in the community where he was born in 1914, Browning, Montana, on the Blackfeet Reservation just east of Glacier National Park, concentrated on wildlife, rodeo, and traditional Blackfeet culture in creating an impressive body of work over a sculptural career spanning more than forty years before his death in 1999. Bronze Inside and Out is a study of Bob Scriver and a meditation on the place of his bronzes within the Western art tradition. But it is much more than that. It is the best book we have on a working Western artist—at once intimate (Mary Scriver was married to the artist), objective, tough-minded, and aﬀectionate. It is ingeniously structured around a brilliant conceit, the stages of creating a bronze sculpture, which are here made to correspond to the human life span. Each chapter begins by walking the reader through a stage in the sculptural process, then groups ideas, stories, reminiscences, and biographical data appropriate to that stage. Taken together, the chapters familiarize the reader with the process of creating a bronze from ﬁrst inspiration to ﬁnal patina, and oﬀer as clear an explanation of lost wax casting as one will ﬁnd anywhere, enlivened by the learn-as-you-go particulars of Scriver’s experiences. Here, Bob Scriver and his art become works in progress. We follow his struggles to express his personal vision, the hard eﬀort necessary to make art and a career of art in an isolated Western town, the frustrations and realities of the commerce of art, the ups and downs of achieving the celebrity status that sells art, and throughout, we see the XV

linkages between character, values, and a speciﬁc artistic achievement. More than any other book that I can think of, Bronze Inside and Out puts a human face on Western art—indeed, all art. It invites us to ponder the very nature of the creative process. Brian W. Dippie June 2007

XVI

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Karl Thuneman, friend and professional editor, gave me the ﬁrst feedback. I am grateful to Jeanette Germaine Caouette Scriver Chase, who opened both her wounded heart and her photograph album to me. Jeanette’s sister, Helene Caouette DeVicq, shared what she knew as well as love of Bob Scriver. Jeanette’s brother, Maurice Chaillot, understood better than anyone else. Bob’s beloved cousin, Margaret Macﬁe Meeks, set things straight, and his cousin’s son, Doug MacFie, head of the Macﬁe Clan for Canada, was invaluable in his knowledge of the family tree. Clyde McConnell did amazing magic to old photos, and his wife, Suzanne, was an excellent cheerleader. Brian Dippie was the one who really understood this book. Don Reynolds and Francis Morrone provided encouragement from Manhattan. Peter Enman and Melina Cusano were stalwart guardians of quality on behalf of the University of Calgary Press. Boyd and Lila Evans and the Cree Medicine family took tender care of Bob Scriver in his last years.

XVII

Part One:

Prelude

I Genre: American Bronzes

1. Why we learned to cast bronze and what it was like Browning, Montana, early Sixties

In 1961, there were no bronze foundries on the prairies of Montana. A sculptor without a foundry is like Beethoven without a piano, John Philip Sousa without a brass band. So Bob Scriver decided to learn how to cast bronze. I learned alongside him. In the Sixties we thought about almost nothing but bronze casting, rising from both table and bed to cross the yard and check on the homemade foundry that consumed so much natural gas that the power company had to install a bigger feed pipe. After days of tension while the mold baked, we would ﬁnally be ready to melt and pour bronze. Carl Cree Medicine held one end of the homemade crucible cradle; Bob himself held the other. By gripping the old farm machinery wheel that controlled the chain hoist, I sustained the balance point. If either of the pourers had dropped their cradle handles, the crucible would have overturned, spilling molten metal hot enough to vaporize our feet. Cranking my chain hoist up and down, I could take the weight oﬀ the cradle, to give the sculptor and his helper the control they needed to make a smooth pour. Every pause, wobble, or backspill aﬀected the quality of the bronze sculpture formed by the seeking liquid metal ﬁlling spaces in the plaster mold, emptiness left by baked-out wax, “lost” wax. It took a month of preparation to make the mold by pouring investment around a wax version of the sculpture. This is called the “Italian block” investment method, meaning that the mold was a big block of refractory plaster as invented in ancient Rome, NOT the space-age thin layer of industrial ceramic shell casting. Then came a week of baking day and night to melt the wax back out – not just the visible wax, but every molecule. The white plaster of the mold 1

glowed cherry red. Finally – sipping air from inside the mold through a long hollow car aerial as a ﬁreproof straw – we could taste no chemicals. Big as a tree stump, the hot mold was packed – steaming – into wet sand, so that if it cracked, the liquid bronze would chill when it met the wet sand and plug the crack. If any wax molecules lingered undetected, spaces could ﬁll with gas that would force gaps in the ﬁnal sculpture or cause cracks big enough to leak the molten bronze out through thin ﬁssures. Once, the mold broke so badly that it let the bronze rush through so all we had to show for a week of work was white plaster rubble and a sand-embedded blob of metal. We opened part of the shed roof and started the kind of fan the ﬁre department uses to clear smoke. Then Bob ﬁred up the bronze furnace recessed into the ﬂoor. Roaring, a seething orange chrysanthemum, a voracious sea anemone of ﬂame, danced over the hole in the middle of the round lid. If poured into an unﬁnished mold, the two-thousand-degree bronze might even explode, sending molten metal out into our faces, so we wore plastic visors and heavy knit watchcaps, but we had none of the enshrouding protective gear of today’s workers. Once in a while, escaping metal set the foundry on ﬁre from under the ﬂoor. As soon as the metal was poured we had to grab extinguishers and pull up boards. Once, the crucible cracked while it was still at the bottom of the furnace, casting in place a disc the shape of the bottom, so the whole thing had to be dug up and dismantled. Our disasters were never quite as bad as those of Cellini, the tempestuous Renaissance sculptor, who allegedly lost his thumb because the mold was set down on it and he refused to scream for fear of ruining the pour. If all went well, the twisting satin ribbon of molten bronze slipped from the crucible into the round hole on top of the chalky refractory mold like cream onto pie. The ﬁrst time we ever tried to cast a bronze, the results were perfect. The next eighteen attempts were laughable, impossible, unrecognizable. We never made the same mistake twice – we just didn’t know there were so many kinds of mistakes. Then we achieved a bit of competence, and ﬁnally we became so proud of our bronze casting that it almost took our attention away from Bob’s sculpture itself, which was the whole point of learning the process. The means were in danger of overtaking the end. Every successful pour left us in a state of euphoria. Afterwards we stepped out into the snow – sun pouring diamonds onto it though the temperature was way below zero – our heads thrown back with laughter, squinting in the ﬂood of winter light. Now that the roaring furnace and fans were oﬀ, it was silent. Earlier I had propped bottles of cola in the snow. If it hadn’t taken too long to position the mold and get the metal up to temperature, they would still be liquid. Otherwise, in the subzero temperatures of a Montana winter, even the ones with sugar would be ice mush bulging out the neck of the bottle. On top of the mold the pour hole would now be a “button” of newly hardened bronze. Bob always poured a bit of cola on it so he could watch the liquid explode black 2

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The ﬁrst Bighorn Foundry, originally the coal shed for the Browning Mercantile. Note the actual bighorn skulls on top. Bob in doorway, 1963. Photo: Mary Scriver.

oxidation away from the shining golden surface of silicon bronze. The smell of caramelized sugar mingled with acrid metal fumes and wet sand. If the pet bobcats had snuck in to use the sand for their own purposes, we could smell their urine. “To the gods! To Fate!” No one said, “To cat pee.” Pounding each other on the back, we walked in circles to shed tension, and unzipped coveralls so arctic air could lick sweaty necks and wrists. I handed out salt tablets. From tender places where ﬂesh pressed against our clothes enough that heat went through – my bra and Bob’s ﬂy, worse because of the zipper – we ﬁshed out insulating wads of tissue. For a while Bob wore a long, heavy apron, but the corners would touch slag and catch on ﬁre. To keep his legs from burning, everyone around him would begin to yell and gesture, which made him angry and impatient, unappreciative.

I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES

3

After the pour Bob set Carl at some small task in the workshop while he and I went out to the small bedroom of the studio and lay down together, our embrace shaped by adrenaline, relief, and sleep deprivation. We lay half-asleep while the day slipped down behind the mountains. The newly poured bronzes ticked in their molds, unseen as they cooled. No one could tell yet whether they would be whole and beautiful or so ﬂawed as to be unsaleable – only raw material for some other casting. In the shop Carl would sing along with the cowboy laments on the radio and if we didn’t come back in time, he’d lock up after himself in the blue twilight, put the key up over the door, and walk home in the snow. Or maybe his wife, Carma, and kids would be waiting for him in their pickup. In those years there was a lot of snow, up to our hips all winter. The mountains shone white on the horizon. In old age Bob would say, “Those were the few really good years.” I agreed. Just for those few balanced, centered moments of peace, Bob and I were an axis mundi, an oomphalos, the center of the world. And then we spun apart, Bob to become a sort of monstre sacré on the Blackfeet Reservation and myself to wander, always trying to return. That was more than forty years ago. I like to remember it as mythic and romantic, poetic and tragic. Maybe it was. Time burns us out, then ﬁlls our loss with memories so that we ring like bells. Now I’m back on the east front of the Rockies, near the Blackfeet Reservation. Only the wind is the same.

2. How I got to the Blackfeet Reservation and what it was like Browning, Montana, 1961

In front of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Montana, is a circle of footprints cast in bronze in 1930. They are the footprints of the last sign talkers, imprints taken when the group met to make a movie gesture-speaking in a circle. In fact, the Museum of the Plains Indian – dedicated in 1941 – began with the intention of creating some kind of building or enclosure to house these footprints and then evolved into the brick building it is today. When my parents drove me through Browning, Montana, on return from my graduation at Northwestern University just north of Chicago and headed back to Portland, Oregon, we stopped at that Museum of the Plains Indian. It was June, the prairie was embroidered with ﬂowers, and the Rocky Mountains reared up white on the horizon. I stood in the sun-warmed bronze footprints of the old sign talkers, stepping from one pair to another, and said, “Just throw my luggage out. This is where I want to be.” I applied for a teaching job and got it. 4

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

When I came back on the train in August, the land was dry, bleached to the yellow ochre of cougar fur. When I walked over the swelling shortgrass prairie, the ground thrummed under my feet like a bronze gong. At ﬁrst I kept my eyes on the wide horizon where moraines left by ancient glaciers met the endless sky. Then I began to watch by my feet, where small verdigris plants and bronze grasses grew at the base of red argyllite boulders encrusted with orange elegantissima lichens. Now and then, on a ridge, I would ﬁnd the splintered silvery remains of a coﬃn with a few bone fragments and perhaps a sprinkle of beads. The ancient practice of Blackfeet was to leave their dead as high as they could get them. I also kept to the ridges. Being up high, looking far away, feeling the wind, somehow added up to ﬂying. “Euphoria at spaciousness” they call it, something like the “oceanic feeling” that Freud felt was the source of religious awe. Sometimes I walked late, and saw the stars come out. Sometimes I walked very early and watched the sky pale, then ﬂush to rose, then ﬂood the mountains with that same rose. “Alpenglow,” they call it. A person needs words to describe the world. This is why the Blackfeet want to save their language, their own words for their own place. Chief Mountain is Ninah-istuki, which is the same as Mountain Chief. Heart Butte is Moskizipahpistuki. Between those two blades of rock, ﬁfty miles apart, stands the great arc of mountains that form Glacier National Park. There is no Blackfeet name for Glacier National Park. Their nation never needed a park. Browning, the capital of the Montana Blackfeet Reservation, is in an ecotone, a transition between the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains, not quite in foothills but high enough (4,500 feet above sea level) that before baking a cake one must stop and think whether to use the high altitude instructions. Boilinghot coﬀee is not quite so scalding here as it would be at sea level. Through the fall and spring the snow-line is often just a little beyond the town. In a good winter the snow is everywhere – there is no line. At least until the wind blows. Water comes from mountain snowpack runoﬀ. The town is built in a marshy ﬂood plain, which was gradually drained by channeling the network of little creeks through storm sewers that still criss-cross underneath Browning. No one kept a map of them. Because there is so much water in spring, the town is surrounded by sheets of wild iris, camas, shooting stars, buttercups. In fall wild geranium (cranesbill) and wild rose foliage blaze up red. To the west are always the mountains, except that in forest ﬁre season they nearly disappear into purple smoke. Ironically, Willow Creek, which feeds this ﬂood plain, is one of the shortest and smallest of the many streams coming out of the mountains – there is never quite enough water for the human infrastructure of the town. There is plenty enough for sweetgrass. The Blackfeet Reservation is point of origin for three huge watersheds, one draining west to the Paciﬁc Ocean, one north to Hudson’s Bay and one south to the huge Missouri/Mississippi river complex we call “the Louisiana Purchase.” I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES

5

It is this last drainage, the tributaries of the Missouri, that gave Europeans easy access to the heart of Blackfeet country and changed tribal history forever. Even so, the Blackfeet managed to defend their lands later than most other tribes. The long-horizoned land never seems to change, but in fact small relationships are always shifting through a rhythm, responding to extremes that press at diﬀerent times every species and life form to its limits. Only the intertwined insects, plants, animals, and people capable of strategies and awareness unnecessary elsewhere can survive here. Their hardiness comes from adaptation. They are tough, but at the same time more sensitive to nuances that make the diﬀerence between survival and extinction. Over all stretches the sky. When there is little moisture or dust in the air, it is a strong clear blue. When there is high ice and mare’s tails blow across the blue, it pales. When a new weather system is on its way over the mountains, driving a high-altitude wind ahead of it, the clouds will curve up from the horizon in a Chinook arch. In summer when heat rises from the prairie, marble thunderheads of extraordinary height and elaborate shape build up and up until they fall apart in hail, lightning, thunder. If clouds move in front of the sun, they are rimmed with silver, or if they are thin clouds, they become amethyst geodes, with glowing hearts. At night stars cram the skies, so many that familiar patterns may be lost. If there are active sunstorms, great gauzy ﬁlms of color dance in the night sky, aurora borealis. It’s not unusual to see space debris tumbling and ﬂaring through the atmosphere. Comets and meteors, of course. The sky is a whole world, occupied and slowly gyring. The Nitzi-tahpi, the old Blackfeet, have many stories about a star who is a person, perhaps a friendly protector, perhaps a husband who takes his wife up into the sky to live.

3. History of the Blackfeet and how artists joined them High northern prairie, 1600s forward

When I came in August 1961, I wasn’t coming from the east, I was coming from the west coast, traveling in the same direction as Lewis and Clark’s party were returning when they killed a couple of Blackfeet just a few miles from Browning. I don’t think I killed any Blackfeet. I may have wounded a few. I myself was pierced through the heart. At ﬁrst the love was for the land, then for that sculptor twice my age, and ﬁnally it came to include not only the Piegan branch of the Blackfeet nation, but also the complex of Métis, Cree, Hutterites, Scandinavians, Belgians, and British who over the last century have inhabited this place, some by accident and some on purpose. 6

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The U.S./Canadian border is the northern edge of this reservation. When Thomas Jeﬀerson bought the drainage of the Missouri River from the King of France and sent Lewis and Clark to see what that meant, Lewis saw from Camp Disappointment (near Browning) that Jeﬀerson had bought the land just up to Milk River Ridge and Hudson’s Bay Divide. Those moraines were raised by a sequence of glaciers, which stopped about ten thousand years ago, more or less along a ragged line of volcanic hills (Sweet Grass Hills, Old Man Lying on his Back, Bears Paw, Cypress Hills). Often weather systems divide just there. On the west side of the reservation is the Rocky Mountain overthrust. Grasses rather than trees grow here. It is grazing and small grain country. For thousands of years people have traveled along these mountain shoulders unimpeded by trees, creating the braided Old North Trail from Alaska down through Mexico. Travois tracks can still be seen. The great path was kept grassy in part by lightning strikes and Indian ﬁres. When the jet stream bends far to the south, cold from the Arctic rushes in. Horses and cattle must be fed to live. Sometimes winter catabatic winds scour the hilltops, taking the midwinter temperature up as high as sixty degrees, so the grass is exposed for grazing. There is a larger cycle, running a hundred or ﬁve hundred years, that swings the pattern from drought to ﬂood, from easy open-winter to iron death, from forest ﬁre to deep grass. Every tribe is shaped by the place where it came into being. It is the land that creates tribes. Blackfeet knew many tucked-in secret valleys and ﬂat-topped buttes. In this sky-place full of rainbows, clouds trailing virga, sudden lightning, and icy sun-dogs, they were a People of Dreams. But they were always grounded in the reality of grass, which fed the bison. Women with sturdy digging sticks found tubers and roots that grew underfoot – in fact, still grow where the prairie is not plowed. The digging stick, worn by earth and women’s hands, was once the most sacred object of the Blackfeet. In 1869 a deﬁnitive incident had broken the back of resistance to the invading whites. Young men had quarreled, a bad-tempered white trader (Malcolm Clarke) was killed, and in revenge Major Baker was sent on a frozen winter morning to punish the band (Mountain Chief) from which the young men came – his orders read “strike them and strike them hard.” Clarke’s wife was a sister of Mountain Chief and Clarke’s sons rode with the avenging soldiers. One of the scouts, Cobell, was married to another of Mountain Chief’s sisters.1 When the soldiers got to the camp, Mountain Chief had moved on. Heavyrunner, a peace chief, and his people, suﬀering from smallpox, were there. Few men were in camp. Baker’s cavalry killed most of the people and left the rest with no food or clothes in below-zero weather. (The scouts and some of the soldiers snuck back to rescue a few of the children.) The children of Malcolm Clarke, half-Blackfeet, especially the daughters, were educated by his white family back East and enjoyed Western art. They invited many artists, for instance, Joseph Henry Sharp (1859–1953) and Charles I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES

7

Schreyvogel (1861–1912), to their Dawes Act2 allotment ranch near East Glacier, where the “Big Hotel” was built on their land. One daughter, Helen, was the ﬁrst superintendent of schools for the state of Montana and owned the ﬁrst piano. In her youth she was an actress who toured Europe with Sarah Bernhardt. Later she helped to work out the Dawes Act allotments across the United States, taking the reservations out of communal ownership and into family tracts. By the twentieth century the European artists were coming by railroad, sometimes with railroad subsidies to record the scenery and people: Joseph Henry Sharp (1859–1953), Charles Schreyvogel (1861–1912), Winold Reiss (1888–1953) and Charlie Russell (1864–1926). The Blackfeet themselves had always been artists, but now they were pressed into service as models.

4. “Indian Days”

Browning, Montana, in the Sixties

The campgrounds to the west of Browning are far older than the reservation drawn up in the nineteenth century. A few days after the Fourth of July, 1962, the grassy ﬁeld behind the Museum of the Plains Indians suddenly had a tent in it, a white canvas Army-style tent shaped like a little peaked house. We could see it from Bob’s studio. In front appeared an old Indian woman with a treadle sewing machine who worked furiously away at something very large, also white canvas. Finally someone brought poles and she put up the tipi she’d been sewing. The second week in July a whole circle of tipis appeared, like the round fungi that pop up on the prairie in a circle this time of year. It was Indian Days, a great gathering of all the people, what is called a pow-wow these days, but which in the ancient days was a ceremonial celebration when everyone came together for business, pleasure, and dancing, as well as the important socially structuring rituals. So many came that it had to be held in June when there was plenty of grass for the horses and enough food stored to last for a week or so without extra hunting. Then the Indian agent talked them into delaying the ceremonies until the second week of July, so the hay would be cut ﬁrst. The lodgeskin the old woman sewed was not painted that year, but other older lodges had unique versions of a particular design vocabulary. Around the bottom edge of the cone was always a broad band of color decorated with the circles the Blackfeet called “dusty stars” (the round fungi found in prairie grass) and thought of as meteors dropped from the sky, as children come into our lives. The top of that color-band might be in scallops or peaks and the people would say they symbolized hills or mountains. The point of the cone with two smoke ﬂaps attached was always black and sometimes had stripes of black beneath the solid black. Four stripes meant the four directions. Each smoke ﬂap had a 8

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

pattern of circles, seven on one side to represent the Big Dipper and a cluster on the other side to stand for the Pleiades. Most strikingly, the animal-spirit-guardian of the tipi was represented on each side, usually facing the door, and the gullet and kidneys of the beast were marked in the design. On one famous yellow tipi a huge black buﬀalo leapt over the door. (That was Jim Whitecalf’s – OLD Jim Whitecalf, who lived to be more than a hundred. Young Jim was a decade older than me.) And on the top of the back of the lodge, if the design had been properly brought in a dream, was a Maltese cross, a stylized version of the “dream moth.” Usually the design was inherited by family, though sometimes the right to use the design was sold. There was an additional sign for those who had had the dream of their own tipi: a buﬀalo tail or horse tail hanging from the center of that dream moth. By the time I came, only Chewing Black Bone had a lodge with that special mark. When the lodges were in place, the drums began, the sound of all the people’s hearts at once – deep and thrilling and world-making. Blue smoke layered the slow evenings and we slept hearing the steady throb. When I went out to the fairgrounds to take care of my horse early in the morning, old Fish Wolf Robe came out of his tipi, which faced east as all Blackfeet lodges do, and addressed the Sun, praying for the People. His old voice rose up strongly over the sleeping camp and he exhorted the People to do the right thing, to stay healthy, to be generous, to keep order, and so on and on. Not many people were stirring. Once I saw an old woman with her gray hair loose around her shoulders so she could comb it, but there was a kitten on her lap and she had stopped in order to tease the kitten with the comb. The earliest hours of the day belonged to the old people. The young ones had the nights. For several days more lodges appeared and, though they seemed to pop up almost magically, they were in fact hard work. Especially if the wind were blowing or the tipi poles weren’t quite the right length, it might take repeated tries to get everything braced and tied and taut enough to satisfy the boss, who was always the old grandma of the family. The women were the only ones who could say whether the job of putting it up was properly done. In the Sixties the directions, the complaining, the objecting, the urging and scolding, was often in Blackfeet. The oldest ladies still wore layers and layers of calico skirts. In the center of the grounds the men put up an arbor, in those days made new from branches every year instead of today’s plywood arena ﬂoored with Astroturf, which is less dusty. The PA system began to snap and boom and electrical crews came out to repair the lines, though there were only a few. Most people still used kerosene. Some brought their tipi poles in with horses and wagon running gears (the box and seat removed). The kids from Moccasin Flats were already used to having to go to an old-fashioned pump with their buckets and jugs. (Country people still took water from creeks.) People brought their own food and cooked at their lodges and tents, so that around mealtimes the whole west side of town smelled of cottonwood smoke and frying bread dough. I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES

9

Finally, the stick game began, the sleight-of-hand gambling game accompanied by a steady whacking beat of sticks on logs, roughly in time with the drums. Two teams sat in long lines while spectators stood behind them, second-guessing where the handheld “bones” might be. The money being bet was thrown out on the grass between the teams, each sitting behind their log while they kept time by beating the log. It was said that ranches changed hands, horses went back and forth, and I myself saw money in paper sacks and legal documents among the loose bills. It was hypnotic, narcotic, deeply addictive. At one time it had had religious meaning, something about the great game of chance we call Life. When it was time – regardless of what the schedules said – the dancers began. Sometimes it took a lot of urging from the PA system. Once in a long time it rained. Often it was unbearably hot, but that never slowed things down much. Once it snowed. When the impalpable moment came, dancers straggled over to the dance arbor, where the drums had been pounding, pounding, and the falsetto wavering melody had been calling, calling.... The arena ﬁlled with color in motion, bells jingling, braids ﬂying, dust rising up around the dancers. For hours the old patterns and motions ﬂew around in circles while people drifted back and forth to their folding chairs or the uncomfortable benches. A few concessions booths dispensed coﬀee, hamburgers and fry bread, but in those years there were few carnies. It was past midnight when the dancers ﬁnally wore out and went to their beds in lodges, tents and truck beds. They would ignore Fish Wolf Robe calling when the sun came up. On Sunday afternoon, tipis began to come down – ﬁrst one or two and then whole sections. By Monday, all that was left was the original canvas tent and the old woman out in front of it with her treadle machine, hard at work on another tipi cover. Now on all sides of her the grass was trampled and crews of repentant drunks from the jail picked up litter. One tragic year the body of a small boy was found left behind, ﬂoating face-down in a little pothole lagoon a half-mile away. Everyone had thought he went home with someone else. In a key Blackfeet legend, a woman falls in love with the Morning Star and goes to the sky to live with him. They have a child, Blood Clot Boy. When she returns home, she is told her son must never touch the ground with his feet. She is very careful, but in spite of that, the boy touches the ground and the child is lost. The story is meant as consolation, explanation, in a world of tragedy. This was a world Bob knew well. Sometimes he forgot he wasn’t a member of the tribe and said, “We Blackfeet never surrendered. We were never beaten in a battle. We just wore out from starvation and sickness and had to stop ﬁghting.”

10

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

5. The roots of American equestrian bronzes Washington, D.C., 1780s to the 1800s

When the United States ﬁrst started up their nation, about the time the Blackfeet were ﬁrst acquiring horses, they had no bronze foundries.3 They felt this lack sharply, because the European tradition was to create heroic-size bronze sculptures of leaders, particularly military heroes. In some ways these big statues were celebrations of war victories, maybe even like scalp dances. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jeﬀerson asked the French sculptor, JeanAntoine Houdon, (1741–1828), to cross the ocean in order to record the appearance of George Washington, but Houdon worked in marble, which meant that the statue could not show Washington on a horse, for its brittle legs would have snapped at the ankles. However, Houdon did an excellent full-length ﬁgure of Washington and continued on to make marble busts of other founding fathers. In 1847, about the time the Blackfeet were being asked to sign treaties, Ball Hughes, an Englishman, modeled the “ﬁrst bronze cast in America,” a portrait of Dr. Bowditch, an astronomer, which was placed on his grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery. The family did not think the casting adequate and had the statue recast in France. Evidently the true ﬁrst cast was destroyed. Decades later people still hungered to see the Father of the Country on a horse, until eventually there were several. The successful pioneer was Clark Mills (1815–1883), a self-taught modeler in clay. Before making a statue of Washington, he had managed to secure a commission for a heroic-size equestrian statue of General Jackson. At that time he had never seen either Jackson or an equestrian statue, but – Yankee-style – he set out to build a foundry to cast the monument in bronze that came from an old cannon captured by Jackson himself. In order to work near Washington, D.C., Mills bought a farm. He was about to begin the real work on his statue when a high wind blew down his studio. Just as that was rebuilt, his foundry burned down. The body of the horse had to be cast six times before it was adequate. The horse was rearing, exactly balanced on the hunkered-down rear legs. Mills ﬁnished his statue of Jackson in 1853, then later his equestrian statue of Washington, and ﬁnally a symbolic statue of Freedom that was put on top of the United States Capitol in 1863 at the end of the Civil War. (It’s still there.) He devised all his methods and equipment himself. (Almost exactly a hundred years later, we did the same.) One month after the unveiling of Mills’ statue of Jackson, Henry Kirke Brown (1814–1886), native born, started work on his own equestrian Washington, unveiled on the Fourth of July, 1856, in Union Square, New York. Brown was interested in the Eastern Indians, visiting them in order to portray them. Indian sculpture, therefore, precedes “cowboy” sculpture, for the American West was only just being invented. I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES

11

The Civil War energized a wave of monumental sculpture, ﬁnanced by fortunes made on the war and the rising tide of industrialism, and driven by the need of both sides to commemorate heroism. Also, there were a great many cannons to recycle. By now the creative center of the art world was Paris, particularly the Beaux Arts school. Forsaking Italian marble, many sculptors turned to French foundries which were just converting from sand-casting to the more delicate ciré perdue (lost wax) Italian block casting. Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) relied on French foundries who could cast his extravagant gestural work. After the War Between the States the President everyone wanted to see in bronze was Abraham Lincoln. Masters among the sculptors of Lincoln were Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), Daniel Chester French (1850–1931), Gutzon Borglum (1867–1941), and James Earle Fraser (1876–1953). Perhaps the culmination of great marble memorial art was Daniel Chester French’s magniﬁcent portrait of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. French’s ﬁrst monument had been a bronze Minute Man in Concord, very much informed by Michelangelo’s marble Apollo Belvedere. Thus marble and bronze were in conversation with each other. When military enterprises after the Civil War shifted to the Western frontier to force the tribes oﬀ their land, Indians became the subjects of monuments, not as individuals so much as symbols of the uniquely American continent. Even as they were being celebrated in bronze, they were being destroyed as humans. The monumental sculptors of Indians were Solon (1868–1922) and Gutzon (1867–1941) Borglum, Cyrus Edwin Dallin (1861-1944), Alexander Phimister Proctor (1862–1950) and James Earle Fraser (1876–1953), who summed up the situation with “The End of the Trail.” These sculptors were all Western people who grew up among prairie tribes. Most of us recognize these statues when we see them – but we have lost the history and names of the sculptors. The sculptures seem always to have been there. Frederic Remington (1861–1909) and Charles M. Russell (1864–1926) – known primarily as painters – were contemporary with the former men, but neither of them did monumental sculpture. Their parlor-table-size bronzes were similar in style and subject matter to monumental sculptures, but their popular reputations have come to obscure the heroic-size bronzes of other sculptors. Often the history of art is told in terms of exhibitions. In 1876 at the Centennial Exposition, French sculptors dominated.4 By the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893, American sculpture had taken a major leap.5 Not only were tours de force produced for the show, but also many Paris-trained American sculptors worked together in a loose coalition of masters and apprentices. Creators of equestrian statues felt free to hire younger men who were expert at horses so they could concentrate on the rider and overall design. It’s a short step from horsemen to cowboys. 12

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The immediate result was an array of “white sculptures” in a White City, all created by casting “staﬀ,” which was a hard plaster reinforced with straw. To the innocent, they appeared to be marble. A few ﬁgures were reproduced in bronze so that they still stand in Chicago. Among those bronzes were portraits of Indians. In addition, Proctor produced sixty excellent individual ﬁgures of Western game animals, all of which he had hunted since his boyhood in Denver. He was an American animalier as well as a key artist of the American West. Edward Kemeys (1843–1907) was equally celebrated as an animal sculptor at the Exposition, but has since become nearly unknown. The towering ﬁgures of the Columbian Exposition were Augustus SaintGaudens and Daniel Chester French, New England men educated in Paris who would teach and lead dozens of American ﬁgurative sculptors. Saint-Gaudens was the senior, a long-faced redhead with a French father and Irish mother. He had a gift for getting along with the wealthy and lived on an estate with a great ﬂourish. Though he had a mistress, also his model, she seems to have been dependable and discreet in the French manner. Responding to the continued shadow of the War Between the States, Saint-Gaudens made strong, winged women in cowls of draped ﬂags, who consoled or inspired as the situation demanded. Possibly Saint-Gaudens’ masterpiece is a monumental bronze equestrian portrait of General Sherman, his horse being led by one of these idealized women as she carries a waving ﬂag. When realist Daniel Chester French began to sculpt winged angels, he wrote home to Concord to ask an ornithologist friend to send him “about seventeen” diﬀerent kinds of bird wings for study. He was much helped when the Italian brothers Piccirilli, ﬁne marble craftsmen, came to New York City to open a stone-cutting workshop supporting American sculptors. (Several of the brothers became sculptors themselves.) He only needed to complete a small clay, and the Piccirillis would notify him when the enlarged statue was ready for ﬁnal touches. French showed no inclination to any other romantic relationships than his wife, who was his cousin, named Mary and called Mamie – the same as Charlie Russell’s wife. In the period surrounding WWI, many American artists continued to travel to Paris for classes at the Beaux Arts, learning how to work with the nearby foundries. Like the marble cutters before them, bronze craftsmen followed the sculptors back across the Atlantic, meeting new opportunities by creating the major New York foundries that still persist: Modern Art, Bonnard, Roman Bronze, Gorham. Now there were true American bronzes. Important schools and societies such as the National Academy of Design formed in New York City. Then came the infamous Armory Show of 1910, the entering wedge of the new abstract and intellectual art that didn’t look like anything “real.” They were of no matter to Bob Scriver, who was inspired by Malvina Hoﬀman (1887–1966) who studied with Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) who studied with I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES

13

Antoine Barye (1796–1875), the ﬁrst to be called “animalier.” Scriver’s artistic forebears were sculptors of realistic ﬁgurative bronze monuments, ﬁrst French and then American, ﬁnally Western. Cubism, impressionism, and other startling innovations were a shock to the systems of conservative art patrons. But in Montana few paid much attention. Many of the early mining and banking leaders were from Boston, and thus were aware of the legacy of the Paris-trained monumental sculptors who had contributed work to the Boston Commons. In front of the Montana State Capital building the politicians erected a huge statue of Irish Governor Meagher pointing his saber to the sky. A statue of Paris Gibson,6 city founder, stands in the park in Great Falls, and a statue of General Stevens, who located Marias Pass, which made the east/west Great Northern Railroad possible, stands at the Continental Divide along the tracks. It was not until much later, closer to World War II, that “modern” art of any kind got to Montana, and even then it remained pretty much sequestered in the university towns. Western American art nostalgically portraying the pre-industrial world has now been collected in major Western historical institutions, founded by fortunate industrialists, engineers, and miners and developed by obsessed and resourceful curators. Soon the clientele of the “cowboy and Indian” painters discovered and claimed realistic bronzes that had Western subjects. By the turn of the second millennium we were used to seeing Remington bronzes in the Oval Oﬃce of the White House. A political dimension lingers, perhaps because of the origin of equestrian bronzes in national military monuments. Western sculpture fans value the open frontier (unregulated by government) and the importance of individual enterprise. “Cowboy” art has become part of the patriotic “grand narrative” version of the settling of the West that still prevails in the face of post-modern criticism. It has become a genre, a popular category of the “gens” or people, in response to both historical nostalgia and present economics which make bronzes aﬀordable to ordinary folks. Scriver’s sculpture career happened to begin just as art of the American West became a kind of craze and whole empires of commerce grew up around the genre. When Bob began doing sculpture, the Great Falls C.M. Russell Museum was a small neighborhood archive created by the bequest of Josephine Trigg, Charlie’s librarian friend. The objects were modest: letters, place marks, small ﬁgures meant to entertain and not necessarily Western: turkeys, monkeys, Arabs on camels, ﬁgures from literature. By the time I write this, the C.M. Russell Museum is a whole block anchored by a huge imposing ediﬁce, with Charlie’s little log studio and the family home over to one side of the lawn. The interior shelters major paintings and bronze, attracts an international crowd of fans, and is managed by a well-educated, competent, – even inspired – art curator, Anne Durand.

14

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

In the Sixties a small experimental art auction was pioneered by the Great Falls Ad Club. By the time of this writing, a dozen major “art of the West” auctions are staged annually. In 2001 one painting alone, a Russell watercolor called “Meat for Wild Men” which was formally estimated as worth $475,000, sold for over a million dollars at the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction in Reno. Later a numinous panorama of Yellowstone painted by Moran, one of those early artists, sold for a little over eight million dollars. Scriver entered the fray early in this chuckwagon race and was still part of the action at his death ﬁfty years later. It all happened so fast he never did really understand what was happening. But he left more than a thousand sculptures, a dozen of them heroic-size. They include Western subjects, animals, portrait busts, nudes, rodeo subjects, a whole series on Blackfeet, and Lewis and Clark monuments.

I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES

15

II Provenance: Family History

1. The importance of story: the quick-draw guy Browning, 1968

Guns and art are more valuable if you know where they come from, who owned them, what their marks mean. Bob and I were discussing this one day when the light-bulb man showed up. He was a traveling salesman, a small unassuming man so eager for sales that if we’d buy the new bulbs, he would take a tall wobbly ladder into the freezing winter museum and replace all the burned-out bulbs. Bob had said every a person has a provenance, a story, and bet me that the light-bulb man was more exciting than he looked. We invited him to supper in order to ﬁnd out. Bob won the bet because he turned out to be the quick-draw champion of Montana. After supper the salesman demonstrated quick-draw. Bob had always shot for accuracy, matching his .22 riﬂe against Joe Foley’s pistol (and sometimes Joe Foley could outshoot Ed McGivern, world’s greatest revolver shot), but speed was new to him. The quick-draw guy showed us cartridges that shot wax instead of lead and we brought in some cartons to draw targets on. When we missed, we made dents in the glossy pale green back door, but we didn’t really care. The quick-draw guy left us some wax ammunition. For days afterward Bob and Carl Cree Medicine went out in the snowmobile in hopes that dogs would chase them. Of course they did – Bob was always at war with mean dogs. Carl steered the Arctic Cat in circles while Bob shot dogs and whooped. Then they traded oﬀ. Because it is possible to make molds and castings that are duplicates – more or less – of a sculptor’s work, the provenance of the individual casting (where it came from and where it has been) becomes crucial to its value. A Remington bronze that was cast under the artist’s supervision is worth hundreds of thou17

sands of dollars. A cheap reproduction of the same sculpture, carelessly cast, can be found on the market for a hundred dollars. For this reason, every bronze that Bob sold was recorded in a book and a certiﬁcate of authenticity was given to the new owner. It was a little like a birth certiﬁcate.

2. Bob’s genealogical roots and how his parents got to Browning The Palatine to England to Quebec to Montana, 1600s to early 1900s

This is Bob’s family provenance. During the 1600s in the European Palatine – which eventually evolved into Germany and other countries – a war broke out that was so long, complex and destructive that it was called the Thirty Years’ War. Such destruction caused waves of emigration. A family called “Scriver”1 emigrated to England, where the Crown gave them refuge. Some went on across the Atlantic to the colonial area along Lake Champlain where today Vermont meets Quebec, and there they settled on farms. It was contested land, changing hands repeatedly, from French to English and then – during the Revolutionary War between the United States and the British Empire – wavering back and forth. On at least one occasion, the families had to take what belongings they could carry on their backs and ﬂee across the frozen lake. Another time, the household silver was buried in the woods while the women and children retreated to safety and the men took arms. The Scrivers were Loyalists, meaning they wished to remain part of the British Empire. Beginning in Vermont, they ended up in Quebec, their second homestead slightly smaller than the ﬁrst because of starting over. Ellison Westgarth Macﬁe was Anglophone (an English-speaking person in the Canadian bilingual province of Quebec), the daughter on the Macﬁe farm next to the Scrivers in Clarenceville.2 Her mother was Josephine Creller, daughter of a preacher and ﬁrst cousin to Lady Kemp, who was not English landed gentry (as Wessie often hinted) but rather the wife of a Canadian industrialist knighted for his contributions to the country. The Kemps had an imposing home and lived very well. The British Loyalist Crellers, like the Scrivers, had come out of the Palatine through England to Quebec. All of Josephine’s brothers (her sister died at age ﬁve) went on to the American West and made fortunes on the frontier in the mid-nineteenth century. Lady Kemp, Josephine’s cousin, had a daughter about the same age as “Wessie,” and often brought that girl to visit. At night Lady Kemp’s daughter was put to sleep alongside Wessie, with Wessie on the outer side so that the visiting cousin wouldn’t fall out of the unaccustomed bed. Lady Kemp came, dressed for supper in her pearls and silk, to kiss her daughter good night. As an old woman Wessie would still tell, with a mixture of hurt and amusement 18

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

at herself for caring at all, how Lady Kemp would lean over to kiss her own daughter, but never once kissed Wessie as well. When she was a little older, she kept a scrapbook of the Kemp social events at Castle Frank, and even now they sound impressive. In the days before jet airplanes, the monied people went by steamship. The Kemps lost family on the Lusitania and a woman who later married a Macﬁe escaped from the Titanic and spent the night rowing a lifeboat alongside her maid. Wessie’s father, George Hawley Macﬁe, descended from another Robert Macﬁe who was born at sea when his parents, Alexander Macﬁe and Ann Tough Macﬁe, emigrated from Scotland to Canada in April 1824. (At this time the Blackfeet were considered the most powerful tribe on the plains and the fur trade was at its height.) Prosperous landed people in Scotland, they did not travel steerage, though it must have taken courage to sail while so pregnant. The generous family money came from sugar trade in the Indies, but Alexander was the youngest brother. In 1837–38 the Canadian population of Quebec – particularly the Frenchspeaking people – began to feel that England was taking advantage of them. To head oﬀ another revolution like that in the American colonies, the English government organized local militia charged with remaining loyal to the Crown, as opposed in particular to the separatist tendencies of the French speakers. The Crellers, Scrivers, and Macﬁes participated in these Loyalist militias. In 1851 Alexander’s son, Robert Macﬁe (1824–1896), married Sarah Eliza Hawley (1833–1914). Their oldest son (second oldest child) was the George Hawley Macﬁe (1855–1923) who became Wessie’s beloved father. By all accounts he was a mild man, though he was a major in the militia. Because of that, the farm was also an armory. His sisters, Miss Annie and Miss Lillie, never married. His two brothers, like his mother-in-law’s brothers, went to the far West to seek their fortunes. George and Josephine Macﬁe had two children, “Robin” (short for Robert Eugene) and “Wessie” (short for Ellison Westgarth, which was the name of an aunt). Wessie was not a girl who played with dolls, but rather made pets of all the barnyard animals, much to the despair of her father, who could not do the chores without the spoiled creatures following him around. Among the young cadets who served Major Macﬁe in the 6th Hussars was that clever young bugler called “Thad,” from the dairy farm adjacent to the Macﬁes, the youngest son of James and Mary Scriver. The oldest Scriver son, Edward Julius, had been born in 1863, just as the American Civil War ended, opening up the American West to turmoil, fortune-seeking, and Indian wars. Franklin John was born in 1864, but only lived a month. Other still-births followed. Robert Elgin was born in 1876, and Thaddeus Emery in 1879. Prematurely born, Thad was so small that his mother’s wedding ring ﬁt him as a bracelet. His ﬁrst days were in an incubator improvised from the warming oven of the wood stove. He grew up small but tough. I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y

19

When the time came for the Scriver boys to seek their fortunes, all headed West. The oldest boys ended up in Minneapolis where, for a dollar-and-a-half an acre, Ed bought much of the land that became the city, making a handsome enough proﬁt to start a luxury furniture store and hire Elgin as his ﬁnancial oﬃcer. Ed became very rich and Elgin was “comfortable.” Thad also went to Minneapolis and at ﬁrst worked for a newspaper. But soon he became friends with J.H. Sherburne, an Indian agent. Sherburne had been in Oklahoma, where he had befriended famous chiefs and warriors, including Chief Joseph. Now he was established with Blackfeet in Montana, just east of the Rockies, where new opportunities were opening due to the Great Northern railroad building its “High Line” track just south of and parallel to the Canadian border. Also there was talk of oil, which had just turned the Oklahoma Poncas into millionaires. Thad came to Browning in 1903 to work in the Sherburne mercantile store on the town square in the little reservation place once memorably described as a “dusty little partridge of a town.”3 Just to the north, across Willow Creek, the government had a much larger square – big enough to drill cavalry, since at that time the Bureau of Indian Aﬀairs was part of the Department of War. The government square was edged with barrack-style housing and crowned, at the top of the hill, with a hospital built of ﬁeld stones. The town itself was only a few dozen one-story buildings on the low side of Willow Creek. In the town square a Maypole was sometimes erected and wound with ribbons by Indian girls in white Edwardian dresses. Two livery stables on the main street – which now runs at right angles to the highway – watered their horses in the town square pond, and sometimes a cowboy would ride a rank horse into the water to give himself an edge if the horse bucked. Thad told us about the day the liveryman brought a stud horse to water him, alone because he was inclined to ﬁght rivals. Everything was ﬁne until they returned from the pond past the hotel, which had just installed a big plate glass window, very expensive. The stallion spotted his reﬂection, reared unexpectedly enough to jerk free, and plunged – front striking feet ﬁrst – through the window. The clerk had barely enough time to duck down under his counter. Thaddeus Scriver was so short that he had to stand on a box to transact business across the tall counters that ringed the mercantile store. But he went nimbly up and down the ladders that slid back and forth across the well-stocked ﬂoor-to-ceiling shelves, he was quick to make folks laugh, and he was the soul of dependability. At one point he won a race against a horse – the horse was so big it took precious time building momentum while Thad was already propelled yards ahead. Some say he had a reputation as a dancer. In a few years he and a partner opened their own mercantile store, Willets and Scriver, across the town square from the Sherburne Mercantile. Willets, an American, had to be involved until Thad became a U.S. citizen. 20

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Bob was always very proud of his father’s Blackfeet name, Stumik-sah-tohsee or “Medicine Bull,” which he thought was given to his dad because of his ability to tell the weather. He felt it was a special name, implying strength and honor. One day I found a photo of the original “Medicine Bull,”4 and saw that he was an unusually small man. I suspect that’s really why Thad got the name, but I never passed this information on to Bob. In time, Thad was ready to start a family. He thought of Ellison Westgarth Macﬁe back in Clarenceville and bought a small four-room house from Ammons, an earlier trader. Methodically, he took the train to Toronto, where he had connections with a diamond merchant, and bought a ring wholesale. Then he proceeded on to Clarenceville and proposed marriage to Wessie. It was the summer of 1911, eight years since he had gone to Browning, but he had often come home for visits. Everyone thought it was a good match. Wessie (1887–1977) was eight years younger than Thad (1879–1970). She had always wanted to be a nurse, though her mother could not approve of her daughter having such a vocation.5 She had even begun to take classes, but in the course of her duties she caught measles, a case bad enough to cause her to be secluded in a dark room for weeks. In spite of this precaution, her vision was aﬀected and she had to wear glasses. Wessie had far too much energy to be happy with the life of a young woman in a genteel family of the time. The most exciting thing to do was to rise early in order to iron a dampened white muslin dress with many ruﬄes and tucks, then wear it into town in order to call on friends – returning home with the hem of the long dress so dirtied from the streets that the garment had to go back into the laundry. She attended Durham Ladies College, a ﬁnishing school where she learned to do ﬁne needlework and to play the piano. Her mother took her on a tour of Great Britain, where they visited Dreghorn Castle, which had been bought in the 1700s by the Macﬁes. Though “accomplished,” she was getting older. She did not envy the spinster lives of Aunt Annie and Aunt Lillie, comfortable as they might be. The arrangements for the marriage went forward quickly, and she was married in a bower at home on August 9, 1911. She regretted only that she had allowed an older relative to arrange her veil, which was pulled into a kind of turban eﬀect across her forehead. After seeing photos of the event, she thought this was unﬂattering. She didn’t wear her glasses for the ceremony, not that they could have helped her see into her future. Thad had bought an automobile, which was loaded onto a ﬂatbed car, and the young couple went oﬀ together on the railroad, headed west to wide-open territory. The rail trip across the continent took days of noise, heat, and soot. When Wessie saw where she was expected to live, she sat down and wept. She would have gone home to the elegant, cool farmhouse in Quebec, except that the thought of repeating that long, arduous trip so soon was also unbearable. Outside this little house there was no yard at all – just dust and a string of I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y

21

barbed wire to keep the cows that wandered the town from thrusting a curious head through a window. The concern was more to protect the cow from getting cut on the glass than to preserve the privacy of the interior, as there were no curtains or drapes. The rooms inside were lined with gray insulating felt with no paint or paper. Each room held a big coal stove in the center. In a while, Wessie got up and began to make improvements. The ﬁrst one was to disassemble the stove in the parlor, which cooperated by falling apart in a cascade of soot. She was disappointed that Thad had no intention of letting his wife work in the store. Wessie found her best friends among the Indian Health Service nurses. She even went on house calls with them to carry supplies and lend moral support. Years later she told about arriving one brisk day at a little cabin which evidently had no plumbing, for a “thunder mug” had just been set out on the step with its coiled contents still steaming. The nurse leaned over in a professional manner and said, “Well, it looks perfectly healthy to me, Wessie. What do you think?” Someone in town once told me about going into the Browning Merc on a quiet day and spotting Thad over by the ammunition, doing exercises with bags of shot for weights. He was solidly muscled late into his eighties. In the early days ﬁfty- and hundred-pound bags of feed were stored in a cellar accessed by a trapdoor and ladder. Thad could lift out those sacks over his head onto the ﬂoor. A photo of him shows a dapper fellow leaning in the doorway. The Browning Merc was built on the straightforward plan of most mercantile stores of the period – simply a warehouse with rows of shelves, an aisle for the clerk, a long counter, and another aisle for the customers. These ran down both sides. In the middle was an island of glass cases with space for the clerk inside. In the earliest days, there was a big stove. A hotel-style counter desk stood at the back for doing business with the accountant, who perched on a stool like a Dickens character, working at a ledged shelf for the journals and other records, with steps up to an open balcony or mezzanine. Up there Thad worked at a rolltop desk, which was locked when he was away. When I came in 1961, the store had changed very little since its founding ﬁfty years earlier. In the early years the eggs were kept in a barrel at the end of the counter. One clever fellow in bib overalls had developed the habit of sidling up to the barrel and slipping the raw eggs into various pockets. One day when the fellow came in, Thad waited a while and then came down from his desk. “Why, there you are!” he said, cheerfully slapping the fellow on the chest in greeting. “How are you doing, anyway?” and he gave him playful but vigorous pats on the lower pockets. The egg thief turned red and left, slime slowly oozing through his clothes. He didn’t come back. Small goods like simple drugs or toiletries were over to the left. Then yard goods and baby clothes. Way in the back was a hardware counter, shelves for dishes and kerosene lamps, and bins for horseshoes. The ﬂoors were wooden, broad thick planks dark from age and oiling. At the end of the day someone 22

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

threw sweeping compound all around and then swept everything up. A bit of poking around would turn up oddball stuﬀ like a carpet beater, which our Egyptologist friend’s wife was delighted to buy for ﬁfty-nine cents, the original price. It seems that Oriental rugs should not be vacuumed, and her old carpet beater had disintegrated. This was a family store but incorporated, and often included partners who came and went. Harold, the eldest son, grew up working in it. Wessie, conﬁned to being “Mom,” simply called over her order every morning and a clerk delivered it to her kitchen door. When her Quebec sister-in-law asked her casually what groceries cost out West, Wessie had no idea. If the bananas in the store got too ripe, she took them home to make banana bread. At Christmas she got one of the row of poinsettias, at Easter she got one of the row of lilies, at Thanksgiving she was asked what size turkey she wanted, and on her birthday or at Christmas, she was brought a catalog and told to order a new dress. Inside the store at the front was a straight chair, often occupied by Mrs. Old Man Chief, bent under the weight of many years. She wore layers of calico skirts, a thick shawl, and a bandana over her head. I never heard her speak English. Or anything else. Late in the afternoon, when Leo Spotted Eagle went to deliver the groceries, he would load her into the Jimmy and take her home. Thad never properly turned the store over to Harold, though Laurel, Harold’s daughter, claims she can’t remember a time when Harold didn’t do the bulk of the work. When Thad was nearly ninety, about the time he quit tying his shoes, he also stopped showing up very much. Harold carried on as usual, opening the store, taking the daily delivery over to his mom’s house – just out the back, down the alley, and across the street. His mom would slip him a forbidden donut and gather the news he had picked up so far. Then he came back to the store for the day. When Thad died, Harold asked Bob to come up to the mezzanine and help him force the rolltop desk open. He’d never been given the key and had no idea what might be inside. When Harold died and the store went to his daughter Laurel, she was shocked at how much money so many people owed – some of them since the Depression. She made one last attempt at collection – which horriﬁed everyone (“How can she want money to pay my grandpa’s bills – he’s DEAD!”) and then closed out the accounts. After reducing the inventory, she ﬁnally sold the building, which stood empty until it eventually burned down. It was not entirely paid for, so the insurance was in her name. It had never been modernized. After it burned, the United States Government bought the property to build a big new brick post oﬃce.

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y

23

3. Bob’s childhood

Browning, World War I and after

In Browning the nineteenth-century pre-industrial world lasted far longer than in the rest of the country, resisting the modern because of remoteness and poverty. One of Robert’s earliest memories was his dad starting the kitchen ﬁre ﬁrst thing in the morning. The small boy, still unsteady on chubby legs, stamped on escaping sparks while he and his father chanted: “Kaiser Bill went up the hill to take a look at France. Kaiser Bill came down the hill with bullets in his pants!” Thad’s oldest brother, “Uncle Ed,” who had become so wealthy in Minneapolis, lost his only son, Edward Stanleigh Scriver, in World War I. There were no other male Scrivers in that generation except Robert and Harold. No one in the Scriver family ever talked about the terrible period after World War I when Spanish Inﬂuenza reduced the population of the prairies by 10 per cent (only a fraction of the mortality rate among the Blackfeet in the Smallpox Pandemic of 1837, which killed two-thirds of the population). Neither did the Scriver family ever talk about the ﬁve-year drought right after World War I, the abruptly falling farm prices that starved out thousands of homesteaders along the High Line, or the many related bank failures. Robert’s memory of this time was that “business was good. The family was healthy and enjoying life and had many a pleasant weekend at the Charlie Buck ranch on Cut Bank Creek, not far from the site of Lewis and Clark’s Camp Disappointment.”6 Thad’s father, James H. Scriver, died on June 8, 1921, at his farm in Clarenceville. In September 1922 the Glacier County Chief records that notiﬁcation had come that Wessie’s father was mortally ill. He had undergone abdominal exploratory surgery, revealing cancer all through him. He was sewn up and sent home. The entire Thad Scriver family packed up and drove to Clarenceville, where they remained until November. Robert was eight years old. Perhaps this was about the time he tried to make a blackbird “come back to life” by putting wires in it and giving it hatpin eyes. The maggots got it anyway. He had a dog called Dart, an English bulldog of the type we might call a pit bull now, but then considered a good child’s dog, like the dog with the ring around its eye in Our Gang comedies. With his dog for company, Robert often ranged out over the hills with his .22, shooting gophers and warily approaching hilltop burials. One day on the way home the boy and his dog met a particularly mean drunk who was famous for his brace of big nasty mutts. The drunk’s dogs began to stalk Robert’s dog. Pit bull or not, Dart was outnumbered and he might have been killed. Robert, who was pre-adolescent, raised his .22 to his shoulder and declared, “If you don’t call oﬀ those dogs, I’ll shoot ‘em!” “You will, will you?” sneered the drunk and forthwith he seized the gun, wrenched it out of the boy’s hands, and slammed the stock up against his left 24

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

temple. Robert dropped unconscious. That part of the skull is thin, poor protection for the brain underneath. Then the drunk and his snarling dogs went oﬀ as Dart stood over the fallen boy, ready to ﬁght to the death. The next person to happen along was J.L. Sherburne, son of Thad’s mentor, who carried Robert home and called the doctor. The boy was all right, but it was a narrow escape and he always bore a mark on his temple. Mr. Sherburne helped in the prosecution of the bully. All his life, Robert was protective of that side of his face. In adulthood he acquired a grizzly skull and studied the thin place at the side. Finally, he shot a grizzly with a .22 by piercing that thin temple. Perhaps it was a kind of exorcism.

4. The white community and how Bob acquired an Indian “mother” Milk River Ridge, the Twenties

Thad Scriver was prospering. Just to the east of Browning was a little railroad town called Blackfoot, the end of the rail line where the cars had to be turned around. The Blackfoot station agent, J.P. Carberry, was a good friend of the Scrivers. Margaret Carberry, the daughter, often babysat Robert. Blackfoot was a humming village because it housed and fed the train crews. Thad and Mr. Carberry started a second mercantile store there. Thad bought the “Bell Ranch” (320 acres on the South Fork of the Milk River), the “Percival place” (640 acres), and a wheat ranch (800 acres) near Valier, Montana. Then he went in with Sam Bird, Charlie Devereaux and Charlie Buck (mixed-blood but enrolled Blackfeet) to start the Stockman’s State Bank.7 All was well until one morning the bank stood with the door open and the safe empty. No one bothered to pursue the thief, presumed to be the clerk since he never showed up again. It would have cost even more money, though Wessie urged Thad to chase the rascal. Bitterly, she demanded why he would just accept the loss, but Thad mused, “He seemed like such a nice fellow.” In order to pay oﬀ the depositors in those days before federal insurance, Thad sold his ranches. When the railroad was extended over Marias Pass, Blackfoot collapsed. The Browning Review of June 23, 1922, reported that the Stockman’s Bank claims were being received by D.J. Hilger, a prosperous and inﬂuential rancher. In the same issue was a notice about the estate of Margaret Carberry (the mother rather than the daughter), and the estate of Horace Malcolm Clarke, son of the Malcolm Clarke whose death provoked the Baker Massacre. (In fact, Horace rode with Baker that tragic winter morning. He was the father of John Clarke, the deaf-mute woodcarver.) I suspect these dark events made more of an impression on the young Robert than he realized. Thad never tried to build back up

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y

25

again. The Thirties Depression intervened, World War II struck, and then he was older, in his ﬁfties. At one time a cluster of white mercantile families used to go goose hunting every fall at Dandy Jim Lake, which was a series of potholes south of the Browning Depot. Everyone took lunches and thermoses with hot chocolate – or maybe something more adult. It was almost like a British shooting party. One day Thad raised his shotgun to the crook of his elbow and it accidentally ﬁred, hitting one of his friends. The man was wearing a heavy canvas coat and the gun was loaded with birdshot, so there was no serious damage. But Thad never went hunting again. He subsided into being a quiet man, puﬃng his pipe, chatting up the customers at the Browning Merc. People of every sort thought of him with considerable aﬀection. After Blackfoot closed down, Mr. Carberry became the station agent in East Glacier. The Twenties certainly did “roar” along the edge of Glacier National Park as Prohibition made resorts with access to alcohol hugely popular. Moonshiners thrived on the reservation and “rum runners” like writer Wallace Stegner’s father became prosperous crossing the Canadian border with quality labeled whiskey. In East Glacier “Mike’s Place” was a dance hall and then a roller rink, where young people went to meet and party. After repeal the building found a new use when the Carberrys bought it. Robert reports in his autobiographical notes: Mrs. Carberry and her daughter Margaret moved to East Glacier to cater to the expanding tourist trade. They had purchased a forty-foot-by-sixty-foot log building with high walls that were dimly lit by skylights. Eventually an attic and living area were added onto the back. The walls were hung with all kinds of great Indian artifacts: weapons, religious items, gaming sets, dance costumes, war bonnets and beautifully beaded Indian-tanned leggings and warshirts, Navajo rugs, baskets and pots – everything imaginable. There were rows of tables conveniently placed, equally packed with artifacts, all of the things wonderfully displayed. 8

It’s a bit of a mystery where all these materials came from, but those who have delved into the history of the Lake MacDonald Lodge, originally built and operated privately, suggest that when the railroad bought the lodge, the artifacts that adorned it were sold separately. The Carberry connection with Great Northern might have been useful. Indian artifacts were still curiosities more than treasures so they were not treated as scientiﬁcally as now nor were they so costly. Through the Twenties and Thirties the Browning newspaper was an eightpage publication, four pages or more of the copy evidently coming from the Anaconda newspaper and then local news inserted. One page was always an exciting story about the frontier, usually illustrated by Charlie Russell or maybe Remington, Deming, or Schreyvogel. Robert’s understanding of Montana his26

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

tory came from these stories about old Indian battles, new fossil ﬁnds, and the building of industrial empires on the wealth of mining. Many features were about the founding of great museums, like the Field Museum in Chicago or the Heye in New York City, and about monumental bronzes being created and placed all across the United States. The names of the sculptors were Augustus Saint-Gaudens, A. Phimister Proctor, James E. Fraser, Gutzon and Solon Borglum – Beaux Arts sculptors of American bronzes. At ﬁrst Robert was expected to work in the store, but he drew on the can labels and carved faces in the potatoes.9 Dreaming, the boy miscounted change or wasted time telling tales. Soon it was made clear to him that he was the younger brother – the oldest was the inheritor. As he put it, he was “promoted backwards” right out of the store, which hurt him all his life though he never admitted it. The real truth might be that Thad saw the store could only support two families, his and Harold’s, aside from the several employees and partners who came and went: Shannon, Starr, and Willets. The families lived on both sides of the same street and socialized together after work, almost as one extended family. The Scriver house was next door to the Sherburnes’, separated in the early days by a little rivulet called “Muskrat Creek,” which now runs underground in a storm sewer. J.H. Sherburne, thinking of the interests of the town, often acted as a de facto mayor. His son, J.L. Sherburne, through his banking interests, became a strong ﬁnancial force throughout the Reservation and eventually foreclosed on the Holy Family Mission in the 1930s. J.L.’s wife was Eula Churchill, daughter of one of the Indian Agents, and his sister married Selden Frisbee, a lawyer in Cut Bank. J.H.’s other son, Frank, took a diﬀerent path, identifying more with the tribal people than with business interests. In his autobiographical notes, Robert says: [Sherburnes] had a beautiful early-style American home with many rooms. One room in particular was amazing to me because the walls, furniture and ﬂoor were covered with genuine Plains Indian artifacts. Buffalo horn chairs, bows and arrows, buffalo robes on the ﬂoor, Chief Joseph’s saddle with blanket, and the prize of them all was White Bird’s war bonnet with two eagle feather trailers reaching to the ﬂoor.

Upstairs in the house was the room where J.H. Sherburne installed his nephew to create the ﬁrst school in Browning.10 That was before the Scriver boys were born. In the early Sixties, when the top ﬂoor of the house caught ﬁre, Bob and I helped carry out maps and desks to heap them on the Scriver lawn. Robert suﬀered from terrible hay fever, just like his dad. The doctor’s prescription for Robert’s “sneezles” – which approached being asthma – was summers out on Milk River at the Stone ranch. This also saved face for a boy who was humiliated by not working in the store. Jim Stone was an authentic I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y

27

old-timer who had been running a jerk-line for Benteen at the time of the Custer event. (A jerk-line driver of multiple teams doesn’t sit on a wagon seat but rather on the rear horse with a “jerk-line” to the front team.) Mrs. Octavia Stone, who was Blackfeet, had been the stage-stop cook in Sun River when Mr. Stone met her. She had needed a serious operation but couldn’t aﬀord it. Mr. Stone had paid, gaining a devoted wife and partner. The couple was enormously popular, a social focus for the whole community. When Robert was at the Stone ranch, which provided stage-stop services and raised heavy horses for hauling, he never had hay fever – even in the long stable where stalls for the horses stood lined up into the shadowy depths while chinks in the boards let in shafts of sun full of dancing dust. Mr. Stone let the boy pick out a horse of his own from the wild herds that roamed the ranch, a blood bay he called Banjo. The horse was seven years old – Mr. Stone felt no horse was mature enough to train until then – but he had been gelded as a colt. The sire was Captain Jack, a state champion quarter horse, and the dam was a gray mare who never was broken. It took a day to get Banjo in oﬀ the range the ﬁrst time. The Blackfeet ranch wranglers – Deefy Gostick, Isaac Smith, Johnny DeRoche, and Charley Ell – cut him out of the herd and ran him down the main wagon road, which was bordered by fences. Just after the opening to the corrals, they had strung another wire to make him turn through the gate. But Banjo, coming fast, soared right over the wire! After a rest and lunch, the cowboys tried it again and this time they tied ﬂuttering rags to the wire. Just in case, Mrs. Stone stood behind the wire and ﬂapped her apron. Banjo turned in to the corrals. Robert claimed he trained Banjo the “horse-whisperer” way. I suspect the horse was green-broke by the ranch cowboys, probably Emory Livermore, but no doubt Robert did hang around with the horse until they were “partnered up.” Boy and horse invented hide-and-seek games in the long stable when it was empty and ranged out over Milk River Ridge to look both ways into two nations. Of course, it was Blackfeet country in both directions, but this was the high ground, the glacial moraine, that determined where the boundary of the U.S. would be. At the ranch Robert lived in the bunkhouse with the other hands but was really Mrs. Stone’s choreboy, with the duty of ﬁlling the woodbox and carrying water. Often enough they ﬁnished the kitchen work in time to take a ﬁshing pole or Mrs. Stone’s .22 out along the creeks to look for a little table meat. This is how Robert ended up with two mothers, one very “English” and one quite Blackfeet, a phenomenon that guided many of his life choices. Side-by-side in his heart stood two civilizations, one indigenous and the other displaced from “home back East.” Sometimes their co-existence was not peaceful. Once Mrs. Stone gave a birthday party for Wessie, but was mortiﬁed when someone gave Wessie a set of huge long red underwear as a joke. She felt her party was being mocked. 28

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The Stone Ranch on Duck Lake in the Milk River Valley, where Bob spent his teenaged summers. The house is log under the stucco and was originally built as a stage stop. Photo: Mary Scriver (1990).

In the Twenties the Scrivers often visited the Glacier Park Hotel in East Glacier. Digniﬁed Blackfeet put up their lodges on the long sloping lawn and met the daily trains of Easterners coming to visit the “Switzerland of America.” Cowboys rode out to meet the train and staged gun battles with blanks. At least they were supposed to be blanks – Charlie Beil, one of the actors and later a well-known artist, said he came back from one such ride with a bullet hole in his tapadero, the cover over his stirrup. He also recalled riding his equally daredevil horse over the railroad bridge just outside town – a terrifying span over a deep gorge. Mr. Carberry was notorious for his piles of papers and for constantly smoking a pipe. Eventually, the two habits came together in a conﬂagration. By then a widower, he had returned to the house at Blackfoot. His son-in-law found his remains in the wreckage early in the morning after the ﬁre. Most of the artifacts had gone earlier to the Field Museum in Chicago, but Charles Shreyvogel, a rival to Remington, had lived with the Carberrys for a while and all of his work stored there was destroyed.

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y

29

5. Artists on the scene

Glacier Park, the Twenties

All through school one of Robert’s best buddies was Ace Powell, a little older and more worldly since his family was associated with race horses as well as running the Park dude strings out of Apgar at Glacier National Park in the summer. The tie that kept them close was art. Ace drew and Robert made little ﬁgures out of the creekside clay that is common around Montana. Both were admirers of Charlie Russell, and Ace hung around Charlie’s Apgar cabin. One day the artist was sitting on a log outside his cabin, whittling. Some tourists came along and, knowing who Charlie was, came over to see if great art were being created before their very eyes. He worked away solemnly, taking a sliver oﬀ, then holding it out at arm’s length to check the eﬀect, only to bring it back and take oﬀ more shavings. Pretty soon he stood up, but the tourists couldn’t quite make out what charming animal he had carved this time. With great dignity Charlie carried his work of art over to a little shed with a hasp but no padlock. Carefully, he tucked the peg he had whittled into the hasp, which it ﬁt just exactly. “Been meanin’ to do that for quite a while!” he exclaimed and pretended to notice the tourists for the ﬁrst time. “Mornin’! Havin’ a ﬁne time, are you?” Robert’s stories about Charlie Russell were about the Mint Saloon, where the boy was allowed to come in and gawk at the paintings so long as he behaved. However, in the back of the room was a nickel crank machine that would show animated drawings by Charlie. They were of the cowboy-visits-a-lady-friend genre Charlie liked so well. Robert thought he would like that kind of picture, too, but he never got in more than two or three turns of the handle before he was grabbed by the collar and ejected. Lost his nickel, too. Russell was around the reservation, especially at the annual Indian Days whose beginnings went far back into the history of the tribe. Robert admired his Métis sash and his entourage, but Charlie didn’t seem so colorful in those days as he would now. The boys went in and out of the households of full-bloods and Métis with their friends from school and never thought very much about it. Only once in a while would things get exciting. Like the time the drunk passed out and fell over backwards into a pigpen where those voracious omnivores ate his face oﬀ. And the time the whole town turned out to look for the victim of an ax murder. The murderer had confessed but wouldn’t tell where he had hidden the body. The boys searched, not knowing if they wanted to ﬁnd the evidence or not, both jealous and relieved when their eﬀorts failed and someone else located the corpse. It was well known that a band of horse thieves kept their herds up around Chief Mountain where they could be moved back and forth across the border. 30

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Telleferos, who were close friends and eventual next-door neighbors of the Scrivers, ran the post oﬃce and store in Babb. (Their daughter, Helen, married Jack Dodd who was the Glacier National Park Supervisor in the Sixties.) Mrs. Tellefero kept a shotgun leaned against the head of her bed. Her father had been a doctor in the Midwest, skilful enough that outlaws who had suﬀered bad injuries sometimes blindfolded and kidnapped him to treat their bullet wounds. He was careful never to identify any of them, though he was pretty sure that one was Jesse James. Mrs. Tellefero knew she should take outlaws seriously. Once “Tick” Tellefero, who had to transport a payroll from the Browning train station up to Babb, asked Thad to go with him. They had an open car, but had heard that a band of horseback outlaws planned to rob them on the Duck Lake Road, little more than parallel wheel tracks in those days. Thad took his pistol, which frightened Wessie. But when he got back he only said, “Well, they had rolled a haytruck out to block the road where it goes through the aspens, but I showed my gun and we never saw them. Just heard their bridles and gear jingling back in the brush. Saw their horses’ eyes shining.” The most memorable event was the shooting of an outlaw who had been working for the Stones. The men were in the bunkhouse – Robert was not there – and they were playing cards, which they almost always did in the evening. One of the cowboys was cheating. The outlaw said, “If you do that again, I will have to shoot you.” The cheater persisted and the threat was fulﬁlled. Then the outlaw, knowing the law would be after him, shot himself in the head. The bodies were brought back to Browning where they were laid out on the ﬂoor in an empty building. Robert managed to squeeze between the grownups to take a good look and he never forgot the sight. “He was very pale and still, with only a dark hole above his eyes,” he said. Moving farther now, because he traveled on Banjo, Robert carried 3 x 5 cards in his shirt pocket and drew little sketches on them of what he saw: bucking horses and curious deer, foxes and cranes, sunsets and twisted trees. Sometimes he found artifacts, like a buﬀalo bone with a hole drilled in it and an old stiﬀ thong still attached. Once he approached a burial house out by Starr School, but veered oﬀ quickly when the family whose people were laid out there sent a bullet zinging by him. He never took anything – just looked. Except sometimes he would steal a nestling magpie or crow to make a pet of it. Once he was down along Two Medicine River and climbed a cliﬀ to see if he could peer into a nest. He levered himself up onto a ledge and found himself staring straight into the empty eye sockets of a skull. The rest of the body was there as well, wrapped tightly. He almost fell rather than climbed back down. Robert and Harold slept upstairs in the old house. There never was any heat up there except what rose from downstairs. The bathroom was installed on the ﬁrst ﬂoor, oﬀ the kitchen, to keep the plumbing close together for the sake of economy and to prevent freeze-ups. Sometimes their grandmother slept in the I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y

31

little “parlor” room at the bottom of the stairs, blocking the way out, but the boys learned how to evade that diﬃculty by slipping out over the roof at night. The brothers slept in the same bed, partly for warmth, until Harold objected to Robert’s idea of room decorations. He had boiled out a rabbit and reassembled its skeleton, which he kept on the bureau. Harold always hated rodents. (If a biologist were to point out that technically a rabbit is not a rodent, he would have said, “Close enough.”) Another of Robert’s good friends, Jimmie Welch, often stayed overnight. Once poor Jimmie woke in a hurry because Robert was pounding on him, “Get ‘im, Jimmie!” cried Robert in his sleep, dreaming that he and Jimmie were beating up on some other boys. Jimmie Welch grew up to have a son by the same name who became a famous writer. 11 In 2004 Jimmie Senior told me that when someone threatened the pair, Bob would urge Jimmie to beat that threatener up. (Bob was small for his age.) Once the bully was Harold! So Jimmie lashed out and by dumb luck (he says) knocked Harold ﬂat. “Oh, oh! We’d better run for it! He’ll get us for that!” The two liked to fool around the railroad and once they tried staying in the snowshed, a kind of wooden tunnel, while the train went through. It was far more intense than they had expected – they nearly got sucked under the wheels – and they never repeated the experiment. Another time they scraped together all their money – a grand total of thirty-seven cents – and buried it on the playground, taking care to disguise the location. The trouble was, they could never ﬁnd it again, even when they really needed that thirty-seven cents. Some pirates had the same problem. When Robert went out to the Stone Ranch, Jimmie went to a nearby ranch where he was the horse wrangler. Before dawn the bull cook woke him when the big man got up to pump water and start ﬁres. If Jimmie didn’t turn out quickly, the bull cook simply picked up the end of the bed and dumped him out on the ﬂoor. By the time the cowboys had ﬁnished breakfast, the boy was expected to have found the horses and herded them back to the ranch house to saddle up. Then he got his own special sit-down breakfast in the kitchen where the cook mothered him, ﬁxing a good lunch to take along while he checked fences all day. In alternate summers Robert, Harold, and their mother would go back to the farm in Clarenceville to stay acquainted with their extended family. What impressed Robert the most was the Macﬁe well-house, with its mossy interior and strangely seductive green smell. Their mother’s brother, Robin (short for Robert) lived in Montreal nearby. He and “Aunt Nina” Macﬁe and their three children often came to Browning for long summers. Margaret was the only girl of the three cousins on the Macﬁe side. Redheaded and freckled, she gave as good as she got. The kids spent plenty of time at the lake near Aunt Annie’s and Aunt Lillie’s. Robert caught turtles to keep in the rain barrels under the eaves, adding wooden rafts so they could sun themselves. 32

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Browning High School Sophomores in 1930 (Class of 1932). Bob is second from left in front row. Jimmie Welch, father of the writer James Welch Jr., is third from the right in the center row. Photo: Etumoe (yearbook).

Harold demonstrated how to ride a bucking bull by climbing aboard Hector, the Scriver dairy bull. The Quebec cousins were impressed. The boys, especially Robert, loved to visit the armory on the farm under their grandfather’s protection. Periodically it was necessary to do an inventory, so Robert would help to count the McClellan saddles on their sawhorses with the bridles and the saddle blankets. Somehow saddle blankets would disappear, even though the cavalry never rode anymore. When that happened, the Major would wink at Robert and tear one blanket in half to make two. They were meant to be doubled over for softer padding on the horse, but no one used them anyway and it was important to make the inventory come out even. Decades later Robert was still pondering the ethics of this. When Robert was a teenager, his mother caught him kissing the Blackfeet girl she had hired to help her and gave him a proper dressing down. Then in I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y

33

Clarenceville he and his cousin Margaret became conﬁdantes. On a 3 x 5 card he drew a picture of their two heads close together as they rode in a buggy with a big moon ahead of them. The next time Margaret was in Browning, Robert made a little statue of a horse with a cowgirl sitting alongside, rather like Lone Cowboy. Modeled of ordinary river clay, it was very fragile, but Robert built a little carrying case, and Margaret managed to get it back to Quebec intact. They wrote to each other and, distrusting maternal reactions, they wrote two sets of letters, one for the mother and one for the other. The mothers ﬁnally ﬁgured it out and treated the relationship as something shameful. Ellison Westgarth’s namesake had married her own ﬁrst cousin and nothing bad had come of it. Daniel Chester French, the most sensible of sculptors, had happily married his ﬁrst cousin. But eugenics was all the rage and Margaret’s father left a book on the subject out for her to read, remarking that he was conﬁdent that she was a “sensible girl.” Gradually, the little clay cowgirl and horse crumbled back to dust. Bob’s love for Margaret never did. On the way to Quebec, the family stopped to visit Thad’s brother Ed, who had prospered with his ﬁne furniture store in Minneapolis and lived on an elegant estate. Uncle Ed’s son, the one killed in World War I, had been the only male cousin on the Scriver side. Uncle Ed’s granddaughter, Barbara, owned four jumping horses and rode in proper English costume with four reins, a pancake saddle, and a hard hat. Robert and Harold were not allowed to ride the tall horses, so they scoﬀed and talked up their “Indian ponies.” Indoors Robert was almost beside himself, especially coming down the grand paneled front staircase with its carved handrail – not so much from the glory of the two-story stained-glass window that lit it, but from the statue of a nude woman at the bottom. He loved it with all his aching being, but was careful to keep that to himself. Already physical love and secrecy were entwined in his psyche. His mother would slip around and cover the nude bronzes with scarves, which only made them more attractive. I never asked the provenance of these ﬁgurative sculptures, but I suspect they were Beaux Arts reproductions. Before fancy art galleries, one bought sculpture at a furniture store, where they were classed as ornaments. His Aunt Mattie also had a ﬁne collection of elephants, because she was a strong Republican. Later in like Bob also collected elephants. Harold, according to Robert, sneaked past rules without any eﬀort at all. He would slide in the back door at all hours of the night, call sweetly to his mother in the parental bedroom just oﬀ the kitchen, “Good night, Mother,” and arrive upstairs with booze on his breath and lipstick on his collar – maybe a black eye. Robert never ﬁgured out how he got away with that. In youth, Harold was considered the more handsome and dynamic brother. Harold claimed he had to learn to ﬁght early because his mother dressed him like a sissy in short pants and a big ﬂoppy bow. When Harold bought a car with his salary from clerking at the store, he grandly allowed Robert to chauﬀeur Harold and his girl – with a blanket hung between front and back seats so the driver wouldn’t 34

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

be distracted, although the sound eﬀects gave him a pretty good idea what was going on. About that time Winold Reiss (1888–1953) established a summer colony at St. Mary Lake, not far from the Scriver’s cabin. (He was the artist who did many ﬁne Indian portraits used to promote the Great Northern railroad on calendars.) Reiss’s son Tjark was the same age as Robert and the latter was invited to join the group. Customarily Reiss included several local Indian boys from both sides of the border. Gerald Tailfeathers (1925–1975) and Victor Pepion (1907–1956) became quite well known. Reiss oﬀered Robert a scholarship to take classes with the others, but Wessie would not agree. The group had a reputation of being too bohemian to suit her. (The reputation was not entirely unjustiﬁed. One pair of students, madly in love, was missing for a couple of days before Reiss noticed.) She also tried to keep her boy away from James Willard Schultz, the popular writer, who was – to say the least – “colorful.” He rented space a few doors from the Browning Mercantile. When it came time to graduate from high school, Robert was salutatorian of his class, though later he claimed to be valedictorian. The real valedictorian was Alice Sewald. Two years later the Browning paper reported that “Robert Scriver and Hiram Upham returned home Monday from a few days visit to the Sewald ranch. They brought back a couple of rattlesnakes which they captured out at the ranch.” It appears that the good students were continuing their natural history projects. On the back of his patriotic graduation speech about George Washington he wrote: “This is the original work of Robert M. Scriver and no other,” and then he drew a bison skull just like Charlie Russell’s. Oﬀ he went to Dickinson State Teacher’s College in North Dakota for a two-year teaching degree (1932–1934). Harold, after a few terms in Bozeman, had taken some business classes at Kinman in Spokane, so that he would be ready to go on with the store, but the ignored truth was that he would rather have been a rancher. It was Harold whose “Senior Class Will” bequest was his “cherished sex appeal.”

6. Earl Heikka, “crazy artist feller” Great Falls, Twenties and Thirties

Another artist’s life haunts the background of Robert’s life in this formative period. Earl Heikka,12 four years older than Robert, was a quiet, stuttering, slender man who made sculptures out of Marblex™ (a diﬃcult-to-manage water-based product) and colored them with oil paints. It was easy for him to haunt Russell’s studio because he lived in Great Falls. In the Twenties he worked on the KBL Ranch, founded by the Klick Brothers, who – as outﬁtters – brought trophies I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y

35

to Robert in his taxidermy years. In 1927, when Robert was thirteen, Heikka’s work was praised in the Great Falls Tribune and exhibited in the window of the Como Co. where Robert undoubtedly saw it. From then on, Heikka’s pack trains and bucking horses were often in store windows. In 1931 he exhibited six pieces at the Stendahl Galleries in Los Angeles. In the Thirties Heikka worked as a guide in Glacier National Park, and made small plaster castings to sell to tourists. Occasionally he worked for S.C. Rumford, the taxidermist at the Great Falls Sporting Goods company, who also (much later) employed Joe Halko, another talented sculptor. During the years Robert was attending Dickinson, Heikka was exhibiting work at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, visiting the Field Museum and Gutzon Borglum. In 1934 Robert arrived in Chicago to study at Vandercook School of Music on the south side. He doesn’t seem ever to have met Heikka there – at least he never spoke of it or of seeing Heikka’s work in Chicago. Heikka’s decline began in 1935 with the death of his brother and the beginning of serious alcoholism. Nevertheless, in 1939 when Robert had married and was teaching music in Browning, Heikka exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in San Franciso Bay and was making dioramas of pack strings on commission. On May 18, 1941, just as Robert was ﬁnishing his ﬁrst year of teaching in Malta and struggling with his marriage, Heikka shot himself to death in his car outside the family home because of a quarrel with his wife. The incident made a deep impression on Robert, seeming to conﬁrm Wessie’s opinion that being an artist was something dangerous, disreputable, and unrewarding. When I ﬁrst met Bob in 1961, he owned a Heikka riderless bucking horse, supported by a fence. The Heikka ﬁgure called The Bronco Buster suggests Scriver’s Pullin’ Leather because both use the fence this way, with one diﬀerence being that Heikka’s horse is up on one hind leg and Scriver’s is up on one front leg. Scriver’s horse has a rider. Among Bob’s early pieces is a pack train – very similar to Heikka’s trademark subject – that was commissioned by Red Harper to display behind the bar in the Businessmen’s Club, a saloon in Browning. In the late Sixties someone brought Heikka’s The Vigilante to Bob for repair. It hung around the studio for months and Bob, thoroughly oﬀended by the lack of proportion in the piece (tiny feet under a long, large body), made a deliberate revision with proper measurements, which he then called U.S. Marshall. When Bob talked about someone who aroused strong feelings in him, he took a certain tone – a kind of knowingness with a bit of anxiety and sarcasm around the edges. He always spoke of Heikka in that voice and I thought it was because of competitiveness, though Heikka’s work never rose to the level of Bob’s best sculpture. Now I wonder if Bob’s voice wasn’t charged because of worry about drinking and suicide – which some believe are the inevitable lot of the creative artist. But also, Bob was often accused of copying and the superﬁcial similarity of some pieces to those of Heikka made him vulnerable. 36

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Robert Macﬁe Scriver, Browning High School Salutatorian, Class of 1932. Photographer unknown.

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y

37

Later in life Harold slipped quietly into genteel alcoholism, quietly sipping brandy after supper while enjoying a good cigar and then, after Hazel died of Alzheimer’s, something more troubled. But Bob Scriver never drank in all the time I was with him, except for the very occasional formal event. Maybe he was remembering Heikka.

38

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

III Inspiration: From Music to Sculpture

1. First career: leading prize-winning high school bands 1934–1950

Bob liked to say, “‘Great art transcends the artist.’ I truly believe that the ﬁnest pieces of art an artist does come about by some great inspiration experiences and he is driven by a force greater than he ... I have done three or four pieces in my life that were inspired.”1 Cagey as usual, Bob would never tell which sculptures he thought were inspired. He knew very well that it would keep people considering and debating over the issue. Sometimes, if he asked me, I’d tell him which ones I would choose. But he always suggested another one that I hadn’t mentioned. After Bob had become a famous artist, worth millions, with a complex of ranch/museum/foundry/gallery, three published books, and close to a thousand sculptures, people were forever asking how he got his ideas. They ﬁgured a mysterious force called “creativity” was the key. Some thought that made him a genius and others felt it was somehow cheating – a way to get out of work by sitting around a studio. They must have been thinking of painters rather than sculptors. He said he had a screen in his head and on it he saw pictures. Then all he had to do was to copy those pictures. “I think me a think and draw a line around it.” Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, had a tale (possibly apocryphal) about his black cleaning woman who saw Borglum carving a huge bust of Lincoln out of a block of marble and went to Mrs. Borglum to ask, “How did he know Mr. Lincoln was in there?” When Bob was in grade school he used to walk home with a kid named Ace Powell who drew pictures on all his school papers. Ace said, “You know what I’m gonna be someday? An artist! Like Charlie Russell!” Robert, as he was known then, thought this was terriﬁc and he burst into his mother’s kitchen full 39

of the idea. His mother said, “No son of mine will ever be an artist.” She thought they were dubious characters. Russell hung out in bars and whorehouses. In the Browning high school yearbook there’s a photo of “Robert” with his class when he was fourteen. His pants are long but his bowtie tilts one way and his grin slants the other. His hightop shoes are scuﬀed. He’s a little smaller than the other boys, still more child than man, but already he’s playing ﬁrst chair cornet in the high school band. A brass instrument was manly. His dad and his Montreal cousins played horns. In fact, his dad had been a bugler in the Canadian cavalry. Robert’s high school graduation photo, only a few years later, shows him as slim, with huge blue eyes, a sensual mouth, and a noble brow, more ﬁt to be a poet than a cavalryman. Now he wanted to be a musician, but his parents said there was no money in it. His band teacher helped him negotiate a compromise: to be a band teacher. Anyone on the Blackfeet Reservation will tell you that when Robert Scriver taught band in Browning, the students won ﬁrst prize in the state competitions all the time – they were the BEST. Those students, some of them only a few years younger than Robert – which means they are retired grandparents now – still get excited about music and still play their instruments. He was clearly one of those conductors whose baton could weave spells. And who could be a tyrant. He taught two batches of Blackfeet kids, once for a few years before World War II and once for a couple of years after, both times with spectacular results achieved through controversial discipline. Musicians were supposed to show up for concerts in black shoes – he kept black shoe dye on hand and anyone who came wearing brown had his or her shoes dyed, no matter how new they were. The rehearsal times were absolute – the doors were locked during practice and anyone who was a few seconds late could not come in even if they had struggled there on foot through three feet of snow. One musician rode in from Starr School on horseback, a distance of six miles. Discipline was supposedly handled by a board made up of the ﬁrst chairs of each section, but Robert was not above manipulating their decisions. Sometimes he entertained them with a trick when they paid their instrument fees. He blindfolded himself and when the coins were put in his hand, he guessed whether the payer was male or female. The secret was that coins from boys’ trouser pockets were body temperature and coins from girls’ purses were cool. (No girls wore jeans to school then.) The kids were so dedicated that they would cut school but attend practice. In every way he stayed in control: rules, bluﬃng, skill, and vision all contributed to the ﬁne achievements of the band and orchestra. The goal justiﬁed the means. The parents were thrilled, the town turned out en masse for events, and the students marched through town triumphantly playing their instruments by heart because Bob thought those music holders on their instruments were ugly. When there was no money for uniforms, mothers made red capes for everyone 40

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

to wear over white shirts and black pants. When it was time to go somewhere, there were no buses, but a ﬂeet of private cars showed up. To outsiders, it was surprising that most of the players were Native American, but Indians have always loved bands and they were a staple of government boarding schools. Robert started the primary kids on plastic “Tonettes,” not unlike classic Native American ﬂutes. He ﬁgured out how to transcribe traditional Blackfeet songs and wrote orchestral music using their themes. (Walter McClintock 2 had gotten Ethelbert Nevin, the ﬁne American composer, to do this.) At Christmas he composed an operetta about a little star, because stars as people feature in Blackfeet mythology. Jeanette, his second wife, and Margaret, his daughter, said that his conducting of the high school symphony orchestra was so masterful and the results so beautiful that they wept. He said the only real secret to music was playing exactly in tune and would spend an entire rehearsal session getting the players to play one note EXACTLY in tune. It is not exaggerating to say that for Robert Scriver, music was religion. In fact, most of the year’s concerts were attached to Christian festivals like Christmas or Easter. Why would anyone abandon such a vocation?

2. Second career: successful taxidermist Browning, 1950–1964

In the Fifties the Blackfeet reservation had just been released from a ban on alcohol. Many men had served in the military and were recovering from trauma both physical and emotional. Indian veterans had been world citizens overseas, accepted and honored, but now they returned to be stigmatized and shut out as second-class citizens. Their families were struggling to reintegrate them plus a wave of new babies. President Eisenhower had resolved to disperse the reservations and was sending many people on relocation to cities, intending to improve their lot but often dumping them in ghettoes with no resources. Burglary rates and violence, especially within families, were so high, and the willingness of the federal government to pay for enough police was so low, that the Browning businesses chipped in together to fund a town police force. By then Bob Scriver was the city police magistrate and also Justice of the Peace. To some degree he felt the same restlessness as the men who came before him to be tried – most often for common drunkenness. He had come to hate authority ﬁgures, even though he was one. Some Blackfeet men, who had done well in the military world and had new conﬁdence in their ability to cope, found their feet and became tribal leaders as well as businessmen. There was an inﬂux of young white men looking to make their fortunes on ranches. Many of them married female tribal members who I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E

41

had large land allotments in excellent grazing country or out on the wheat ﬂats. Their “mixed-blood” children were the beginning of a true middle class on the reservation but also another force for cultural disintegration. Some felt that an Indian was necessarily poor and a drunk, so in their eﬀorts not to be “Indian” in that sense, the successful ones became scrupulously “white.” Unsolved was the puzzle of how to assimilate enough to relate to the larger world while remaining faithful to a unique way of life. During World War II Bob had been the ﬁrst chair cornet in the U.S. Army Air Corps band in Edmonton and then the band leader and arranger at the Trocadero, one of the ﬁnest dance clubs in the city. He’d been a powerful man among other highly skilled men, so it’s not surprising that he could not return to balky children, disgruntled parents, and small-town principals. He would not have returned to Browning if it had not been his home in the deepest sense, as truly as it was for Indians, the people he knew best. Teaching was the only job in town. In the end he lost his temper and quit teaching mid-year, an act that blackballed him from any other teaching contracts in the state. He called Fred Stone, Jim Stone’s son, who was running an ice-cutting operation in Whiteﬁsh and asked him for a job. “I don’t know much about cutting ice,” confessed Bob. Fred said, “That’s okay. I’ll make you the foreman so you can just walk around with a clipboard and keep track of things.” He got along ﬁne until spring when the ice melted. Now he could tell his mother, who so wanted her son to be a music teacher, that he HAD to do what he’d wanted to do all along: taxidermy and sculpture. The two skills wove back and forth between each other. Vern Mundt, a newspaperman who sometimes played in a combo with Bob, remembered later that Bob leaned forward between sets and asked him, “What would you think about a taxidermy business with a little line of curio animals?” He didn’t listen to Vern’s answer, because he’d already decided. Actually the path had been blazed by Carl Akeley, Louis Paul Jonas, and others who combined taxidermy and sculpture into major careers. While Daniel Chester French was making his ﬁrst commission, the famous bronze statue of The Minute Man for Concord, he supported himself with plaster castings called “parianware.” They were genre vignettes like The Chicago Incendiary, a model of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over the lantern that supposedly started the Great Chicago Fire. French’s very ﬁrst commercial piece was two little owls, comically in love. Bob knew Montana local people who were making a living with original curios and wood-carvings: Blake in Hungry Horse, John Clarke in East Glacier, Al Racine in St. Mary. A.E. Bessette had opened the Diamond A Studio in Browning on July 12, 1946, featuring miniature horse models and other wildlife, plus paintings and sketches. No one knows what happened to Bessette, but Blake’s comical gaunt horse, Clarke’s mountain goats, and Racine’s church panels are still admired. More signiﬁcant Beaux Arts sculptors of Indian 42

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Sergeant “Bob” Scriver, ﬁrst chair cornet, U.S. Army Air Force Band, Alaska Division, 1943. Photographer unknown.

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E

43

Bob with cornet, 1947. Photo: Jeanette Caouette Scriver Chase.

44

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

subjects, Adrien Alexander Voisin (1890–1979) and Edwin Willard Deming (1860–1942), had passed through the reservation at diﬀerent times, but evidently without Bob knowing them or the local newspaper noting them. Bob never did anything in small ways or with a short timeline. In this post-war period when so many were rebuilding the world, he laid out a plan. He would begin a taxidermy business. That summer when taxidermy was slow, he would use the GI Bill to give his music credentials another lick at Vandercook (just in case), and, while in Chicago, would ﬁnd someone to teach him to make plaster curios for tourists. His buddy, Ace Powell, had been exploring ways to turn out multiple small toys and novelties. He had even worked for a business that produced injection plastic objects, but who could aﬀord the thousand-dollar steel dies necessary to mold plastic? Instead, Bob and Ace both turned to plaster. As soon as Bob had a line of wildlife animals, he’d start a summer tourist business to sell them. Also, in the back of his mind was a museum, complementary to the Museum of the Plains Indian built on the west end of town during the war. The Scriver Museum would be about Montana wildlife and he would ﬁll it with full-mounts of the major game animals, collecting the specimens himself. His timing was excellent. The new Al-Can Highway went right past the door and on up the continent to major trophy hunting in Alaska. Combat veterans across America itched for adventure and were comfortable with guns, so hunting “boomed.” When hunters returned from Alaska with a trailer full of moose horns and Kodiak bear hides, Scriver Studio was the ﬁrst taxidermy place they came to in the States. One look at the full-mounts in the museum persuaded them to leave their hides and heads for mounting. Tires and gas were ﬁnally available. Families could aﬀord automobiles, which they took on long trips around America to all the patriotic national parks, feeling they were making pilgrimages to sacred places. There were kids in every car and everyone loved souvenirs to brag about to the neighbors. The road to Glacier National Park was the perfect spot for a museum and souvenir shop. The ﬁrst summer Bob experimented with a little tourist shop in an abandoned service station across from the Blackfeet Trading Post. The next summer he built a one-room log cabin shop up at St. Mary, forty miles away. That small building was moved down to Browning for a year and then over Looking Glass Pass to East Glacier, another twenty treacherous miles, but the cabin was very stout. Every log was splined and grooved lengthwise and pounded together with oakum, as tight as a boat. In St. Mary he had mounted a real horse on a swivel so it would “buck” for snapshots. It soon wore out. Bob saw clearly he had to pay a high price for two lots on the highway just east of the Museum of the Plains Indian. Those lots were the key. He would build in sections. His theory about the design of the ﬁnal building was that it should look “Western,” a long, low building with a barn-like midsection big enough for the large animal mounts. Maybe he would show wildlife movies in I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E

45

the evening or give lectures. There were vague ideas about anatomy lessons for artists and using the Museum mounts as models for sketching classes. The sewer under these buildings was to haunt Bob. In the ﬁrst place, it wasn’t deep enough in the ground for him to sink the basement a full story, so the ﬁrst section had to be up higher than he had intended. Second, the main sewer line was evidently an ancient wood-and-tar conduit that began to collapse in a few decades. Third, it became a source of gas fumes from a leaking gas tank belonging to a service station at the other end of the block. More about that later. The oﬃcial PR story was that Bob had started out with an old red pickup, $500, and an ancient warehouse which he bought from J.L. Sherburne for one dollar. Originally the warehouse had been the Ammons Mercantile Store, next to the Browning Merc. (Ammons had also been the original owner of the T.E. Scriver house.) Bob used a nail puller to dismantle the boards, hauled them up to the lot, and rebuilt them into his shop, even straightening out the nails to re-use. At Bob’s death ﬁfty years later, the attic of the shop was still crammed with white blanks of little animals. They had a distinctive “feel” to them – they were “cute.” Partly they had slightly bigger heads than they ought to and they were smooth, sometimes with lightly incised hairs like the heads of baby dolls.

3. The Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife Browning, 1953–1999

Scriver’s idea of a wildlife museum was based on that imposing millionaire’s institution in Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History, but he had translated it to his own resources. As each animal was collected he recorded it in a one-ﬁfth life-size sculpture with as much detail as possible, teaching himself anatomy. He had been hunting since he was a kid, in contrast to Charlie Russell, who was willing to help pack carcasses and even cook the meat, but never was a shooter. Among artists it was Carl Rungius who shot one elk or moose after another, stringing them up between trees as models. In 1952 a big grizzly was taken on the east slope of Chief Mountain, barely on the Blackfeet reservation. This was the seed of the museum, a rearing mounted grizzly in an alcove. Ten cents to get your photo taken with the bear! People loved posing, some pretending to be eaten, others pantomiming handto-hand combat. This is from Bob’s autobiographical notes in his best sports magazine style:

46

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

... Some Indian men brought in a huge grizzly pelt. Being in rough terrain, they had not skinned the head or paws but had left the carcass where it fell. I wanted to do a life-size mount of it, so I asked the hunters the locality of the carcass. They told me this story. When hunting elk near Chief Mountain one day in February, they crossed the tracks of a small elk herd. They had followed them for a while, when they came upon the tracks of a large grizzly, also following the elk. In February, no less – he was supposed to be in hibernation but he surely wasn’t. These tracks alerted the hunters and as they moved cautiously to the top of a small hill and glassed the timber area for elk, the bear had gotten their scent and came charging at them from some nearby bushes. The Indians were terriﬁed. One had a .25-.20 riﬂe (way too light a weapon for a large grizzly), another a .30-.30 model ‘94 Winchester (still too light) and the third a .30-.06 Springﬁeld. The ﬁrst two men stood their ground and emptied their riﬂes into the bear. After thirteen shots were ﬁred they ﬁnally brought the monster down and ended his life with a fatal shot to the head. The man with the .30-.06, the only riﬂe in the group that could reasonably have brought the bear down, was up a tree a hundred yards away.... After they described the location carefully, Hiram Upham (an Indian friend from boyhood) and I set out to ﬁnd it from the directions the hunters gave me.... After a two hour hike we came upon it. We viewed the area of the scrimmage – the blood-covered ground and brush torn up all around attested to the great bear’s ﬁnal struggle. I had brought my calipers, tape measure, notebook and a fairly good-sized piece of clay. We immediately set to work. Hiram measured and I wrote and sketched. After this was accomplished, I made a one-eighth life-size model of the carcass. I opted to bring one of the forelegs home to make a plaster cast of it. Hiram helped load my backpack and boosted me to my feet. I’d go a short distance, then have to sit down on a log to rest. Hiram would hoist me up again but each time my legs got weaker and I’d have to rest more often. After three miles of hiking, we ﬁnally reached the pickup truck. I was exhausted, so Hiram drove us out of the wilderness. When we got home, we weighed the forearm of the bear – it was nearly a hundred pounds. It was quite a load for me up and down hills, over dead-falls and across a rushing mountain stream.

That was the bear who posed with the tourists. Occasionally some nut would steal its tongue, which was rubber. We had a whole drawer of tongues, numbered by size, but it was a nuisance to have to glue in a new one. (Bob used clear bathtub sealant.) No one seemed to realize that the claws were worth ten dollars and more, each. In 1957, when enough dimes had accumulated, Bob began the main hall of the Museum of Montana Wildlife The businesses boot-strapped each other: the taxidermy business paid for the ﬁgurine factory, and then the Museum brought I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E

47

The big Chief Mountain griz that started the Museum of Montana Wildlife at a dime a pop (1950s). Photo: Bob Scriver.

48

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Bob in the early Fifties, still in thrall to grizzlies. He used a self-timer to take his own photo. The gun is an Enright. Photo: Bob Scriver.

in a steady stream of admission money which paid for the foundry until the sculptures began to sell. In the early years Bob still played his horn at small clubs and dances along the High Line with a combo – often himself and Jimmy and Johnny Girard. Jeanette worked around town as a clerk and bookkeeper while starting a business in original leather jackets. Meanwhile Bob became president of the Chamber of Commerce. He was a Mason, along with his father and brother, and proud to serve as chaplain one year. He was an associate member of the Guides and Outﬁtters and both secretary and president of the Glacier Wildlife Association. The taxidermy business was a great success right from the beginning and the curios began to sell as well. He was still City Magistrate and Justice of the Peace. The seal of approval was given to his teaching career when he was listed in “Who’s Who in Music,” the Mid-Century Edition, 1950. He was so proud that he kept the canceled check he had sent to pay for his copy of the book. None of the achievements was enough. Eventually, everything (including Jeanette, his wife) fell away but the Museum and the sculptures. Bob had stopped casting plaster tourist ﬁgurines just before I came in 1961. The last of the taxidermy was a couple of years later. He wanted to be “renowned,” and it appeared that bronze sculpture was the means. I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E

49

Bob the small-town businessman, later in the 1950s. Photo: Jeannette Caouette Scriver Chase.

50

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

By that time, the operation was ten years old. The shop was an amazing jumble. Bouquets of glass bird eyes – each pair fused on the opposite ends of short wires so they wouldn’t get separated – bloomed in zinnia colors from open drawers. Yawning jaws and rude pink rubber tongues lolled in others. Mysteriously encrusted cans and jars perched everywhere on the counter that surrounded an ordinary bathroom sink and tub, set waist-high. The walls were knotty pine. On nails alongside goggles or tools, hung string-wound blobs of excelsior with wire legs for mounting birds. In one window was a stack of half-destroyed radios. A visitor could not guess which one was wailing cowboy music on any given day. Often it was the most ancient, which had no dials and had to be tuned with pliers. Over the top of this taxidermy detritus was the encaustic and rubble of art: paint, wax, plaster shards, and big chunks of plate glass used to seal oﬀ a mold when it had been ﬁlled with plaster. Tools wandered at random. The only bathroom was in the basement and was not the sort of place that encouraged people to linger. We were cautioned NEVER to let tourists use that bathroom. Vern Mundt, local newspaperman and musician who liked his drinks, went down there only once – he claimed it gave him nightmares for a week. Skulls and horns were piled here and there. Strange smells of acid, hides, and bear fat hung in layers of still air, stirred only when someone walked through. The actual museum was entirely diﬀerent, a shining checkerboard of evergreen and gray tile, walls the soft dove gray of rain clouds, and a vaulted ceiling. Spotlights were focused by wiring stovepipes over them. There was only enough money for one big glass case to display the small animals and birds, so the larger animals stood free. Visitors could walk around them, even gently touch them. It was wonderful to watch a blind person stand on a stepladder, feeling the horns of the moose. By the end of October, dead game animals were often chilling in the unheated front room on tarps thrown down to protect the ﬂoor. By late November the pet dogs underfoot would have gotten fat on the neck meat of deer, moose, elk and mountain sheep. Bob acted as a fur buyer for Paciﬁc Hide and Fur, so stacks of beaver plews, stretched round on willow hoops, mixed with mink ﬁtted wrongside out like scabbards over wooden boards. Winter was a long quiet time while the hides soaked in mild acid to tan them. Ever the schoolteacher, Bob would explain that there were three substances to get out of hides before they could be considered tanned: ﬁrst came the water content, which was extracted with salt; then came the fat which was partly scraped oﬀ and partly removed with soap; and then came the glue among the ﬁbers which soaked out in diluted acid. After all that, the ﬁbers of the skin were so stiﬀ that the capes looked as though made of cardboard – unyielding. The ﬁnal step was using a grinding wheel to thin and soften them. (Old Blackfeet ladies had done the job with scrapers and rubbing.) All day Bob sat at the wheel, pressing the hides against the abrasive stone wheel, thinning withI I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E

51

The Museum of Montana Wildlife, now the Blackfeet Heritage Center, in Browning, Montana (early 1960s). Photo: Bruce Strachan.

out grinding holes in the hides. Hours of this gave him massive shoulders and wrists. A lifetime of horn-blowing and walking the mountains had deepened his chest. Every head “cape” had to be put on its hollow papier maché form, antlers bolted to the top, clay thumbed into its eyeholes and nose, thin plastic leaves slipped up into its ears and more clay thrust into the ear-base, and then the whole mass worked around into a likeness of the original animal. Glass eyes went into the eye holes, the mouth was tucked down into a slot cut in the form (herbivores were never shown with their mouths open, except for bugling elk), and the rest was a matter of poking, twisting, aligning one side against the other, and then stepping back to squint at the results. When all was in the right situation, the back of the neck and around the horns was tightly sewn up before the glue between the hide and the hollow papier maché form could set. Bob had repeated this operation so many times and knew the animals so well that he could have the day’s work ready for the crew to sew up before lunch came around so he could turn back to sculpture. Sometimes mounting heads was so automatic and repetitious that he got a little bored with it. “Where is this bear looking?” he would demand as he focused its eyes on the distance and then changed to a focus about where a 52

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

person might stand and look down at a bear rug. “Which way is best?” Once he was ﬂummoxed by a man who insisted he wanted his bear rug to be smiling. All afternoon he experimented with imposing a human expression on a beast that never smiles. In the end it looked mildly pixilated. Museums contracted Bob for high quality taxidermy on their exhibits, for instance, a javelina and a desert mountain sheep for the Death Valley Museum in California. The most notable custom job was Big Medicine, the albino buﬀalo who had happily aged into great-grandfatherhood on the Moiese Bison Range. His pink skin showing through the thin white fur, the ancient bull looked his age. But the Montana Historical Society director at the time wanted him mounted as a young on-the-prod bull with tail in the air. Bob sighed and did it. The deer heads drying on the walls tended to acquire accessories, like sunglasses or hats or a pencil tucked over the ear. We thought of them as distinct individuals and were a little sorry when they were ﬁnished with shiny lacquer eye “makeup,” the eyeballs scraped to get the lacquer side-stream oﬀ, and some turpentine wiped over the horns. When Bob ﬁrst began his taxidermy business, he calculated the cost of mounting each head – adding up forms, eyes, tanning, his time – and came up with a ﬁgure much below everyone else in the area. Word got around and he was ﬂooded with heads to mount. By spring they were all done and hung on a wall for an amazing group portrait – none of them smiling for the camera except the novice taxidermist in his rubber apron. The taxidermist soon lost his smile: he had forgotten to ﬁgure in his overhead – the lights, the heat (a big item in Montana), the rent, the taxes. Each head cost him money. His father and brother laughed. The cougar, seven feet and four inches long and weighing 185 pounds (game animals are always described like prizeﬁghters or babies), showed up in Louis Nightgun’s woodshed about two and a half miles out of Browning towards East Glacier. Louis shot it and then came in, a little shaken, to tell Bob about it. Bob ﬁgured it was a bobcat until Louis got to the part about the long tail. Bob always wanted to ﬁx that tail so it would gently twitch at the end. The cougar’s eyes, on a level with human faces, are focused about twenty feet ahead of the cat, and he wished he could make them suddenly refocus on the face of whoever was standing right in front of it. The story of the museum buﬀalo is a little longer. Bob and Ace had made friends with C.J. Henry, the manager of the National Bison Range at Moiese, Montana. They rode in the fall roundup and went over during the summer to draw and sculpt from the big animals. One year, to improve the genetics, a group of new bulls were brought in from the herd in Niobrara, Nebraska. This meant that the entire “pecking order” of the range had to be renegotiated. All over the dry, dun hills rose clouds of dust and roars like lions as the bulls threw dirt over their backs with massive hooves and issued challenges in universal huge vibration of male sound. BBRRRROOOOMMMMRRRRR! I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E

53

NNOOOOAAARGGGHHH! They crashed into each other. One went sprawling; the other pretended to lose interest and sauntered oﬀ, rolling his eye to peek behind him. The emerging alpha bull was dubbed “Old Blue Bull” because of his moreluxuriant-than-average blue-black mane. Musculature bulged at the rear where his tail was erect. When he whirled to face a challenger, he showed a ﬂash of white eye, a shining runckled snout that dripped silver strings of drool, and a purple tongue in a gaping mouth – the horns and ears were buried in fur. There was less hooking with horns than direct frontal smashing, like a demolition derby. The artist buddies were thrilled, and forever after thought the mating season was a failure if it wasn’t like that. In fact, once the new hierarchy of bulls was established, there was far less ﬁghting. The year a new manager, experimenting with grazing management, fenced the herd onto a steep hillside, the season was a ﬁzzle. Every solid impact sent the lesser opponent not just sprawling, but rolling, so that by the time he stabilized and got up, he was ﬁfty feet away and not clear about just whom he was ﬁghting. In the end the buﬀs got tired of the confusion and simply walked through the fences back to where they were used to being that time of year. Some of them were kept in an exhibition pasture enclosed by cyclone fencing on twelve-by-twelve posts, but one day a bull tired of that, too, and was found grazing in the manager’s front yard, dragging the cyclone wire on his head a like bridal veil. The “boys” at the Range knew that Bob was looking for a bison to mount and one afternoon they found the carcass of a bull who had died from his ﬁghting wounds. He was a little ripe – mating season is July – and the wound had gone untreated (even healthy old bulls tended to hide out in the brush) so there was a bad mess on one side, but if Bob were interested he could come get it. Otherwise it was a loss – since it was summer the hide wasn’t good for a rug and the meat couldn’t be used. Bob, his son, and another helper closed the shop, sharpened a bucket of knives, rounded up some ﬂashlights and got there just after dark. By the pickup headlights and the ﬂashlights, they discovered that skinning a bull buﬀalo is not an easy task. Often they had to stop to put a new edge on their knives. Even in the dark it was warm enough that sweat poured oﬀ of them. While the sky began to streak with morning, they unloaded hide and carcass in Browning. In the early light they saw that maggots were squirming everywhere and were glad to have skinned in the dark after all. A few hours’ quick nap later they were back up and out to put the plaster mold on the carcass, already stinking. The hide, salted as soon as they peeled it, was in better shape. Tom Kehoe, curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian next door, asked for the skeleton for an exhibit. When the plaster mold came oﬀ, great waves of stinking corruption swelled out of ﬂesh now becoming green goo. Neighbors, grimacing, called City Hall to report a burst sewer. No one on Bob’s payroll would even go into the corral where the work was proceeding. 54

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

As City Magistrate and Justice of the Peace, Bob had a certain amount of inﬂuence and discretion, so he went down to the jail and announced that any man who would come clean the buﬀalo’s bones would be released from his jail sentence. He got two volunteers, both of them tough old characters with senses long since dulled by hardship and alcohol. Neither lasted more than an hour. “Take us back to jail, Your Honor,” they begged through the bandanas over their faces. “We’d rather sit it out there.” Eventually the buﬀalo got cleaned somehow (probably Bob did it himself) and the bones, so far as anyone knows, are stored somewhere in the Museum of the Plains Indian. In the end the mounted buﬀalo was pushed up against the wall so the patched side wouldn’t show. Ropes under the skin mimicked swollen veins and Bob even painted tiny red blood vessels on the bulging eyeballs, though the tourists rubbed them so much that they wore oﬀ. The ﬁnal touch was picked up on the next trip to the Bison Range to scatter around the base of the pedestal: genuine buﬀalo chips.

4. The earliest sculptures and the C.M. Russell Contest Browning, the Fifties

Bob worked so hard and so close to the limits of his strength and knowledge that he could get into a tantrum of frustration. Jeanette said that in the Fifties he sometimes talked wildly of suicide. Then she would persuade him to take a drive up to East Glacier for a cup of coﬀee – a little break. Sometimes he disappeared for a few days without telling her where he was going. Usually it was hunting season. She says he was always restless until he shot a grizzly in the fall, legally or not. (There was a wicker clothes basket of grizzly skulls in the basement of the shop that he never would discuss.) She could not understand what drove him so hard – where that desperation was coming from. The earliest sculpture worth casting in bronze was a warily stepping little buck whitetail deer, dated 1951. The ﬁrst bronze version was cast twenty years after it was created, at the request of a customer who saw a plaster cast. Bronze. Bronze meant something beyond souvenirs, beyond anything local. Bronze was real fame and fortune, the media of a true sculptor. No one could say that bronzes were toys. When Charlie Russell had died in 1926, a statue of him had been proposed for the Congressional Hall of Fame. Nancy, Charlie’s wife, chose a man named Lion to make a maquette for the big statue but it was rejected, partly for the political reason that Lion was not from Montana. A Montana female artist prepared a model of a seated Russell, which Nancy disliked intensely. The matter became so snarled that it was put aside. At that point there was no money anyway. I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E

55

In 1956 the idea revived when Weaver, the staﬀ sculptor at the Montana Historical Society, created a portrait for the Hall of Statuary in Washington, D.C. Recurring outcries for a native Montana sculptor resulted in an oﬃcial contest. Besides Weaver, three sculptors met the arbitrary requirements and deadlines of the competition: Evelyn Cole of Chinook, whose career never really happened; Bill Gephardt of Conrad, whose reputation remained local; and Bob, who caught ﬁre and created an international career. Sculptors had to be “sponsored” by someone. At ﬁrst Bob’s “sponsor” was L.T. Aubrey, but then that gentleman switched his allegiance to the lady, Evelyn Cole. Aubrey’s sister, Mae Aubrey Coburn Williamson, became Bob’s sponsor. Mae, “Many Victories,” was a formidable Blackfeet woman who had become the ﬁrst female member of the Blackfeet Tribal Council about the time of Bob’s ﬁrst marriage. She never stopped being Bob’s mentor and promoter and he, in turn, used her as the central ﬁgure in his classic bronze called Transition. By the time the actual contest started, Bob’s oﬃcial sponsor was the Browning Chamber of Commerce. The contest kept getting tangled up in politics and ended in a bit of a scramble. Bob had cast his statue of Charlie in three pieces, divided at the belt and at the collar. Mrs. Gephardt said it made her think of a cookie jar, the kind that is a clown or Aunt Jemima with a top that lifts oﬀ. The set-up crew for the contest was tickled, too, and at ﬁrst put Charlie’s head on backwards, which must have provoked Bob. As expected, Weaver’s bronze was chosen and everyone went home, not necessarily satisﬁed.3 One of the judges had been Charlie Beil, a friend of Russell. He liked what he saw in Bob’s sculpture, because he understood what was the matter with it – Bob didn’t know anything about proportion. He didn’t use any measurements – just eyeballed the clay, so the portrait looked like a cartoon of Russell, with a big head. Beil was intrigued enough to stop by Bob’s studio, which was on the way back to Banﬀ anyway. This was exactly what Bob needed: a mentor. Charlie Beil was an old cowboy artist who had led Russell’s horse in the funeral cortege in 1926 and who had for years supplied the prized trophy sculptures for the Calgary Stampede. He vaguely remembered Bob as a small boy who sometimes stayed with Margaret Carberry, daughter of the station agent in East Glacier, where she belonged to a crowd of Roaring Twenties pals. In those colorful young years, Charlie and others met the Great Northern with its load of dude summer tourists in a supposedly spontaneous display of high cowboy spirits. Earlier, Beil had survived a lot of hungry years, some of them working as an extra in Hollywood for Westerns. By taking a job in a California foundry, he learned how to cast art bronzes, and managed some formal art classes. In the Thirties he rented a little studio in Great Falls. Close enough to Charlie Russell and then Nancy to arouse the jealousy of Joe DeYong, that designated protegé declared Beil to be “cold-blooded.” Actually, he was just tough and practical, 56

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Bob, Jeanette, and the portrait of Charlie Russell that lost the contest, 1956. Photographer unknown.

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E

57

and his early years proved it. His father had been a blacksmith in the Black Forest area of Germany. In 1906, aged 12, Charlie had signed onto a nineteenth-century sailing ship but eventually left the sea in Argentina, where he became a gaucho. Oceans and grasslands seem to share their appeal. Working his way back north, he drove twenty-mule teams and oxen in Arizona. In 1917 he joined the cavalry and was sent to Hawaii. Then came East Glacier, California and Great Falls. Finally settling in Banﬀ with his wife, Olive, he built his own foundry in the backyard and raised three children, all of whom turned out very well indeed. Now Bob learned about proper armatures and how to check proportions with calipers. He set about disciplined preparations: measuring, making diagrams to record the measurements, taking photographs, using models, collecting a “morgue” of images by other artists and photographers. He knew from his music training the importance of practising scales, the necessity of developing an embouchure (lip musculature for blowing a horn) and the basic drill of mastering an instrument. He also appreciated the importance of the logical structure of the music. His willingness to do this kind of basic work soon distinguished him from others who wanted to “create” without practising. This is less common than one might suppose. In fact, Russell – who was more likely to be painting anyway – didn’t use calipers or models. He painted from his imagination, often based on memory, though he wasn’t above checking out his own anatomy in a mirror. Some people suggested to Bob that he was “cheating” by using models and recording their measurements, but it gave his work a solidity and speciﬁcity quite diﬀerent from many Western sculptures. No More Buﬀalo was the result of what Bob learned from Charlie Beil. There was still a lot of oil money around Browning in those days. Blacky Wetzel and Iliﬀ McKay, tribal leaders and councilmen, began to talk about a series of heroic-size Indian sculptures to be cast in bronze. The ﬁrst was this portrait of an old-time Blackfeet hunter standing at the edge of a piskun, a buﬀalo jump. It was not a Charlie Russell kind of sculpture, but a monumental bronze like Malvina’s portraits in the Hall of Man. The model was Eddie Big Beaver. In Bob’s notes for an autobiography he says he told Eddie, “... he would not have any decorative feathers, no fancy war bonnet. He needed no props to make him look like an Indian – he WAS Indian. His clothing would consist of a breech cloth and moccasins with the Blackfeet camp circle design.... Eddy asked me for a staff of some kind, so I gave him a broomstick. He immediately struck this pose in the sculpture. It was just what I wanted.”

Edward Big Beaver was born in 1886. Because of his ﬁne face and noble demeanor, he was a favorite of artists and casting directors in Hollywood movies. Sometimes he played “Tonto” in local skits. 58

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

A. Phimister Proctor visited Browning the ﬁrst time in the summer of 1895. In 1917 Proctor was working on a commission for a monumental sculpture called On the War Trail, an Indian on a horse. At his New York City studio his models kept quitting, until ﬁnally he put the sculpture in his car and drove clear out to Browning, where he located Big Beaver. Fall arrived and Proctor loaded Eddie up to take him along to California. Proctor plays him up as a superstitious old fellow who likes women, but Eddie was only 31. When On the War Trail was ﬁnished, Proctor “sent Beaver on ahead” to his studio in New York City. There he ﬁnished a second statue, theoretically of a Mohawk Indian, with Eddie posing again. On the War Trail now stands in Denver at the Civic Center, paired with Bronco Buster. From the Glacier Chief, August 7, 1958: Eddie Big Beaver Services Set for Saturday Morning Funeral services have been set for Saturday, August 9, at 10 AM in Little Flower Catholic Church for Eddie James Big Beaver, Sr., 79, whose body was found in an irrigation ditch between Yakima and Toppenish, WA, early this week. Authorities believe his body had been in the ditch about six days before discovery. Big Beaver was a full-blood Blackfeet Indian who spoke excellent English and was regarded as a competent game-keeper, experienced in the handling of all kinds of animals and an experienced show man, having done this type of work in different sections of the US. In 1931, during his employment with South Park, a director for the Bureau of Parks described him as a “picturesque full-blood Blackfeet.” During his lifetime his activities were many and varied. In 1935 he and four other Blackfeet Indians were employed by Ringling Bros. Circus. He was also a one-time game warden at Pittsburg. In 1936 Big Beaver was requested to participate in the National Folk Festival at the Texas Centennial, an educational and cultural organization that brought together different Indian groups from many regions of the U.S. In 1939 he was employed by the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation in the motion picture Susannah of the Mounties. Survivors include sons, Sam Wolverine, Eddie Big Beaver Jr. & Lynus; Daughters, Joyce Boy and Margaret Boy and 11 grandchildren.

[Death was due to a fractured skull from a blow on the head.] Eddie never saw the ﬁnal casting of Scriver’s portrait of him, though his family sometimes visited to look at it. A doctor said that his body showed signs of starvation and alcoholism. At one time Eddie had kept a pet badger and that

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E

59

may be where Bob got the idea. No More Buﬀalo has endured as one of Scriver’s best sculptures. The edition sold out most quickly and was one of the ﬁrst to be copied illegally. It is as excellent a sculpture as any American bronze. The copyright year for this piece, 1957, was also the year that Bob met George Phippen, at that time the only other Western artist doing similar sculptures to be cast in bronze. Phippen would become one of the key members of the Cowboy Artists of America, but died of cancer quite young and never saw how big Western art became. Today there are awards and a museum that carry his name.

5. Beginning to sell

Browning, late Fifties

Every time Bob made a new sculpture, he took it to show his folks. His mother cooed, “Is that what you were playing with today, dear?” as though it were a crayon drawing from grade school, and then praised “all the little buttons on the shirt.” His father would say, “Well, Robert, are you makin’ any money?” For a long time little or no money came from sculpture. One day an entrepreneur who specialized in athletic trophies – sculpture of a kind – stopped by to talk. This was Bill Ukrainetz, who wanted Bob to make a set of ﬁve small equestrian statues which “Uke” would get cast back east. They were meant for window-dressing in men’s haberdasheries. Each would illustrate a diﬀerent period of Western history. They signed a contract. That night Bob rose from his bed in a panic. He wrote a long letter in red ink (the only pen he could ﬁnd) on adding machine tape (the only paper he could ﬁnd). It summed up the fears that haunted him for his entire career – that he would be legally tied up in a way that would cripple and conﬁne him, destroying all his creative freedom. Bob and Uke broke up, but in a few years cheap plaster castings of the horses and riders, by then being sold as ﬁne art bronzes, began to show up in curio shops. Uke had not paid the manufacturer for the ﬁrst test molds, so the manufacturer was recovering his costs by selling castings. In spite of each piece having been carefully copyrighted, lawyers could only achieve a stand-oﬀ: no damages paid to anyone, but an agreement that the manufacturer would destroy the molds. This bad beginning would echo over and over down through the decades as Bob’s paranoia became conﬁrmed, in part through self-fulﬁlling prophecy and in part due to Bob’s inability to resist ﬂattery. He never had a decent crap-detector. The constant gnawing fear of being destroyed haunted him, though he was 60

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

No More Buffalo, 1957. a portrait of Eddie Big Beaver. Photo: Paul Juley. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.

Transition, 1961. Portraits of Chewing Black Bone, Mae Williamson and a boy whose name has been lost. Photo: Paul Juley. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E

61

Fighting Elk, 1963. This is one of the sculptures that resulted from the design lessons of Warren Baumgartner. Photo: Paul Juley. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.

able to swagger and bluﬀ his way past it sometimes. The steadily climbing value of Western art kept the crooks interested. Nevertheless, Lone Cowboy, the last sculpture he made for Uke’s series, is one that qualiﬁes as inspired. This classic portrait of a horse with its rider on the ground in front of it – which is itself an abiding Western ﬁgure interpreted by many artists as well as the title of a famous novel by Will James – was nearing completion when Warren Baumgartner, an outstanding illustrator, visited. The older man guided Bob through a lesson in composition, using this piece, so that every line on it is graceful and fulﬁlled. Even Bob’s later version of the same idea, Lone Cowboy 1860, in which an old-time cowboy and horse are turned in the opposite way, is not so satisfying in some subtle way. No More Buﬀalo, Transition, and Lone Cowboy are strong, peaceful bronzes, quite unlike the usual ﬂashy, action-oriented Western art of the time, and – early in his career as they were – are among the best by Bob Scriver. Rather than being in the tradition of Remington and Russell, they are like the straightforward portraits by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, Malvina Hoﬀman, and A. Phimister Proctor. 62

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Lone Cowboy, 1960. Self-portrait of Bob Scriver and his horse, Playboy. For many years this was Bob’s logo, on checks and stationery. He acknowledged that the concept and title came from Will James. Photo: Paul Juley. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E

63

The foundation under Bob’s work was all those humble portraits of taxidermy specimens, carefully observed in their natural habitat, studied again écorché (skinned), and recreated twice, once as full-mounts and once as sculpture. Since Bob hunted, skinned, mounted, modeled, and displayed each animal, all that he loved about them was preserved and expressed.

64

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

IV Plastilene: The Early Years

1. About the material and what it demands Plastilena. Roma plastilena. Sounds like a woman’s name. But it’s merely a special kind of artist’s clay, a mixture of ﬁne sediment and waxy oils instead of water, so it never dries out but can be reused again and again. It never turns into the dry, hard-edged shards of water clay, but it never achieves permanence either, remaining a potential, receptive surface ready to accept the smallest detail or tool stroke. The same plastilene is used over and over, formed into a shape, buried in a plaster mold, dug out, cleaned and reused. It is mixed back on itself again and again, so that what was once a woman becomes a horse and what was once a hairy mountain man becomes a delicate fawn. Often as I sat near Bob he handed me a wad of cold plastilene to warm. At ﬁrst it was hard and cold. Gradually, as the top layer warmed and slipped under my ﬁngers, it moved over the inner resistance of the deeper, still-cold clay. In the end the whole mass became soft as pie crust dough and the surface was silken so that my ﬁngers slid over it, but it was tiring, took energy and muscle. While he incorporated the ﬁrst clay into the animal he was making, he handed me the next cold lump of clay. His own hands, strong and square-sided, were capable of both force and exact control because his joints were strong and tight, especially his wrists. He used his ﬁngers as much as the tools, creating long sliding lines that delineated muscle and denoted movement, almost caressing some parts into existence. His thumbs dented the clay, leaving prints. His hands told him what he was making as much as his eyes did, transferring his own kinesthesia into the small ﬁgure. Technique is the diﬀerence between marble sculpture, which is cut into a hard surface, and bronze, which begins as malleable clay or wax. Working in these quite diﬀerent materials requires disparate skills. Chiseled stone is called 65

Creating Trophy Rams, 1961. Photo: Jeanette Caouette Scriver Chase.

glyptic sculpture. Modeling soft material is called haptic. Two diﬀerent kinds of energy shape them and the materials themselves have demands. Stone glyptic sculptures tend to be massive, compact, and sharply detailed or sometimes smoothed to a ﬂesh-like quality. Marble busts are often classic, like Roman portraits, with clean outlines and no fussy decoration, perhaps showing a bare neck and shoulders, a squared-oﬀ herm as base. Discussion of them is about shadows and “holes,” where the stone is deeply cut. Bob never did glyptic sculptures. Clay-based haptic sculptures, especially those to be cast in bronze, are likely to be more romantic, gestural, with arms outﬂung and legs leaping. In cast bronze busts, a broad-brimmed hat may be added (impossible in a large marble, so there are no marble cowboys in sombreros) or the shoulders draped, collared or wreathed with ﬂowers. No one can cut a waving ﬂag out of marble or a bucking horse balanced on one leg, but bronze can do it. 66

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Trophy Rams, 1961. Meant to portray a “legal” ram, a 3/4 curl and a really worthy trophy ram at the top. Hand-painted hydrocal. Photo: Bob Scriver.

In France Auguste Rodin relied on foundries for ﬁne sand casting and then investment ciré perdue. Most of the time he was a “modeler” – haptic (working in clay) rather than glyptic (cutting stone). A clay sculptor need not take into account the limitations of a speciﬁc piece of marble or granite, its possible ﬂaws or inevitable weight, and he does not need a crew of stone cutters. Rodin had a fondness for leaving some ﬁgures half-emerged from the stone, a tender head rising from rough chaos, but the heads were cut by someone else, working from a Rodin clay, and then touched up by the sculptor. I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S

67

Return of the Blackfeet Raiders, still in plastilene and unﬁnished, 1961. Photo: Bob Scriver.

Rodin was fond of pointing out to others that as the eye traveled over the surface, it was like looking at one pose after another, and even proposed that the eﬀectiveness of his sculptures were caused by him deliberately sculpting one end of the ﬁgure at the beginning of a gesture and the other end at the conclusion – which accounts for an illusion of sinuous movement. But this is pretty sophisticated stuﬀ. Were Scriver and Rodin produced by haptic forces – warming/ smoothing/pressing – that gradually shaped them into sculptors through loving their work, or by glyptic forces – striking/cutting/gouging – until what was left was only the sculptor and nothing else?

68

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

2. Malvina Hoﬀman’s plastilene Greenwich Village, the Forties

In Malvina Hoﬀman’s autobiography Yesterday is Tomorrow,1 she tells of going to buy some plastilene from a sculptor named Rudolph Evans: ﬁve hundred pounds of it at seventy cents a pound, a sizeable investment for her. She took her plaster caster, Russo, along with her to help make a judgment as to whether to buy. As it turned out, Russo – who served many sculptors – recognized the batch of clay and said he had handled it many times. It had originally been bought (at thirty-six cents a pound) for Daniel Chester French to use in his studies for the huge seated marble Lincoln that occupies the Memorial in Washington, D.C. Then Saint-Gaudens used it for various ﬁgures and eventually sold it to Evans. Forty years had passed since French bought it, and Hoﬀman – who could hardly resist a material with so much history – used it for panels on the sides of an American War Memorial Building erected in the Vosges Mountains of France after World War II. Eventually she gave the clay to an art school. I wrote, Once, Bob Scriver stole a bit of plastilene from the studio of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mt. Rushmore, and for a long time he kept it separate from his other plastilene. But someone saw it on a shelf and – cleaning up, consolidating, making neat and categorical – failed to realize the distinction and pitched it into the clay box with all the rest. Now Gutzon Borglum’s plastilene, the particles of clay and molecules of oil that were warmed and rubbed by his ﬁngers, are dispersed imperceptibly into the whole mass and it is impossible to tell whether the lump you hold was once a part of the mockup for Mt. Rushmore: perhaps a bit of Teddy Roosevelt’s mustache or Abraham Lincoln’s wart. It is identity-less, unﬁndable, and yet permeates all the plastilene, unchanged on a microscopic level.

I showed the above paragraph to Bob Scriver himself. (“So how are you coming with your famous book?”) He told me I’d completely fabricated the whole story. In the ﬁrst place, he wants me to admit that he NEVER steals. The artist – or at least his helper – GAVE him the clay. The true situation was that his Dickinson, North Dakota, art teacher, Zoe Bieler, happened to be in Chicago when he was going to Vandercook School of Music in the Thirties, and, in an eﬀort to persuade him away from music, she took him to the studio of Lorado Taft – not Borglum. Taft was not there. (He died in 1936 so he might have been ill.) That’s why it had to be the helper who gave Bob the clay. It was water clay and Bob said he still had it, carefully protected. (Who knows where it is now?)

I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S

69

So even the stories are malleable. Who knows which are true? Only the people directly involved. Even they may not remember accurately. Bronze that seems to equal permanence is an illusion. The greatest hazard to a sculpture, as to many other things, is human beings, who – when times change – melt up bronze to make something else. Fine statues and church bells have been sacriﬁced in order to cast cannons. In recent years we’re seeing statues of dictators pulled down onto their faces. Simple neglect can destroy a poorly made bronze. Air pollution and ice are acid and chisel. Just the same, Bob felt that bronze was a step toward immortality. In his childhood the Browning paper often pictured distinguished statuary as it was placed around the country after World War I. The accompanying rhetoric lauded each such object as for the future generations, eternal, to mark The War to End All Wars. After Charlie Russell’s death in 1926, Nancy Russell tried to make a little money from his sculptures, since only a limited number of paintings were left for her to sell. Customers would persuade her to cast Marblex™ ﬁgures that the artist might not have meant for bronze, reasoning that the sculptures would be more permanent in that form. In theory she could duplicate the sculptures and still have them. In fact, the mold-making process lost the little tufts of rope for grass and other details, even pulled paint oﬀ the surface. Sometimes the process destroyed entirely the charming but fragile little clay ﬁgures. If the bronze was badly cast, it couldn’t be repaired by comparing it with the original. Nancy struggled with bad castings and dark matte patinas, almost like stove blacking. A haptic sculptor is at the mercy of molds, which are the only way to transform something soft and malleable into something hard and lasting. That interval in which the clay is soft is dangerous. Any “mishap,” a careless thumb, a bump against a doorknob, and hours of work are destroyed. A mold-maker who can be trusted to take a soft plastilene or wax and safely make a mold of it should be valued almost as highly as a sculptor. Unfortunately, such artisans are far and few, mostly concentrated where there is enough work to keep their skills sharp. Their names are rarely recorded anywhere. During the Sixties an enthusiastic female journalist often dropped in to the studio in search of a story. Once we talked to her about plastilene and she went away to write an article extolling the virtues of the “new material” Bob Scriver had discovered. It was everything an artist could want: malleable, reproduceable, and it could even be hardened in an oven. (We had told her we wished it could be. Today materials actually exist such as polymer-based clay, but then we only longed for them every time we damaged a plastilene.) The name of this “miracle material,” she conﬁded to her readers, was Petrolane (the name of the local gas company) and Bob Scriver “absolutely refused to reveal his source.” It was months before we stopped getting phone calls from aspiring sculptors, none of whom believed us in the slightest when we told them this woman reporter had pulled the whole thing out of thin air. 70

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Still, for Bob, plastilene was a kind of privileged substance. Intrigued by the diﬀerent kinds in the art catalogues, he bought ﬁve pounds of each for experiments. I didn’t know until many years later that some artists make their own plastilene, developing a recipe that suits their purposes. A woman sculptor in Saskatoon, who sculpted huge “African queens” that looked like chess pieces, showed me how she made up her black plastilene with wax, oil, and clay. I was grateful Bob didn’t know about this or we would have been launched on making plastilene. (He did make his own taxidermy water-based clay, mixed with carbolic acid to keep it from getting moldy. When we were working with it, our hands stung but we weren’t troubled with infections.) The woman sculptor had said part of the reason she made her own plastilene was to avoid the lead in commercial plastilene, which gradually absorbs into the skin. There was sulphur in the commercial stuﬀ, too, and the plastilene would react chemically with some kinds of wire, creating a strange dark jelly. Now there are lead-free plastilenes on the market. I wonder how much lead Bob absorbed over the years. It saturated his skin and clothes.

3. Plastilene sculptures shelved Browning, 1962

When I ﬁrst met Bob, on top of his kitchen cabinets were some ﬁgures made of plastilene. I asked and he lifted them down to show me. They were fuzzy with household dust and some had fallen apart a bit. Two were Indian subjects and one was elk. The two Indian subjects were vignettes that had been suggested by George Montgomery, who had intended to buy them until his divorce from Dinah Shore wiped out his discretionary money. Both were in the context of conﬂict, typical of early Western art. Price of a Scalp showed a warrior on horseback pierced by a spear held by a warrior on the ground who will clearly be brained by the downstroke of the war club the equestrian is holding. Enemy Tracks (a Charlie Russell title) was two Indian men on horseback in cactus country following the tracks of a shod horse and spotting an empty discarded U.S. Cavalry canteen. When George couldn’t pay for these storytelling sculptures, Bob set them aside, disappointed. (George did buy other pieces and eventually began making his own sculptures.) The third plastilene was Fighting Elk, with two bull elk ﬁghting so close to a recumbent cow elk that they had bashed into her. This violent but graceful piece later won prizes, at least in part because Warren Baumgartner, the ﬁne watercolorist, had spent time with Bob using this piece as another lesson in composition, showing how he could create design lines – along antlers, out along the backs of the elk, and even through “rock crevices” in the sculptured base, just as he did I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S

71

for Lone Cowboy. The contribution makes both of these sculptures more uniﬁed to the eye, easier to see and understand. But Warren, an older man, became ill with pneumonia and slipped away. Saddened, Bob had put the sculpture on the shelf. I couldn’t understand letting them just disintegrate. After a while, he did return to them.

4. The miniature wildlife dioramas: a team eﬀort Browning, Spring 1962

In the winter of 1961–62, soon after we met, Bob prepared to add the ﬁnal room to his museum: miniature dioramas scaled at inch-to-a-foot. A scene of mountain goats on the precipices of Glacier Park had already been completed for years. Now he wanted to make one “window” for every major mammal species in the state. In the shop he and Carl started to make shadow boxes with plaster hills and valleys while a crew was set to work opening up a room I hadn’t known existed. Until that moment it had opened outdoors to the horse corral in the backyard, and had been used to store saddles and hang deer carcasses. One day the crew simply cut an arch in the wall and there it was. At the end of every work day, Bob threw his indispensable modeling tools (traditional steel instruments from a sculpture supply house, some leatherworking styluses, a handful of dental picks donated by his dentist, and other handy things like wire-cutters and a light hammer) into his ten-gallon metal lard pail so he could carry them all back to the house where he worked at a proper sculptor’s cast-iron and hardwood revolving table. The sound of those sliding, jangling tools being pulled out of the pickup in the driveway always signaled a long, snug evening of work with plastilene. That March he created more than sixty little portraits of animals, some of them worth casting into bronze later on, most notably Reclining Bighorn. Following the plans sketched out on the backs of paper napkins at “teatimes” (one at 10 AM and the other at 3 PM) and ﬁled by stuﬃng them into his breast pockets, Bob went directly to his sculptor’s turntable after supper every night. Choosing a blob of plastilene, he softened it in his hands while he “thought him a think.” Roughing out the body with a knife, he twisted its head and limbs around experimentally. Since the creatures were so small, there was no need to be conﬁned by an armature. Every culture, no matter how primitive, has loved miniature objects, if only as toys. Play is often where we do our deepest changing and make our most poetic discoveries. With our toys we are as gods, free from consequences. The psychoanalyst Kohut and the philosopher Langer speak of a “virtual world” created by art, religion, or play – a world of intense meaning and fulﬁllment 72

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

that makes change and growth possible, in part because it is a mental construct as ﬂexible as plastilene. He became the animal. Sometimes he remembered particular animals he had watched secretly, for he had spent most of his later childhood and early youth prowling around the reservation and up into Glacier Park, disdaining – as did others in those days – any arbitrary boundary lines. If he found a band of mountain sheep or goats, he would accompany them through the day – hanging back just enough to keep them from running away – until they habituated enough to tolerate him. As a kid so young he was using a learner’s driving permit – with his mom alongside him, knitting – he took a car up to the hotel garbage dumps in the fall after the tourists left, letting the vehicle be snowed in, and sat quietly watching bears search for last meals before hibernation. Later, of course, he was an avid hunter. Now with clay in his hands he looked out of his own head with tiny bear eyes and curled his upper lip to lift his snout into the breeze. His massive shoulders rippled as he reached to roll away a boulder and search beneath it. For moments he would be lost in the drama he was creating, and then he would stop to tell me about it. I thought of the ﬁrst “real” book I read as a child, The Biography of a Grizzly by Ernest Thompson Seton. How I wept at the end when the old lonely bear died! Sometimes we’d get far enough into the play of “being bears” that no more work got done. Only now do I realize how much Waab, Seton’s grizzly, was really Seton, the same as Scriver’s bear was really Scriver. Each diorama had to meet certain criteria: tell a story, teach something about the animals, be typical of the species, hold enough detail to be looked at for a while, and so on. Bob traded one of his sculptures to Les Peters, a ﬁne realistic painter in Great Falls, in return for Les painting two of the backgrounds in Peters’ signature muted, softly detailed, realistic style so that Bob had them to learn from as he went on with the rest. Les, rocking back on his heels and pushing his hat oﬀ his forehead, was generous with support and advice. He was the Gary Cooper of the Montana painters. A private man, he never became a star of the national exhibit circuit but he was a major force in the development of Western art in Montana and the curator who prepared Charlie Russell’s studio for exhibit. The medium of dioramas rested directly on Bob Scriver’s lifelong dilemma as an artist, which has also been the dilemma of Western art. Isn’t cowboy “art” merely decoration, collectible, some kind of folk phenomenon of a self-taught and self-identiﬁed artist? Isn’t real art supposed to be some kind of privileged, eternal, and high-aesthetic product of education? Is Western art “high-brow” or “low-brow?” Is illustration really art? There is a sense in which these “story-telling” sculptures were a throwback to an early genre of three-dimensional story-telling that was often made in wax. Bob loved the little story-telling group sculptures of John Rogers, which are sneered at for being “un-artistic” in the same way that Norman Rockwell’s I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S

73

friendly small town folk are considered “low-brow.” Yet the quality of the art is often very high. If Rogers had been illustrating Greek mythology, as many of the early American marbles did, he might have been respected as well as making money. But because he made many copies of sentimental little groups – for instance, a young couple getting married with the parson peering over his glasses – which were enormously popular, he is mentioned only brieﬂy in the scholarly studies of American sculptors. (Part of Bob’s estate was a collection of John Rogers plasters.) Bob’s understanding of the world came out of his life as a reservation smalltown shopkeeper’s son, and as such was often “corny.” But – partly because he had a (tenuous) back-east connection with money and prestige – he knew enough to long to be a sophisticated sculptor in a nineteenth-century way. No one would ever think of Malvina Hoﬀman making a dollhouse or Rodin concocting dioramas, but Charlie Russell did those things without apologizing. It was the diorama scenes, the accuracy of the knots and riggings on Bob’s mules, the “true-to-life” details like rivets on jeans – in short, the reproduced familiarity – that his local audience thought was ﬁne and admirable. Even his most educated mentors – Charlie Beil, Warren Baumgartner, Robert Lougheed, or John Clymer (who used to alternate with Norman Rockwell on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post) – were popular artists, not salon artists. Their work illustrated slick magazines – until Lougheed and Clymer joined Cowboy Artists of America and acquired ﬁne art easel studios. When “modernity” swept through the art world – turning attention to thinking about images as shapes instead of depicting reality, which photography could do better anyway – the “educated” and “sophisticated” world elevated abstract art and scorned the representational. The beautiful monuments of the Beau Arts tradition, the ﬁne tabletop bronzes by Animaliers, were now just oldfashioned. Except that out West people never gave them up. For them it was still exciting to see their ordinary world recorded in paint and bronze. Anyway, there is an anti-snobbery doctrine in the West that meant people were free to scoﬀ at Picasso and Pollock, even as they were impressed by the Life magazine stories about what outrageous geniuses they were. Cowboy artists are supposed to be clean-living, happily married, and well mannered. Bob had what I often called his corny “Wall Drugstore” side, since that most famous of roadside attractions featured automaton puppets. Clever as his dioramas were, Bob wanted to add clockwork. Powers, one of those early creators of a George Washington equestrian monument, earned his living in his youth creating wax ﬁgures with clockwork in them to make them move. They were exhibited in dime museums where the gruesome subjects sometimes made the patrons faint. But there were no scenes of horror in the Scriver dioramas except the forest ﬁre, which we have learned is not all bad. (On the other hand, one of his early taxidermy mounts had been a small bobcat ripping up a duck, with copious fake blood. The weekly Browning Chief felt that it had to remind 74

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

its readers that nature was “red in tooth and claw” and that Scriver was just being honest.) In fact, Bob knew his former student Billy McCurdy could devise the little cams and gears that would have made the deer ﬂick their ears and the cougar lash its tail. He just never got around to it. The success of the mechanized rattlesnake in the museum was encouraging. It had taken him months to ﬁnd a mechanism that would make the tail on his specimen shake in realistic fashion (a vibrator from the aerator in an aquarium did it). As rationale for the gimmick, he claimed he only installed the coin-operated snake so that people could learn to be safe in rattlesnake country. No matter that Glacier National Park and most of the reservation is too high for rattlers and no matter that the snake in question was a huge Texas rattler, quite unlike anything local. Could he be blamed for appreciating the many quarters the machine reaped? He ﬁgured out how much it made and showed the numbers to his skeptical Pop. That February and March of 1962, Bob did taxidermy all morning, cast his diorama animals in the afternoon, and in the evening either modeled more animals or chipped out the ones he had transferred to hydrocal in the afternoon, putting them up to dry on racks near the ceiling in the shop before sealing and painting them. By now the big shadow boxes for the windows were crowding us out of the shop and Carl Cree Medicine, Bob’s best employee, was working full time on the new diorama room. The hardest part for Carl was ﬁtting the tile on the ﬂoor around and under a circular seat Bob had invented to get some use out of a necessary support pillar. Carl must have trimmed and ﬁtted those blasted tiles a half-dozen times before Bob thought they were good enough. The big Indian, awkwardly kneeling so he could reach under the seat, squinting in the glare of a worklight that was never in the right place, fuming with impatience and frustration, never said anything until eventually he got a good ﬁx. My turn to fume came when we composed the little explanations that went under each diorama. I, with my pretensions as a would-be writer, discovered that I couldn’t get the knack. Bob had tourist women, his old girlfriends and the wives of buddies all writing better captions than I was. (They were all women, which didn’t help.) I ﬁnally ended up writing the majority, but at great emotional cost and after many revisions. It was a valuable lesson. Bob’s most frustrating problem was the water in the beaver dam. We had discovered some pourable clear plastic and how to mix it, but it was meant to be in sheets rather than solid volume, so when it cured, it cracked. With great eﬀort we dug it all out. The next time we poured it, the color mysteriously changed to purple. We never knew why. There were “trout” embedded in the water, so the water had to be partially poured, let set, the trout put in – like banana slices into half-set Jell-O – and then the rest of the plastic goo poured onto them without knocking them on their sides or backs. When the diorama was ﬁnished and lit (“moonlit”), we discovered you could only see the trout by shining a ﬂashlight I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S

75

through the glass in front and even then you sort of had to know where they were. But we comforted ourselves that they still added something – maybe people would see them unconsciously, just “sense” them.

5. Bob nearly goes blind

Browning, Summer 1962

Another complication entered the picture in 1962. While it was still winter, an oﬃcious man had appeared in uniform saying he was the “federal warden” and demanded to see the closed museum. Bob, thinking about prison wardens, reluctantly let him in – it was cold in there and untanned hides were stored on the ﬂoor in piles. The man came out upset and threatening. There were many mounted songbirds, mostly victims of a late storm. Local kids had brought them in for a quarter each. One specimen was a swan, which had been found in a ﬁeld dead, a hole eaten in the underside by mice. The state game warden had given it to Bob who mounted it on the wall next to a snow goose for purposes of comparison, since swans were protected and snow geese were not. This warden stormed that Bob was violating federal law, that he could be ﬁned $2000 and given six months in jail for every single illegal specimen. Bob protested that he had a taxidermy license. The warden pointed out that it only gave him permission to mount migratory WATERfowl, not migratory birds in general. What he needed was a MUSEUM permit. This was the ﬁrst Bob had known of the existence of such a thing. Reasonably, he inquired how to acquire one. “No, no!” objected the man. “You can’t have a museum permit – you’re PRIVATE!” Bob could stand it no longer. “If this is private, then you get out and don’t come back without a warrant!” The man left. We later heard that he gave a similar dressing-down to a man on the west side of the Rockies whose cat caught a phalarope (a wading water bird) and brought it into the house. The warden did in fact have the power to charge Bob with a felony for each bird and to padlock the museum, thus eliminating the summer’s income. We removed all songbirds but left the swan. In those years we had no understanding of what a non-proﬁt organization was. In fact, it might have made good sense to create one, especially for the wildlife museum, but I suspect Bob thought that meant any proﬁt would have to be sent somewhere else. This is the kind of price we paid for being so isolated and individual. There was no one to teach us the small strategies of survival, so Bob just did it his own way. Not like a rancher or farmer but more like someone living in Britain on an estate, Bob felt the land was his. At that point he only owned two city lots, 76

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

but the mostly unfenced land stretched out around town in a sort of assumed commons without any particular feeling that it was owned by the Blackfeet nor even any feeling that there was a real boundary around Glacier Park. From the big picture window in the studio he built that ﬁrst summer, we looked across the Indian museum and camping grounds, past the fairgrounds and the undeveloped Methodist “ranch,” to the Rockies. It was still almost like the old open range days of the West. In summer Bob would bring our horses up the alley to my open bedroom window and say my name to wake me. Out I’d ﬂy, and we’d ride oﬀ across the grass in the early rosy light. There were few fences but, just in case, Bob carried wire cutters in his saddle bags. If we had to cut a fence, we usually wired it up behind us if there were any wire scraps around. If there was wire on the ground, especially barbed, Bob would stop and wind it up – hang it oﬀ a fence post. He had a constant fear of wire cuts on the horses. Nearing ﬁfty, he had more stamina than I had in my early twenties. The age diﬀerential entitled him to teach me the lore and ceremony of what he’d learned as a boy out on the Stone ranch. Not fancy contemporary rancher stuﬀ, but old nineteenth-century notions of what worked. Teacher to student was his best kind of relationship, even in intimacy. He was my ﬁrst naked man, a mature, hard-bellied, furry male. I did a lot of exploring but was puzzled by his toes. Some of them were webbed. He tried to pass them oﬀ as an evolutionary improvement. I wondered why his mother didn’t have them clipped when he was born – it would have been easy. He said she wanted them left alone because they would be good identiﬁcation if he were killed in battle. Is this what one thinks when looking at a newborn? It added to his sense of being slightly freakish. Whenever there was trouble, Bob would build something. That ﬁrst summer there seemed to be nothing BUT trouble. As soon as the diorama room was ﬁnished and the coal shed that was to be the foundry was moved aside, he staked out a studio/home behind the museum and ﬁnished it in the fall of 1962. Moving the boxes from under the eaves in Bob’s rental house was a revelation. I read everything in them – letters, divorce papers, his “little black book” from Edmonton – with the urgency of reading a novel. One day in 1962, my ﬁrst spring with Bob, when he was still in the rental house across from his mom, a letter had been propped in the music rack of the spinet piano, almost as though Bob hoped I would see it. Probably his mom, who came over every morning to make his bed and vacuum, saw it, too. Written in graceful script, it was postmarked Great Falls. Naturally I read it. This was Arlene, the one who would NOT marry Bob. He had told me about her, but she was only hypothetical until then. Now she was returning to work in the museum for the summer. I was expecting to work there, too. One bedroom in the little studio/home was for Arlene. He made a scale model to show her what a dear little room it would be and to ask her what details I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S

77

Bob the cowboy artist, about 1961. Photo: Albert De Smet.

78

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

of construction she would prefer. Arlene was cool. She and I alternated shifts in the museum, quarreling bitterly over whose till came up short and why. Bob would ignore us sometimes and other times he reacted violently, throwing the drawer of money on the ﬂoor with a great crash, so that we had to crawl around ﬁnding money in order to count it again. Stress always aﬀected Bob physically. One day his eye began to itch and water, then it turned red, and ﬁnally it became painful. He had been quarreling with Arlene. Pitifully he begged her to take him to the doctor, since he couldn’t see to drive. She decided it was a ploy for sympathy and refused. Luckily, his old hunting partner, Calvin Augare, happened along and took him up to the Bureau of Indian Aﬀairs hospital. White people were not supposed to use the facility, but few people ever argued with Calvin, who was a very large man not averse to violence, and anyway, if there were a true need, few doctors would turn anyone away. The doctor took one look and said Bob had to get to a specialist in Great Falls. It was herpes simplex keratitis and if it got much deeper into the layers of the cornea, the only cure would be to remove the eyeball. A worst-case scenario meant the virus traveled up the optic nerve into the brain. Bob had no health insurance. How could a blind sculptor make a living, especially with the museum padlocked? Calvin took him straight down to Great Falls to get the diagnosis conﬁrmed and begin treatment. Calvin brought the patient back late at night and to my shock, since we hadn’t been speaking, Bob came knocking on my door for refuge. He said he didn’t want to stay with Arlene – who was living in his house – since she hadn’t believed he was sick and hadn’t helped him when he really needed it, after all he had done, etc. I lay awake all night holding him while we listened to Miles Davis play Sketches of Spain over and over until he slept. He told me he was sure that if he’d gone on with the cornet, he would have played like that. (Everyone always says he played like Harry James.) I couldn’t wake Bob up early enough for him to leave in the dark as he had promised to do. When he ﬁnally went out my only door, I saw that the occupants of the little cabin on the corner, Mary Mittens and Calvin Boy, were in their window watching and laughing at him climbing over the wire fence into the alley. He could not have looked more guilty. I don’t think they ever told anyone white, though I’m sure all Indians soon knew. I began to realize how thoroughly the town was divided into levels and classes, each with their own secrets and principles. The only treatment for this herpes infection of the cornea was to scrape the surface of the eyeball, like taking lacquer oﬀ the glass eyes of the mounted heads, and to pour iodine on it, a procedure that had to be done three times a week in Great Falls. Bob was convinced that his career as a taxidermist and sculptor was doomed – if the Museum were closed down as well, he would be completely

I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S

79

impoverished and helpless. His only hope was to go to be tortured, but he would be sick to his stomach all the way to the treatment. I didn’t know how to drive and Arlene refused to do it. The folks bravely assumed the chore and in the next weeks they calculated they drove the equivalent of the distance to Montreal and back. Then appeared Ruth Hill, author of Hanta Yo, with her mild little husband DOCTOR Hill (her emphasis) and her large asthmatic son, Reed, whom she intended to somehow turn into John Wayne. Doctor Hill, or Buzzy as we called him, was not a medical clinician but a Ph.D. cancer researcher who worked at the City of Hope in Los Angeles. Musing, he remarked that he remembered something or other about a cancer drug that worked on herpes infections ... if only he could think where ... oh, yes, it had been a dinner party ... but who ... perhaps if he contacted the hostess. Miraculously, he located the experimenter and the drug. Bob could receive treatment but only if he were in the Cut Bank hospital under the strictest of protocols, so as not to ruin the experiment’s integrity. He would be the twentyeighth guinea pig. Of course, he did appear to need someone to drive him down to Great Falls for checkups – so why not just keep Reed for the summer? Reed, cigarette in one hand, cola in the other, rolled his eyes. Buzzy and Ruth took oﬀ without him. He was used to such arrangements, he said resignedly. When he had turned ﬁve years old, his mother had ﬁxed him a sack lunch, told him he was on his own, and pointed out the way to the public school. He had coped somehow. He was very fond of uncooked red wienies (the kind full of dye) dipped in mayonnaise. Later in the summer, Hal Bieler, author of Food Is Your Best Medicine, appeared on his annual pilgrimage and assured Reed he was killing himself with such a diet. Reed looked at Hal’s plate of boiled greens and remarked at least he would die happy. So the summer began, with a sneering Reed and an increasingly desperate Arlene, the new studio/home merely a foundation and frame, Bob in the hospital in Cut Bank, and a steady stream of eccentric visitors demanding attention, to say nothing of impending legal problems. In the midst of the confusion a letter arrived canceling Bob’s taxidermy license. We hardly paid attention. Somehow I appeared to be the person expected to cope. Whether I was drafted or simply took over in order to protect my own interests is impossible to distinguish. But Bob’s sculpture career continued to grow throughout everything else. We took orders for Hydrocals™ every week. From the hospital Bob issued a steady stream of notes full of details about how to run the business, along with sketches of himself in jailhouse stripes. I talked to him on the phone, but Arlene actually went to visit. The Scriver family “code” required that anyone in the hospital be visited every day or at least every other day, but they drove the forty miles in daylight while I was working. Bob suggested on the phone – rather petulantly – that if I really loved him, I would ﬁnd a way to come visit. 80

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Alonzo Skunkcap, a very old, nearly blind man who had a log cabin a few doors away from us, sometimes asked us to drive him out ten miles to his ranch on Willow Creek. We didn’t mind. Bob always respected him as a hunter. Now it occurred to me that one of Alonzo’s sons might be willing to drive me to Cut Bank if I paid him. Sure enough, Leroy – looking rather baﬄed – agreed to run me down one evening. I told him the truth and he took me straight to the hospital. To say Bob was glad to see me would be an understatement. He walked me back to the door at the time Leroy was supposed to be there and we were both a little surprised to ﬁnd that he was there. Bob paid him another ﬁve dollars (which suddenly cast a new light on my visit) and we drove back, Leroy still baﬄed about what was going on, but hopeful about what other good things might happen to him. The treatment worked, though Bob claimed he couldn’t see very well past the scars on his cornea. His eyesight was a sensitive point with him.2 In his youth he had been diagnosed as needing glasses but had evaded them by doing a series of exercises. They were one of his best examples of mind-over-matter, or at least over his own body. Now his eyes had gone bad in a way he couldn’t control. In fact, his whole body seemed to be balking. He complained about his shoulder aching and about being tired. A place in his back ached constantly. Sometimes he would crawl up on the pile of bear hides on the bear table and nap for a while. Arlene spent her quiet moments at the reception desk writing long letters to Bob and others, then tearing them up and leaving the pieces lying in the shelf underneath. I secretly gathered them and taped them back together to read. Once she slashed her wrists and left handfuls of bloody tissues under the desk, but by the time I came to work she had put band-aids on her wrists. I said to her, in a snotty voice, “You can’t do anything right, can you?” In a little reservation town with no car, no telephone, no doctor for white people, where does one ﬁnd counseling help? In those days people in small towns knew nothing about psychology. My drama training only suggested emotional scenes. A sick symbiosis grew among the three of us, but Bob didn’t ask us to be friends. Just get the work done. I worked the early morning shift, arriving at 6 AM, unlocking, cleaning, and setting up the till. Arlene came at noon and worked until suppertime. Then I worked the evening and closed up. Bob insisted this was the only schedule possible, because of Arlene’s private life. As compensation, most afternoons – if, because of waiting for supplies or workmen, there was no building to do – Bob and I would saddle up the horses and roam oﬀ across the prairie. Or sometimes we loaded up art supplies and looked for a place to paint a bit of scenery. We must have been going back to places Bob knew because he rode there as a kid. We set up easels to paint, en plein air, as one says now. Bob always took oﬀ his shirt and the bugs would try to bite him, but he was so hairy that they got tangled and trapped, struggling and buzzing. Then he would absent-mindedly I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S

81

smack them with his paintbrush, until after an hour he looked like a human mixing palette. The smell of the oil paint mixed with the smell of grass and maybe mint along a creek where we could go skinny-dipping to wash oﬀ the paint and squashed bugs. Fish rose around us. I had never tried painting before. We talked about colors and shapes, composition on the canvas, light direction. Gary Schildt had a particular way of painting that Nancy McLaughlin Powell also used in her pastel portraits. They got it from a little art book by a guy named Merlin Enabnit. It was a matter of “cool” (blue and green) light coming from one direction and “warm” light (red or yellow) coming from the other. It made no sense to Bob, but the light bulb ﬂashed for me, because that’s the way stage lighting is done – warm lights shining from one side and cool lights from the other. In fact, Montana scenes are just like that – blue sky reﬂecting where there is shadow and the low pink winter light painting everything else. The result was an eﬀect of depth, modeling. Charlie Russell used it. Bob claimed it was a silly idea for color to have temperature and that some greens looked warm to him and some orange looked cool. Certainly, color was not his strong suit. (He couldn’t understand left-wing politics versus right-wing politics either, but I suspected he was just being stubborn.) Often I read up on something until I understood it, and then explained it to Bob, who could actually do it, while I watched. When the ﬁrst blizzard of the year came on September 8, the studio still had no windows, but soon it was weathertight. The inside took months and months longer, because Bob was determined to get it right, to make it a jewel box. “If every baseboard and molding isn’t done now, it never WILL get done.” I took all the pots and pans he owned, laid them out on the ﬂoor, edited them, and then designed cupboards that would hold just these things – no more, no less. Between wives abandoning goods and his mother giving him her castoﬀs, he had four teakettles (all crusted with alkali and some burned through), three frying pans (only one with an intact handle), a strange assortment of plates, and no sharp knives at all. Finally, Arlene had fallen in love with Gary Schildt, a Blackfeet artist of enormous talent and tumultuous character. Bob paid Gary to choose the colors for the studio and paint it, which the young man did beautifully. Then Bob took Gary and Arlene up to Cardston, Alberta, and acted as witness while they got married. Wessie and I prepared a little reception feast – Wessie even baked a cake – and Bob provided a mattress on the carpet in front of the massive new ﬁreplace for an overnight honeymoon while he slept elsewhere. Gary got drunk. In a while they moved to the other side of the mountains.

82

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

6. Evelyn Cole

Chinook, Montana, 1967

When Bob was commissioned to make a heroic-size statue of rodeo cowboy champion Bill Linderman, everyone was in a great hurry, as usual, and Bob didn’t have enough plastilene on hand. (Later he learned to use giant styrofoam blocks as a lightweight core in order to make the clay go farther.) Once he had had enough plastilene to make a heroic-size statue of Charlie Russell, but now that clay was all tied up in other projects that were not yet ready to cast. Looking for a source near to hand, he thought of Evelyn Cole, who had entered her portrait of Charles M. Russell in the 1959 contest. He had lost, and so had Evelyn, but she had a lot of clay and she only lived a few hundred miles away in Chinook. Even though they had never been buddies, a little persuasion by phone got her to agree to loan several hundreds of pounds of plastilene – just about her whole supply – “for a few months.” I was sent to fetch it, driving our little old red van. Evelyn Cole, to be direct about it, was a stocky, mannish woman sculptor. Where she got the vision of being a sculptor, I’ve always wondered. She never married, lived with her parents on their little farm until they died and then converted a barn to be her studio. Following some inner drive, she made portraits of local heroes and murals for local businesses. With her butch haircut and ﬂannel shirts under bib overalls, she was far from pitiful. She followed her stubborn vision, making herself into more than just another unmarriageable country female. Her supporters were local folks who thought her eccentric and thus probably a genius. She was treated with amused respect. I always felt that falling in love with Bob Scriver saved me from becoming Evelyn Cole. Then one day it occurred to me that if I’d become Evelyn Cole, it would have saved me from falling in love with Bob Scriver. Evelyn never did get her clay back. That plastilene is melded and rolled into the bins of Scriver clay now, and maybe that’s just as well. Her health failed, she needed money, she was discouraged after the Russell contest led nowhere. No mentor or opportunity came forward. Bob wrote her a check and we never saw her again.

I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S

83

7. My ﬁrst hunting trips

The Rocky Mountain front, Fall 1962

Bird-hunting in the fall of 1962 was my introduction to driving – wallowing the pickup through slimy gumbo clay along irrigation canals dug for the wheat ﬁelds south of the reservation while Bob and his son-in-law, Butch DeSmet, walked ahead of me with their shotguns over their shoulders. The day was glorious and by afternoon the road was no longer mud – now it was rutted concrete. Every once in a while a cock pheasant would explode out of the brilliantly hued fall foliage of rosebushes and willow along the ditch and almost always one of the two men would blast it in ﬂight. Then they’d wait for me to catch up so they could pitch the elegant bird into the back of the pickup. I asked for one to be in the cab so I could look at it, the clever metallic feathers and round glassy eye. During the 1962 Thanksgiving vacation we took the horses in the pickup up the Blackleaf Canyon road into the Rockies. This is where Nature Conservancy has established the Black Butte grizzly refuge, where there is an old Métis cemetery ﬁlled with refugees from the Riel Rebellion, where novelist A.B. Guthrie Jr.’s ranch was, and near Egg Mountain, where the dinosaur nests that revolutionized dino theory were found. It’s a quick way to get deep into the mountains. Snow was on the foothills and the temperature was subzero. Bob wanted to start from Browning at 4 AM. Gunsmoke, Bob’s half-Arabian gray, loaded easily, but Skeeter, my old brown relay racehorse, balked in spite of oats in the feedbox. “Go back there and slap him with a rope,” said Bob, and I did – with little or no eﬀect. “Throw pebbles.” Stooping to feel around my feet in the darkness, I managed to scrabble up some pebbles which I ﬂung as hard as I could. I must have hit a sensitive spot, because Skeeter lashed out with both hind feet, ﬂipping my bangs up in the air. A quarter-inch closer and my brains would have been sent spraying like a fountain into the freezing dark. Then the horse went into the back of the pickup as though he’d meant to all the time. Shaking, I swung the gates of the stockrack shut while Bob climbed over the front to tie the halters and put out hay. He made no comment on the near miss. We drove out of the sleeping town, every building detail and tree skeleton ﬂashing in the headlights of my adrenalin-charged mind. An hour or so south of Browning we turned west up the gravel road into the mountains. Because a “double & doe” season was intended to curb an explosion of deer, we could shoot four deer of either sex between us. The pickup toiled up narrow roads along foothill shoulders that were increasingly icy. Two horses are a big load for a half-ton pickup. I didn’t even think about where we’d put four deer carcasses. Then we spun out, with a drop-oﬀ on one side and a hillside steep up the other. Morning was just beginning to chalk the sky. Bob let the pickup roll 84

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

backwards slowly, meaning to ﬁnd a bare place in the road to get traction, but instead of responding to the steering wheel, the pickup slid closer to the edge. Now one rear wheel was perilously close to the edge. Our eyes were bugging with fear. If the horses jumped around a bit, we would go over, but their eyes showed white, too, and they stood still. “Chains,” said Bob. I couldn’t believe it. How could he drive forward or back to get them on? “Jack,” he said. My mouth was dry. “Chock the wheels.” I searched for big wedge-shaped rocks and stuck them in tight behind the tires. The horses stood unmoving as Bob reached carefully in back of the seat for the jack and chains. He did not slam the door shut. For a seamless time Bob worked smoothly, using his considerable muscle to wrestle the chains on without wrenching or pushing. The horses snorted, but hardly shifted their weight. I concentrated with all my might, not so much praying as WILLING that nothing would happen. At the same time I began to develop a plan for going back down the mountain road alone to report the deaths, since I would be the only one left, standing alone in the road. Then the chains were on, Bob shouted at me to get in, I did, and we made only one try, creeping, then lunging and thrusting the rest of the way with never a pause until we were at the top and it was safe to stop. We hooted. The horses did a little dance. It was still ﬁrst light, too early for color, and all around us spread the east overthrust front range of the Rocky Mountains, stretching away in long valleys of pine to soaring curtains of stone. I thought of Japanese ink drawings, so abstract yet full of meticulous clarity. Every needle, every bit of weed showing above snow, existed with deep inevitability. We breathed exaltation. The horses unloaded easily. They were carrying their saddles, so we had only to tighten cinches and put on bridles. Hardly had we ridden out along the hilltop when Bob was oﬀ, aiming, and had ﬁred. It was a muley buck, yards and yards away, instantly dropped with one bullet to the head. We had only gotten to that fallen deer when a doe stuck a curious head up from behind an outcrop of rocks and Bob dropped her, too – one bullet. It would take the rest of the day to get a third deer. But at least the ﬁrst two didn’t have to be packed far to the pickup. There was no fourth. I held the horses while Bob went to cut the buck’s throat and gut it. The sky was bright now and our mouths trailed steam. Deftly, he slit the buck’s belly and reached in to tumble out the guts, a blossoming of intense poppy red, and ﬂing them onto the paper-white snow. Steam rose up, cell-life escaping, and I saw how orderly the insides were, how cleverly arranged to just ﬁt. I felt abstract love, like a theoretical physicist considering the order of the universe. Bob was solemn, too, as he cut away the heart and liver to stow in my saddlebags, since mine were the biggest (and since he didn’t want to mess up his own), and then scrubbed his hands clean in the snow. There was no nonsense about putting blood on faces. I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S

85

The third deer was shot from across a valley and it took sweaty, straining hours to get to it. The carcasses went on top of the pickup cab. Driving home, we were in darkness again but had no trouble, until we hit pavement, stopped to remove the chains and shared the last salted nut roll, which was Bob’s traditional hunting food. (They don’t melt in saddle bags.) He reached over and pounded my knee. “You’re a good sport,” he said, and I understood that it was high praise. We hung the deer carcasses up in a cold room until they were covered with green mold, then cut them into two-inch-thick slices with the bandsaw, ignoring the proper traditional way of making steaks and roasts. I cut all the fat oﬀ and broiled them with butter and garlic, because Bob was allergic to onions. Every time I ate a bite, I remembered that cold morning and said a kind of prayer/poem, thanks for my life coming from their life. I was eating sunrise and jack pine.

86

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

V Armature: Forming Structure

1. About armatures Armature can mean either a protective shell, like a suit of armor, or an internal skeleton and support. For an artist, it is the latter. A strong sculpture must be supported by a strong armature. Nearly every beginning sculptor struggles with the problem of armature. Some make all their early sculptures of animals lying down, because it is too hard to ﬁgure out how to hide wires in slender legs with uncertain bends in them. The strategy is rather like painting horses always standing in deep grass because one can’t paint the complexity of fetlocks. Bob’s childhood work did tend to be of animals lying down but mostly because they were ordinary mud clay that crumbled in thin places anyway. Charlie Russell was an improviser when it came to armatures. Most times he drove nails up through a piece of wood so they pierced the legs of the alreadymade ﬁgure. He was fond of strengthening sections with hairpins plucked from his wife’s head. Hard to know whether he worked small to avoid armatures, or didn’t need them because of working small. I think he enjoyed small sculptures, like the tiny sand-cast and colored “Austrian” or “Vienna” bronzes then popular (not necessarily cast of bronze but also of less expensive alloys), often exotic animals like the ones he loved to make: monkeys in coconut trees, camels, pigs, and bears. When Bob made his ﬁrst portrait of Charlie Russell, he had no knowledge about armatures except what he had improvised for mounted animals or seen in books. The day he decided he was ﬁnished with his ﬁrst heroic-size statue, the one for that ﬁrst competition, was the day he came to the shop and found that Charlie’s arms had fallen oﬀ onto the ﬂoor in the night. The weather had warmed up, which made the plastilene less cohesive. There was no other internal support. No wonder Russell appeared to be a little squatty. 87

Another very early sculpture, On the Lobo Trail, was made with no armature. It showed an outlaw on a rugged little pony struggling up a mountain trail. After a warm summer night in the shop, the pony almost buckled down onto its belly, which Bob decided made the sculpture better! When he inserted some wires, he left the legs bent, only correcting the impossible anatomy of the joints. Bob’s idol, Malvina Hoﬀman, was just a girl when she tried to model a portrait of her father over “three sticks of kindling wood fastened to the base, a tin can upside down over the top ends, and a short board tied across to hold up the shoulders.”1 When it fell apart of its own weight, she was rescued and corrected by Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, a friend of the family who happened to live nearby. In fact, at that point Hoﬀman entered a whole community of sculptors and was given access to the studios of Gutzon Borglum and A. Phimister Proctor. Through her family she already knew many of the ﬁne artists of that period and had been given an opportunity to handle and study a large collection of Rodin sculptures. When Hoﬀman ﬁnished the portrait of her father, which Proctor helped her to translate into marble, she did a clay head of her future husband, Samuel Grimson, a violinist, working in Borglum’s studio. He gave her the following critique on her portrait, which would also have been valid for Scriver: “These lines are a bit sharp ... but here you’ve accented the chin and jaw forms with free strong strokes of your thumb – leave them – they give freshness to the surface. Try to work spontaneously. Don’t use little tools; they tend to make it look fussy. Use only your ﬁngers to get the feel of life into the clay – emphasize the forms of character but don’t carry it too far. Above all, keep it fresh and active. It takes courage to know when to stop. Don’t forget that! I’ll come in again tomorrow.” When Borglum came the next day, he pronounced the bust “ready for your plaster caster.” Taxidermy had taught Bob a kind of armature for his work, in that he had the knowledge of many real animal skeletons, plus their real carcasses, skinned by himself – not just plaster models like the small écorché (skinless) horse or man that art stores sell for the study of muscles. Taxidermy animals are not stuﬀed at all, but are hollow sculptured forms of papier maché onto which the hide is glued. Bob learned to cast and to reproduce the ﬂesh of many animals. Each of his papier maché forms was custom-cast from the carcass of the original animal: no need to fudge to get a good ﬁt. But they needed support, an armature, inside. He had put welded steel skeletons inside the large museum animals and, with Charlie Beil’s prompting, he saw that’s what was needed for sculptures as well.

88

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

2. The armature of Bob’s inner world Browning, the Sixties

An artist’s work rests on a sort of armature of principles, assumptions, and worldview. The armature of Bob Scriver’s philosophy was very much turn-of-the-nineteenth-century, progress-focused, and anchored in hard work. He believed in what is called “the Grand Narrative” of the settling of the West. When it came to art, the 1894 Columbian Exposition in Chicago exempliﬁed his romantic, entitled, untrammeled idea of what the world was about – or ought to be. This was the world he learned from adults in his childhood and to him it was the “Big T” Truth. My favorite place to visit on weekends or evenings was Hubert Bartlett’s lumber yard, which was really only a little shack where he lived out by the “Y” where Highways 89 and 2 divided again on their way south and east of town. Hubert brought lumber over from the west side of the mountains where it was cheap. Clouds traveling from the wet coast, going east under the jet stream, dump their rain in order to rise over the mountains. This creates the amount of rainfall it takes to grow thick forests, but the east side is in a rain shadow and has few trees. Hubert traveled at night to evade weigh stations and other complications. In the little shack of two-by-fours stacked up like Lincoln logs, Hubert himself – minus his front teeth – generally rested in an old easy chair with the legs busted oﬀ. A cat wreathed around his shoulders, a dog scrabbled in its sleep at his feet, and the little tin woodstove hummed with lumber ends and scraps. It was wood-fragrant, dark, low-ceilinged, and wind-proof, like a cave, with a constant peppery smell of gunpowder from Hubert’s reloading of ammo in the next room, and an occasional whiﬀ of the strong coﬀee on top of the stove. We would come in from below-zero cold, stamp snow oﬀ ourselves, and settle by the ﬁre. I never said anything, except hello, and no one ever said anything to me except to nod and give me coﬀee. It felt safe and easy. But the conversation was hair-raising. Hubert was a John Bircher, as far to the political right as it was possible to get, and he was convinced that the world was soon to be plunged into World War III. He swore he had ammo and guns “greased, wrapped in plastic, and buried” where the hated “feds” would never ﬁnd them, in case it was necessary to ﬁght a revolution. The right to bear arms was his main religious principle, and he was sure that anything less than a John Wayne approach to life was an example of moral rot, to say nothing of unpatriotic. He talked a lot about the posse comitatus, as people did in those years. I was grateful to be with Bob, who would no doubt know how to survive in the mountains after the atomic holocaust began and the people from the cities came to wreak havoc on us. Somehow the people from the cities and the regulatory agencies always sounded worse than Russians. V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E

89

Of all the endless yarning, the story I always remembered most vividly was a simple one. About 1960 on a bright, snow-laden moonlit night Hubert had been bringing a load of lumber over Marias Pass, along Highway 2, which skirts the south border of Glacier National Park. As always, his riﬂe with scope lay on the seat beside him. As he passed along the series of elk meadows, white and ﬂat as paper, he saw movement and then what he thought was two big dogs playing. Curious, he pulled over, rolled down his window, and – as many do in this part of the world – used the scope on his riﬂe for a closer view. They were wolves, probably a mated pair, out there in the subzero moonlight. Their fur would have brought a couple of hundred dollars each. Hubert, who knew this, was always short of money. Wolves were not protected – no one knew there were any. He didn’t shoot. After watching until the cold made him shake too hard to see through the scope, he drove on. When he told the story, both he and Bob were quiet for a long time. The wood shifted in the stove, settling, and the dog on the ﬂoor made sounds in his throat and twitched his feet. We all understood that this had been a story about freedom, wilderness, and sanctuary. Probably both Bob and Hubert, if they were alive today, would oppose the restocking of wolves in Glacier Park or Yellowstone. They would say it was just more tinkering and that it endangers the property rights of ranchers struggling to make a living and how could a rancher make it with all these damn regulations anyway? They would say that no authorities, no college-educated smart-alecks, should be allowed near Montana and that, anyway, a wolf that wears a radio collar and gets tracked everywhere, a wolf that is captured and recaptured by some scientist, that is drugged repeatedly, is not a wolf at all. And they would have a point, but it was a point relevant to a world that was ending. The apocalypse that ﬁnally came was a shift that the John Birchers felt but couldn’t resist. Some called it the Age of Aquarius. Machine guns could not prevent it. A whole lot of young people fell in love with wolves. In the end, Bob made a sculpture of the cherished Nine-Mile Pack. But he also made a sculpture of a bull moose being brought down by a wolf pack that had managed to get the long-legged ungulate onto thin ice. He called it The Mighty and the Many, which he conﬁded was about government regulators and tax collectors bringing down the creative entrepreneur. So his sentiments switched sides, not uncommon with wolves. To my mind the best wolf was a portrait he called Lunging Lobo. Bob had long wanted a big male to mount for the museum, but in the Sixties they only existed (we thought) far to the north. He made arrangements to get the carcass of a wolf that had been poisoned by a government trapper. Friends went up to get it in Edmonton and drove it to their home in Calgary, where we could pick it up. To save a lot of people trouble, we brought it back over the border under a big pile of garbage in the bed of the pickup, undeclared. Somehow, as the wolf traveled, it acquired the name of “Charlie.” Properly, Lunging Lobo goes alongside a female wolf crouched into the horns of a moose, Starving She-Wolf. 90

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Resentment of regulation, desire for independence, and love of freedom put Hubert’s politics where the political gamut bends around to where the rightwing John Birchers meet the left-wing anarchists. All this had nothing to do with the family Bob was born into, but Bob managed to make himself think it did. The Macﬁe family motto, Pro Rege, “For the King,” became “for” Ronald Reagan. In his archives a letter to Reagan begins, “My liege lord....” Bob always portrayed his dad as a Vermonter whose motto was “Don’t tread on me!” But in fact Thad was born in Clarenceville, Quebec, a loyal Canadian subject of the British Empire, and he was never a troublemaker. His ancestors had lived in Vermont before it was Vermont. The tangle didn’t bear up under examination, so Bob was careful not to examine it. While still in grade school, Bob had walked out of town with his dog, Dart, to shoot gophers. He was stopped by the town policeman for carrying his .22 and taken before the crusty old Justice of the Peace. The mouthy kid defended his case hotly, saying that “the right to bear arms” was in the Constitution of the United States. The JP denied it. “Ha!” the old man scoﬀed. “I’d like to see THAT!” So Robert went up to school, got his civics book and brought it back so he could point out the Second Amendment. The JP scoﬀed, “Why, boy, that’s an OLD copy. It’s out of date now.” Bob was outraged at such ignorance. From then on, though he never belonged to the NRA, Bob was adamant about the right to bear arms. In truth, Scrivers and Crellers had been in an actual militia and had had to ﬁght more than once – he knew that – but AGAINST Americans in defense of the British Canadian homeland during the American Revolution. He ignored that. One day I was walking home along Boundary Street with groceries and heard a bullet go zinging over my head, close enough to make me hit the ditch. Two little boys were shooting gophers and had shot towards town, not realizing how far a bullet can carry. I arrived at the studio in a tizzy. Bob had been working with his shirt oﬀ, so he was sweaty, sunburned, and hairy besides, a formidable sight. “Get in the pickup,” he said. In a cloud of dust we swerved out to the campground and up to the two boys. Bob said almost nothing, though he was the City Magistrate and Justice of the Peace. He just took the .22 out of the boy’s hands and bent it over his knee into a U shape. Then he handed it back and we left. So much for the right to bear arms. In spite of Robert’s admiring graduation speech about George Washington, he was proud of the family connections to British landed gentry who saw Washington as a traitor. He was proud of his Scots heritage – never friendly to the English king – and evidently unaware that three-fourths of his genes were from parts of Europe that would today be included in Germany. In short, when it came to family and nation, he was all emotional sentiment and very little rational analysis – but that was true of just about everything in his life. Scots are notoriously proud of their national origin, based on education and endurance, anchored in the place and history of Scotland. This I know V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E

91

because my maiden name is Strachan, which is a little town not far from the River Dee in Scotland. My great-grandfather Strachan brought his family from Edinburgh, Scotland, to homestead in South Dakota. My paternal grandmother was also Scots, but her family arrived earlier through Canada. Beulah had a bit of German in her family tree, but because of the feelings against Germans in World War I, she never mentioned it, and took enormous pride in her U.S. citizenship. Bob’s family had much the same situation. He represented his father’s name as “Flemish,” and was very proud of his mother’s name, Macﬁe, which he carried as a middle name. His mother had a book of tartans, showing the plaid and a few sentences about each particular clan, but the page for Macﬁe said, “Noted for being....” and then the rest of the sentence was blacked out. Wessie’s bridge friends had looked at this book and were very intrigued to know what had been censored. One of them happened to be in Waterton Peace Park, which is the Canadian national park contiguous with Glacier Park, and spotted in a tourist shop the very same book. Quickly turning to Macﬁe, she saw that they were noted for being sheep thieves! She could hardly wait for the next bridge party. Wessie was mortiﬁed. But then it became a funny story within the family. National allegiance was a high value, but what was their country truly? England? Scotland? Canada? Or the United States? Strictly, they were a continuation of the displaced Palatine families, British colonialists who did not return home, Canadian nationals who had become U.S. citizens for reasons of commerce, and whites on an Indian reservation where their allegiance shrank to each other, only four people: Mom, Pop, Harold, and Robert. Bob memorialized each in a small bust. In time they were buried together, also Harold’s wife Hazel, but none of Robert’s wives. The “family stone” is on Bob’s grave but was bought previously by Wessie when Thad died. It’s not impressive. Their feeling was that they were of a privileged class, and on the reservation this seemed true. Most older Indians would never tell me what they thought of the Scrivers, though some expressed admiration and friendship, but it was pretty clear that they all thought of Scrivers as “OUR white people.” They were not Indian and yet they belonged to a shared history. Everyone, white or not, was absorbed in the diﬃculties of living on a reservation. Was the town an “island of jurisdiction” in the reservation, accountable to the state? This is what the whites liked to assume. Did the tribe itself have sovereignty over its lands, or was it only living there at the suﬀerance of federal agencies? This was vital to the dignity of the tribal members. The land was listed as federal land, not tribal land, and therefore compensatory federal monies were supplied to the school for the value of that federal land. The tribe was sovereign but paid nothing to the school. Could an Indian on the reservation be sued in civil court? Could a white man be arrested by tribal police? Must Indians buy a state driver’s license? The questions remain unresolved, though the courts are slowly working their way through them. Today the dilemmas are much sharper 92

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

because of tobacco, casinos, and drugs on one-tribe/double-reservations that adjoin at the national border, making them a kind of overlay on two nations, a gap in the national borders. The T.E. Scrivers were raised in the Edwardian years, the Upstairs, Downstairs years. At home Wessie’s family had had a much-loved “hired girl,” Alice Chew. She had been sent from England as a youngster because her birth family was rock-bottom poor. I don’t know whether she was technically “indentured.” In Canada at some point she stopped being a servant and became a member of the family, formally adopted. Certainly Wessie loved her and depended upon her. Occasional hired help in Quebec was French and I suspect that in Wessie’s mind, French was not unlike Indian. When she hired temporary help – she never had servants in Browning – they were Indians, often one of the Bremner girls – vigorous and competent sisters. One said to Wessie innocently, “Oh, I like cleaning at your house so much better than cleaning at Mrs. Sherburne’s house. In this house I can tell what I’ve cleaned.” It was Wessie who repeated the story. If someone were ill or hurt, it was Audra Pambrun, the Blackfeet nurse, who asked no questions but arrived to stay as long as necessary. She was never seen as hired help, but always as a skillful friend. In Browning the Scrivers were entrepreneurs who had to keep the goodwill of their customers, not Bureau of Indian Aﬀairs oﬃcials who could impose their ideas. The only time Thad got involved in politics was when it aﬀected economics, like the constant attempts to move the highway out of Browning. (The threat remains. Bob fought it all the time I was with him.) I was cautioned not to say anything oﬀensive about Indians, but it wasn’t always possible to predict what might be oﬀensive. I remarked about all the glow-in-the-dark Jesus ﬁgures on the car dashboards and was quickly shushed. (I never see them anymore. Now it’s dream catchers, eagle feathers, and crystals.) The nineteenth century persisted in Browning. Once wash water was delivered to the door in barrels on a wobbly wagon driven by Green Grass Bull, at one time famous as a warrior and now famous for the pack of dogs that followed him everywhere. Over the decades after World War I, plumbing, electricity, and ﬁnally (after World War II) piped gas came to the house. Additions were made, the last of which was a breakfast nook in the kitchen which the Scrivers, by then aging and alone, enjoyed thoroughly, not least because it gave them a good view of whatever was going on in the street. The newspaper noted the installation of a “boulevard” (grass strip) and sidewalk in front of the house. At some point Bob planted poplars by cutting sticks in spring and burying the lower branches to become roots, so the breakfast nook was pleasantly shaded in summer. The trees grew quickly but the people felt no need to grow or change.

V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E

93

3. The Buﬀalo Roundup: we both ride Moiese, 1963

The buﬀalo roundup came around again and Bob decided I could go along. It took a lot of people to push the buﬀalo in from the hills and coulees, but even so they had to be brought along a diﬀerent route each time to keep them from ﬁguring out where they were going. When they were close to the actual chutes and corrals, only a determined horse and a hell-for-leather pace would get them to go where they were supposed to go. We both rode in the grand sweep and Bob would help cut out the smaller groups at the corrals. Once started in the ﬁrst of a series of chutes, the buﬀalo were handled mostly from above, where the cowboys used catwalks. They had two tools: an axe-handle to defend themselves down on the ground in the corral, and a long bamboo pole with a half-dozen jangling tin cans wired to the end which they used as a distraction and as bait. They tried to separate bulls so they were handling only one at a time. Enraged, bulls could rip up even the two-by-twelve boards and timber posts of the corral, so everyone moved slowly and calmly. The goal was to count, brand, doctor, and cull the herd. A few were sold live. The robes, skulls, and meat of others were sold later on, after the work of the roundup was over. It was clear October weather. I wore my new shotgun chaps, a birthday gift from Bob. The manager had two orphans in his yard: a baby antelope and a baby buﬀalo born out of season. I fed them windfall apples, noting how the antelope chipped oﬀ a little bite and the buﬀalo chomped half the apple. I was warned never to turn my back on the buﬀalo, because she loved to sneak up and butt people in the rear. Only as tall as my waist, she was strong enough to knock a grown man ﬂat. When we all stood around with loose cinches on our horses, waiting for instruction, the little buﬀalo walked back and forth, just short enough to pass underneath the horses so they shuddered at the tickle under their bellies. If they hadn’t been both agreeable and conserving energy for the day they knew was coming, they would have bucked. My orders were to stay with Bob, to keep back, and not to try to chase any animals on my own. We went far out to the ridge we had been assigned and waited for the signal to begin the long drive back to headquarters. I took a picture of Bob and Gunnysack and he took one of me. When the prints came back they were over-exposed, but we thought they looked like Remington paintings, romantically bleached to dust-color. We didn’t have long to wait until the signal came. A long line straggled out from the edge of the range, and buﬀalo began to move ahead of us. A small group of animals doubled back, and Bob rode oﬀ to the side to head them back in. Most of them turned, but a young bull came out of nowhere and headed toward me. 94

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

These photos of each other were taken while we waited for the signal to begin moving the bison. I’m with my “learning horse,” Skeeter, and Bob is with his “buffalo horse,” Gunsmoke. 1963. Photo: Bob and Mary Scriver

V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E

95

It was all very well to tell me the rules, but Skeeter had been used on cattle roundups before and he had no intention of letting anything go by. Shifting directions so quickly and violently that I had to clutch the horn with both hands to stay on, he confronted the young bull. Its horns were very sharp indeed: I could see the sun glinting oﬀ their polished ebony points. Everything stopped, except for my heart and Skeeter’s breathing. The bull glared, trying to make up his inexperienced mind. He kicked up a few gouts of dust. “Don’t move! For Chrissakes, don’t move!” Bob came as fast as Gunnysack could travel, and that was enough to turn the young bull back in the direction he was supposed to go. Skeeter relaxed, but I didn’t. “Yahoo!” I yelled and swung my hat, which was really one of Bob’s old hats. He laughed. Nothing much happened for the next couple of hours. We soaked up the sun and the amazing sight of the buﬀalo gathering into a herd. Arrowleaf balsamroot, a kind of low-to-the-ground sunﬂower with big heart-shaped ruﬄed leaves, had dried where it had bloomed in sheets during spring. The thundering feet of the running animals rushing through the leaves sounded like the surf of a mighty ocean. When we pushed the buﬀs up to a steep and rocky hillside, we expected them to go around the shoulder, but for some reason they went right on up the broken incline to the top, not even slowing. Bob followed them up, but Skeeter thought it was a waste of energy – meaning he ﬂatly refused to go – so we went around the shoulder in case of stragglers. In a few minutes Bob appeared at the edge of the rimrocks above me. His arms were waving wildly. “Molonimfutedgorup!” he called. I couldn’t get any sense out of it. Then the ground began to shake. Skeeter stopped. Ahead of us, coming straight for us at full speed, was the whole brown, heaving wave of the returning herd. Determined to do my part, I detached my picket rope and waved the whole coil over my head, shouting as loud as I could – the only obstacle between several hundred buﬀalo and their freedom. They simply parted and went around me, rolling their eyes sideways as they rushed past. It turned out that one of the other guest riders, a Texan who had come to buy buﬀalo, had gotten too eager and pushed the herd a little too fast. Unlike cows, when buﬀalo are crowded, they disperse into small clusters and go in every direction. Bob explained later that the principle is survival: drive up on a bunch of domestic chickens in the road and they will tend to stick together, even if it means running under the wheels of the car. Drive up on a bunch of grouse, and they rush away in all directions, so that some of them are likely to be safe no matter where the vehicle goes. When we all regrouped to decide what to do next, Bob and the others were tickled by me. They said I’d been so excited that my voice was falsetto and my self-assigned mission was so hopeless it was ridiculous. I laughed, too, but secretly I thought I was rather brave. And I was glad I wasn’t the Texan, who was ostracized for the rest of the day. 96

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The horses were exhausted and most of the riders voted to stop for lunch. Babe May, the foreman, was a determined and competent man. He was also disgusted and perhaps that was part of the reason he said, “All right, ﬁne. I’ll go get those buﬀs myself.” And he did. Somehow he rounded up the whole herd and had them back on their way to headquarters by the time we ﬁnished our break. He had lived through several attacks by bull buﬀalo, once surviving a charge that carried both him and his horse for yards on the horns of the bull. Rather sheepishly, the crowd ﬁnished their job. A few old bulls were left in brushy ravines, simply noted rather than endangering everyone. Late in the afternoon we sat on the ground, decompressing and telling stories, and someone started a whiskey bottle around the circle. Each man (there were no women besides me) took a swig, wiped oﬀ the mouth of the bottle, and handed it on. Bob took his jolt, handed it to me, and I wiped it oﬀ – and handed it on. Not because of sanitation or even because I wasn’t one of the boys, but because it was a chance for a joke and it was a little too much like a communal kiss. All the next day Bob helped run small bunches of buﬀalo down into the chutes. The men risked their lives in every wild descent, mostly because of a giant boulder that obstructed the hillside. It was several more years before anyone thought to dynamite the rock out of the way. Everyone was so competent that it was easy to forget the danger. But when one bull went on the ﬁght, Grant, one of the regular hands, was just a second too slow swarming up the corral fence. Hooking at him and leaping to get higher, the bull barely caught one horn around Grant’s lower leg and ﬂipped all six feet of him end-for-end high into the dusty air. Grant hit ﬂat, momentarily immobilized by lack of air, and the bull twisted around to drop his massive head into Grant’s back, so as to grind the life out of him. At the very last second, another hand jangled his tin-can pole right beside Grant and the bull mistook his target, smashing the cans. By that time, Grant was rolling and three other hands were down on the ground to boost him up the fence while two more stood guard with their ax-handles. No bones were broken, but Grant had a little trouble getting his blood to circulate for a few minutes. The bull stood drawn up into an arch, every muscle bunched into a ridge. His shining black nose wrinkled up high, and the slobber ran from his purple mouth in long silver strings. Warily wheeling in circles, he threw sheets of dirt up behind him. His great swinging belly tassel vented acrid urine into the dust. Everything stopped while we all gazed at his huge frustrated male power and wondered if he would demolish the two-by-twelve fences. It had happened before. We were relieved not to be out on the open prairie with him, as the Blackfeet must have been. Long before the Plains Indians were a horse people they were a buﬀalo people. The most sacred ceremony of all, the Horn Society, is in two parts. The men’s part is about virility – bison bulls. The women’s part is about birth – bison cows producing calves. These natural events shape the dances, songs, V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E

97

Annual October Bison Roundup at the Moiese National Bison Range. Bob is second from left (1963). Photo: Mary Scriver.

Bob Scriver and Ace Powell at the Moiese National Bison range, 1962. Photo: C.J. Henry. 98

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

and pantomimed actions of what might otherwise seem arbitrary. That’s why it’s so important to get everything exactly right. The ceremony is meant to touch by imitation whatever forces create a viable population of healthy bison, because they are the source of everything. To blunder, to quarrel, to balk, might mean that no buﬀalo would return. And eventually none did, until modern times when tribes pride themselves on their herds. The Moiese buﬀs didn’t have to be run over cliﬀs, nor was there any relevant ceremony except prayer for one’s personal safety. No need to hurry. Before this old bull was pushed on through the chutes, he was left to settle for a while. We walked around a bit and talked quietly. Many took photos. Grant was checked out and found whole. Then work resumed. When the animals not diverted for sale or slaughter came out the end of the chutes, they most often came “stotting,” a strange bouncing-on-all-four-feet way of going along. They calmed quickly and began to graze their way back out into the open ﬁelds, looking peaceful and approachable. We knew better. Lying along the fence, I took a series of photos, safe only as long as I held perfectly still. A telephoto would have been smarter but I didn’t have one. When it was time to butcher the animals that had been separated, Bob was invited to go back so he could measure them. I didn’t go because of teaching. When he created his bronze called Real Meat, each of the animals was based on one of the animals whose carcass he had crawled all over, sketching and measuring. In fact, they let him shoot one of the bulls. As directed, when it had been run into a tight chute, he put the riﬂe right in the ear of the animal, and pulled the trigger. In spite of the roar and impact, the bull reared up and fought for a few minutes before dying. Afterwards, still a bit shocked, Bob told me, “He fought for his life to the very end. I’m ashamed.” Its huge vitality made him yearn for the days of unlimited herds on an unlimited prairie where a dead buﬀalo had more dignity. The next year we went back. The day of the drive a cloud came down to the ground and everything was shrouded in fog. We could only tell where the buﬀalo were because of their feet swishing the balsamroot. It was like a ghost roundup. We hardly dared separate more than a few feet because we lost sight of each other. Mr. Henry retired, and the new manager refused to let outside horses participate for fear of equine sleeping sickness. Bob went once after that and rode “Cactus,” a tall Appaloosa, but for him the fun was riding Gunnysack (Gunsmoke). The ﬁrst time Bob had gone, people had turned up their noses at the little white horse and assigned Bob to ride with Ernie Kraft, a Refuge employee, who was supposed to keep him out of trouble. At one point Ernie went hell-bent-for-leather up a steep hill, paused at the top and looked back to see how far up Bob had gotten – Bob loved to act out how Ernie was baﬄed to see no one coming up the hill and then did a double-take when he realized Bob was right beside him. V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E

99

That ﬁrst time, Bob had been charged by a bull down in a coulee and Gunnysack had narrowly saved himself and his rider by going nearly straight up the coulee wall. The way Bob told it, the whole thing was research to see whether Blackfeet could actually have killed buﬀalo with bow and arrow from the back of a horse. His conclusion was, “Hell, yes!” The last time we rode, we watched the sold buﬀalo going away in the backs of trucks and U-Haul trailers – tarped to make them dark to keep the buﬀalo quiet – and felt that nearly constant sense of ending, loss, disintegration that is part of being a Westerner. We didn’t have quite the overwhelming sense of the whole planet being dirtied and diminished that eats at us now. Nor did we have any consciousness that there were ways of ﬁghting back, of turning the tide by changing ourselves. We felt that to be changed was to join the lost, the ones who gave up, the weak. News from the cities was scary. And then one snowy November afternoon Bob was sitting in a café for lunch when someone came in breathlessly shouting, “Kennedy has been shot!” Someone asked, “Oh, yeah? Which Kennedy?” The Kennedy clan on the reservation was a big one and they weren’t exactly mildmannered. It took a while for the messenger to make everyone understand that he meant the President of the United States. When the principal announced the assassination over the school P.A. system, I was talking to a student, Ed Kennedy, just before the afternoon classes began. I’ve forgotten what we said, but the wood-patterned formica of the desk in front of me became imprinted on my brain. “This is history,” I thought. “And maybe the right-wingers are right – maybe the world as we know it is ending.” In a reservation town with a shocking death rate from disease, violence, and drunk-driving, far enough to the north that blizzards raked us all winter, and dry enough that a few inches of rainfall meant the diﬀerence between grass and drought, it was easy to despair.

4. Organic armatures: skeletons

Bynum, Sun River, Moiese, Starr School, mid-Sixties

Since childhood Bob had been interested in skeletons, their graceful shapes and clever joints. As a boy he had boiled out a rabbit and wired its bones back together, then set it proudly on the bureau in the room he shared with his brother. Now he was thinking about getting a human skeleton and I could only hope he didn’t intend to go collect one locally, particularly one still in use by its “wearer.” He spotted an ad in the newspaper. A human skeleton was for sale in Bynum. It was historical, a skeleton that had been found on the prairie with a metal arrowhead in its hip bone. It had been reassembled by some doctor long 100

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

ago and was being exhibited in a glass-fronted case at the Trexler rock shop. Trexler’s widow, who eventually became Marion Brandvold, the original ﬁnder of dinosaur eggs, was selling it to meet an unexpected expense. We stood in her rock shop late at night, while her son David showed us the two bummer lambs they had brought inside to raise. Probably there were unrecognized stone baby dinosaur bones in the pails of rocks around our feet. Marion is a remarkable woman, a person of force and charisma who grew up there in Bynum. In advanced age she somehow manages to be sexy even when she has failed to get around to dyeing her hair black long enough that the part shows an inch of silver on each side. I never forgot her after that night and still stop to visit. We didn’t buy the skeleton. It went to the tourist village in Choteau while Marion developed a larger fossil shop in an old Bynum church with purple and turquoise dinosaurs painted on it by John Brandvold, her second husband. Her son became a professional paleontologist who conducts tours. But now Bob was obsessed with the idea that he should get a skeleton of a man and a skeleton of a horse. He would get a six-foot man to make it easy to use the inch-to-a-foot scale, but a life-size horse would be too big, so we would look for a Pony of America skeleton. That would be far more convenient since they weren’t much bigger than the largest dogs. It turned out to be easy enough to order a human skeleton from a biological materials catalog we borrowed from the high school. But we were a little stumped as to how to go about acquiring the horse skeleton. It would be too expensive to buy a live horse – and we’d have to wait for it to die, since none of us would be willing to kill it for its skeleton. Finally we discovered that there were some Pony of America breeders down by Great Falls. But we never got farther than, “We’re looking for a Pony of America horse skeleton...” before they’d slam the door on us, yelling, “You monsters! Don’t come around here! We don’t kill our horses!” Finally we found one person who recognized Bob as a sculptor and listened to the end. It just happened that they’d had a stallion that had died from a twisted gut – which meant that the skeleton would be intact. They’d hauled it out to a ﬁeld and dumped a truckload of sand on it, so it would be easy to get at – it wasn’t in a hole in the ground or in a carrion heap. It had been a very valuable stallion. It took us a while to convince them that probably the skeleton was NOT so valuable as the living horse. But we ﬁnally reached an agreement. We looked around for people who wouldn’t mind digging up a dead horse. Blackie No Runner claimed he was pretty tough and would be able to do such a job. When we got there, the sand seemed clean and quiet. It wasn’t until we got down to the former horse that we hit the bad stuﬀ. Blackie began to throw up and he pretty much spent the next few hours retching in some bushes oﬀ to the side, while Bob and I dug out the horse bones. We got everything except the very last two bones of the tail. No one had the time or motivation to assemble the bones, so eventually Bob inquired of a scientiﬁc supplies outﬁt the cost of

V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E

101

wiring them together on a stand. The estimate on April 17, 1970, was $1,680. I’ve forgotten what we paid for the bones – a few hundred dollars. But then the skeleton of the man didn’t come. Month after month with no skeleton. We called the company and they explained that they got their bodies from India – poor people who died in the street and had no family. But those people were small, normally, so they had been waiting for someone six feet tall to die. We decided to compromise and asked for the biggest skeleton they had. It came. We sat – all of us, including the skeleton – and pondered. This was all that remained of someone in India, so poor that his bones were sold, so unknown that no one cared. When that really got through to us, we sent it back. Very slowly, our consciousnesses were being raised. The biological supply people asked if we would like a plastic six-foot skeleton, since someone somewhere had once made molds for plastic replicas of some Norwegian of that height. We agreed. When he arrived, he was beautifully clean and non-human. This was especially clear when looking at his jawfull of ﬂawless plastic teeth, which was spring-loaded to stay clamped shut unless someone pulled it open. The real skeleton had had woefully bad teeth. The skeleton became a sort of character in our lives. We left him loaﬁng on the sofa or with his legs crossed in a rocking chair. He leaned over a chess set or a bowl of soup – well, an empty bowl with a spoon in his hand. When Halloween came, I put hair chaps on him, stood him in the window holding back the drapes with his bony hands, rigged blue Christmas tree lights in his eyes, put a six-shooter in each hip-bone hole and – for a ﬁnal ﬂourish – clamped a Bowie knife in his jaws. I was looking forward to seeing what eﬀect all this had on the trick-or-treat crowd, but no one knocked on the door. We could hear the cars and pickups slow down, stop, and then suddenly step on the gas – in a hurry to get out of there. We had to eat leftover candy for days. When Lane, Bob’s six-year-old grandson, came for the summer, we made him a bed in what we called “the Indian room” because of the artifacts on the walls. The skeleton hung in there under his muslin cover. We pumped up an air mattress and spread out a sleeping bag, and thought the boy would be comfortable. He thought so, too. We left the hall light on. But we hadn’t considered the skeleton’s bony toes hanging out the bottom of his cover. Lane rolled over in the semi-dark and there, at the level of his face were THOSE TOES. I was sound asleep when I felt a small ﬁnger prodding my shoulder. “Mary, can I sleep in here with you and Grandpa? That skellington is just TOO MUCH.” He slept in the middle and made no trouble at all. One of my favorite Blackfeet ghost stories is in Walter McClintock’s The Old North Trail. Bob said his dad knew McClintock, who came at the turn of the century as a scientist making a survey and took excellent notes as well as photos. In fact, he lived with an Indian family for quite a while and returned annually with gifts. In this ghost story, a Blackfeet man camps alone for the night in a grove of trees. He sits for a while by his ﬁre and along comes someone 102

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The skeleton earns his keep by posing for a cowboy sculpture, “Saturday Night in Cowtown” (1960s). Photo: Mary Scriver.

else, wrapped up in a blanket. The man asks to share the ﬁre and, of course, the traveler agrees. But pretty soon the guest stretches out his toes toward his host and his toes are long and bony. He won’t keep them to himself. Finally the traveler, losing his temper, takes a piece of ﬁrewood and smashes the man’s feet and legs. Then he has enough peace to sleep. The next morning he sees that he has camped by a tree with a burial up in its branches – and the feet of the burial are smashed. The absolutely real ghost story of the Blackfeet is Ghost Ridge, which is on the turnoﬀ from Highway 89 to Heart Butte along Little Badger where the Old Agency used to be. In the Starvation Winter a combination of smallpox and no buﬀalo – plus none of the supplies promised by the U.S. government in payment for the reservation – killed as many as six hundred people. All this V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E

103

lethal winter the people, as they died, were taken up to the top of the highest ridge and stacked. When spring came, the bodies had pretty well freeze-dried, but they had leaked nutrients into the ground so that vegetation grew up around them and then dust blew in and piled up. We never understood what happened after that, until someone told me that he was driving the ambulance once with Vinie Chattin in it. At that time she was a sick old lady being taken to Great Falls for treatment, so she was supposed to lie down in the back, but she wanted to ride up in the front to see everything. Red-headed Vinie never wanted to miss anything. The driver stopped close to Old Agency, where no one could see, and let her move up to the front. Her father had been the Indian agent in the years after the Starvation Winter. She said that he had sent a crew out to burn oﬀ the top of the ridge – the vegetation, the bones and whatever wrappings were left. At some point thirty-seven skeletons were removed and sent to the Smithsonian. They were repatriated in 1991. The sanitation people wanted bodies buried and gradually converted people to using cemeteries – with some exceptions. A few people felt it was too repellent to put their loved ones in the dark ground, so they built small houses and piled the coﬃns into them. One of these frail weathered mausoleums was on Bird Earrings’ place near Starr School. When Bob was a boy, he rode up that way on Banjo and was about to investigate the rough little cabin when a shot rang and buzzed by his head. He was not wanted and he left. In the Sixties, when the Egyptologist Keith Seele was visiting, he asked to see that burial house. We took him there and looked at the people in their broken-open coﬃns. All their heads were gone, taken as souvenirs. One woman had a small child in her arms, but the baby had no head either. Dr. Seele wanted to look more closely at a bracelet on a woman’s arm, and since it had become detached, he simply took it out into the sun. We snapped a photo, then put it back where it belonged. Just then a coat hanging on a nail by the door began to move. There was a frozen moment until a mouse jumped out of the pocket. We left. Dr. Seele was used to handling dead people – he was in charge of the excavations made when the Aswan Dam was going to ﬂood a whole valley and he found in the graves several remarkable objects (for instance, a mirror that was a dancing woman holding up the round polished disk). But still I wonder at us. We ought to have understood that these people had died recently enough to be the parents and grandparents of living people we knew. We were infected by that strange conviction that dead white people are diﬀerent from dead Indian people, who are objects of scientiﬁc and then idle curiosity. We knew those heads ended up in bars or in some man’s study, like the heads of stuﬀed animals. It was like an evil spell, one that makes contemporary Indian people desperate with rage and sorrow, because it still clings to and blinds white people. There is another story about dead people. A small Indian boy came into the shop and said he had found bodies, that he was afraid of them, and that Judge 104

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Scriver should do something about it. (Bob also acted as coroner sometimes.) With the small boy riding in the back of the pickup, we went to see. The boy said he didn’t want to go near the place, so he would jump out when we got close. When we got near, he pounded on the top of the pickup cab to stop us. It was Starr School again, a grove of evergreen trees not far from the burial house. Walking into the gloom, we had to wait for our eyes to adjust from the afternoon sun. This time we found two very small tree burials that had been wedged into the forks of evergreen trees until the wind had sprung them out. Fallen to the ground were the bodies of babies. The small boxes they had been in were crushed except for a few boards that stayed up somehow – perhaps nailed. The bodies had freeze-dried, which made them light and porous, and they were in pieces, either from the tree smashing the boxes or because dogs had been at them. We left them as they were and went back to town to call the coroner. We never did ﬁnd out what their story was, and it’s just as well that we didn’t. When the coroner went out to take care of those tiny bodies, he also cleared out the burial house and burned it down.

5. Broken rib cage

Browning, 1965

Early in the summer morning Bob came for me so we could go riding. He wanted to take the edge oﬀ Playboy, who was usually the company horse because of his easy gait, so we caught the horses with oats in the Trombley ﬁeld where they were living and saddled up. A small creek crossed the ﬁeld with a trail worn down to the rather deep water and back up the other side. Bob led the way but as soon as he got into the water, Playboy exploded. Even with water up to his belly he was rising into the air, twisting, and hitting again in sheets of creek water. In a few seconds he was across the creek, bounced oﬀ alternating sides of the trail-cut, and ﬁnally knocked Bob oﬀ so that he lit on the worn trail on his chest, a shoulder on each raised side, and burst the cartilage of his rib-cage sternum. I thought he’d been killed. Playboy went galloping oﬀ, carefully holding his reins over to the side so he wouldn’t step on them. When I knelt beside Bob, he would only repeat over and over, “Get me the riﬂe from the pickup. I’m gonna kill that sunnavabitch.” He could hardly stand up, but managed to get one foot in my stirrup and bend over the saddle so I could get him back to the pickup. I stripped Zuke and let him go, then got behind the steering wheel. “We’re going to the Indian hospital,” I said. “No, no! Not the hospital! I refuse to go to the hospital!”

V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E

105

“Either we’re going to the hospital, or I’m going straight to the nearest bar and announce that you can’t stay on your horse.” He shut up. I went to Emergency at the Indian Health Service. A young doctor came to look and went away to get a hypo. “Don’t give him morphine,” I said. “He’s allergic to morphine.” The doctor looked at me and gave Bob the hypo of morphine, which caused him to melt. We ended up on the ﬂoor with his head on my shoulder, his chest curled over, me kneeling. A nurse came in with a big roll of adhesive tape, took oﬀ his shirt, and wrapped his chest from armpits to waist with layers of the stuﬀ. She didn’t shave him or put on a layer of gauze ﬁrst. Never needed to with hairless Indians – but Bob had a true pelt. Then she helped me get him back into the pickup while he raved incoherently. Luckily, the men were already at the shop and Carl had the idea of supporting Bob’s back with a piece of plywood. We eased him into bed and he was unconscious for the rest of that day. The next day he discovered that even wrapped in tape, having one’s sternum broken is the most painful of injuries, partly because every toe wiggle and head turn is connected. It took longer to heal than if he had broken a bone. Every morning Carl and the others slowly sat him up with the plywood and every night I struggled to lean him down. Removing the tape was an ordeal I didn’t witness, thank goodness. One of the crew drove him to Cut Bank and I could almost hear him screaming forty miles away when the nurses, their jaws set, cut and ripped oﬀ tape with hair attached. Once it stopped hurting, Bob was interested in how hairless he was for the ﬁrst time since childhood. In adolescence he had been so upset by the growing-in fur that his mother had paid for electrolysis, but after one square inch had been cleared, he decided it was too painful. I used to look for that square inch. After that when we rode (including the bison roundup that fall), I rewrapped him according to his directions (a layer of gauze ﬁrst), with a pair of crossed sticks at his back to keep his sternum from being stretched. Pretty soon he went to the saddlemaker and got him to create a hybrid between a belt and a corset that he could buckle up the front. He wore it often over the rest of his years. I wonder if it was buried with him. Every morning in Bob’s little studio home we opened the drapes and stood looking at the mountains for a while. In the Sixties they were full of snow all winter every winter. The sun painted them peach and indigo, shifting all day as the sun moved through a clear sky. The Backbone of the World, an armature of the land, controlled everything. It was our weather maker, our water keeper. These uprisings of rock, which result in the tumbling and over-sliding of gigantic slabs of continent, are easy to interpret because they are sedimentary layers created by ancient oceans and winds. “We can understand it,” say the geologists, “But only afterwards. We can’t predict much and certainly we can’t hope to control what happens.” They say that the prairie grasses evolved after the Rocky Mountains created the high plains. 106

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

VI Waste Mold: Shards on the Table

1. Waste molds, made for destruction The plaster waste mold is the one made directly against the plastilene. When the plastilene is picked out, the space is ﬁlled with a harder plaster positive (called by its trade name, Hydrocal™), and then the soft plaster is sacriﬁced – chipped oﬀ in bits. Chiseling oﬀ the softer plaster from the hard Hydrocal™ casting takes skill, conﬁdence, and concentration: even the best craftsmen will do a little damage to the casting unless they have good luck. The crucial skill is the ability to see both the positive shape of the ﬁgure and the negative shape that ﬁgure makes in the mold. The management of that inﬁnitesimal interface with parting compounds and one’s mental map of where the surface goes in or out – how ﬁgure and mold pull on each other – is the key to creating molded ﬁgures. The principle of the whole sequence of processes in lost wax casting is transformation without loss. This is an idea worth pondering, even as one acts on it. First look at the plastilene ﬁgure from all sides. Sit quietly and turn it slowly, imagining cross-sections, noticing undercuts, planning strategy. What is now a positive clay form, soft and malleable, must be converted to a negative plaster imprint, rigid and permanent. How will the plaster pull at the clay when it is removed? Will the clay give way as it should? Or will it break a piece out of the plaster? Can the divisions between plaster sections be planned to eliminate the trouble? Hasty judgments are a mistake. Experience is a great help. An eye for three dimensions. An engineer’s appreciation of stresses and strengths. Animals with long slender legs always present major problems. The miniature animals for the dioramas were remarkably diﬀerent from all the smooth little trinket animals Bob had previously made. They were supple, suggestive, alive, full of individual personality and made with a slightly rougher, 107

Making the ﬁrst waste mold of “An Honest Try,” 1968. Photo: Mary Scriver.

less ﬁnished technique. As soon as one of them was complete in plastilene, they had to be converted into hard Hydrocal™. The highest point of the little diorama animal was often something delicate: a furl of ear, a ﬂare of tail. (The horns were simply removed to be cast in latex and added back later.) In a cigar box were hundreds of bits of keystone-shaped brass, thin as paper. These had to be inserted, oh-so-carefully, into the animal, often right down from the ear and through the side of the face, like a scalpel being sunk into ﬂesh, a razor slashing but the razor remaining in place. The next shim went in, barely overlapping or just touching the ﬁrst, and then the third, until there was a little fence going down the neck and the breast and the leg to the bit of plate glass on which it rested. Another row of shims had to meet this fence at the top and then proceed down its own course, until the two dividing lines had marked oﬀ a section to be covered with plaster mold. Since these diorama models were so small, the work demanded considerable manual dexterity. 108

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Mix batches of plaster in the old margarine tubs and plastic bowls that wander about the shop. First break the old hardened plaster out by crushing the bowl in one’s hands or against the table. Like china, it rings, shatters, and falls in shards into the garbage can (for careful workers) or onto the ﬂoor (for those in a hurry – like Bob). Put water of a certain temperature in the bowl. Too hot makes the plaster set too quickly and too cold makes the plaster set up too slowly. Gypsum, or calcium sulphate, which is what plaster really is, belongs to a family of minerals that are held together with chemical bonds. They can be particle-ized by grinding and baking, but the broken chemical bonds are reactivated by the addition of water. Water temperature aﬀects the speed of the reaction. If the plaster has been stored out in a cold shed in the winter, warmer water is helpful. If the work is going to be tricky and demand time, cold water is a good idea. For the rigid mold around a clay model, add laundry bluing to the water (to distinguish the mold from the model later in the process) and use ordinary soft plaster. The key to mixing plaster is putting the plaster into the water and not the other way around. Carry the powder in a can or jar, if that’s handy, or simply cup a hand directly into the torn-open sack. Then, as in sifting ﬂour, rain the powdered plaster into the water gradually until a volcano arises in the middle, slowly absorbing the white powder and turning a delicious soft blue almost impossible to ﬁnd in paint or cloth. When the summit of the volcano develops cracks and faults, like a miniature geological demonstration, stop pouring plaster and pitch the rest of the handful back in the sack. This is a key point in the process to be learned only by experience – the whole thing is experience. Next come a few moments of respite. Lay out a small cheap paintbrush, the kind meant for painting trim. In a minute, slide one hand to the bottom of the plaster/volcano, if the container is big enough. It is vital not to make bubbles, and a brush tends to make bubbles. The idea is to agitate, not stir, to let the water gradually touch every particle of powder. Again there is standing around. Bob uses the time for a bit of housekeeping or making a last-minute inspection of the shim-insertions, testing to make sure the pressure of plaster won’t knock them out. This is a bad time for the phone to ring or for someone to drop by. Soon, what had been a skim milk solution begins to transform in the way that a sauce or cooked pudding begins to change with heat. The mixture becomes like cream and coats whatever it touches. Put the little brush to work painting plaster onto the animal – only in the section partitioned by shims – so that plaster is poked into every little crevice, swizzled up its nose, urged into every bit of detail, rudely hustled up between legs, always trying to make sure plaster goes everywhere but without making bubbles. One how-to book advises, “Enough force must be used to make sure that [plaster] penetrates the smallest anfractuosities.”1 (Little sinuous twistings and turnings.) Some people throw the plaster at the clay. Then the mixture passes into another phase, stiﬀening like whipped cream. Gravity can no longer pull all the creamy stuﬀ back oﬀ, for it smooths now, like butter frosting. Put aside the brush and pick up an artist’s spatula – or maybe even a V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E

109

cook’s spatula. With dexterous wrists and a light-ﬁngered grip on the tool – and with consciousness of the underlying shape of the ﬁgure so as to keep a consistent thickness of plaster over it and not let some part poke through a thin place – smooth it, like frosting a cake. Very little time is left, and then – abruptly – it is all over. The plaster is set up and beginning the molecular bonding that will make it into stone. Avoid teasing at the job any more. Do other work. Make a phone call. Even go for a coﬀee break. Be sure to wash your hands in a bucket of water rather than the sink – plaster will plug the drains so completely that it will be necessary to jackhammer up the main sewer and replace all the piping. The little paintbrush is clogged with set-up plaster. It takes a hammer to re-powder the plaster and free the bristles. If you touch the blue plaster between the shims, it is hot, reacting. Return after the plaster is cool. Delicately, take out the shims. Scrape the smudged and stained brass with a sculptor’s knife until it gleams like gold among the bits of heavenly blue plaster on the table. The shims must come out straight, perpendicular to the model’s surface, so that the razor-cut in it can be healed with a bit of light pressing. Cleaned, the shims go back into the cigar box, ready for next time. They’re tedious to make and shim-stock sheet brass isn’t always easy to get. Removal of the shims reveals a smooth, thick edge. A bit of trimming with a steel hook tool with rough teeth on the edge will knock oﬀ peaks and ﬂat ﬁns of plaster. Then make dents with a small hook tool along the surface where the shims have touched – these will be the keys to ensuring that the other sections ﬁt back where they belong. Paint it with a parting compound. Much of sculpture work is the art of choosing a parting compound, for it is parting compounds that keep one substance from sticking to another so that molds may be made in pieces and castings may be removed from molds. For plaster, the parting compound is a coating of shellac cut half-and-half with alcohol, and then another coating of soap. A strange substance called “waterless hand soap” is sold to auto mechanic shops, and works admirably to keep almost anything from sticking to anything. When that is dry, do the next section of the mold. Another margarine tub of water, another sifting of plaster, the violently cleaned paintbrush, the tabletop cleared oﬀ, and the whole process repeats. Another interval. Bob goes out back to see if the horses need anything or maybe takes a moment to smoke a cigarette and check orders. In a mold for a simple animal, two halves might be all that is needed, especially if the animal is lying down so that legs didn’t make trouble. The mold is soon ready to open. Scrape the hook tool along the division line on the outside shell until the soaking-in of the alcohol/shellac mixture (perhaps darkened with a bit of alcohol-based leather dye) is apparent. It will be a hairline, a tiny fracture in the blue with a faint stain alongside. The knife tool is held along the line, its thin wedge ready to enter, and one raps on the back of the knife with a light hammer – oh, so lightly. Then again. Again. Is the thread of a line widening just a bit? Another rap. Gradually, the two parts of the mold separate. Pull them apart, like an avocado with a plastilene pit, or maybe use the knife-tool to apply a bit of leverage. Avoid 110

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

gouges along the edge of the divisions: the ﬁt must be tight enough to hold water later. When the mold comes in half, the little plastilene animal inside is pulled apart, removed from its little blue womb the way a stillborn calf is sometimes dismembered for removal from a cow. Sometimes it is only twisted and deformed a bit, but usually it is destroyed enough to be cleaned and wadded back into a lump. Carefully scrutinize the new mold. Did bits break oﬀ and remain in the clay? Did bubbles form? Did detail remain without blurring? Bits of clay remain here and there and must be removed carefully, sometimes with a tool so small as a dental pick or even a large needle.

2. Dick Flood

The northern prairie, Fifties and Sixties

A culture, especially in a small town, can be a hard mold, forcing compliance with local custom. But always there are fault lines, boundaries visible and invisible, where the local norms are susceptible to being broken open. If much of that happens, through a shift in population or economic circumstances or even weather patterns, “what is done” can be reduced to rubble, but the people shaped by local custom can remain resistant for a while. When the Sixties ﬁnally got to Browning – so late it was really the Seventies – the eﬀects were subtle at ﬁrst and then sweeping. Things happened that seemed so trivial that no one would put them in a biography, and yet they often were part of our lives in a deep way, down among the assumptions and adaptations of everyday life. Their power to explain is strong if one is careful to look at them. One of the most shrewd visitors in the Fifties and early Sixties was Dick Flood, who sold leather goods and supplies. He was one of a pack of art scouts all through the West, the only one to come so far north. We kidded that he “started on a shoestring” and indeed he did sell leather laces as well as dye and so on. Going up and down the Rockies, Flood had realized early that the art scene in the Southwest would eventually spread up into Montana, and he intended to be ready. He was one of Ace Powell’s patrons, but mostly he watched for minor Russell works, which still turned up in attics or some old ranch parlor. It was still possible to buy a used book, shake it out, and ﬁnd an original Russell sketch worth a lot of money. Everyone dreamed about it, and Flood often found bits and pieces, sometimes things that “could be” Russells or were surely “unsigned” Russells. There were a few other sculptors – like John Clarke or Les Kauba or Earl Heikka – for whose work he watched. Flood, and Ace as well, urged Bob over and over to “loosen up,” so his work would look more like Russell’s. Bob was still making hair patterns in ﬁne lines V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E

111

and smoothing out the ridges scraped by his tools. He was told his work looked too much like Remington, who was considered Eastern and not quite one of the boys like Russell. “Looseness” was one of the few artistic qualities most people could distinguish, all they knew about the treatment of surfaces. One day Flood came in with a Russell bear he had bought. “This is the most fabulous bear ever made,” he said. “Just look at how wonderful it is. NO ONE else could make a bear as good as this one.” And he looked at Bob signiﬁcantly. That was at lunch. Flood took his bear and went oﬀ to make his salesman’s rounds. Bob, aggravated by Flood’s tone (as was probably intended), grabbed some plastilene and began to model. In a short time he had a bear exactly like the Russell bear. At supper he ﬂaunted it in front of Dick, “NO ONE, huh? How do you like this bear?” Flood liked it. “How much?” Bob took the bear out of Flood’s hands and began to twist it. “Russell wasn’t so very damn terriﬁc! The nose is too big, the gait is wrong….” He made corrections to suit his own notion, while Flood blanched and could hardly keep from grabbing at it to prevent the changes. “Now, THIS is a good bear!” “How much?” “I won’t sell it to you.” Bob enjoyed teasing such operators as much as Picasso did by drawing in wet sand when the tide was coming in or drawing in the dust on dealers’ cars when he knew the drive back to town would destroy the picture. On the Prowl, that little bear, eventually sold many castings but not to Flood. Once an illegal casting of it turned up at the Montana Historical Society and when Bob protested, the director had someone with a welding torch burn holes in it, which made it more valuable than it was originally because now it was unique and had a story. In 1962 Flood was visiting when the ﬁrst real Scriver bronzes came back from Mendota Foundry, a little backyard artist’s operation in St. Paul, Minnesota. We didn’t know much about the artist, Richard Randell, except that he was not representational (so we ﬁgured he wasn’t likely to copy or steal) and he was said to have the technical part of casting down pat. His price was right. Bob’s biggest worry was somehow being cheated, accepting second-rate castings. We had read that the word “sincere” comes from the Italian, sine ciré, which means “without wax.” The phrase refers to patching bits of bad metal, or even rather large holes, with wax to disguise them instead of repairing them by welding. Bob pulled his gooseneck lamp down to focus on the bronzes and the three of us went over each one looking for ﬂaws and wax. We found them: a pinhole here, a bit of porous metal there, a surface not quite right somewhere else – in total innocence that a bronze that didn’t have such anomalies would be like an apple with no ﬂaws: unreal. The next day we typed out a list of all these “problems” and sent them oﬀ to Randell. It was years before we understood his reaction, half-exasperated and half-amused. Then we realized that Flood hadn’t known any more than we did; 112

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

in fact, maybe he had never looked at a bronze that closely before. From then on he did. When Flood retired from the shoestring business, he built Trailside Galleries in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which expanded into a branch in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Eventually, it went out of Flood’s hands, but for a while he was a key to the entire ﬁeld of northern plains Western art. His name is on many items at the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, including a casting of the Russell bear in question. Many of them were never meant to be bronze: the head oﬀ a walking stick, a tiny diorama, or a novelty. One wonders if Charlie would want them cast, since the process often damaged their charm. Flood bought them from Joe DeYong when the latter had aged and fallen on hard times.

3. Ace Powell

Hungry Horse and Browning, 1928–1976

When we sold something, it was usually to someone who had accidentally come into the museum, gotten interested, maybe went out to help feed the horse or play with the bobcat, possibly stayed for a picnic on the prairie – then produced a chequebook or asked about time payments. In those early years they weren’t buying to invest or to be big shots – they just loved the sculpture and wanted to be part of a kind of family. Hydrocal™ castings cost one-tenth as much as bronzes, which put them within reach for local folks. (Shirley Welch, a rancher, bought the ﬁrst bronze Bob sold – a casting of Lone Cowboy.) At that point Bob’s philosophy was that he was a “people’s sculptor.” But it was rather like his original taxidermy strategy, which cost him so much money because he wasn’t taking into account an intangible that might be called his “energy overhead.” After he had worked in the foundry or shop all day, and sat up late with potential customers, where was the creative energy? A person with less stamina would have crumpled much sooner. Late in life he ﬁnally did choose a few galleries. One day Ace Powell himself showed up, an unmistakable character. Ace knew that stories sell art, and he had a yarn for every painting or sculpture. Some of Ace’s art looked suspiciously Russell-esque, but once in a while he turned out something tenderly moving and authentic. Anyway, no one could resist his big ravaged face under a John Birch crewcut (though he resigned from the John Birch Society as soon as he discovered they charged women half-price for membership – “I can’t stand discrimination,” he snorted). A cigarette always dangled between his ring and little ﬁngers when it wasn’t tucked into his big lips and making him squint – this man knew how to present an image.

V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E

113

But it wasn’t an image – it was really him. Every moment that he was awake, drunk or sober, his worn-out whispery voice philosophized and theorized and soliloquized and otherwise provided a cowboy voice-over of ideas. You could pay attention for a while, wander oﬀ to do something else, and come back again, all without him slowing down or stopping. His ﬁrst wife had been Russian, well-educated and dynamic, one of those exceptional women who sometimes came to Glacier Park for a vacation and ended up joining a cowboy guide’s remuda. He listened to her even after he lost her. Artists’ wives seemed to either stay the rest of their lives, becoming part of the legend, or leave after a few years, exhausted and lonely. This Russian wife taught Ace a world-view and a set of principles in startling contrast to his rugged appearance. He shared what he knew with Bob. The two men were so close that if one of them was expecting a divorce or lawsuit, they would arrange to have the other one hold their property for them until it was safe to be prosperous again. Or so they claimed – I never saw it happen. Ace didn’t believe in money. “Barter, that’s the thing!” His wife when I ﬁrst knew him was Nancy McLaughlin, half his age and an artist herself. She believed in Ace. When she had each of her three babies she spent the recuperation time after the birth lying in her hospital bed drawing Indian portraits in pastel on velour paper in order to pay the bill. Three or four days of bed rest were traditional then and Nancy had asthma that always complicated physical exertion, so she generally created a pretty good pile of drawings. Of course, there wasn’t any money anyhow, so trade it had to be. (Her son, David Powell, is an artist like his dad, though he also makes good money as a period advisor for movies. His wife Sasha is also Russian, and their son looks much like Ace, nose and all, except small and tender as a new pea.) Ace used to joke, “Well, I got Nancy a good present this Christmas: a lantern so she can see to chop wood. I may even go out there and hold it up for her.” The truth was that Ace was more frail than Nancy. Alcoholism had nearly destroyed his liver and emphysema was dragging at his heart. Mostly he lived on cigarettes, black coﬀee, and ideas. And all too often, booze. One afternoon Ace came through alone, an unusual occurrence. After supper I was invited to go along with Ace as passenger to his studio at Hungry Horse in order to meet his family. Nancy would bring me back in a day or so, or I could get on the train. I’d been tired and crabby, so Bob urged me to go. I didn’t understand that Ace had been drinking, was late getting home and therefore in disgrace, and was afraid he would fall asleep at the wheel unless he had someone to talk to. Even if I had understood, I would have gone. In the car on the dark mountain road across the pass, Ace talked theatre to please me, while managing the twisting road and an endless chain of cigarettes. The Powells’ gallery at that time was an old storefront on the highway, beautifully renovated and furnished with a mix of Navajo blankets, Paciﬁc Northwest Indian chests and masks, graceful Windsor chairs made by George 114

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Montgomery, and the paintings of both Ace and Nancy. Nancy unfolded a bedchair for me right in the gallery. I lay for a long time smelling cedar wood and oil paint, watching the moon cruise among the tops of ﬁrs and larches along the highway. I thought, “Artists live so beautifully!” Based on my theatre experience, I believed that all artists created around themselves a community where they could explore ideas and support each other. Next morning the girls and Nancy came to sit on my feet and do their long blonde hair for the day. I sipped coﬀee and answered questions and admired what the sunlight spilling through the gallery did for the colors of the paintings. Nancy drove me home. I took all this to be the artist’s life: easy camaraderie, colorful surroundings, a gypsy schedule. Nancy and Bob went oﬀ for a private conference but I hardly noticed. No doubt Nancy was desperately afraid that Ace would die. Divorce was inconceivable at that point. Sometime, maybe six months after I’d met Bob, he said to me, “You haven’t even noticed.” “Noticed what?” “I quit smoking.” He’d decided that “those little white cylinders” were bossing him around and quit as an act of deﬁance. For quite a while he carried the pack of Camels in his pocket to show they had no power over him. Until he told me, I really had not noticed – he never said a word about whatever struggle it cost him. Nor did he say anything about what motivated it. Now, my guess is that he had early heart symptoms and quit smoking because he was afraid of dying. But to me his death was inconceivable. He was just turning the corner on ﬁfty. Ace was two years older. Nancy and I, young wives, stood as bulwarks against aging. It was the middle of winter when someone called to tell us that Ace’s gallery had burned. We left immediately after work, driving on ice, and arrived in the dark. All that was left was a metal shower stall, sticking up in the middle of a charred foundation. This was a new gallery, back from the highway, and they hadn’t lived there long. Ace and Nancy had just returned from Michigan where they’d had a very successful show. Ace always tried to barter or to convert money immediately into precious objects, so their proﬁt had been in carved jade beads, Victorian solid silver ﬂatware, ﬁne saddles and furniture, and so on. The jade had turned from green to white and the string had burned from within the beads. The ﬂatware was a solid silver puddle. Ace had gotten a couple of saddles out. The Lone Cowboy that Bob had given Ace was twisted beyond recognition. A bootleg casting of a Russell wolf with a bone, cast solid because the caster didn’t know how to make a core, was so heavy it had fallen through the table that burned under it and buried itself in the insulating ashes of the ﬂoor. With a new patina it could be saved. Everyone assumed that it was Ace’s cigarettes, combined with liquor and turpentine, that had burned the gallery. Nancy divorced him not long after. We

V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E

115

stood with her a long time, just looking. Her face was red and slick from being scorched by the ﬁre. Ace must have been sleeping it oﬀ somewhere. A few years later we got another call, this time saying that Ace was in the hospital and if we wanted to see him alive one more time, we’d better get there fast. As soon as work was over, we got in the pickup to cross the Rockies to Kalispell. When we got there, we rushed to the room. Ace was sitting with the bed cranked up, painting quick oil vignettes of the Montana prairie. Sunsets with Indian lodges or old wagon running gear, nothing elaborate. “You know,” he informed us, “I’m painting these on little cheap tablets of embossed paper that look like canvas, and in the right place you can sell each page for $10. Twelve pages, so that makes $120. Not bad.” He was simply indomitable. There were a few other artists around, far from Beaux Arts trained, but a community nevertheless. Gentle, unpretentious, most of them made their money from the tourists. Blake the Woodcarver carved Indian portraits in chunks of wood and cast plaster editions of the sway-backed, sad-eyed, knobbly little horse who became the mascot of Hungry Horse, where he lived. Blake had been a highway patrolman and was enjoying a happy marriage late in life. Al Racine, another woodcarver, a Blackfeet, had a sturdy white wife, Inez. Al’s carvings graced the Methodist church in Browning: the Sermon on the Mount on the pulpit and the Last Supper on the altar. He was best known for his “Napi” cartoons – a caricature Indian in a big hat and braids, usually riding a cougar, whipping it with a rattlesnake, exclaiming, “I’m getting out of here! It’s too tough for me!” In summer he and Inez sold ﬁgurines from a tumbledown log cabin along the highway in St. Mary. Though Al pretended to be a spontaneous self-taught artist, he had in fact been to art school and also could make his living painting signs if necessary.

4. John Clarke

East Glacier, 1881–1970

The really signiﬁcant artist was a Blackfeet woodcarver, John C. Clarke, a gnarled old man with a shock of white hair and bright dark eyes, who had become famous in spite of being deaf and mute from childhood illness. Past the peak of his fame and even past the era to which he belonged, John had a little studio-house in East Glacier with the top burned out of it, simply closed oﬀ so John could live in the bottom. When we stopped by to see him, he was usually 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, making the room an oven. On the walls were rows of photos that had struck his fancy. Most of them were 116

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

animals, notably a picture of bears mating out of Life magazine. Bears were John’s specialty, along with mountain goats. Great Northern Railroad had helped to promote him by using his portrait of a goat on their trains. A big cement mountain goat like the one on the GN logo marked the studio out front. Bob repaired it at least once. John dressed in the old-fashioned way, with a suit-vest over his shirt and long underwear under everything. In fact, he walked wrapped in the past much of the time, not just because of being old, but because he was the grandson of Malcolm Clarke, whose death had provoked the Baker Massacre. John’s aunt, Helen Clarke, the ﬁrst state Superintendent of Schools, and John’s father, Horace, are buried in East Glacier, in the same small cemetery where John was eventually laid. At the tail end of the tourist season, when there weren’t many people around, we ate supper at Buzz Lutz’s restaurant (once Mike’s Place and later the Carberry Museum) and John would sit with us on the stools at the counter “talking” by making quick notes on napkins or using Indian sign-language. Or rather Bob and John talked, because every time I tried to make a sign they both claimed I’d just said something obscene and hooted like teenagers. Everyone around us enjoyed the joke. John always called Bob “billy goat,” because by then he had grown a mustache and chin tuft. (People thought he was trying to be Buﬀalo Bill, but he said it was because everyone mistook him for his brother. I think the latter is true.) Eventually, Bob and I attended John Clarke’s funeral mass on a winter day after a snowfall. The Church of the Little Flower in Browning was full. The sun came out as we gathered and soon the solemn words were punctuated by chutes of snow leaving the warming metal roof. Father Paul Kingston spoke about artists participating in creation, the work of God. When we got to the little cemetery up among the trees in East Glacier, it had begun to snow again, great drifting goose-feathers. A backhoe had dug the grave among the roots of one of the huge evergreens, and John’s coﬃn was laid down in them as though into the arms of a waiting ancestor.

5. The last full-mount: a moose Browning, 1968

There was one animal Bob had yet to shoot and mount for the museum: a moose. Having acquired a good hide, he decided to go ahead and mount that rather than waiting for a chance to hunt himself. The mold for the body took up the whole workshop. The frame had to be welded up out of steel rebar. Finally everything was all set to glue the hide onto the papier maché form which had had V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E

117

the horns bolted onto it. But Bob could see that the glue would dry before the hide could be sewed up around the legs unless there was one person per leg. Luckily, almost every hourly-wage man on the reservation had worked for him at one time or another and he could round up a crew just by driving along the street. Pretty soon he came back with three helpers and left them oﬀ while he went to look for a fourth. “Now just wait right there and don’t start until I come back,” he told them. The three settled themselves to smoke and consider the task. I could hear them from the other room where I was trying to ﬁgure out some paperwork. “Mighty long legs.” “Yup.” “Take a long time to sew up that bugger.” “Yeah. Pretty long. Might go past suppertime.” “Them are sure long legs.” “TOOO long, if you ask me!” Then I heard a scramble and a scuﬄe and before I knew it, all three were out the door and going down the road. When I hollered after them, they ignored me. When Bob got back with number four, he was not surprised, though he was angry with me for letting them get away. There was nothing to do but go round up another three. This time he kept all the men with him until he had four, and because it took so long to ﬁnd three more workers, the job DID take until a couple of hours after supper. They couldn’t stop to snack either, with their hands full of glue. Bob pushed them on through the job and they suﬀered a little, but didn’t complain. It was a little money in a town with no jobs. For years afterward all seven men would drop in now and then to look at the moose. They’d stand respectfully for a while, then shake their heads. “Them sure are really loooooong legs. Take a looooootta sewing.” (In the Blackfeet language, one emphasizes a word by elongating the vowels.) The second summer we had Gimpy, the only one of several bobcat kittens we raised who stayed tame – and alive – long enough to grow to full size. Gimpy’s favorite napping spot was up in the basket formed by the moose’s horns, which just about ﬁt her when she curled up. One ten-foot-high leap got her up there. Sometimes a nice tourist lady from Iowa would go by, trying to get her bifocals at the right angle, and before she succeeded Gimpy would reach a gentle paw down to pat her ﬂuﬀy tinted hair. The result was usually a shriek, a hubbub as her family gathered around to defend her, and then amazed laughter and excitement when Gimpy stretched and purred and meowed.

118

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Interior of the Museum of Montana Wildlife, 1960s. Photo: Bruce Strachan.

6. Eegie

Browning, 1962–1975

Early in the summer of 1962 some kids from Heart Butte brought us a box with a live eaglet squashed into it. Still half-fuzzy instead of feathered, it had fallen from its nest and was nearly starved to death. We didn’t speculate about what had happened to the adults. It peered at us with a gaping beak, resigned and passive. We stood it on the fence and I poked mouse-sized balls of hamburger down its throat. Overnight it stayed in a cage to protect it from the other animals and the next day Bob shot a gopher for it. Shrieking in shockingly loud cries of recognition, the revived eaglet methodically tore open the gopher’s belly, sucked out the guts, and gobbled each limb in turn. The rest went down its stretchy gullet and then the eaglet napped until the roughage was ready to be thrown up in a pellet. There were no raptor rehabilitation programs in those days. We thought it was good when she seemed to bond to Bob, treating him ﬁrst as a parent and later as a mate. We built a big cage in a corner of the building, adding a tub of water where she splashed boisterously. Her feathers came in like ﬁnely-grained shingles, forming a kind of shell around her, and we could put our hands in under her V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E

119

Bob hugging Eegie. She was imprinted on him as her “mate” and wouldn’t let others touch her (1960s). Photo: Mary Scriver.

wings, next to her body, where the down was so ﬁne it was almost imperceptible, like soapsuds or meringue, except warm and alive with the quick beating of her heart. She rode around on our arms, trying not to dig her talons in, with better success if we moved slowly, or we planted her on the bottom half of the Dutch door between museum and workshop, which was ﬁne until she vented with a great swash of white. She loved Bob, who brought a gopher every morning, and when he put his arms lightly around her, she nibbled gently at the same place under his ear that I liked. When the traveling school assembly people sent the man who trained Perri the Owl for Walt Disney, I got him to come look at Eegie. He had come with raptors of his own which ﬂew out over the heads of the students and then returned to be hooded after their rewards. He taught us about “di-morphism,” which means female raptors are usually bigger than the males. He guessed Eegie 120

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Eegie being noble (1960s). Photo: Mary Scriver.

V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E

121

was female, and told us that every hawk or owl must have roughage of some sort in its meat. After that we never substituted hamburger for gopher without cutting up paper or string to imitate fur. We knew he was right when an egg arrived, though it was sterile. At ﬁrst we had fantasies of raising eaglets, until we read that eagles mate at thousands of feet in the air, on the glide – quickly. When we went outside to ﬁnd Eegie staring up at a seemingly empty sky, we knew that if we got binoculars we would be able to spot a male wheeling high on a column of air. Yet she had never in her lifetime ﬂown more than a few feet and when we took the wire oﬀ to make her cage taller, she only ﬂew to the top of the studio and then back into her cage without urging. One day we came back from a trip that had lasted overnight. Bob had a new navy-blue jacket and when he hurried to the cage to greet his “girl-friend,” she ﬂew at him with talons extended, shrieking, clearly attacking. His feelings were hurt. Later he went back out in his khaki shirtsleeves and she was once again his friendly chirping nibbler. We reasoned out that someone must have teased her while we were gone, someone in a dark jacket. The backyard had to be enclosed with a high board fence. Her most dangerous moment came that fall when the ﬁrst blizzard hit. We had put a board wind-shield up alongside her perch, but this was a real norther with driving wind. After supper at Bob’s house, then still the rental across from his mother’s while the studio got ﬁnishing touches, we suddenly thought of her and returned in a hurry. There she hunched, white as a schmoo, only one eye barely open and her nose holes freezing over. Each of us took a wing-tip and we walked her into the shop where she remained until we made a way she could get under the shop next to the warm pipes. Indoors she didn’t try to ﬂy, but stomped around like a crabby little bent-over cowboy in heavy spurs, startling visitors. Bob crawled under the shop to close oﬀ part of the space and took his electrical saw along with him, but Eegie kept unplugging it. Annoyed, Bob got one of the neighborhood kids who was always hanging around to crawl in with him and hold oﬀ Eegie with a stick. But when the eagle jumped up and rapped him in the chest with her “ﬁsts,” he resigned from the job and we didn’t see him for a while. We stocked the freezer with gophers in ziplock bags, but Eegie didn’t eat as much in winter. Whenever we passed a road-killed rabbit, we stopped to grab it and throw it into the back of the pickup, arriving at the rare formal occasions with a tangle of furry, blood-stained remains behind us. I was the one who played retriever while Bob stayed behind the wheel, calling “Hurry up!” Several times when I hopped out to get a contorted body, it was frozen to the pavement and I had to jerk hard –even get the shovel from the truck bed to hack it free. We joked about what other drivers must think when they caught me in their headlights – in high heels and dangly earrings, tugging at my road-kill prize. 122

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Eegie liked sticks and we kept her supplied. She carried them back and forth and wrestled them from end to end. Like most predators, she played a good deal of the time. Once Bob and I rode horseback over a hilltop and spotted a pair of wild eagles playing at the edge of a pothole lake, splashing in the water, passing sticks back and forth, dropping them from overhead and generally frolicking. We rigged a bleach bottle to hang from a string like a giant parakeet toy. Her best trick was playing catch with a rubber ball, though she really seemed to be batting the ball back when it was pitched to her. Many years later Peter Mattheissen explained to me that most predatory birds don’t grab smaller birds in the air, but dive to clout them with their ﬁsts, and then stoop lower to catch the stunned and broken prey. This strategy avoids struggles in the air. Cats who intruded into Eegie’s cage for gopher remnants met a quick demise. Gripped in piercing talons of steel, they squalled and ﬂailed their last while Eegie held her face away from them as though she were oﬀended. I put a corrugated ﬁberglass wall around the bottom of the cage to keep kittens from climbing the wire and constantly mended the chicken wire, but cats found gaps and holes. One morning we awoke to screams and Bob looked out the window to see what he thought was one of the bobcat kittens in the cage. Charging to the rescue, he grabbed a shovel and bashed his way in through the wire – only to see it was an unknown domestic cat and too late for it anyway. It was lucky we’d put a tall fence around the backyard, because Bob was wearing nothing at all. In fact, I had to take out his slippers so he could walk back over the gravel on the driveway. He had such tender feet that even when he was nude at the cabin, he wore high-topped tennie runners. The eﬀect was rather like a satyr with tennies instead of hooves. We never did think seriously about hunting with Eegie according to real falconry techniques. She seemed like a friend. Anyway, when the federal law protecting raptors was passed, we had to ﬁght hard just to keep her, since the federal bird warden came to clout us again. Bob said ﬁercely that the only way they would get his bird was in eagle soup. Somehow nothing developed beyond threats, and in the end, she lived happily until the shop burned. Smoke killed her. One day before the high fence was built, we found a local Blackfeet man staring at the eagle. Ruth Hill, author of Hanta Yo, was with us and said, “Look at that man reveling in his heritage!” The man turned and said, “Boy, that tail is worth a lotta money.” But Bob didn’t think about it that way. When Eegie moulted “money,” he picked up the giant feathers and carelessly thrust them into an empty mayonnaise jar.

V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E

123

7. Electric cowboys

Cut Bank Creek, 1965

Back in 1962 two movie crews were shooting ﬁlm (this was before the invention of videotape) – one from a university and one from some other place – and we met them one evening at Cut Bank Creek for a picnic. We decided to travel the few miles on horseback. I had acquired my ﬁrst horse, a tall brown stubborn beast of ancient years from the Bullshoe family’s famous relay racehorse string. Bob called the gelding my “learning horse,” because he refused to do anything unsafe or against his policy of non-exertion. His worst habit was sinking slowly down like a camel. I wished he WOULD do that when it came time to get on board. He was a tall horse and cleverly waited until I had one foot on a fence before swinging away on an angle or, if I were standing on a bucket, crowding in to kick it out from under me. I could ride him for any length of time in any direction and be back in ﬁfteen minutes because he lagged all the way out and hurried all the way in. His name was “Skeeter,” and a less mosquito-like creature I’ve never known. But he could keep up with Bob’s white horse, more or less, and once he got moving for a while, he began to warm up and cover ground at a steady pace. He could rock along for an hour or more with never a pause. With the movie people we sat around the campﬁre talking too long and too carelessly until all at once the sky darkened and lightning began to sizzle on the horizon. If we hadn’t been down in a creek bottom, someone would have seen it coming. Our friends jumped to pack up their cars. Either Bob and I stayed under the trees where it was dangerous and we’d get drenched, or we ran for town. Already Bob had cinched up and was ready to be on his way. His horse whirled in circles while I leapt desperately to follow suit. Then we pounded out along the borrowpit, now far too dark to see broken glass or tangled wire. Lightning was all around us and the stunning WHOMP-GRUMBLE of thunder seemed right overhead. The barbed wire fences began to sing and the horses’ manes lifted hair-by-hair just as our own hair would have if we hadn’t jammed our hats down so hard. We hurtled along in near-total darkness, Gunnysack leading the way so I could barely tell his apple-shaped white rump was going up and down ahead of me. Rain drenched us, and I put all my faith and trust into the horses and Bob. What choice did I have? By the time we were safely back in the yard, we were laughing with hysteria and relief.

124

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

8. Life in Browning The Sixties There was a big gentle man who worked for us named Sullivan Hameline. We never did keep a coﬀee pot going in the shop – instead we went for “tea” at 10 AM and 3 PM. (If Bob were angry at us, he’d sneak oﬀ alone and we got no tea or “long johns,” the local name for maple bars. But otherwise, he picked up the tab.) Most of Sullivan’s “work” time was taken up with lighting cigarettes, ﬁlling his coﬀee cup with hot water and putting Band-Aids on his ﬁngers. He often used a whole box of Band-Aids in one day. In tourist season he loved to drape himself over the Dutch door and gossip with the visitors, who never seemed to realize that his glossy hair and copper skin came from being an Indian. “Is there a reservation around here?” they asked. “Are there any Indians around here?” When Sullivan told them he himself was Blackfeet, they always moved back a little ways, which tickled him. Sullivan had a new baby but she caught pneumonia and died. He and the mother, who was quite a bit younger than he, were heartbroken. We took money and food up to their little shack on Moccasin Flats just as the Rosary ended, and then went with the crowd out to the cemetery where the priest blessed the small soul and sent it on its way. It was the ﬁrst time I had ever faced the precariousness of life for people on the reservation, how easy it was for part of a family to slip away. For the ﬁrst time I heard the old-time wailing, like Irish women mourning sons drowned at sea. It was as elemental as wolf-howling, inﬁnitely desolate. The average life-span for a male American Indian at that time was around 45, and it has risen since then to maybe 55 – not just because people die at age 55 (though diabetes will do that), but because for every elder who achieves a long lifetime, a tiny baby is lost soon after birth. To know this from a page of statistics is quite diﬀerent from following a baby coﬃn to a tiny grave. The siren wailing, other than for a ten o’clock curfew that was supposed to mean all the kids went home, announced a ﬁre and everyone turned out to ﬁght it. One of the ﬁrst I saw was a two-story house, a neat little place with two trees on either side of the front yard, symmetrical as a child’s drawing. An old woman, crippled, was trapped in the upstairs, but all the walls were sheets of ﬂame. Some claimed they could hear the old woman screaming and, as the walls burned away but the frame remained, said they could see her, but I saw only the ﬁre and that the trees were burning, too. When the ﬂames were ﬁnally gone, kids clustered around to see the body carried out. (There were no body bags in those days.) The Browning Chief of Police couldn’t drive them away. They hooted and circled back from the shadows. They wanted to know for themselves. “Show us the worst! We can take it!”

V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E

125

At school the kids wanted to talk about death. They said they snuck into a morgue and saw a stillborn baby – it was blue. And they insisted that ghosts came out of the graves in the old graveyard on the west side of town where weeds grew tall and cows sometimes browsed. When I tried to rationalize the ghosts as gas escaping from collapsing coﬃns, they scoﬀed. I didn’t know anything at all. It was not the babies and old people who died most often. It was the young men, who drank and fought or drove drunk. Sometimes they killed women, usually half-by-accident. Sometimes they killed themselves. The informants and artists whom John Ewers had employed at the federal Museum of the Plains Indian came occasionally to work for us or to sell us something. Almost always they were drunk. Darrell Blackman had been to college before he learned to drink. He said he had resisted until the students on his ﬂoor held him down and poured whiskey in his mouth. Victor Pepion died in a ﬁre before I came. Victor Auld died in a car accident, almost back to town from drinking in East Glacier. Calvin Boy. These should have been the people who preserved the old ways with their art and skill. Artistes perdues – lost artists. Bob and I went to a rodeo, not the kind I was used to with a huge amphitheatre and professional contestants, but a local competition where everyone either sat on the fence or on the hood of a pickup. We sat with old Joe Davis, on the ground right in the corral. Ed Connelly had a little black mare that he tied next to us, and she kept putting her soft nose, with its white blaze and a dent from ﬁghting a tie-down, on my shoulder to be petted. In the course of the afternoon we got so attached to that friendly little horse that Bob tried to buy her, but Connelly wasn’t selling. He said she was the easiest horse to load into a pickup he’d ever had. We watched once and, sure enough, the horse went in like a cat. We tried to get our own horses to load that way with limited luck. Gradually coated with dust, slowly roasted by the sun, occasionally scrambling to our feet and maybe on up the fence when a bucking horse or bull came in our direction, we were not mere spectators but right IN the action. Being an Indian rodeo, it was slow, with lots of time for joshing around between chutes opening. If someone put on an exceptional performance, all the pickup truck horns honked. Our old cowboy friend, Joe, looking like a brown and wizened Leanin’ Tree greeting card, hunkered down alongside, rolling cigarettes. I thought I might burst from happiness, even as the sweat trickled from under my hat, into my stinging eyes, and down my back. We all felt that way, proud and competent and part of the REAL WEST, like Marlboro Men. Once we went to a local rodeo on a wet day. The ground was caliche, gumbo, slippery sucking mud. Horses couldn’t keep their feet. The cowboys were soon plastered with mud. A bucking horse, a light-boned palomino mare, fell and broke her leg. One of the cops was called over to kill her. He was afraid to get close for fear she would kick him in her thrashing, so he stood too far away and shot with his pistol. But he was a lousy shot and we watched, hypnotized, 126

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

while he shredded the horse’s head until she went down, spouting blood. We never went to a rodeo on a rainy day again unless it was indoors. Another time we were looking for someone who was out at a corral with others and horses. I ran ahead and jumped up on the fence to look. They were gelding the horses, breaking the “strings” to the testicles with their teeth. As soon as they saw me they stopped, but I had heard the horses scream and now I heard them moaning. Kids were forcing them to move in circles around the corral so they would drain and heal. It has been done this way ever since horses got to the prairie.

9. Drifters

Browning, mid-Sixties

When it had come time to build the ﬁreplace in the studio, a young man walked in the door. I’d never seen him before, but felt I recognized him somehow. He was skinny, wore glasses, and spoke softly. In need of money, he stayed a few days to help lift rock. His story was that he’d been running a chicken farm – or was it a turkey ranch? – that he had inherited from his uncle, so he could read philosophy in the evenings. He was an intellectual. Now he had sold the ranch and was headed to Stanford for a Ph.D. in philosophy. Or was it Cornell? It had been a while since I’d talked about ideas the way this young man did. He was living in a little camp he made out at our picnic place on Cut Bank Creek and on his last evening he invited me – alone – out there for supper. Of course, I asked Bob, who said angrily he didn’t care what I did. We ate beans and wienies and talked until it was late. I explained my theories of life and he said I sounded like Spinoza, a person I didn’t know. He thought I was wasting myself and that I should go to graduate school. I argued that nothing was so valuable for a writer as real life, and that I was having adventures in a way that wouldn’t be possible when I was old. When it got chilly, the young man fetched blankets for our shoulders. He began to rub my back, which I accepted innocently, too inexperienced to realize it was meant to be seductive, and he asked me to go with him. “Grad school is an adventure, too,” he argued. “If you stay here with that old man, you’ll just rot. Keep your mind alive.” Flattered as I was, I turned him down and asked to be taken home. But he had the right bait. Next morning, the young man reported, Bob rode up on his lathered and panting white horse and circled the camp, trying to peer into the station wagon – to see if I was in there. I had never even considered staying overnight and was solemnly impressed by this development. It had never occurred to me that Bob might be jealous. I rather liked it. V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E

127

“Are you sure you won’t go along?” the young man asked before he left. I shook my head. He gave me a scrap of paper. “Here’s my address. Call or write if you change your mind.” I kept it a few days and then stood on the front porch of the museum and let the wind take it away. But it was always a comfort to me and I wondered what happened to him. It was my Bridges of Madison County moment. A tall, pushy writer from Texas appeared. When he came to the house, he expected to be fed. Bob developed an intense dislike for him. He was staying, more or less, with old Jim Whitecalf, and was writing a journal of his visit, claiming to be old Jim’s adopted son. His tone was always mocking and superior. One evening he showed up at suppertime when I’d planned that Bob and I would pick the last meat oﬀ the carcass of a Canada goose. Bob got up, went into the shop, locked the door, and refused to come out. I did NOT want to feed our goose to this guy, so I scrambled some eggs. Quickly he shoveled them in, told me he’d certainly had better, and went on his way. I wished I’d clobbered him with the frying pan. Somehow he charmed Ace’s wife into illustrating his book and then leaving with him. He was so abusive that decades later the now middle-aged children still shudder and check the shadows. I’m told that for a while he was committed to an institution for the mentally ill. But his book won prizes and was widely read as true. So it went for decades as the drifters came through, often making gifts of the spirit and other times deeply destructive. Rarely did their self-accounts match what we saw in reality. One of the exceptions was Bill Ballantine and his wife, who were circus people and wonderful fun.2 Another was Barnaby Conrad III, who wrote of Bob at age 75 as having “strong worn arms” and “slightly crazed blue eyes.”3

10. Downhill

Hudson’s Bay Divide, late Sixties

Bob wanted to ride the horses down trails he had once used when traveling from the Stones’ ranch to the folks’ cabin. Pop drove us to the end of a trail that went oﬀ north along Hudson’s Bay Divide, then took the empty truck down to the cabin where Mom joined him with their car, so we could truck the horses back home on the highway. It was pleasant at ﬁrst, going down an old ﬁre trail wide enough to ride side-by-side, hearing grouse in the brush and thrushes in the trees. Once oﬀ the ridge, the trail was overgrown, long and treacherous, through beaver dam brush, 128

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The cabin Bob built between St. Mary and Babb (1970s). Photo: Mary Scriver.

and we struggled to make our way. We got to the cabin so late that the folks had left us a note on the pickup windshield and gone home. Gunsmoke loaded into the back with no problem, but this time it was Zuke, my second horse, who wouldn’t load. He turned sideways, he sat down, he reared up. Anything but get in. Bob ﬁnally lost patience entirely. Looking around for a club, he saw a fence post that was not entirely ﬁrm and yanked it out of the ground, tearing the wire away from the staples. Wham! on the top of Zuke’s head knocked him ﬂat. I thought for a minute he was dead. Then the chastened horse got up and nearly crawled into the pickup. No more trouble. And I got in quickly. Neither of us said anything until we got back to Browning. V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E

129

These stories are fragments, some jagged as plaster fallen oﬀ a casting, others with clear imprints of a moment that stayed with us. Unconnected to each other, puzzling to those who weren’t there, in theory they had recorded the whole story, a time in history. But the times and the people ended, lost. No longer needed.

130

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

VII Plaster Original: First Success

1. About plaster originals: the key When every particle and crumb of plastilene has been teased out of the plaster waste mold, seal the inside with shellac and alcohol, grease with waterless soap, fasten it back together – empty, of course – and tie it. Another of Bob’s “secret advantages” was bungee cord, then only available from army surplus, where it was known as parachute cord. Billy McCurdy had discovered it, like so many other things. The stretch in it was invaluable for holding molds together. This time the gypsum comes from a diﬀerent bag: the hard kind of plaster called Hydrocal™ for artists. Leave the water white. When this Hydrocal™ begins to turn to cream, pour it into the waste mold, back out of the mold, into the mold, shake it while holding it in every position so that the stuﬀ goes into every small place, every “anfractuosity.” This takes muscle and control, which Bob had. Pour it out, pour it in, shake it side to side – at last close it oﬀ with a bit of plate glass on the bottom. Turn the mold end over end without losing the plaster, pour out, pour in, until your arms ache. Then, at a moment only experience can teach, pour one last time and jiggle vigorously to make all the bubbles rise one last time. A bit of tipping to release air from undercuts, more jiggling, and – that’s it. Either it’s cast or it isn’t – no second chance. The plate-glass fragment squashes down onto the top of the “whipped cream” to make a ﬂat bottom, and the whole thing is propped somewhere to let the bonding set up. If you touch it, the bottom of the cast will be hot from the chemical reactions. The hardest task is still to come, chipping away all the blue plaster from the white Hydrocal™. It takes the nerves of a diamond cutter and a ﬁne ability to visualize what is inside. The ﬁrst blows of the light hammer on the back of the carefully placed knife tool might cleave away large pieces. If there are long ﬂat surfaces inside, it’s even possible that the blue will separate simply from jarring and fall oﬀ to reveal 131

the smooth white surface of animal muscles underneath. More often the blue has to be nearly carved away. The faint stain of the shellac/alcohol might be the only warning that the Hydrocal™ is a mere whisper away under the surface. That’s the only real clue to the thin boundary in space, negative in blue and positive in white. Carefully, gingerly, rap a bit here and a bit there, until ﬁnally a shard falls away to show an elbow or half a face. One is tense in the balance between hurrying to see if the cast is good and going slowly so as not to knock oﬀ a nose or an ear. Sometimes a piece does get knocked oﬀ, and then the trick is to recognize it and pick it out of the shattered mess of blue plaster lying around the base of the work like scree around a mountain cliﬀ, so as to lay it aside and glue it back later. Never throw that rubble away until the positive is checked carefully. Anywhere between a half-hour and a whole evening later, the ﬁgure stands clear, once again created, twice-born. But now the sculpture is no longer clay, warm and pliable. It is a sort of Platonic ideal of form, ghost-white, marble-cold, stonehard. Not until it is dirtied with a coat of the shellac mixture does it show detail and come back to life. This ﬁgure is the artist’s reference model, the key against which all other castings will be compared. If a new ﬂexible mold must be made, this is the original that the mold will be made around in order to preserve the integrity of the sculpture.

2. George Gray

Browning, 1968

I thought life with Bob would go on as it was in those ﬁrst years. It never occurred to me – or to him – that casting bronze would be diﬀerent from casting plaster, that the new customers would be diﬀerent than the earlier ones. We didn’t know that becoming famous would change everything. But Bob was aware that he was aging, which I tried not to think about. Sculpture is an arduous art form – Bob longed for the ease of painting. Most of his attempts didn’t satisfy him. Ace’s theory was that Bob should never paint with a brush. He urged use of the palette knife, on the principle that it would be more like sculpture. Actually it was good advice, because Bob’s biggest faults were fuzzing up his boundaries and muddying his colors. If he used a palette knife, he HAD to mix his color on the palette and then put it on in one smooth facet. But he didn’t feel as though he were really painting if he used a knife. To him, painting meant a ﬁstful of brushes. Then salvation came in the form of George and Sandi Gray. George was a photo-retoucher – a highly skilled one who made a good living in Manhattan – but who yearned to make his living as a full-time painter. He was studying with Frank Reilly, longtime painting instructor at the Art Students League in 132

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Trimming the plaster. Johnny Bench, catcher for the Cincinnatti Reds, 1982. Photo: Buster Ruetten.

VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS

133

New York. Reilly had a system worked out to teach values (dark versus light) by conﬁning his students to graded shades of gray. Most people can’t see values – they are distracted by shade, hue, and saturation – and anyway don’t have the concepts to discuss what they see. Getting values accurate and in proper relationship was the single most eﬀective way to improve amateur painting. We were impressed. George taught us to look through our ﬁsts. The darkness of the inside of one’s hand is a good reference point for values. We realized that we had been making everything too dark and with too little subtlety between values – like most beginners, we were distracted by contrast and what we “knew,” even though Ace had given us the speech about twisting up a shiny tin can and painting it, so that we’d realize it wasn’t gray but rather the composite of colored reﬂections from everything around it. Now that we knew about values, we went around squinting through our ﬁsts at everything. To keep people around town from thinking we were using some kind of threatening hex, we had to explain to other folks, who also tried it. I don’t know what tourists thought of all these people looking through their ﬁsts. Maybe some ethnographer recorded it as a Blackfeet sign. George also encouraged us to make a square with our hands in order to think about composition, but that seemed to be recognized as an artist’s gesture, like holding out a thumb at arm’s length to judge proportions. We set up easels, and George painted an orange resting on blue paper, teaching us about color transfer (a little blue reﬂected in the orange and a little orange reﬂected in the blue) and controlling the crispness of boundaries (sharp edges where people should notice, blurry ones at unimportant places). Then we went out around the reservation to paint landscapes. When we visited the pale sandstone escarpments along Two Medicine River, George criticized our dark skies, but then he saw that we were right: somehow that sky WAS heavy and dark, especially in the long clefts where erosion had made good habitat for swallows and owls. Each bird burrow had a white patch under it. Painting is the creation of an illusion, especially if one is doing representational pictures, which is what Bob wanted to do. It requires thinking on several levels at once, seeing many qualities in relationship, almost like working a puzzle – if one does this here, then one must do that there. Adding a spot of the complementary color can intensify the ﬁrst color – but though Bob could see that it did, and knew his color wheel, he couldn’t see why. It was all too intellectual and removed for him. George came closer to explaining it than anyone else had, because he could demonstrate and then Bob could feel it. Sandi Gray, as well as being beautiful, was part of the upper-class world that I envisioned from magazines. Her liveliness and conﬁdence, her willingness to scramble around on rocks in gullies, and her curiosity about what I thought and felt, came as fresh water to one in a desert. We chattered, goofed around, said outrageous things, and, to let me paint, she did the support-system stuﬀ: the lists and sandwiches. When the Grays left, we both actually wept a little. All 134

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

next winter we painted pictures and tried to ﬁgure out what George would say about them.

3. American Artist and Paul Juley Browning, 1964

American Artist magazine assured us they would accept the article I had written about Bob IF we could come up with decent photographs. A fussy, demanding man appeared who assured us he knew exactly what was needed. His theory was the more lights, the better. For weeks he lived on the sofa, told us all about his dear mother, and blew out overloaded fuses in an eﬀort to get the bronzes ever brighter. It would have been easy to bake cookies at the point of focus. American Artist was not impressed, but we used the photos for a ﬁrst attempt at a catalog. Desperate, we demanded to know from the magazine just what photographers they approved of anyway. They gave us the name of Peter A. Juley & Son. As it turned out, Peter was deceased and the son, Paul, was the whole business now. We didn’t realize until later that between the two they had photographed the works of all the great Beaux Arts sculptors and their negatives would end up in the Smithsonian. When we called to ask how much money it would take to get him to Browning, Montana, his fee seemed exorbitant, but we sent him a plane ticket (tourist class) and drove to Great Falls to get him. We had sent Paul photos of ourselves in the course of our correspondence, but neglected to get any clues about his appearance. Craning our necks for the sort of person we expected, we were mildly annoyed when an old man toting a big box came up and stopped in front of us. He pretended to be indignant – I think his feelings WERE a bit hurt. Gradually we focused. His polka dot bowtie was ﬂamboyant as a South American butterﬂy. His ﬁngers were purple from impatience with tongs in putting his prints in and out of developing chemicals. He had no other baggage than his big box and a little satchel. “Well,” he announced, “I only came because I was curious to see who had the nerve to send me a plane ticket that wasn’t ﬁrst class!” It was winter and the landscape was overcast, strictly black and white. The drive, crammed into the pickup, was awkward. “What’s next?” he asked, “A dogsled?” We had wrapped his luggage up in plastic to keep the snow out of it but he was worried about what the subzero temperatures might be doing to his camera in its box. It was an ancient 8" x 10" view camera held together with bits of tape and wire, its lens made with a skill no longer in existence, its massive wooden tripod looking more like a stepladder. In the museum we had prepared a setting for the bronzes and put on an extra hired man to carry things around. Bob was prepared to enter into a long VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS

135

discussion of angles and lighting on each piece, but Paul waved him oﬀ. “Just bring ‘em and bring ‘em fast,” he said. “I hate having to wait for the set-up.” He only used one portable spot and a dim ﬁll light, the exact opposite of our last genius photographer. Carl Cree Medicine brought Lone Cowboy and set it on the backdrop. Bob, torn between respect and trepidation, began to ask again about angles, but Paul wouldn’t listen. He had lit a huge stinking cigar and blew smoke in all directions. We had visions of the sculptures looking as though they had ascended to the clouds of heaven. For a moment he considered, tinkered with the back of his ungainly contraption, and looked at the bronze upside down on the view-glass, then he chucked the massive ﬁlm holder into the back of the camera, reached around to take oﬀ the lens cap, and began to tell a joke. “Aren’t you timing this?” squawked Bob, not hearing the joke at all. “Naw. I know about how long it takes.” At the end of the joke he put the lens cap back and demanded the next bronze. His joke was about sex, a subject he liked very much. He was fascinated with my relationship to Bob and not quite rude in hinting about it. “You aren’t bringing these pieces fast enough!” he complained. “Don’t you want to try out a few negatives? I have a darkroom,” suggested Bob desperately. He was beginning to realize that we were not going to see any of the photos or even know whether they turned out until Paul was back in New York City, a plane ticket away. But Paul had his own way of doing things and he intended to accommodate no one else’s notions and anxieties. In a few hours he had photographed all sixty pieces in existence at the time, as well as taking some candid snaps of Bob and I, and going on a quick jaunt down to the folks’, where Bob’s mother was charmed. Pop just puﬀed on his pipe. But Paul was hinting strongly that he needed a cocktail, so we came back to the studio, where our meager alcohol supply dismayed our guest. I set about ﬁxing supper. Paul, seeing that the open galley kitchen had only one entrance, came to “help” me while he worked on his cocktail. His help consisted of Frenchkissing the cook, who was not French. I had no idea how to fend him oﬀ, though I was repelled and alarmed, and was getting more and more angry that Bob was pretending not to notice. I knew he thought the photos were so important that almost any price was justiﬁed – especially if I paid it. But where was this going to lead? Would I have to suddenly vault over the counter? At last the phone rang: it was Paul’s wife. She asked to talk to me and sighed humorously as she asked if he were “behaving.” I said something ambiguous, so she understood at once. “I’ll scold him for you, dear,” she promised. “He doesn’t mean any harm. He just likes to ﬂirt and get away with mischief. He’s really just a little boy at heart. It’s so good for him to have this adventure.” Everything was ﬁne after that, Paul minding his manners a little better and me leashing my indignation. 136

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Paul was using time exposures to get a deep ﬁeld of focus. That – and a negative so large it could be used for 8" x 10" contact prints – meant that every detail on the sculpture showed clearly. We had thought the angle of the shot was the key and then raised the light level to compensate for modern 35-mm fast-ﬁlm technology. Simply, we had passed over the classic considerations of photography, even as we clung to classic realistic sculpture. We should have known better; it turned out that Peter Juley had been Malvina Hoﬀman’s photographer. Paul represented two generations of experience in exactly the context Bob so longed for. In the September 1964 American Artist, the article about Bob ﬁnally appeared between an article about Norman Rockwell and one about Maurice Sendak. We waited breathlessly for fan mail to roll in, but nothing much happened. Still, it was nice to show the magazine around, and we bought a box of them.

4. True magazine

Browning, 1965

Years earlier, Bill Browning, whose job was promoting tourism for the state, had come to Bob and asked him to mount a ﬁve-inch ﬁsh for a joke gift. It was a nasty little job – especially for Bob, who was allergic to ﬁsh – and there was no money in it. (The charge for mounting ﬁsh is usually by the inch – people mount trophy ﬁsh and the bigger they are the better.) But he did it anyway, and Bill went away grateful. Now, this fall, he called Bob to say he had Erwin “Joe” Bauer with him and Joe wanted to take photos of the museum animals. But could they take the animals outside to habitats? That would be exciting and real, and Joe could do some super-close-ups. It was agreed. Carl Cree Medicine and some Heavyrunner brothers spent all day – luckily one ﬁlled with much sunshine and little wind – hauling the mounted deer and mountain sheep around the reservation. It was a struggle, but no one complained because it was so interesting to see what they looked like, which was real enough that there was a little concern about someone shooting at them. The next day Joe had hoped to photograph the bobcat kittens, but they – unconﬁned and perverse as usual – had disappeared. Since I was the one who fed them, it was my call they responded to, so I went up and down Willow Creek, their normal travel corridor, calling, “Kitty, kitty, kitty!” We checked a huge square boulder several miles west where Gimpy liked to sun herself while digesting gophers and the nearby rancher’s chickens. (We bought a lot of chickens after the fact – our own private predator compensation program.) Normally she came in great hopping leaps, sometimes getting so excited to see us that she VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS

137

ﬂopped into the creek instead of going to a narrow place she could leap across. But this time there was no sign. Reluctant to waste time, Joe and Bill hit upon the idea of taking the sculptures out to photograph them in landscapes, just as they had done with the full mounts. We wondered why we hadn’t thought of this before: the Return of the Blackfeet Raiders on a cliﬀ against the sky. Boss of the Trail Herd – painted naturalistically with oils – in a reﬂecting mud puddle. The big grizzly rearing up among rosebushes with rosehips bright as blood drops. This was great stuﬀ! Joe felt sure the photos would sell to True magazine. And they did! Maybe no one read American Artist but surely, we thought, everyone read True, and now fame and fortune would be upon us. While we waited to ﬁnd out, Bob was asked to join the Salmagundi Club, old and honoriﬁc bastion of artistic respectability. This put him in the company of Malvina Hoﬀman – well, not Malvina exactly, because women weren’t accepted into the men’s club – but Warren Baumgartner and Bob Lougheed and many of the biggest and most respected names of traditional American art. Bob was so proud he strutted, though he was unclear about what it meant to belong to a gentleman’s club in New York City.

5. New York Shows

Manhattan, 1963

To keep in touch with the theatre world, I bought the Sunday New York Times at Val’s Cigar Store every time we got to Great Falls. The art pages were folded with the theatre news, so I read both. To me, Broadway and Manhattan were where art happened, where reputations were made or broken. I didn’t know that Western art was in a sort of bubble by itself. I noted invitations for juried shows with Audubon Artists or National Academy of Design and thought Bob was perfectly well qualiﬁed to exhibit with them. With a little persuasion, he sent some bronzes to various shows, where they were invariably accepted. This was clear proof of quality, and we gleefully went down to the folks to tell them about it. “Did you sell anything?” asked Pop. One piece sold. But the shows made Bob’s reputation. He was a New-York-City-approved artist, no question about it, and very few of the other Montana artists around at that time had even exhibited out of state. A friend of Malvina Hoﬀman, a woman sculptor named Joy Buba, traveled through. She asked Bob to ﬁnd her a model, so Bob took her out to meet Cecile Last Star, an experienced model, an older woman with a ﬁne face. Her grandson, Victor Auld, was on his way to being a painter. He and his new wife, Ginger, were sleeping out in a tipi in the yard. Bob said, “Let me introduce you, 138

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Joy,” and scratched on the canvas, which is proper etiquette. There was a lot of scrambling inside, because they hadn’t bothered with pajamas. Ginger rolled under the canvas on the backside and made for the house with a sheet around her. Victor called, “Come on in!” He couldn’t get up because there was a big orange cat sleeping on his stomach, but other than that, he greeted Joy with a handshake and welcoming words, as though being ﬂat on one’s back was just as good as being upright. Cecile had long been up and dressed. She used to meet the trains in Glacier Park, and was able to negotiate with Joy smoothly. Joy made her portrait that afternoon and then asked Bob to cast it in plaster for her so it would travel. We were interested because Joy worked mostly by putting pellets of the plastilene to build up the face, while Bob had a tendency to push and pare it away from a block. He took special care in making the plaster original, and Joy, meaning to pay him a compliment, said oﬀhand, “Well, if your sculpture doesn’t sell, you can always make a living as a really ﬁne plaster caster.” Then she saw Bob’s face and realized her mistake. Joy Buba and Malvina Hoﬀman recommended Bob for membership in the National Sculpture Society, the absolute criterion for a ﬁne ﬁgurative sculptor. Now Bob was certiﬁed and included beyond all doubt. This was the organization that had included the ﬁne Beaux-Arts-educated turn-of-the-century American sculptors. The modest scrapbook that Bob had kept until now was suddenly an excellent marketing tool and we set it up on a lectern in the little gallery so that people could read for themselves. The cap was when the International Art Guild, sponsored by Princess Grace of Monaco, exhibited Return of the Blackfeet Raiders. Everything was in French so we had to go up to the high school to get translations from the language teacher. I had suspicions that it was some kind of con game, but Bob exhibited with them for the rest of the century. It’s just that there were never any sales.

6. Glenbow Foundation Calgary, 1967

It must have been John Hellson (more about him later) who ﬁrst brought us rumors of a man in Calgary “so rich that he doesn’t buy things from a collection – he just buys whole collections.” This man was “Colonel” Eric Harvie, a lawyer who, during the Depression, had taken mineral rights as payment for the legal work he did. Since there was quite a bit of litigation over the oil-rich land between Calgary and Banﬀ, he ended up owning huge oil and coal deposits. By the time we heard of him, he was old, frail, and – as John put it – so rich he could VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS

139

aﬀord to be anonymous. He was known as the “Glenbow Foundation.” Harvie and his family gave this institution to the people of Alberta in 1966, and it exists now as the Glenbow Museum plus related legal bodies, such as the Devonian Group or the Riveredge Foundation. The pitch John made to Bob was about an entire collection of mounted birds that Harvie had bought in England. A talented taxidermist was needed to clean them all. One item alone, he said, was a glass case made into a ﬁre screen for a ﬁreplace and ﬁlled with more than a hundred mounted hummingbirds. But Bob was just leaving taxidermy at this time. He was dubious. In fact, after being attacked by the federal game warden, he had qualms about birds altogether. John could not be resisted. He suggested we take along some of our newly cast bronzes and see if Harvie would look at them. The man was buying everything, raved John. Then he found the entry point, “Bob, they have hundreds of paintings by Rungius! Maybe they would sell or trade.” John arranged the whole thing. When we arrived in Calgary, a hotel room was provided. A crew came to the pickup and disappeared with the bronzes. We were assigned a guide – a high level executive in the foundation – who would take us around to see the Harvie collection as it stood so far. There were warehouses full of the strangest medley of objects anyone could imagine, much of it junk, all set up on temporary tables of plywood on sawhorses. Buyers had been roving the West, not taking time to sift through what they bought, but merely hauling it all back to Calgary for evaluation. There were life-size rubber Indians (intended to prop up in front of roadside attractions so that tourists would think they were old-timers snoozing on the porch) made by a guy Bob always suspected had stolen one of his bison skulls and reproduced it to sell at tourist traps. (They’re still being sold, made from molds that have twisted and lost detail over the decades.) There were tables and tables of New Guinea penis sheaths. I had read about these long feathered embellishments and wanted to look at them closely, but the anthropologist who was working on them shooed me away. He had been a friend of Thor Heyerdahl, who built and sailed the Kon-Tiki, which fascinated Bob. (The sheaths made him blush.) The anthro hinted that I should go powder my nose somewhere else so he could help Bob try on one of the decorations. The anthro was a very handsome man: tanned, blonde, muscular. Bob encouraged me to stay. At some point we were getting a little punchy after looking at so much stuﬀ – like paste replicas of the British crown jewels displayed in an actual safe. (At that time exhibits were housed in the former Calgary City Hall.) We went down a narrow stairway that opened into a hallway with doors on one side. Bob was ahead of me and as he stepped into the doorway he doubled back so quickly that he bumped into me. Confused, I stood there until he got behind and grabbed my arms. “Tell me what you see!” he exclaimed, thrusting me forward and quickly pulling me back. I could hardly believe my eyes: a whole room of Malvina Hoﬀman sculptures! Harvie had bought an entire set of her work. 140

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

We refused to go on. For the next hour we went from sculpture to sculpture, exclaiming to each other. We knew them all from photos and many of them as enlarged versions in the Field Museum in Chicago. Our guide got a little exasperated with us. We were behind schedule. The crew that took our bronzes had polished them, put them under spotlights on velvet draped bases, and made little name tags for them – as though they were being presented in a classy gallery. We’d never seen them that way ourselves and were impressed at how good they looked. There were indeed nearly a hundred Rungius paintings. His studio had been in Banﬀ, not far from Calgary. Charlie Beil, Bob’s mentor, had lived close by, sometimes acting as a caretaker. The paintings were spectacular portraits of bighorns and elk against the huge characteristic stone slabs of the northern Rockies. The paintings were hung on pull-out screens and we went through them until we were exhausted. Many other paintings were there as well. The best are included in Lorne Render’s book, The Mountains and the Sky,1 and they are very good indeed. But then there would be some fussy little scene evidently painted by someone’s aunt. There was little of the cowboy art so popular in the States. And it was clear that nothing was considered to be trading stock. We looked at the stuﬀed birds. They were all European and up to a century old. Bob estimated that for one man there would be a decade of work. Birds really are “stuﬀed” with tiny bodies of excelsior and string. Rather than being tanned, they are treated with poisons, usually arsenic, which will fade and discolor organic materials. (Bob used borax.) These had been in glass cases, but dust had inﬁltrated. Each would have to be gently blow-cleaned with compressed air and then every feather put back into place with a big needle, preening in the same way a bird preens its feathers. A bird spends hours a day keeping its feathers ﬂuﬀed, smoothed, and properly overlapping to be waterproof and aerodynamic. There WERE more than a hundred stuﬀed hummingbirds looking like jewels in a glass case with brass feet, meant for use as a ﬁre screen in a parlor. One could imagine them with ﬁrelight glancing oﬀ the iridescent feathers. But one could not imagine sitting day after day, dusting and preening them. Finally we were to meet the Colonel himself in a huge taxidermy room with hundreds of mounted heads around the walls. Bob was very concerned because no one had thought to put steadying nails at the base of the necks of the bighorn sheep heads. Because of the horns, they were so top-heavy that unless they were prevented from swiveling on their point of attachment to the wall, they would eventually dump themselves onto the ﬂoor. These were high on the twenty-foot walls so their horns and the papier maché shells inside the hides were bound to be damaged. Someone had said to Bob that he should speak very frankly to the Colonel, because he was a blunt man who wanted the bottom line always. Someone whispered, “Here he comes!” There was a ﬂurry of hair-smoothing and clothes-straightening and then Colonel Harvie came along slowly with his retinue. The ﬁrst thing Bob blurted was, “You’ve got to get someone to stabilize VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS

141

those bighorn heads!” The Colonel did not smile. He wanted to know if Bob would rejuvenate the birds. Bob refused. He began to talk about the bronzes, but the Colonel cut him short and left. We were crestfallen. The “someone” explained that the Colonel’s health was so bad that he could only be out of bed for an hour and was probably already tiring when he met us. Overwhelmed, we packed up and went home. Pretty soon we got word that the Glenbow Foundation wanted to buy several bronzes. It wasn’t until after Bob had divorced me and his reputation had greatly increased that the Riveredge Foundation bought the entire set of rodeo bronzes. Today they are on display in the Calgary Airport, where they are seen by millions, especially around the time of the Calgary Stampede. The money from the sale made such a bulge in Bob’s annual income that the IRS could never believe it wasn’t typical. He was permanently earmarked for review to keep him from hiding any repeat sales of that size. In many ways the just-developing Glenbow Foundation gave Bob the conﬁdence and direction to go on with his sculpture and museum. We spend many long hours trying to digest what we had seen, all the hypotheses about art we had heard, and what a small operation like ours could learn from such a mammoth outﬁt. The lesson we got out of it was focus. The smaller, the more focused, the better the quality and the more important the quality. At the time we didn’t know that Claude Schaeﬀer’s papers had gone to the Glenbow library, but maybe they weren’t there yet. Claude had followed John Ewers as the curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, and his widow had taken his estate to her retirement home in Seaside, Oregon, to sort through the many papers. (She was a trained architect, though it is unclear how much she developed her profession.) As well, the Glenbow had the papers of D.C. Duvall, vital informant to Clarke Wissler, who was one of the earliest anthropologists of Blackfeet. From then on, Bob was always aware of the Calgary institutions as our original big-time institution. Lorne Render was at the Glenbow before he became the director of the C.M. Russell Gallery in Great Falls, and Render became one of the few people Bob really trusted and should have.

142

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

7. Christmas

Browning, 1964

When the June 1964 ﬂood changed life on the reservation, Browning was completely isolated. All bridges were out and the phone went down. No tourist business was operating. We didn’t know that Margaret, Bob’s daughter, and the four grandkids, had gone from Valier to Margaret’s mother in Anacortes, Washington. The DeSmet marriage appeared to have ended. Surely she would be back soon. We had known things were rocky, but we’d had no notion that it would come to this. Weren’t they devout Catholics? Didn’t that mean no divorce? No one was telling us anything. At Christmas, when Margaret and the kids ﬁnally came for a week, we “taught” them what we had learned about painting. At ﬁrst it is the seeing that is important – looking at what it is easy to take for granted and really understanding the relationships of shapes and colors, values, and saturations. Is that pine as dark as it seems? Does that long shadow seem more blue or more red? The kids pretended to listen and then painted their own stuﬀ the way they wanted to. Margaret was more impressed. When she had been close to high school graduation, Ralph Crosby Smith had oﬀered to take her into his family home in Westport, Connecticut, while she went to art school. She had been afraid to go so far alone, afraid she didn’t have enough talent. The sensuousness of the eye must be the most subtle and complex of all human pleasures. What bliss to sit quietly in a panorama of air and light, merged and yet observing, and with small movements of the hand to create a virtual world of tiny contrasts and blends of color and shape! Touch does come into it: soft mink brushes, stiﬀ bristles, springy thin metal of palette knives, kinesthesia of hand muscles transferred to the slender enameled wand of brush handle and then to taut canvas. And smell: the tang of the oil medium and – on the prairie – painting plein aire with the incense of grass, one’s own body, and nearby herbs such as bee balm, horse mint, sage, wild onion. But it was also good in the snug little studio, the Christmas tree, cottonwood smoke from the ﬁreplace, good food smells. We were very proud of ourselves. This was art. I thought an artist should live beautifully. I envisioned a community of kindred spirits, wonderful evenings of good food and talk. A home ﬁlled with cherished objects created by friends. A year that revolved around human ceremony, deeply understood, joyfully shared. The new studio seemed an excellent beginning. It had taken me some eﬀort to convert Bob to the idea that a Christmas tree could be anything other than a Fifties conventional cone, maybe ﬂocked white, with tinsel and blue lights, but now he was an enthusiast for my gnarled jack pines covered with candy sparkling in cellophane among twinkling white fairy lights. In a gesture of compromise, I put his blue lights around the window. VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS

143

He especially liked the part after Christmas, when all the candy is given away to visitors – thus avoiding the chore of taking down and packing ornaments. Since Bob and I weren’t married yet, I went home at night and the kids were divided between Bob and their mom’s beds. I returned for breakfast. We set up still lifes, one after another, and painted Indian corn, buﬀalo skulls, candelabrum, and eagle feathers. We ate, talked, played, and painted all day every day for almost a week. Bob had rigged loudspeakers to play Christmas music inside and outside the museum. We ﬁlled the back of the pickup with hay, blankets, and a real buﬀalo hide and drove around town jingling real sleigh bells, singing and waving. The next Christmas we managed it again, and then never after that.

8. Hunting in the snow

East front of the Rockies, 1968

Another fall was very snowy during hunting season, and we could not have gotten up high into the mountains if we’d wanted to. Bob had an elk tag this time and we went back into foothills, Gunsmoke stoutly plowing along in snow sometimes chest deep. Zuke, my new little pinto horse, ﬂoundered – seriously underpowered and undermotivated. At one point the trail went up over a bank with a pine bough hanging low over it. Bob bent the branch to go past, but instead of holding it for me, he unthinkingly let it go just as I was halfway up. It caught me in the chest, sweeping me out of the saddle and leaving me stuck head-down in a drift. I felt like Charlie Brown upended by a fast pitch from his own team. Zuke collapsed in the snow. Bob, all unawares at the top of the bank, scolded, “Why can’t you keep up?” I don’t know about Zuke, but fury kept me going for an hour or so. At some points in our hunt, we walked along in front of the horses. There was no need to lead the horses physically, as Gunsmoke got into the spirit and practically tiptoed while scanning for elk. Bob talked to him more than he talked to me. Zuke stayed right close, anxious not to be left alone in the wilderness. Me, too. We saw no elk, but ﬁnally got a fat muley buck and Bob put a rope on the carcass to drag it out. Just as we broke out of the treeline on the way back to the pickup, Gunsmoke stopped short and stared oﬀ to his right. Bob, following his line of sight, saw a whole row of ﬁne elk, not far away – just standing and looking at us. Struck with buck fever and not at all prepared, he grabbed for his riﬂe, but it was caught under the rope on the deer carcass. In a ﬂurry of ﬂung arms and legs also worthy of a cartoonist, he actually yanked himself oﬀ his own horse and ended up on his back in the snow with the gun pointing at the sky. The elk watched this foolishness a few more moments and left for saner parts. 144

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Mary on Skeeter, Gunsmoke waiting for Bob. East front of the Rockies (1960s). Photo: Bob Scriver.

Gunsmoke watched, too, but didn’t move. He might have been worried about being shot. Bob was too furious at himself to talk as he drove back home. But I was sitting in a warm glow that didn’t entirely come from the pickup heater. There are two other moments that are vivid in my mind, but I can’t attach them to speciﬁc trips. Once was when I waited on horseback for Bob to explore ahead around a cliﬀ that pushed up above the trail. Zuke looked up, so I did too. At the top of the rocks, maybe six feet away, was a little group of deer, a couple of does and their fawns standing side-by-side, gazing down at me. “Look out!” I hissed. “There’s a man with a gun loose in the forest and you’ll be reduced to soup!” Those big limpid eyes with their long lashes just stared at me while they tried to take it all in. Then Gunsmoke’s feet sounded against a rock on the trail and the deer vanished. They didn’t wheel and run – they just vanished. I never told Bob. He usually assigned me the role of beater. Zuke and I would ride oﬀ to the side and a little ahead and push the deer so they would go close to him. Once we were following a big buck, even caught glimpses of him. We were sure he had hidden in a ragged clump of wild rosebush, so I circled around. Amazingly, I saw the buck get down on his “hands and knees” – belly scraping the ground – and creep unseen right past Bob. We never did catch up with him. I thought it was a lesson in the uses of humility. The noble, soaring, bounding technique would not have worked: it was a crafty belly-crawl that saved that buck.

VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS

145

VIII Black Tuffy: Troubles Begin

1. About ﬂexible molds

Browning, Fifties and forward

In the Fifties Bob had gained a huge advantage over other sculptors because of a “secret” mold material he had found in Chicago: Koroseal™. In Rodin’s time, molds for waxes and plasters were made of agar-agar, which is only gelatin. The material was fragile, decomposed and distorted easily, and lost detail every time a casting was made. We tried it once and were disgusted. Old-time collectors took care to buy copies made early in the life of the mold, and artists numbered their castings to make this easier. “Editions” were based on the number of castings a mold could produce without losing so much detail as to be unsaleable. To change the number of a casting lower was equivalent to pretending the casting had more detail than it did, and thus more value. As ﬁne accurate detail became an index, many artists worked over their waxes before they were cast into bronze or even sharpened details on the bronze with small chisels and hammers. Bronze, a malleable metal, will accept such techniques. In Malvina Hoﬀman’s time latex molds were widely used for casting, but they had their disadvantages: time-consuming to make, hard to stabilize in larger dimensions, and, again, prone to blurring of detail when repeated copies were made. They could decompose and had to be stored carefully to keep them from losing shape entirely. In comparison, Koroseal™ was a miracle material: tough, resilient, and storable. The tenth, the ﬁftieth, the hundredth copy made from the mold, whether in plaster or wax, had as much detail as the ﬁrst. But the idea that low numbers meant higher value has persisted. When Bob made a Koroseal™ mold he used as much caution as someone cooking up illegal amphetamines, partly because he so loved having secrets and partly because the process was tricky enough to be vulnerable to interruptions. 147

Generally he worked late at night with the phone oﬀ the hook and the door locked. The Koroseal™ came as ground-up rubbery stuﬀ, dark red. It had to be melted in a turkey roaster to a kind of hot syrup that poured slowly and thickly around the sculpture. Spilled on ﬂesh, it clung and burned painfully. To make sure the Koroseal™ snugged up tightly into all the small overhanging conﬁgurations (“anfractuosities”) of the sculpture without trapping bubbles, Bob used a vacuum table, a smooth slab of marble with a small hole in the middle and a pump underneath to pull out air through that hole. What made it nearly impossible to use was the necessity of hollowing out the interior of the plaster sculpture with an electric hand drill until it was thin enough for the pump to pull air through, maybe a half- or quarter-inch thickness. The smallest slip of the drill could destroy the model. A water-clay dam was built around the hollow ﬁgure to seal it onto the vacuum table, the motor set to pumping, and the hot syrup poured in between dam and ﬁgure. When it cooled, the resulting mold was ﬂexible, resistant to tearing, and exquisitely detailed. It was not unusual for Bob’s ﬁngerprints to carry through from the plastilene model to the conversion into plaster and then to the pliable mold where it was imprinted in the wax or hydrocal replicas. Helping Bob cut open the cooled molds was a task of cooperation and intimacy. Two chairs were arranged facing each other so we could sit knee-toknee. Bob brought out the special knives he had made for cutting molds, knives that had been diﬃcult to make and that he kept carefully hidden for fear of someone using them for skinning or whittling or cutting up sandwiches. Only cheap kitchen knives in the beginning, they now had double edges and kinks bent into the blades, bends of diﬀerent sizes and diﬀerent distances between the handles and points, which were ﬁled to sharp edges. When something of the consistency of cheese was cut with these knives, a groove was created – a gasket – which keyed the mold for reassembly and prevented any liquid material from leaking out. Today you can buy this kind of specialized knife from a sculpture supply place. The lump of Koroseal™, like a big resilient piece of meat, was cradled on our nudged-together knees and the knives arranged like surgical instruments alongside. The light was pulled down close. Only the ﬂat base of the sculpture showed at the bottom of the mold and it took Bob a moment of studying to orient himself, visualizing exactly where the ﬁgure was inside. Then he began to cut. My job was to support and separate as he cut. “A little more pressure to the left.” “Here?” “Yeah – that’s good. Maybe a little harder. No, it’s coming too fast. Hold still now. Don’t move. Try to tilt a little.” “How’s this?” “Oh, yes. That’s good. Keep that up.” 148

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

He never forgot where the anatomy was inside the mold. The stuﬀ didn’t cut easily, but in a while the sculpture re-emerged and the mold fell away in two pieces. Or sometimes it was necessary to cut the mold into three pieces – not many more, for it really was quite ﬂexible. The color and texture always made me think of tumescent ﬂesh, slippery and sensuous. I thought of episiotomies at the moment of birth. I thought of sex. “Do you think of nothing else?” demanded Bob, passing on a comment made to him by previous women. Then there was Black Tuﬀy™. “Polysulﬁdes ... consist of two parts – a base compound and a curing agent – which are mixed just prior to application. Curing takes place with negligible shrinkage at room temperature, producing molds suitable for casting gypsum plasters and cements, waxes ... This material, although very smelly and gooey, is a consistent and reliable rubber. Affectionately known as Good Old Black Tuffy!” (From the website of a sculpture supply catalogue.)

“Black Tuﬀy™” was a “cold molding compound” for making molds that would remain ﬂexible. It revolutionized mold-making because it did less damage to models, was relatively easy to mix (there were two syrupy ingredients which were mixed like epoxy glue and then “gelled” by chemical reaction), and was ﬁrm enough not to distort. There were several “Tuﬀy” formulations, for instance “Gray” and “Stretchy” Tuﬀy, but none of them was as good as “good old Black Tuﬀy.” The stuﬀ didn’t tear easily, no heat was involved and it didn’t require a vacuum table to get accurate detail. Suddenly it was possible for Bob, all alone, to make a mold directly from a plastilene model in a few hours with no waste mold. There was only one drawback. It was sticky, thick, blacker than tar, and got on everything. On a day we worked with it and for days afterwards black smudges turned up everywhere – on doorknobs and light bulbs, on dishes in the kitchen, on the dog, on the toilet seat, on the pickup steering wheel and sticking together the pages of the phone book. It was miserably hard to get oﬀ. And it stunk of rotten eggs. There was another characteristic: it had to be measured very accurately in small amounts by weight. Bob scoured the country until he found a set of second-hand pharmacy scales with tiny increments marked on a balance beam. A strange assortment of containers – mixing bowls, wash pans, empty margarine tubs – had always ﬂoated around the shop with the remains of plaster in them. Now a second ﬂotilla appeared, this time with Black Tuﬀy™ leftovers. If it had set up, it was sort of fascinating to peel out, stretching in sheets and strips. If it had not set up, it was nasty and you’d be ﬁnding black marks on the backs of your arms or across your face. Just passing through the shop could get it on your clothes.

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N

149

One Saturday when Bob was gone someplace, I decided I would clean the shop. All day I scraped lacquer oﬀ the bathtub and sink, rubbed clean the windows that surely hadn’t been touched since they were installed, hammered old plaster stuck to the ﬂoor into chips so I could sweep it up, rounded up, sorted and organized tools. Late in the afternoon Bob still hadn’t returned. My eyes lit on the Tuﬀy-smeared pharmacy scales. Determined to take it back to its former brassy splendor, I worked on it with steel wool until it shone. Just then Bob walked in and bellowed. In my zeal I had scrubbed oﬀ all the little increment marks on the balance beam. The scale would never be accurate again. That’s the way trouble came. Small bits of darkness, unreconciled and unresolved, turning up unexpectedly in strange places. The eﬀorts to get rid of them resulted in more damage than the original trouble. Doing the work meant getting dirty.

2. The Big Flood

Blackfeet Reservation, 1964

1964 was the year of Montana’s territorial Centennial, and we were all preparing. The famous screenwriters in East Glacier, Betsey and Talbot Jennings (who wrote the script for the movie of The Good Earth), wrote a pageant and the city fathers – still mostly white at that time – began to look around for a director. I made Centennial costumes to wear in parades and to dances and for the receptionist girls in the museum. Then it rained. Warm, heavy rain fell on deep snow in the mountains and water levels began to mount in all the ponds and reservoirs. The Blackfeet Reservation is on the east slope of the Rockies, crossed by three major drainages and many small ones, each coming down out of the mountains swiftly, not slowing until the prairie ﬂattens out on the eastern wheat ﬁelds of the Reservation. Bureau of Indian Aﬀairs and Glacier Park managers went out to open ﬂoodgates on their headwater dams, but found them rusted shut, tangled with driftwood, or simply broken. Early one June morning, the water rising and becoming more violent in every drainage, three dams collapsed and sent walls of water charging down Swiftcurrent Creek, Two Medicine, and Birch Creek, so swiftly and unexpectedly that few realized the danger in time to go to high ground. School had just dismissed and many people had moved for the summer down to their little cabins by the watercourses. Bill McMullen, a police oﬃcer, went to warn people to move to high ground, and saw a deadly wall of water traveling down Birch Creek. On the front edge the water was tumbling a dead cow end-for-end, raising a terrible dust in the compression wind that went just ahead of the water. 150

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The Browning school principal and superintendent were among a group who stood helplessly on a ridge at Two Medicine while two old ladies struggled to get their ﬂock of grandchildren into an ancient pickup, and then in their haste stalled the motor, which cost them just enough time for the water to catch them and sweep them away. The group of men stripped barbed wire from the fences, tied spare tires and boards to them and threw, threw, repeatedly threw them to within the grasp of the children, but the children were too shocked and confused to get hold. One teenaged girl survived being swept away but, stranded in the brush, died of exposure during the night. Books have been written that include all the stories of the tragedy. Every bridge was destroyed except the bridge to East Glacier, which is very high, but the river under that bridge was traveling like a roller derby, high up one sheer wall. Ancient Viney Chattin stood in the middle of the bridge when we went up to see. Her bright red hair waved straight up in the wind as she shrieked to the rest of us, “Get back! Get back! The bridge is going to go! The pilings are being undermined!” When we called out for her to take her own advice, she said, “I’m an old lady. I can do what I want. I want to see it go!” Luckily, she was wrong and the pilings were safe, though they did get some rebuilding a few years later. At the other end of the reservation Badger Creek ripped out the old cottonwoods along its banks, bent all the willows ﬂat, and threw huge slabs of Highway 89 oﬀ the right-of-way, each of them rearing up taller than a house and then falling over in a somersault. It took everyone a while to realize we were isolated, every highway interdicted. Even 4x4 trucks, which eventually began to travel cross-country and ford the creeks, had to wait until the water went down and the mud dried up. All-terrain vehicles hadn’t been invented yet. KSEN radio station transmitted with generators and kept us all in touch with each other. Bill Grissom, the superintendent of the reservation, didn’t sleep for days. Slowly we accounted for people, dead (more than thirty) or alive, and the stories accumulated. The local priest had gotten trapped in a tree while checking his cows. (We hadn’t realized he owned a herd of cows until then.) A mother had managed to get her two children onto a raft formed by a roof torn oﬀ a house, but the turbulence ripped at them until she had to let one go in order to save the other. A helicopter went to check on the occupants of a house and a man burst right up through the shingles where he had taken refuge in the rafters. Some people were never found. Houses were ﬁlled with mud that rotted everything it touched and as soon as the electricity was back on, the laundromats ran around the clock to try to save anything washable. Merle Magee’s house ﬂoated, so gently that the kitchen cabinet contents were undisturbed, and came to rest on a ten-foot-tall tangle of trees and brush. Next to the house, a main branch of a toppled cottonwood tree stuck up with a robin’s nest in it, the nestlings safe. The parents had found them and were poking worms into them as though this were all normal. V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N

151

The little village of Heart Butte was devastated. The Centennial was cancelled. Instead we held memorial services and tried to understand what to do next. Bob and I had few losses really, no close friends killed, no property destroyed except the furnace under the house, but it was as though an apocalypse had swept through, and it entered our dreams. Now, ﬁfty years later, the driftwood and gravel mostly are still where they were left by the water. Then good weather returned, the prairie blossomed again into sheets of yellow and blue, and the shadows of cumulus clouds moved like live things over the swells and hollows of the land. The government sent in money and many new houses were quickly built. Local white ranchers joked bitterly that the net gain was great enough that Blackfeet prayed, “God bless us and send another ﬂood.” The tribe cancelled Indian Days but then at the last minute reversed themselves, saying the people needed to come together in order to restore family ties and grieve. There were few tipis, but the drumbeat was the same. There were no tourists since they couldn’t get through, so we had more leisure than usual. Mrs. Stephenson, who had been going to work the front desk with me that summer, turned gardener and planted delphiniums, poppies, and shasta daisies in the newly created backyard. We planted grass, which came up a uniform ﬁeld of little white-ﬂowered weeds. Bob’s mom and I spent an afternoon pulling those up, which upset Bob greatly. “At least there was something GROWING there,” he lamented. We were still unaware that part of Bob’s family had left Valier. Worse than that, what was growing in Margaret was cancer though not even her doctor knew that yet. Bob got interested in the faces of the locals who had grown whiskers for the Centennial and began to make characters, sort of half-portraits, who turned into the vignette sculpture called The Dead Man’s Hand, which is Aces and Eights – what Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he was shot. The Methodist minister was the long tall fellow. Bob’s brother was the gambler. Hubert Bartlett, our John Birch lumber-hauling friend, became the oﬀended cowboy. It was the sort of story sculpture that John Rogers had been turning out in plaster decades earlier for Victorian parlors. Bob presented the piece in a little diorama of a saloon with a turntable inside. It was the epitome of his corny genre side, but everyone loved it.

3. Animals drive a wedge We had two bobcat kittens now, litter mates but nothing alike in personality. Rufus was a rumbustious, self-possessed kitten who nearly crowded the accommodating mother-cat’s kittens clear out. By the time we had given away the domestic kittens, he was inseparable from the old gray-striped tabby and cared 152

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

nothing for us humans. At dusk the two of them went down the alley in search of mice, visiting back and forth in fond throaty little sounds, and if Rufus got out of line, the old Mommacat gave him a good clout, even after he’d gotten twice as big as she was. One day I got a phone call from a household down the alley. Rufus had been enjoying the warm vent of their clothes dryer, which they thought was charming, so they had invited him in and given him a little canned salmon. Now he was camped on the daybed in their den and refused to go home. They were due to go somewhere – could the bobcat please be removed? Rufus only glanced up when I came in, hardly cared when I put my hands on him, but when he realized I was going to take him out of this wonderfully hospitable setting, he turned into a buzz saw. I barely got him outside before I had to drop him and follow him up the alley clapping my bloody hands to keep him from doubling back. Gimpy was at ﬁrst given to a grandmother with a small child, but in spite of the cat’s sweet disposition and in spite of the bond that formed between the kitten and the child, she proved to be too much for the grandmother and ended up joining Rufus with us. The gray tabby seemed to have an inﬁnite supply of milk, but I supplemented with baby formula. As the kittens grew older, I mixed puréed liver baby food into the milk – making the hole in the nipple larger – and when the kittens ripped the nipple oﬀ and ate that, too, I knew I’d put oﬀ weaning longer than necessary. But Gimpy seemed to have chronic diarrhea and trouble grasping the use of the cat litter box. Maybe her sweetness came in part from being dumb. Inevitably she made a mess on some of Bob’s carefully prepared painting canvases. And Bob’s reaction to excrement was always extreme. He cursed poor Gimpy, grabbed her up, and ﬂung her into the catbox. Today’s sanitary arrangements for cats, so deodorized and private, were not available then, so the kittens had a cardboard sand box inside a wood crate to support it when damp. Gimpy’s leg slammed into the edge of that box and she screamed. My brother, who had been studying veterinary medicine but gave it up because he was too soft-hearted, felt Gimpy carefully – while the little cat purred – and diagnosed a “green-stick break”, that is, not broken through but split. I demanded the pickup keys and we drove the eighty miles to the veterinarian, leaving a shaken and confused Bob behind. So Gimpy had a cast on one rear leg, which was both an encumbrance – she had to learn to swing it sideways when she came up steps or else it caught and held her back – and an advantage – it made a pretty good weapon in the wrestling matches with Rufus. My brother soon left – events were too painful –and things settled down again. When it was time for Gimpy to have her cast removed, Bob and I took her back to the veterinarian. We held her for the vet to cut the plaster away but she screamed horribly. “You’re cutting into her,” I said. V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N

153

Mary the bobcat wrangler with Rufus (left) and Gimpy (right), 1963. Photo: Bob Scriver.

“No, no. Look, this thing can’t cut ﬂesh, only plaster.” He ran the ﬁber disc back and forth on his own arm. “She’s just scared.” But when the cast came oﬀ, the disc had not only cut the ﬂesh, it had made a groove down the side of the newly healed bone. The veterinarian was appalled and apologetic, but I didn’t care because I could hardly keep from fainting and had to stagger outside and sit down. It was Bob who comforted the cat and held her while the vet sewed her back up. On the way home, silent and sickened, we came to a creek where some children were swimming and Bob suggested we stop for a little while. As soon as we put Gimpy down, she spotted the children across the swimming hole and struck out into the water mewing, dog-paddling over to join them. Our hearts constricted with empathy for this poor kitten – broken, weighed down, cut and 154

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

sewn up – still wanting children to play with. We retrieved her and held her purring between us on the drive home. Long afterward, I was mad at the dog and took a swipe at him. Bob said in his serious voice, “Mary, if you are angry and need to beat on something living, don’t strike a small animal. Take it out on something big like a horse or cow. It won’t hurt them so long as you just hit with your hand.” He must have thought about it. But he didn’t strike small animals – he threw them like the bobcat. Jeanette said he threw her kitten once. Another time a cocker spaniel was around and in heat with a pack behind her. She came in the open museum front door and Bob threw her out so hard I was afraid her back would be broken. But he neither struck nor threw me. One October day Bob came by before sunup on a school day. “Let’s go duck hunting!” “Now? What about school? I can’t be late.” “You won’t be late. Trust me.” We went to a little pothole just past the depot. There was a handful of mallards. Bob thought I should be the one to shoot this time. (I had carried a gun a few times, but I hated to shoot animals and always aimed a little oﬀ, while pretending to be chagrined to have missed.) To my surprise I winged a green-headed mallard, who seemed to drop like a stone into the pothole and never surface – very strange for ducks, which ﬂoat easily even dead. Dawn was brightening to daylight across the clear sky. Then Bob pointed out that old mallard’s beak sticking up as he slowly snorkeled along, paddling like mad to keep himself under the water. I must have busted a wing. I shot again, but it was hopeless – the lead pellets just bounced oﬀ the surface of the water. “What can I do?” I was frantic, hating the bird to be wounded, feeling how late it was getting, getting angry at the sneaky creature for not either escaping or surrendering. Bob was laughing by now. Finally I lost my temper entirely, plunged thrashing into the icy water and emerged victorious, my own bird dog. But then I had to get Bob to wring its neck for me – I tried and only succeeded in doing something excruciating that made it gasp. I got to school barely in time and damp around the edges. I think Bob had hoped I would catch the killer instinct, but I didn’t. Once we went goose hunting late on a day when a front was threatening to come through, standing in a gray wall along the mountains. We bumped around the usual potholes a bit, avoiding the south sides of the hills where the sun shone in summer, building up plant clumps and encouraging burrowers, and scanned with the binoculars for geese settled down along a shore. We spotted geese on a lake with a tumble of boulder erratics in just the right place for a hunter to hide behind them. All the gentle hills and scalloped potholes looked the same to me, but Bob had hunted out there so much that he knew the lay of the land. In fact, he’d gotten geese right there before. V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N

155

“There’s not enough cover for the pickup. You walk around behind that hill and come up exactly opposite to those boulders. I’ll be hidden there waiting for them. Now be sure that you come up exactly straight across and don’t let them see you before you get there. Then charge as fast as you can. Take the .22 and shoot it to make noise.” It was cold out of the pickup, but walking warmed me up. I followed along behind the hill and then, when I was sure I was far enough, I crept up to take a peek. There was no pothole lake. Fog was rolling in. Should I go back or go forward? I decided that the hill I had started out around had branched and I should go oﬀ to my left. When I got over that ridge, there was no lake. Now I was baﬄed and disoriented. It began to snow and I thought, oh, good. Now I could tell where I had been, at least. But pretty soon it was snowing hard enough that my backtrack was covered. I trudged on, always sure that the next hill would reveal a lake, and sometimes it did, but not the right lake. Someone’s cows were out there, watching me stoically. I began to be tired and chilled. I expected Bob was really angry and I listened for the pickup to come along behind me, but it didn’t. It was getting dark and the fog thickened, obliterating directions. All I could tell was that my feet were on the ground, so I knew where “up” was, but my feet were getting a little numb. There was no fuel to build a ﬁre. I remembered an old Robert Taylor movie where he killed and gutted a buﬀalo in order to survive a terrible blizzard by climbing inside the warm carcass – but then the cold was so intense that the carcass froze into stone and the last image was Taylor’s blue and ice-crusted face staring out of the cage of ribs. Wondering if I could shoot a cow with my .22, I tried a cluster of three shots into the air as a signal. Snap, snap, snap. The sound didn’t carry. The only ammo was in the gun. Finally I came to a fenceline that was diﬀerent than the others. It was twelveby-twelve timbers with six strands of wire, built to hold someone’s experimental band of buﬀalo. I knew one side of it ran along the highway. Also, about that time, I heard the train whistle back at the depot so I could tell what direction I was walking – towards town. I even knew what time it probably was. Late. I hurried along the fence, feeling proud of myself for being so resourceful. When I got to the highway, I couldn’t decide whether to try to go back and ﬁnd Bob, probably frantic by now, or go on into town on the assumption that he’d gone there when I didn’t turn up. While I was debating, the pickup came from the direction of town. Bob had gone in to get Bill McMullen to help him look for me and decide whether to call out Search and Rescue. For once, I understood that his rage came directly from fear. To me the experience was proof that the universe can save by grace those who pay attention. Bob, however, was embarrassed by the whole thing and forbade me to tell people about it. I thought at ﬁrst he felt badly about sending me oﬀ into the prairie like that – and probably his folks and Bill did give him some heat for it – but really he was angry because in his code one is not supposed to 156

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

get lost. One is always supposed to know exactly where one is. One must be in control. It is a terrifying burden.

4. Bob the conservative, Mary the activist Browning, 1969

The city government and the tribe (mixed with Bureau of Indian Aﬀairs) were in a perpetual struggle that focused on law enforcement because of the confusion in jurisdictions and the failure of any government body to allot enough funds for a decent police department. Until now, the Town of Browning had tried to preserve its identity as a “white” – or at least white-controlled – island of jurisdiction inside an Indian- and government-controlled reservation. The main symbol of this status was ordinary policing: each jurisdiction (city, tribe, county) hired its own force and abided by its own laws. Now there was pressure to combine, and the dwindling white community was ﬁnding it hard to resist, but it seemed to them another symptom of their oppression and loss of control – ironic in view of whites had done to Indians. I attended my ﬁrst town meeting, though Bob didn’t let me participate. He spoke himself, but as City Magistrate and Justice of the Peace it was his obligation. Of course, his idea was maintaining the status quo. Still trying to be a writer, I had a column in the Glacier Reporter called The Merry Scribbler. It started out being natural history and then drifted into muckraking, which got me into trouble. When I wrote a piece about the mayor not licensing his poodles and secretly running the Browning water line out-oftown to supply his new motel, the mayor called Bob in and told him either he made me quit writing, or he was ﬁred from his City Magistrate job. “Get that woman under control!” Bob quit being a judge but I quit my column, too. The only lasting result was that one of the street characters loved yelling at me from blocks away, “Hey! Mary Scribbler!” Essentially, Bob was a conformist, and he was a little naive – at least I read about things in books. Yet his local reputation was potent. He was considered a major womanizer, insatiable. Women couldn’t stay away from him. The year after his death an 80-year-old woman who had known him all his adult life asked me if he were “really that good, you know, in the husband way.” Not wanting to disappoint, I smiled, sighed, and only said, “Oh, my!” The locals would never understand that his secret was tenderness. In short, he seduced women by treating them as a loving mother would treat a child, caressing and praising. Since he didn’t consciously realize what he was doing, he didn’t know when he stopped and turned away.

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N

157

Harold was the one whose high school yearbook legacy was his sex appeal, so maybe that’s why in middle age Bob believed his own reputation and even his mother seemed rather proud of it. In the larger community the idea created jealousy and antagonism. In a community without money, sex is powerful coin, second only to secrets. Many other women would have liked to take my place.

5. Keith Seele, James Willard Schultz, Lone Wolf and Paul Dyck The Reservation, 1966

Keith Seele and his wife Diedericka came to Browning nearly every summer. Keith, aside from being an Egyptologist from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, was a great fan of James Willard Schultz, who had written dozens of exciting books about the Blackfeet plus two classic memoirs, My Life as an Indian and Why Gone Those Times? Dr. Seele had edited the book Blackfeet and Buﬀalo1 from essays and stories left by Schultz and he was active with the James Willard Schultz Society. Adopted by Chewing Black Bone (the old man sitting on the ground in Bob’s sculpture called Transition) who was “Ahku Pitsu” of the Schultz stories), Keith took his responsibilities with considerable seriousness. A natural curator, he did everything with great care and attention, from gently wiping oﬀ his Mercedes with a handkerchief every morning to advising “Sparky,” the Boston Bull. Diedericka had been told early in her life that she had a bad heart but that she would be all right if she would do things slowly. Now aging, she went everywhere with a long deliberate stride, something she had to teach herself since she was more naturally a person who rushed with delight into new ideas and situations. The couple had never had children, partly because of Diedericka’s heart and partly because they were often on excavations with no medical care. Keith felt the danger for a pregnancy or a toddler in such remote places would have meant Diedericka could not be with him. One summer visit of the Seeles blurs into another. One fall we took them to the park to bugle elk out of the golden, shimmering aspen, which amazed and delighted the elderly non-hunters. We took them to the picnic spot on Cut Bank Creek and built a big ﬁre to roast our supper and then marshmallows. Leaning on our elbows or sitting in folding chairs, we lingered long after midnight, until the ﬁre was just a red glow, while Keith told us the stories of the Egyptians he had read in hieroglyphics. They were pretty boring, as he warned us, since they were mostly about sharp trading among camel dealers and other such eﬀorts to get ahead, but maybe they were appropriate tales for us in those days of trying to build a career. He told us that the sarcophagi were inscribed with the life stories of the occupants and, instead of writing left to right, the Egyptians wrote from 158

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

head to foot, which meant that the writing went in diﬀerent directions on the two sides. The Seeles were in Browning when our little black dog, named “Timmy” because he was so timid, was killed by a car. Doctor Seele and I both cried. I buried “Timmy” up at the cabin and the Seeles asked Bob if they could be buried there when the time came, because it was such a beautiful place. He told them “NO!” To me he grumbled, “I don’t want a bunch of dead people at my cabin.” I always thought it was strange that Keith, who started out aspiring to the clergy, so admired James Willard Schultz, a temperamental and melodramatic writer with a bad back which possibly led him into addictions, probably at least marijuana. (The Indian agent at the time was a morphine addict, as were many after the Civil War.) Certainly Bob’s family labeled Schultz as “one of those artist fellows” with the kind of genius that borders on crazy. It would have made more sense for a scholar to admire Schultz’s friend, George Bird Grinnell, a stable and prosperous Easterner who did his best to help the Blackfeet, except for the ambiguous achievement of forcing them to surrender Glacier National Park in exchange for food when they were starving. Perhaps Schultz was Keith’s shadow, the eternal irresponsible child who craves adventure. When Schultz’s half-Blackfeet son, Lone Wolf, died, his ashes were returned to the reservation for burial alongside Yellow Wolf, his uncle, and Bird Tail Woman, his grandmother. His mother had been Fine Shield Woman, a Blackfeet and Schultz’s ﬁrst wife. Lone Wolf, or Hart Schultz, had mixed emotions about his father, who had gone on to remarry. Lone Wolf’s ashes were returned by his wife Naomi, his adopted son Paul Dyck, and Paul’s wife Star. They were a colorful trio.1 Paul claimed to be a direct descendant of Van Dyck, the famous painter, and he certainly looked it with his characteristic Van Dyck beard and long curling hair. The family had been collectors of Plains Indian materials for generations and Paul claimed to have trunks of invaluable artifacts. He wore blue denim western outﬁts, custom-made by a tailor, a Southwest Navajo hat with a ﬂat brim, and boots with “doggin’ heels,” which boosted his height. Intense, opinionated, and bitter, Paul alone would have been formidable. His wife Star looked like Melina Mercouri and wore tank tops with her jeans, Navajo hat and massive turquoise jewelry. She was as American as Paul was European, with her easy loose-limbed stance and a big grin in the middle of her sunburn. In everything she did was a kindness and attention that made up for Paul’s abrupt judgments. He knew it. They were a wonderful team. Paul painted abstractly, using egg tempera glazes to create haunting images of Indians – more reminiscent of Bodmers or Catlins than Russells – in deeply lacquered chiaroscuros of shadow and glint. Here was a REAL artist, we thought respectfully.

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N

159

I wrote the following for the Glacier Reporter: Lone Wolf, whose legal name was Hart Merriam Schultz, died at St. Mary’s Hospital at the age of 88. He was born in the old Montana Territory in 1882 on Birch Creek on the Blackfeet Reservation. His father, James Willard Schultz, adopted the life and ways of the Blackfeet in 1877 and married Natahki (Fine Shield Woman) in 1879. Until Natahki’s death in 1903, the family lived on the reservation. After that they divided their time between Arizona and Montana, establishing residence in Arizona in 1908. Lone Wolf was an artist from his early childhood and won national recognition as early as 1904. He worked as a cowboy and horse breaker and gained renown as an expert horseman.

Burial took place on the afternoon of June 19, 1970, with half a hundred friends and relatives in attendance. The ceremony was simple and drawn from Lone Wolf’s Indian heritage. Four willow wands, each topped by an eagle feather, marked the grave of Last Rider (Louis Champine). Susie Redhorn spoke an Indian prayer. Paul Dyck lowered the engraved copper container, and Mrs. Schultz replaced the ﬁrst spadesful of earth. The eagle feathers were given by the widow to friends and relatives of her late husband as mementoes of times gone by but well remembered. A year or so later, when the business of the estate was cleared up, Naomi went quietly out to the backyard with Lone Wolf’s heavy old revolver, knelt in the grass and shot herself. She did not want to live without him.

6. Overwork and blow-ups Browning, 1969

Through the 1960s, because many of the cruelest blows to the Southern Piegan Blackfeet had happened in the 1860s, the reservation was half-consciously walking through the centennials of massacre, starvation, and pandemic. One hundred years was a short enough period of time for the old people to remember their parents and grandparents telling ﬁrst-hand stories of the grief and despair and, ﬁnally, numbness. Trauma still echoed through Blackfeet lives, unhealed and unﬁnished – even unrecognized. Bob, in the times when he thought he was an Indian, would say, proudly, “You know we never were defeated in a battle. We never signed a surrender.” That was true, but eventually the Amskapi Pikuni were ground into submission. At the Indian Days parade, Bob loaned his much-prized restored spring wagon for some dignitaries too old to walk, but a pack of able-bodied politicians also jumped on the wagon, breaking it. On New Year’s Eve our next-door 160

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

neighbor, a prosperous grain-farming Sioux who with his Blackfeet wife had double-dated with Bob and Jeanette, got drunk on our booze and assured us it would be a happy day when all the white men were run oﬀ the reservation ... and it would come soon ... and that meant us. We loved small dinner parties and though I wasn’t much of a cook, we threw them often and spontaneously in those days. I mastered three menus: steak and baked potatoes, chicken and corn on the cob, and a small canned ham over which I dumped a can of raisin pie ﬁlling. Bob always made fry bread in the electric skillet, sometimes at the table. My Hollywood friends came and I quarreled with them. Bob’s aunt and uncle came from Quebec. Nick Eggenhofer, grand old illustrator, and Dick Frost, tactful museum curator, came. George and Sandi Gray returned from New York City. It was a steady stream, on and on. We ate in the backyard, where you had to guard your salad or “Thunder” the pony would eat it. He had a real fondness for Green Goddess dressing. One summer day we had a crowd and some man came out with us, sat down, and pretty soon pulled over Bob’s plate and began to eat from it. Foolishly I had ﬁxed individual portions: a small steak, corn on the cob, fry bread, and individual strawberry shortcakes with rum in the whipped cream. Bob had gotten up to fetch something to show around or to settle a question in the shop, and when he came back, this man was just tucking away the last of his shortcake. Pretty soon the man thanked us and left, but we never ﬁgured out who he was. Everyone had thought he was a friend of someone else. When the DeVicqs, Bob’s former in-laws, were visiting, I had an abscessed tooth, drove myself to the dentist, lost a lot of blood, and came back in a rage. Bob took one look at me and steered me across the street to the café for something cold to drink. Hélène’s spoiled little girl came along with us. I grabbed her hand to cross the highway and she kicked me in the ankle. Without pausing I kicked her back. I think Bob explained about the dog being killed right on that spot. Then I went out to the studio, took my pain pills, removed all my clothes, got into bed and pulled the sheet over my head. I was tired of restraint and tact. One summer the two Great Falls girls we had hired to be the receptionists in the museum (and live in my attic room) became so wild and unreliable that I ﬁred them on impulse. Since there were no replacements, for the rest of the summer I worked from 6 AM to 10 PM, quickly running to the café across the street for a hamburger when things were slack. Bob kept the same schedule. No more afternoons en plein aire. Bob had hay fever and slept in the bathtub for a week or so. He said I didn’t keep the bedroom clean enough. I suggested that he get allergy shots, since the animals slept with us, but that idea went nowhere. Secretly, I thought it was psychic hay fever. He knew I thought that and held it against me as another betrayal. A fellow who had bought a plaster Pullin’ Leather, the early bucking horse supported by the fence, brought it in for some changes. He had been studying V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N

161

the whole matter of where the rider’s hat had fallen, touching the ground by its brim, and had decided it was in the wrong place – it wouldn’t have fallen there at all. Soon it was clear that the guy just wanted to argue with Bob, maybe because he thought it would make him closer to a famous person and maybe because he was fond of challenging people and powering them down. In the end Bob smashed the little plaster hat on the ﬂoor. “The problem is now solved,” he announced.

7. Into the Wind, Bucky, and breaking points The reservation, late Sixties

On a fall day roaring with wind we went out some side road, idly checking the territory, and Bob spotted a pond with geese in a little bay, all sleeping but one sentinel. A dry irrigation ditch, fairly deep, ran from near the road all the way down to the bay. It was a perfect setup for an ambush. We parked and began to belly crawl. Bob took the shotgun and I had the .22. Luckily there weren’t very many stickery wild roses growing in the ditch we plowed through on our elbows. It seemed as though we crawled for an hour. The ditch meandered back and forth in oxbows, so it was much longer if you followed it instead of walking straight. At last we were there and jumped out into a great thrashing mass of geese. Bob was blasting away, shouting, in an ecstasy, orgasmic. I snapped my little .22. Geese fell on our heads and shoulders like sandbags, knocking us silly. If there were any wounded, they got away. We had ﬁve dead geese to lug back to the pickup, quickly because we were over the limit. Bob was very excited and proud, but I wondered why we were doing it. His answer was a sculpture of what he saw in his mind’s eye, ﬁve geese leaping into the air, held up by each other’s wing tips and called Into the Wind. At that time no one had a sculpture like it and it did well at exhibits. Today there are lots of versions of this idea, none quite so fabulous as the Kent Ullberg fountain in Omaha, Nebraska, which ﬁlls a public square with ﬁfty-eight soaring life-size Canada geese that seem to ﬂy through the walls of buildings. But at the time ﬁve little geese in a tabletop pyramid seemed an achievement. I had wanted to put two of them on top of our wedding cake, symbolic of partnership, but both mothers and Bob objected. “Mary is notional,” explained Bob’s mother. Some years there were lots of pheasants and other years we walked a long way without seeing anything. We bought a springer spaniel from Bill Spencer, who owned the Brighten-Up Shop in Great Falls where we got art supplies. Bucky, 162

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

short for Buckshot, was just a little pup when we ﬁrst took him out and we had no older dog to teach him anything, but he had a champion mother and his instincts were strong. The ﬁrst time we winged a bird, it went down in brush and we urged Bucky to go after it. “Pheasant!” we repeated hopefully, trying to make it sound like the most wonderful thing possible. Bucky charged oﬀ, full of excitement. When we found him again, he was looking eagerly in every direction in hopes of spotting one of those pheasants – while he stood right on top of a hen paralyzed with fright. When it ﬂew up, he fell over backwards. “Pheasant!” we yelled, pointing. Then he got the idea. “Ducks!” worked out a little better. At ﬁrst he tried to pack a duck along with us, but it was as big as he was, so Bob cut oﬀ a wing for him to carry. The little liver-and-white pup held his head high, like a lion proudly dragging an antelope. He was a great retriever, plunging into any kind of water. When he was older, he went into St. Mary Lake after a goose, so late in the season that chunks of ice ﬂoated on the water. Bob said he was afraid for a while he was going to lose his brave-hearted dog. When it wasn’t bird season, Bucky would carry the camera, trotting back and forth through the grass to pass it from one of us to the other. Or I could give him a note when supper was ready and Bucky would take it to Bob, wherever he might be. Someone brought in a young marsh hawk with a hurt wing and we diverted a leg oﬀ Eegy’s daily gopher. The hawk was aggressive and territorial. It pounced on the leg, hooked its strong little beak deep into the meat, and gave a mighty yank – which threw it over backwards because it pulled the gopher leg out from under its own feet. Hawk jumped up, bristling with rage. “Who did that? Come out and ﬁght!” Over and over this happened, while we laughed. I thought about how often I did the same thing to myself. Since the hawk couldn’t ﬂy, we let it loose in the shop. Bucky would sneak up on it, gently pick it up from behind and carry it around until it had dog slobber all over it. This enraged the hawk, but all its ﬂapping and kicking only made Bucky squint to protect his eyes. Once when I had a litter of kittens growing up in a box on the back porch, I came out to ﬁnd Bucky squashed into the box with kittens and mother cat. He looked a little sheepish, but blissful. When we acquired a pet fox, Bucky was her playmate and I made a linoleum cut of the two of them to use as our Christmas card. “Who needs Donner and Blitzen? We have Bucky and Vixen!” Everyone thought Bob did the art. When Bucky was grown, he went foraging everywhere. In winter the snowbanks drifted high enough against the back fence for him to get out. Someone on Willow Creek was trapping and left beaver carcasses around which Bucky packed home. Then he was hit by a snowmobile so that one side of his face sagged. One ﬁne spring day I was sitting beside him on the front steps of the Museum, hugging and petting him, talking to him as though he were human. V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N

163

Fox cub plays “hop on Bob” (1960s). Photo: Mary Scriver.

“My dog, my soft dog, my own dog.” Somewhere in there the dog slipped from being a surrogate child to a surrogate lover. Bob came up just then and his face was a study. Not too long after that Bucky disappeared. I don’t think he was shot. I think Bob gave him away. There was a similar dynamic with Bob’s earlier Springer spaniel, Blackie. Jeanette loved the dog and lavished attention on it. But so did Bob. The dog was devoted to Bob and followed him everywhere. If the dog couldn’t get into the pickup to ride, he would think a minute and then meet Bob at his destination, or so claimed Bob. In the divorce Jeanette had to leave Blackie behind and mourned. I never saw him alive, and I’m not sure how he died, but Bob kept his body in the walk-in freezer, meaning to do a sculpture some day.

164

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Bob the incubator – we never found out what kind of hawk this was (1960s). Photo: Mary Scriver.

Like Bucky, the bobcats roamed all over. Then they disappeared. Years later someone told me that the local kids had stoned both cats to death. They were pets, so they weren’t wary. I always hoped the stories were lies, but probably not. Two other animal deaths bothered me. One was a baby weasel that cried and cried, no matter how carefully I fed it and kept it warm. At last it died. The information I was missing was that it needed its rear-end massaged in order to evacuate its bowels. I should have been using a warm washcloth or sponge to gently wipe it. The other was the albino ground squirrel. A boy sold it to Bob for a dollar or two. It was only a baby and I took it up to school in the bottom of a bucket with some horse oats and grass to eat. The students were rural Blackfeet and yet never really looked closely at the animals. One of the girls was cuddling the two-inch “gopher” when it had a seizure. Crowding around, we could see the V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N

165

little pink open mouth and quite human-looking tiny tongue. But no teeth. I hadn’t looked closely either. This baby was not equipped to eat solids. We sent oﬀ someone to the home-ec room for formula and took turns dripping it into that little mouth. “Gophy” survived and thrived. She lived loose in the studio except when the bobcats came in. Once someone let a bobcat in just as I let the gopher out of its cage, and I made a dive for it in time to catch it inside my two hands, but then the bobcat caught my two hands in her four sets of claws – while the frightened gopher bit me from the inside. Most of the time things worked out better. The gopher loved to hook the sheets from underneath where they hung over the edge of the bed, hoist itself up, and burrow around under the covers. Bob had built a music cabinet that she could barely ﬁt under. One day she decided to build a nest in there and gathered some good materials from the bathroom, where she enjoyed spinning all the toilet paper onto the ﬂoor. With a big mouthful gripped in her teeth, she came galloping through the room and dived to go under the cabinet. But her head was a quarter-inch fatter with the paper in her mouth. She rammed and rammed and rammed until she ﬁnally got some of it inside the space, then crawled in and pulled. A strange sight to see the toilet paper unrolling from the bathroom, down the hall, across the carpet and under the cabinet, evidently all by itself. Another favorite pursuit was jumping into wastepaper baskets to rummage. She died of the most ridiculous of hazards, jumping into the toilet one day when no one was there to rescue her from drowning. I wept and wept, which Bob thought was excessive for a gopher, but I imagined the desperation of being trapped and drowning. There was evidently a strain of white gophers rather than one mutant. The boy who sold them to us cleverly kept their location secret. Another white gopher was in a little cage with one-inch mesh, which we put out in the grassy yard and moved now and then so the gopher could graze. But a strange dog got into the yard and in the eﬀort of trying to get the gopher out in order to eat it, dragged one hind leg through the wire and broke it. Playing nurse, I scrubbed the wound with green soap and dosed it with B.F.I. powder, getting bitten in the process. Bob set the leg as well as he could but we couldn’t ﬁgure out how to make a splint on an animal shaped like a croquet ball. Finally he just sewed the leg onto the gopher’s stomach. When it healed, the gopher chewed oﬀ the thread. Then the bobcat clawed the top oﬀ its cage, and ate it. In the fall of 1970 there was a swan season out at Dandy Jim’s. We went out, found a few young swans, and used our strategy with good success. Except that one swan was only winged and it took oﬀ across the prairie on foot. We ran it down and captured it at the cost of bruises and pinches from its strong beak. The dead swans, gutted, went into the freezer. (When it came time to thaw them for roasting, I had to shear them like sheep or it would have taken days to warm the ﬂesh under the thick down.) The live one Bob wanted to study, 166

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

so it went into the bathtub, the pink bathtub where Bob spent so many hours behind the sliding glass doors. The swan was furious, attacking us every time we peeked, and the bottom of the tub was soon decorated with swan dung. I cut open the stomach of one of the dead birds to see what it was eating. Pale shoots of some sort. I bought a couple of cans of bamboo sprouts as an approximation, but the swan would have nothing to do with them. In a few days, so we could take baths, we moved the swan over to the horse barn and put it in a stall. Bob hadn’t made a model yet – there was no time. The sight of that white indignant bird – a mythic swan, no less – in the dark stall still reeking of horse urine though I’d shoveled it out as thoroughly as I could – and the act of swinging the heavy door shut on it ... I was upset. In fact, something broke in me. We both loved animals, loved having them in our hands and interacting with them. But I began to feel that the price was too high, that we were forcing suﬀering upon them in order to please ourselves, particularly since they were wild creatures not meant to be pets. I hadn’t wanted children because I felt I couldn’t protect and guide them adequately, but now here was the same problem with the animals. And I didn’t feel that I was supporting and guiding Bob very well either – he had doubts about me, too. It didn’t seem as though my devotion was as whole-hearted as it once had been. His mother remarked on it. Twice Bob came to me for reassurance. The ﬁrst time he had been in the shop using the grinding wheel when the grindstone split in half. Evidently no one had checked it for cracks as they ought to have. The two halves spun at high velocity past Bob’s head and out the window, then punched a hole in Bobbie Anderson’s roof next door, missing Bob by an inch. “I could have died,” he panted. “But you didn’t die – you’re safe.” He became angry. “You don’t understand. It was ME. And I almost DIED.” The other time was when he had gone over to the barbed wire corral to put out hay for the horses. It ought to have been a pole corral, but there hadn’t been time and money was a little short. He got there just in time to see a small boy throw rocks at Gunsmoke in order to make him run. The horse could easily have been chased into the wire and been badly hurt, maybe enough to require euthanizing. Bob had thrown the kid down, grabbed a big stone of his own and was about to bash the kid’s head in when he came to his senses. “I almost KILLED!” There was nothing to say. Violence and death were everywhere. In those years half a dozen of my students committed suicide. One of them was the son of Bill Cochran, Bob’s rodeo advisor. The boy, a student of mine, was just beginning art training and had obvious talent. When Carl Cree Medicine’s brother came around while Carl was working in the shop, Bob always disappeared, telling me to deal with him on grounds V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N

167

that women can handle drunks. (Jeanette could.) It was known that the brother had killed his sister, so I was afraid of this man until one day I noticed him watching my hand as I waved it around when I answered the door. I was holding a modeling tool but plainly he thought it was a knife and was very meek, obedient, and jumpy. In the course of writing this book, when I read through all the old Browning newspapers, I came to the account of his tragedy. The sibs had been young teenagers, drunk, quarreling, and the gun was simply handy – it was an impulse. The brother was devastated by what he had done. The death was not because of toughness, but because of weakness. While I was teaching in Heart Butte, twenty years after Bob divorced me, a female Highway Patrol oﬃcer stopped a pickup and, when she went up to the driver’s window, was shot point-blank in the chest. An outsider, a drugged-up hitchhiker, was driving Carl’s son’s pickup. The son was on the seat, shot dead. I remembered that boy when he was just a little curly-head with his arms wrapped around Carl’s leg. The Highway Patrol oﬃcer survived. The boundary between life and death is like the interface between mold and casting – one is shaped by the other, one begins where the other ends. And it can be unpredicted, unseen, almost uncontrollable, almost the same as the boundary between control and out-of-control. Life and death are not any diﬀerent on a reservation than other places, but murders, suicides, abuse, and violence are part of ordinary life, because both victims and killers, some convicted and some not even prosecuted, are friends, neighbors, students, even relatives. Only recently has there begun to be reﬂection about the consequences of such trauma for both individuals and communities. In the background of the reservation always looms the American holocaust of the indigenous peoples. The only reassurance possible is religious. There has to be some anchor point or explanation for why human beings should be pressed so hard, often by the people they were closest to and loved the most. In the twenty-ﬁrst century the Catholic churches are crowded and the small Pentecostal congregations are intense. But still too many reach for the wrong “spirits.”

8. Hunting again, Sweetgrass Hills We went hunting in the Sweetgrass Hills, which are volcanic cones on the Canadian border, east of Browning. They are more properly called “Sweet Pine Hills” because what grows there is balsam ﬁr.2 Scientists ﬁnd the hills fascinating because they are refugia, high enough that they weren’t scraped bare by the glaciers. Farmers honor them because they are water-makers, ﬁlling the underground water table that supplies the wells. Wives love them because when they lift their eyes to the horizon, there is something to see. The Blackfeet went 168

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

there for visionquests, and their low rock walls, the outline of a body just high enough to cut the wind for a person lying down, are still there. We camped overnight and when evening came we were startled to see how many campﬁres were around us. Trying to forestall trouble, we put on our dayglo vests and rode around to the other camps to show them our white horse and pinto horse – NOT deer-colored. Everyone was cheerful and assured us they would be careful. About half the hunters were Blackfeet. Just before dawn, we rode on up towards the ridge. At the ﬁrst little ﬂash of sunlight coming up, a bullet sizzled past between my head and Zuke’s head, like a bumblebee going by impossibly fast. It took a moment to ﬁgure out. A few more bullets came quick, but not so close. We couldn’t tell where they were coming from so didn’t know whether to cross the ridge for safety or double back. Then we spotted the shooter: it was the son of one of Bob’s old hunting partners from Browning. He’d been ﬁring with a scope on his riﬂe and the deer he scoped had gone right past us. The lenses made his ﬁeld of vision so small that he didn’t see us until his buddy socked him in the shoulder and pointed. Bob, enraged, took oﬀ down the hill at the kid, who was sitting on the ground. Bob’s riﬂe was already out. He took Gunsmoke practically into the kid’s lap, so that when the horse sat down on his haunches at the last moment, his front feet were almost touching the young man’s jeans. Then Bob put two high-powered bullets into the ground about three inches on either side of the paralyzed hunter, right by his knees. “How do you like that?” he demanded. We wheeled and rode oﬀ fast. No one shot at us. Down the hill, halfway back to camp, I realized that the camera had bounced out of my saddle bags. “We’re going back to get it,” said Bob through clenched teeth. I was in favor of just forgetting it – it was a cheap camera – but Bob said he wanted the photos on the ﬁlm. Zuke was exhausted, hardly able to travel down the hill, much less up. “I’ll go alone,” said Bob. He turned Gunsmoke back, scanning the ground, and the shooter – still stunned – now scrambled for his life. Many years later he assured me he was convinced Bob was coming back to ﬁnish him oﬀ. With camera in hand, Bob returned. “Let’s go some place safe. Let’s go explore the gold mine shaft on Gold Butte. Underground.” When we bumped away down the road, still expecting more bullets from hidden shooters, we looked up at a hogback in the distance, just in time to see three hunters in a jeep jump out after some elk. They had failed to set the brake and the jeep, unoccupied, sailed out into space with its doors ﬂapping as though ﬂying. We were totally uninterested. We just left. There were no legal consequences to any of this, which is not the same as saying there were no consequences.

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N

169

IX Mother Mold: Wives and Others

1. About mother molds Once a ﬂexible mold has been made in a layer around the plaster original, a second layer, a cradle of plaster and burlap, must be built around the soft ﬂexible mold so it will keep its shape. The thinner the soft mold is, the more durable and enclosing the mother mold must be, but it needn’t be beautiful or smooth – just strong. And it has to come oﬀ without crushing the contents. Seeing a row of mother molds on a shelf tells you nothing – they are ugly, haphazard, like objects left under the sea until they encrusted with salts. Giant oysters with rough barnacled shells, big enough to grip you by the leg, but with soft tissue inside the shell to satin-pad the bite. That soft tissue is the vital part of the mold, which can easily distort if it is unsupported either from the inside or the outside. The surrounding case of something hard is made like a doctor’s cast over a leg with a broken bone. But it needn’t be smooth – in fact, it has knobs of plaster so that it can be wrapped in bungee cord to keep it closed without slipping. This shell holds the soft mold in place while it is being ﬁlled or while it is stored – either closed, maybe with a casting inside, or open – halves lying side-by-side on the shelf. The armature supports sculpture from inside, as the skeleton in the plastilene, but the mother mold is a kind of exoskeleton, a crustacean shell. Bob’s early heavy Koroseal™ molds were resistant to distortion, but even they could collapse or stretch, especially with larger pieces. Thick molds are more expensive, heavier to handle. Even Black Tuﬀy™ molds curl and lose their elasticity unless rubbed with a secret plasticizing ﬂuid that was carcinogenic. Someone who swore us to secrecy gave us a small bottle, but Bob would never let me use it and was nervous about using it himself. It’s easy to see how the metaphor of the soft vulnerable creative surface inside the rough container works for an artist. The ungiving but protective encase171

ment of convention and custom closely embraces the tender and impressionable creative imagination inside, whether it is empty or ﬁlled with a new casting. The mother mold must be a means – never an end. And it can be conﬁning. If it is distorted itself, there is no hope of a good casting. It preserves the shape of the back of the ﬂexible mold, just as the ﬂexible mold preserves the shape of the sculpture, both molds hard-against-soft but in opposite ways. No one buys an artist’s mother molds. It can only be of use when the ﬂexible mold it supports is included, and then only to someone who knows how to cast, to go from negative to positive. When the sculptor dies, asking in the will for the molds to be broken to prevent more castings, it is the mother mold that can be smashed. The rubbery inner mold must be cut or ground to destroy it. After Bob’s death the mother molds of his sculptures were taken to the dump where a bulldozer ran back and forth over them. I don’t know what happened to the ﬂexible inner molds.

2. Ellison Westgarth Macﬁe Scriver Human beings are not sculptures, but they are molded by their mothers, and their mothers are molded by their own mothers. Bob’s mother’s mother, Josephine Creller MacFie, was the German daughter of a Quebec clergyman. In fact, the house and farm where Wessie grew up were built by her grandfather Creller and only became the MacFie place when Josephine married George Hawley MacFie. George was an easygoing man, which balanced him in marriage with the very proper Josephine. Though Wessie happily loved both her parents, it was probably Alice Chew, the household helper, who was the closer nurturer since she took care of the small daily routines. When Josephine MacFie came to Browning to visit her daughter, which was more often after she was widowed, Thad spent more time at the store than usual. My theory about the marriage of Thad and Wessie, who had an age gap of eight years and who had hardly seen each other in the near decade Thad had been in the West, is that Thad chose someone healthy, in contrast to his own bird-like mother who lost so many babies. But in choosing the young, energetic, pleasingly plump Wessie, he was walking into a set of expectations that he shared but could not fulﬁll. The assumption was that, like his brothers, he would soon make a fortune so that Wessie would raise her children in the kind of comfort she had known. But the frontier was closing. Drought and world war haunted the reservation. Thad never struck it rich, though the family never suﬀered and the little boys were perfectly happy with their circumstances. The two-story Scriver house in Browning is generous by local standards, but at its heart it is old and has no foundation. It never had electrical outlets or heat 172

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Photo: Bob and his mother with “Peter Pumpernickel” (1960s). Photo: Mary Scriver.

upstairs and had no central heating. The bathroom and kitchen plumbing were add-ons, as were the glassed-in front porch, the breakfast nook, and the master bedroom. But it was a beautifully decorated house downstairs, with especially ﬁne mahogany furniture from the Minneapolis Scriver furniture store in the dining room. Creller silver was wrapped in plastic and stored in the sideboards and china cupboards. Carpet covered the rather uneven ﬂoor. An upright piano and a grandfather clock lent an air of class, but Thad sat in a modestly priced, locally bought recliner and Wessie did her needlework in a “lady chair,” a small armchair. No Scriver bronzes were on display. I suspect that Thad was not an emotionally accessible man or else learned to withdraw to protect himself. Both his sons were like that. I think Wessie I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S

173

Fiftieth wedding anniversary of Ellison and Thaddeus Scriver. Left to right: Harold, “Wessie,” “Thad,” and Bob Scriver. Photo: Don Schmidt.

found an emotional intimacy with her second son, Robert. She invested him with her love of music, culture, and achievement – her conviction that he was exceptional. In fact, she moved her hopes from her husband to her son, so much that he had to learn to fend her oﬀ, mainly through secrecy – sometimes with deﬁance. This pattern persisted into his own marriages. Wessie was a strong but not a haughty woman. She used her inherited money to buy a series of small houses around Browning and rented them until her death. (This was a common pattern in small towns.) After each tenant – and turnover was high – she went over herself to scrub out the place, repaint, and – usually – supervise the replacement of the toilet. Laurel, her granddaughter, says that these rentals were the bulk of her income while living and the majority of her estate at death. Thad never interfered. She invested her private means in Bob’s enterprises but Thad, as far as I know, never did. She was a woman raised in ease and plenty who had taken on hardships over which she had no control and who felt that in this way she had earned the right to govern her son’s lives. Josephine would have had the same assumptions. When – earlier – “Robert” had gotten Alice pregnant (or she had managed to get pregnant by him, depending on which point of view one chooses to take), Ellison Westgarth MacFie Scriver reacted with outrage, physically attacked her 174

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

alarmed son, and never really got over it. When “Robert” eluded her by enlisting in World War II and then staying in Edmonton with his new wife’s family, she intervened and was able to bring him back. The failure between the two of us to reach an accord was a small tragedy. If I had been more mature, I might have been a daughter. The fourth wife, privately complaining of interference, did not openly quarrel, maybe because Wessie was very diﬀerent from her own mother and maybe because Wessie passed on fairly soon. In all she did, Wessie was only acting as her mother and grandmother would have in the small Jane Austen-type world of Clarenceville, Quebec. Many other mothers in Browning felt as free to interfere in the marriages of their children, particularly sons and particularly in the period during and after World War II, when mothers were beatiﬁed for their sacriﬁces. When I tried to understand what Bob’s women – both the wives and the others – had in common that we would be so receptive to him, the conclusion I reached was that all of us, like his mother, yearned for nurturing and that Bob knew how to give it – but then he would fear intimacy and withdraw. This naturally drove us crazy.

3. Alice the high school kid

Browning and Malta, 1937–1943

Alice, the ﬁrst wife and the mother of Bob’s children, was 19 years old, a senior in high school, when she became pregnant in 1937 and “had to” marry Bob, her 23-year-old high school teacher. He changed her name to his in the class grade book, then he drew a horse’s head on the other page. After two children, she divorced Bob in 1943, remarried, had four more children, was widowed, and then – late in life – married a third time. I barely knew Alice. She was not one to hold grudges. Hardly collegebound, she soon remarried someone she loved. Bob had nothing to do with her next four children or the death of her second husband. Old ladies I asked said she had the meanest mother on Government Square but that her father was a sweet, patient man. In any case, despite their being nearly the same age, the marriage between Alice and Bob was hardly between equals. It did produce the only two children Bob would have. To maintain control at home, Bob resorted to violence, at least in dealing with Alice. I’ve never heard about him striking the children, though Alice’s second husband did. The worst incident was when Bob went to get the children from Alice’s mother, who refused to give them up to Bob. In the grappling struggle he broke her arm.

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S

175

Margaret and Jim Scriver in Edmonton about 1946. Photo: Jeannette Caouette Scriver Chase.

176

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

This badly dysfunctional marriage was interrupted by World War II or it might have been worse. As it was, Bob was shamed to himself and the community – they did not forget. But I was brought up short when I described him slapping Alice in the face to his 80-year-old cousin Margaret. “I’m sure she deserved it,” said the starchy former schoolteacher, whose grandmother was also Josephine Creller Macﬁe. Alice had little to do with Bob’s development as an artist. In photos taken of her during the summer she accompanied Bob on his annual pilgrimage to Vandercook, she stands in front of major sculptures looking bored, tired, and sweaty. Alice was too young and her inﬂuence too thin. She was overwhelmed by the unyielding shell of Bob’s family.

4. Jeanette the ﬁrebrand

Edmonton and Browning, 1946–1959

Jeanette was a diﬀerent story, a ﬂexible mold but one that didn’t ﬁt the pre-existing shell and one determined to have control. When Bob’s vocation was music, she was right there recording his band on the radio, dancing with friends while he blew his horn. When he decided on taxidermy and the series of souvenir animals, she was working beside him. But she had her own mind and no intention of stopping her own pursuits. Bob didn’t marry Jeanette so much as he married her whole family. The three surviving siblings, Jeanette (the oldest), Hélène and Maurice (who was a “surprise” late-in-life baby about Margaret’s age) were small, intense, physically strong, mentally clever, and emotionally extravagant. They grew up in Morinville, a tiny French-Canadian town north of Edmonton. Their father, from an easygoing, fun-loving, music-making family, and their mother, from a much more religious and rigorous family, were both Catholic. Jeanette’s father ran a pool hall with a barbershop. Cathedral bells rang out over the village and Jeanette sang in the choir. As the oldest of all the cousins, she had been praised, cherished, and carried around like a princess, except that her mother always resented her for some reason – maybe just that. When Lucille, the second baby, arrived, Jeanette claimed the child as “hers.” Then came Hélène, so much prettier and sweeter. Hélène was mother’s girl, a star who did a Shirley Temple act. When Lucille, aged 12, died of rheumatic fever, the family was devastated, especially Jeanette, who was twenty. In fact, she may have had a mild case of the disease herself that was not taken quite seriously enough. Moving to Edmonton to make a new start, the parents ran a mom-and-pop store and Jeanette started her own beauty shop a few blocks away. Maurice attended the Jesuit boarding

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S

177

Jeanette and Bob at her parents’ house, 1945. She was madly in love. Photo: Jeanette Caouette Scriver Chase.

school, eventually becoming a college professor and artist. Hélène married a hockey star named Stan DeVicq. It was wartime. When all the young Canadian men had gone overseas to defend England, young small-town women had ﬂocked to Edmonton to occupy their jobs. Then the U.S. Army Air Force came into the war and established a base in Edmonton. Suddenly the town was swarming with handsome young men who might take a bride back to legendary California. Glamour reigned in the evenings and Jeanette was a genius at hair and style. All the women who visited her beauty parlor were ga-ga over Bob, “Jeanette’s Americain.” At the Caouettes he learned a major repertoire of French-Canadian jokes. “Robaire, what’s een zee empty box, “ Jeanette’s dad would ask. Then, roaring with mirth, “Nothing! Eet eez EMPTY!” The plan was to build a music studio next to Jeanette’s beauty parlor, with an apartment upstairs. Maurice was pulled into the couple’s life as a surrogate son. Jeanette’s uncle hunted, and he took “Jeanette’s Americain” along to look for moose. Once Bob 178

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Jeanette and Bob, wedding picture, 1946. Photographer unknown.

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S

179

wanted to collect some snowy Arctic owls to mount and sell, but the uncle was occupied, so Maurice, still a child, went along because he knew the roads. After retrieving one white owl, Maurice announced it was only injured. Bob told him to squeeze it hard under the wings until its heart stopped. The sensation of a warm feathered life stilled to death haunted Maurice the rest of his life. When Bob was honorably discharged on November 7, 1945, the soldiers were ﬂown back to Cut Bank airport. Earl Old Person, not yet Blackfeet chief, played in the Blackfeet Band which welcomed them home with a circle of fancy dancers. Earl said that when Bob got oﬀ the plane, he didn’t rush to his family – instead he dropped his duﬄe bag and began to dance with the celebrating Indian dancers. In a few weeks Jeanette arrived to meet the family at Thanksgiving dinner. When Bob unexpectedly took a ﬂash snapshot, Harold dove under the table, then went into the bathroom to throw up. Later the family realized he’d been hospitalized for a while to treat what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome. He had married Hazel on leave. Returning to Edmonton, Bob and Jeanette married on January 4, 1946, at the courthouse, with her family present but not his. She had made the elegant tailored suit she wore. Bob had a job as ﬁrst chair trumpet and arranger for a popular band at the Trocadero in Edmonton. In the daytime he gave private lessons. Then suddenly the elder Scrivers arrived and packed them up for a return to Browning. Jeanette was stunned, her family astounded. “We paid for Robert to be a music teacher, not a band leader,” said the Mother Mold. Also, Bob could only have legal custody of his son Jimmie while he was in Montana. (Lawyers said there was no hope of Bob getting custody of Margaret, so he didn’t try. She was devastated.) The couple was expected to live with the senior Scrivers in Bob’s boyhood bedroom. Desperate after a quarrel, Jeanette moved to a nearby motel apartment, carrying her belongings over in her arms. Thad confessed to her sadly that he would like to help her, but it would only inﬂame Wessie if he did. The couple ﬁnished the summer in the cabin at St. Mary, but it wasn’t the same as when Bob lived there with Alice. In the fall they moved into Wessie’s rental house across the street from her. Though it was a duplex, Jeanette felt that this was truly “her” house and set about improving it. When Bob went back to Vandercook to get a master’s degree in summer 1950, he invited Jeanette to come along with him to Chicago and she was delighted to go. The ﬁrst time they stopped to get gas, Bob turned to her and said, “I bought the ﬁrst tank of gas, so you can buy this one.” She was indignant. “If this is the way you invite me to come, I’ll go home on the train!” Pretty soon he agreed to pay for the gas and they went on. He began to sing “Chiru-biru-bim” to her and everything seemed better. At Vandercook she took classes on how to teach marching, baton twirling, and rope spinning, 180

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

so she could organize the kids back in Browning. Joey Peterson, six years old, became her star rope-spinner. (Jealous Bob never liked rope spinners after that.) The second summer in Chicago, Bob left Jeanette in Browning with a lot of trinkets to sell, among them his own little ﬁgurines, in a rickety converted gas station on the highway through Browning. Harold Boyd and Bill Byrne, students from his band, went with Bob to Vandercook. While in Chicago, he worked for a Japanese family who made plaster castings. He modeled a seated cavalier and made a mold for it. Also, he discovered he knew one of the staﬀ taxidermists at the Field Museum and hung around learning everything he could. Carl Akeley was his hero, a very ﬁne taxidermist and animal sculptor. Of course, he spent a lot of time in Malvina Hoﬀman’s Hall of Man, the site of ﬁne bronze portraits of more than a hundred people from around the world. Arriving back in Browning and expecting a hero’s welcome from Jeanette, he found the little souvenir store locked. When he asked in the bar next door, the owner told him, “Oh, she went oﬀ with some salesman to tour the Park.” It was Dick Flood, who later became a major Western art entrepreneur. Bob’s imagination went volcanic. When Flood brought Jeanette back, they found a pile of merchandise outside the little shop and a big scrawled “for sale” sign on top. By winter of the last teaching year, Bob was miserable. He couldn’t ﬁt back into his old teaching life. He had caught the superintendent of schools, his enemy, stealing from the band’s pop machine. The man later left with a bagful of embezzled money, but was never convicted because he had coolly destroyed all records. With Jeanette’s support, Bob quit mid-year and went to Whiteﬁsh to be the foreman for an ice-cutting crew run by Freddie Stone, the son of the Stones with whom Bob had spent his summers as a youngster. In spring 1952, he began his new plan for a taxidermy shop, another major departure from his mother’s plan for him. During the summer Jeanette lived at the cabin and operated a souvenir shop in St. Mary. In 1953 he began to build in Browning. Jeanette worked as a cashier, a clerk, or a bookkeeper, to support them while Bob disassembled the old Ammons warehouse on the town square and rebuilt it on the highway. An old rancher remarked to me, “I always thought Scriver worked Jeanette too hard,” but she seemed to want to do the work. Jeanette was, Bob said, the best apple-box carpenter he ever met. Since they practically lived at the shop, she invented a kitchenette there. This was a woman with a mouth and a temper. When fully aroused, she threw things, which Bob thought was hilarious. His laughter, of course, only egged her on, which was hard on their crockery. One evening he became jealously convinced that she was stepping out on him – actually she was taking tickets at the show house – and waited for her in the darkened bedroom. He slapped her across the face. The results were not the same as slapping Alice. Jeanette’s parents had been battlers and her mother usually had come out on top. She reacted quickly. Groping for any heavy object, I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S

181

she found the alarm clock and threw it as hard as she could, hitting him dead center in the forehead, knocking him cold. When he awoke, he discovered her standing over him with the baseball bat she usually kept behind the front door. He never struck her again. Or any other woman. But that was after things had begun to go wrong. Jeanette took a patternmaking course by correspondence and started up a business making custom cowboy shirts and then buckskin jackets in her sewing room upstairs. Bob set up his art studio in a room oﬀ the living room, carrying little dishes of water from the kitchen to make his plaster castings. Photos show him in plaid ﬂannel shirts, slightly pudgy, with his hair curled by Jeanette, who insisted she had to practice perms to keep her skills. He was mortiﬁed when a “hook and bullet” journalist caught him with his hair in pink foam rollers. Jeanette and Margaret became very close. When Margaret graduated from Valier High School, she immediately married Albert (Butch) DeSmet. “Johnny” Skogen, the stepfather who escorted the bride, said that if Bob showed up, he would shoot him. Bob and Jeanette dressed up and went anyway. There was no incident. The DeSmet children were born in 1956, 1959, 1960 and 1961. After John Skogen died, Alice couldn’t handle the teenaged Jimmy, so he moved in with Bob and Jeanette. Margaret had proposed the idea of him going to their dad, because all her life Margaret believed her dad could ﬁx anything. It was actually Jeanette who “took hold” of Jimmy. She told me there was nothing she loved more than managing a man-child. By this time Jeanette was increasingly plagued by mysterious symptoms. She slept late in the morning but was still nearly paralyzed with fatigue – or maybe it was depression. Wessie came over to scold her. When Jeanette went to the doctor, he put her on tranquilizers. After a year, he said he didn’t want to extend her prescription and she would have to make some changes in her life. One day she went out to drive somewhere but Bob, to prevent her, had taken all the wheels oﬀ the car and hidden them. That afternoon her older woman friend helped her take an armload of buckskin shirts to Cut Bank, where she used them to make a down payment on her own car. She was no softie. Bob had begun to have “secret” aﬀairs, though everyone in town was quick to inform Jeanette, even an earnest old Indian lady who came to her door. When Bob asked for a divorce, Jeanette was already fed up. Margie helped her to pack. Jeanette claimed that Bob prowled outside the house in the dark that night, possibly armed. Bob said that his mom watched all day, noting what went into the car, and calling him now and then to report. One day when cleaning, I found a packet of letters and read them. The writer was educated, clearly in love with Bob. He responded, writing notes in the margins that left no doubt. She had been married to someone else at the time of her writing and Bob was married to Jeanette. They planned to divorce their spouses to marry each other. Before they could do that, she became pregnant 182

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

by her husband and decided to remain with him. Bob’s divorce went through anyway. On October 16, 1958, Jeanette went to court and swore she was broke, had no way to make a living, and had been thrown out of the house by Bob, against whom she asked for a restraining order because he had threatened her. She said nothing about being struck, but rather complained that she had to work around town to support the household while Bob put all his money into the business. She said that when she asked for necessary money, he told her to “go get a job” and that he accused her of “bad moral character” and was extremely jealous. She said he required her to “wait on him hand and foot” and to “subdue herself to his, the Defendant’s will.” (Jeanette was never known to subdue herself to anyone’s will.) Jeanette described herself in terms of the deﬁant French nonconformist who is never going to get along with the prissy, self-important English. She was also a terriﬁc ﬂirt and often teased Bob by being a little too friendly with other men, especially his friends. Oddly, he liked the excitement of that, or so he told me. He called it “playing chase,” and compared it to the games he played with the little pet fox. (The context was that he felt I would be more interesting if I would do that same.) It was an eﬀective but dangerous way to deal with fear of intimacy and also made him feel he had “won” over other men when she returned to him. After the divorce action began, Bob wooed Jeanette all over again, made a nude portrait of her called “Jay.” (Which the copyright oﬃce misread as “Joy,” which was not too far oﬀ since Bob said he was trying to capture the emotion she showed when he came back from a trip.) He talked her out of any alimony except $1,000 and the little log cabin that had been the St. Mary tourist shop. But before she left town, she went to the jewelry and clothing stores and ran up major bills for which he was liable. She had outsmarted him again. In the years after Jeanette left, Bob and Jimmy, plus other strays, ran a disorderly, deﬁant bachelor household. Wessie came with her key and cleaned house or washed clothes while the men were gone, picking up what clues she could from whatever she found. She couldn’t quite encompass the situation. (In 1958 and 1959, both of Thad’s brothers passed away, which pressed him more deeply into his quiet interior life.) On November 26, 1958, Harold Prestmo (Alice’s brother who had been damaged in wartime training exercises) committed suicide. Bob had promised Alice to get Jimmy to the funeral and he did, but George, Alice’s brother, was much oﬀended that Bob wore his buckskin hunting jacket – blood, fringes and all. Surely it was meant to be oﬀensive.

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S

183

Nuclear family, 1959, just before it scattered. Butch DeSmet, Jim Scriver, Bob Scriver, Margaret Scriver DeSmet, Jeannette Scriver, Baby Charmaine DeSmet. Photo: Bob Scriver (using self-timer).

5. Arlene the ideal

Browning, 1959–1962

A notable romance was with Arlene, my immediate predecessor. She had dropped out of school, pregnant and unwed, and was waiting tables until her baby came. She asked Bob, as City Magistrate and Justice of the Peace, to intervene to stop a man who was stalking her. Soon she went to work for Bob. The baby was given up for adoption. Her own mother had abandoned the family when Arlene was very small. It was a surprise to me to discover Arlene’s birthdate and realize she was only three years younger than me. Arlene, as several have remarked, was like Marilyn Monroe, a blonde sexy kitten. Bob was hopelessly and recklessly in love with her, but after a permissive beginning, she managed to convince him that he should withdraw to being a father-like protector. He continued in that role for the rest of his life. 184

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

When Arlene joined Bob’s household, rivalry over her is probably what broke the group up. She liked the boys her age, especially Jimmy. Nevertheless, she worked hard in the studio and museum, well enough for Bob to leave her in charge while he took his ﬁrst big art shows to Los Angeles. He asked Arlene what she wanted as a gift and she asked for a dress from Frederick’s of Hollywood, the Sixties version of Victoria’s Secret. He bought a dress he described as “pretty, pink and well-made,” and said he didn’t see anything wrong with it. Bob made a bust of Arlene, which he meant get carved in pink alabaster, but that was never done. He gave the plaster an ivory ﬁnish instead of bronze.

6. Mary the English teacher Browning, 1966–1970

My “mother mold” was not so diﬀerent from Bob’s. My mother was a Daughter of the Oregon Pioneers. Her great-grandmother crossed the prairie on the Oregon Trail. Her grandmother, a spirited young woman from a prosperous family, died of infection after the birth of her second child, a boy. Her ﬁrst child was my grandmother, raised by a harsh and snobbish stepmother, made always uncertain of herself. My mother, the oldest of four daughters, was close enough to her ﬁery political father to make my gentle, insecure grandmother a little jealous. John Pinkerton made it a point to brag that his daughters were as tough and competent as any boys. My mother had married late (I was her ﬁrst child, born when she was thirty) and the plan was two children, but she had three – two sons. I was a needy smart-aleck of a little girl whom she treated more as a little sister than a daughter. My legs ached and then I had tonsillitis. It made my mother feel desperate when she couldn’t meet the demands of all three of us, and she was often impatient if not angry. When I got to school, I did well there. At home I was often spanked or switched. My mother had been pulled out of college because of the Depression, so when I started high school, she went back to college and got a teaching degree as she had intended. Her plan was for me to get a teaching degree and to live close by, still a “little sister.” I thought marrying Bob was a brilliant solution – he had the status, the money would come, and I would not be accused of hogging the spotlight because I was just serving his genius. I did not want children. College had not had the eﬀect on me that my mother had hoped. Instead I had joined a theatre crowd focused on originality, inner strength, and creativity. The last thing I wanted to do was go back home and teach school. In wrapping myself around Bob Scriver, I myself was molded, though I proved to be more unyielding in some respects than either of us expected. When I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S

185

I was given the Blackfeet name of Meekskimyahkee, “Iron Woman,” Bob liked to say it was because of my disposition. But he also said that I was a master of tenacity and determination – that if I said I would do something, I could be counted on to keep my word. In August 1961, having come to Browning to teach high school English, I walked up to the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, expecting a corny tourist attraction. Bob was working alone in the shop. Ernest Thompson Seton’s book Two Little Savages was dear to my heart and Yan (which I pronounced like “yam”) loved taxidermy shops, so I did, too. At Northwestern my acting professor, Alvina Krause, had assigned her students to memorize and “become” a statue from Malvina Hoﬀman’s Hall of Man at the Field Museum, so I knew them well enough to discuss each individually. These shared memories swept me into Bob’s world quickly. Then I didn’t see him again until January, when I invented a scheme to ask him to speak to my classes. He took me home and cooked supper: cracked wheat and deer steaks. He sat me on the sofa, knelt in front of me to take oﬀ my soaked boots, put his sheepskin moccasins on my feet (they just ﬁt), and gave me a long talk about why his Rungius painting of a moose was better than any other painting in the world. It was Bob’s ﬁrst “real” painting. I still think it’s marvelous in its evocation of the green and gray New Brunswick mountains where a moose stands among downed logs. I felt nurtured, both physically and with ideas. The ﬁrst night I stayed over, he kept saying I couldn’t at the same time he handed me his pajama tops and put on his pajama bottoms. I was a sexual dunderhead with no experience at all, but entirely too well read, and convinced it was time to be initiated. I think he really didn’t believe that I was so innocent, but he knew exactly the right moment to tell me about his vasectomy. He said, “Don’t you go claiming that you’re sacriﬁcing something by having sex with me, because you’ve got to enjoy it as much as me or you shouldn’t be doing it.” Made sense to me. Anyway, my mother always said no one would want me and he had proved her wrong. It wasn’t just the sex I enjoyed as much as he did. I was the only wife who didn’t hate Browning and the wind, who joyously rode horseback, drove the pickup, skinned bears and poured bronze. I thought it was a wonderful adventure – and it would make a good book eventually. It would be fair to say I was the only wife who really embraced Indians and Blackfeet history. Even with the advantage of being young, I could barely keep up with him. We talked and talked – or rather he talked. I remembered. I went home and wrote it down. If he reached for his hat, the dog and I were in the pickup before he got there. If he bullied me, insulted me, tried to push me down and turn me away, I just didn’t pay any attention, any more than the dog did. On the other hand, if I gave it up and walked away, he was knocking on my door, needing me back. I was exactly the kind of girl Wessie would have wanted in 1937: white, educated, Scots, and a teacher. Unfortunately, I wasn’t born until 1939. 186

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Bob and Mary at the Moiese Bison Range in the fall of 1962. Photographer unknown.

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S

187

Marriage of Bob Scriver and Mary Strachan, November 27, 1966, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Portland, Oregon. Left to right: Paul Strachan, Margaret Paul, Mary Strachan, Bob Scriver, Mark Strachan, Harlan Hansen. Two girls: Michelle on left, Charmaine on right. Photo: Yuen Lui Studios.

In 1964–65, after the ﬂood, we had an unsettled school year. Three daughters of school oﬃcials got pregnant. The school board met and decided that this was caused by schoolteachers having aﬀairs. Eight, including me, were identiﬁed and notiﬁed that their salaries would be frozen. Everyone left but me. I signed a contract for 1965–66, just to prove they couldn’t run me oﬀ, and told Bob that either we got married in 1966 or I would have to move on. When I was all packed, he said his mother thought we ought to get married because it would be good for his career. He had a catalogue and showed me we could get a diamond ring wholesale. It wasn’t very romantic and I was tempted to just leave, but I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine life without him anymore. The diamond was a quarter-carat, very high quality, and his mother seemed to think it was hers. She constantly fussed that I shouldn’t wear it in the shop but if I wasn’t wearing it, she wanted to know where it was. After the divorce I sold it for grocery money ($200) and Bob was upset. He refused to wear a ring, saying it was too dangerous because it might catch in machinery. (Late in his marriage to Lorraine he wore one brieﬂy.) 188

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The wedding was in November in Portland. I insisted that everyone be in it and that it be in a church, since his ﬁrst two weddings were Justice of the Peace ﬂy-bys. His folks came, Margaret was the matron of honor, Charmaine and Michelle were the junior bridesmaids. My brother was Bob’s best man. My mother managed everything, except that Bob’s mother picked out his wedding suit and bought it for him. She also kept him from wearing his cowboy boots, which I wanted. Just before Margaret and I went up the aisle, I hugged her and she ﬂinched with pain. It was cancer, still undiagnosed. Even not knowing that, I wept right through the ceremony, not a good idea with glazed kid gloves and no hankie. Bob’s new suit appeared to have a hankie in the pocket but was only fake points stapled onto cardboard. Margaret said afterward she was about to tear a strip oﬀ her petticoat. The Clan Macleay bagpiper my mother had hired led us across to the reception hall and Bob slipped him more money to keep him playing. At my mom’s I went to pack the wedding presents into the footlocker Bob had brought, but they wouldn’t all go in, and I was near screaming with frustration. Gently, Thad Scriver put me aside, knelt on my mother’s braided front room rug, and expertly packed everything. After a small wedding dinner at a restaurant, we got right on the train and went home, back to work. On the train Bob and I began to discuss a divorce before we slumped into exhaustion on each other’s shoulders. His folks sat up, just behind us, alert and unfazed. Divorce did not become a reality for four more years. By that time I had the unreasonable idea that by marrying Bob I had killed Margaret. Our actual divorce was in November 1970, but I stayed on in the house, then out at the ranch, over the next winter. I didn’t stop going out to dinner with Bob or leave the reservation until 1973 and then only because Lorraine had moved in with him.

7. Lorraine the widow Browning and Vancouver Island, 1972–2002 The fourth wife, Lorraine, was also the widow. I can ﬁnd no record of a marriage ceremony. News reports begin to describe her as Mrs. Scriver about 1973, and she always reported her marriage date as August 15 that year, which was Bob’s 59th birthday. She said the ceremony was performed in New York City at the 21 Club, but I don’t think they were in New York on that date. The law had changed since Bob divorced me: now it deﬁned a common law marriage and stipulated an automatic division of property in case of divorce. There was a lot more property by that time, no way that alimony would be $1200. I asked him

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S

189

Bob and Lorraine Scriver, 1975. Photo: Buster Ruetten.

once if he had married her and he said, “I was only really married once.” He told Hélène the same thing. But it was only a point of pride. Born in 1924 (which made her ten years younger than Bob), Lorraine was a secretive person. From her own accounts she was abandoned by her mother back on Vancouver Island, so young that she needed to be fed, bathed, and clothed by adult neighbors who took her in. Her father, at least partly Indian, 190

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

went to Alaska and died there, possibly murdered. Her mother remarried and had two sons with the second husband but refused to let Lorraine back into the household. In 1941, when Lorraine was a beautiful teenager, she married Max Caldwell, a gingery, deaf, bald clerk and saxophone player when I knew him. They were in Alberta when some sort of trouble developed around Max and the Caldwells moved to Browning where Max was hired to work at the Browning Merc. He was a nephew of the Robert Starrs, who were investors and employees. The Caldwells lived next door to Bob. Lorraine was a lifelong alcoholic, which suited some purposes. She would never abandon Bob, because she was too needy, and she could never dominate him because she couldn’t hold her focus. By eight o’clock every night she was anesthetized, so he didn’t have to relate to her except during the day when he needed her to take notes and answer the phone. In return he made her eat proper meals, which extended her life, and he kept her sheltered. Over the years they shared enough good times, mostly out at the Flatiron Ranch, to become attached to each other. Severe childhood abuse would explain many of her otherwise irrational actions. Like Bob’s other women, she wanted him to protect her, but then didn’t trust him. Something in him wanted to heal wounded women, but he ended up despising them. It fell to Lorraine to help cope with the deaths of Bob’s mother, brother, son, and granddaughter. More than that, his health – including brain function – was disintegrating. It was clear that, like his father, he was having small strokes, with at least the 1988 incident being major. His heart bypass in the mid-nineties was only partly eﬀective. He became indecisive and subject to abrupt mood swings. His schedule of medications was so complex that he needed a chart. For a while he was diabetic but stabilized on a diet. His lawyers and inheritors need him to be depicted as mentally competent in the last years, but in fact, he probably was not. (Even earlier, Jeanette and I both wondered about lead poisoning from the plastilene constantly rubbed into his hands and clothes.) But Lorraine was never in good health either. Frankly, no one expected her to outlive him, not even Bob. Lorraine worked in the shop, doing the same jobs I had done. When she divorced Max, he didn’t attend the trial or contest it, though he was served papers twice. She used the same lawyer Bob had hired for me when we were divorced, so Bob may have paid for her divorce. Max died of cancer in 1994 without remarrying. In 1977 Wessie, aged 89, had a heart attack and was taken to the Indian Hospital. The whole family was there, Lorraine and Laurel both a little tipsy. Lorraine was very worried about Wessie’s diamond rings, which were substantial. When Wessie was declared dead, the nurse brought the diamond rings out and put them in her hand. “Oh,” cried Lorraine. “They’re still warm!” Then she handed them over to Laurel, bypassing both Bob and Harold. I had assumed I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S

191

the diamond rings came to Wessie from Thad, because she wore them with her wedding rings, but they were inherited from Wessie’s Macﬁe maiden aunts, Aunt Annie and Aunt Lillie. Bob hung a formal portrait of his mother, complete with her Barbara Bush pearls, in the shop, where she smiled benevolently until his death.

192

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

X Lost Wax: Cruciﬁx, Pieta, and Margaret

1. Making a wax duplicate Making waxes was the ﬁrst step of the real bronze casting process. We used the “ciré perdue“ method: ciré meaning wax and perdue meaning lost. It’s a wonderful name for a process, echoing Proust with overtones of tender memory. Wax itself is plastilene with the sediments removed, responsive to haptic pressure and body temperature as well as the sharp knives of the glyptic sculptor that cut and shave harder waxes. Some people model directly into wax, but at this step we melted the wax and painted it into molds until it was about a quarter of an inch thick. At ﬁrst we thought we needed some kind of special casting wax and ordered various densities, melting points, and hardnesses, discovering that the consistency and characteristics of wax vary widely. Then later we began to use local beeswax mixed with other waxes and to control the colors with wax dye. We melted up our mixtures of wax in second-hand deep-fat fryers and turkey roasters because they had thermostats and could be moved around the shop from table to table. We lived in terror of the thermostats going haywire, allowing the wax to get hot enough to explode. At night Bob would be nearly asleep and suddenly jerk awake to go check the shop one more time to make sure they were all turned oﬀ. Once we began to use beeswax, the air was honeyed. We strained out dead bees and other debris by pouring the melted wax through old nylon stockings. I always had plenty of ruined stockings while I was teaching. (We were required to dress up in those days – no trousers, much less jeans.) Once I was in the shop full-time, I rarely wore anything but jeans, so we depended upon Wessie, who wore nylons even doing housework. Melted wax that stuck to the bottom of the fryer or got stranded on the edges would char, turning dark and grainy. Above a certain temperature smoke stung your eyes, which was a reminder to check the thermostat.

193

To make a wax, nestle the ﬂexible plastic mold properly in its supporting plaster “mother mold” on the table. Wedge scraps of wood or plaster under the edges to stabilize it. Then, with a cheap paintbrush, paint in a layer of wax, coating evenly all over the inside of the mold. Some books show the artisan pouring the closed-up mold full of hot wax, in and out like casting a plaster, but we didn’t get good results with that. Putting the two halves back together took a good eye, but it worked for us. Bi-symmetry was the ﬁrst thing Bob checked if another foundry did a casting, and they often failed. A core of investment, the ﬁreproof plaster, had to be poured inside the bodies of horses or other thick shapes to keep them hollow. (Cellini referred to it poetically as “the soul,” but when digging it back out, it was not so exalted.) The core inside was pinioned with small stainless steel nails that pierced through both investment and wax. We cut out a “trapdoor” of wax, ﬁlled the wax inside with investment, and then spliced the piece we cut out into a sprue, one of the wax rods that would make a channel for the molten metal, so that it would cast as bronze. After the casting the bronze piece was welded back in place. “Spruing a wax” is another job for delicate ﬁngers and an engineer’s eye. It means adding long tentacles of wax – the “sprues” – which will melt out when the mold is baked to leave the tubes into which is poured the molten bronze and other tubes through which gases can escape. Where to put them, what size they ought to be, and how ﬁrmly attached are all crucial considerations. Everything is consciousness of ﬂow and deftness at fusing wax with a hot steel blade. While working, keep a bowl of cold water handy, so that if the wax spatters on your hands, you can plunge them into the water for relief. Otherwise hot wax just keeps right on clinging and burning until it’s cool enough to be peeled oﬀ – maybe with cooked skin attached. None of us even considered using gloves. The warm work was pleasant in winter. After a while we stopped trying to work in warm weather because the waxes wouldn’t hold their shape, and anyway, warm weather meant interruptions from tourists and customers. Stubby sprues on the base hold the wax oﬀ a piece of glass. A cage of more slender sprues converges above the wax into what would be a drain spout when the mold was turned upside down. At ﬁrst we made plaster molds for sprues in various sizes, all cylindrical and smooth as candles. Soon we could see no particular advantage in that and simply poured out sheets of wax and cut long strips out when needed, as though working with leather. When the cast bronze was chipped out of the investment, the square edges of the strips made them easier to distinguish from the actual sculpture. They also tended to prevent vortexes from forming when bronze was poured. When the wax was done, we enjoyed writing on the bottom. The back of the saddle on my casting of Lone Cowboy has my initials on it, and the underside of the sculpture is dedicated “to my partner.” (“What do you want me to write?”

194

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The cool room for waxes. There are several bronzes in this wax (1980s). Photo: Buster Ruetten.

X L O S T W A X : C R U C I F I X , P I E TA , A N D M A R G A R E T

195

he asked, taking the romance out of it.) I drew the little curly face I often put at the end of letters. We used a tiny hot stamp, like a brand, to add “Bighorn Foundry,” and the year. The big portrait of Linderman holding his saddle that is now at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City has a dozen hidden initials on it, inscribed with pride by the craftsmen who made it. I’ve forgotten where I put mine. Once a wax is complete with sprues and vents to let molten bronze in and gases out, pack it into investment the consistency of Cream of Wheat, which hardens like cement or plaster. One of Bob’s little strategies was to interrupt the wax sprues with small waxes of On the Prowl or Bellowing Bull or some other small bronze which would cast along with the major ﬁgure. The value of them sometimes paid for the cost of casting the bigger piece. The resulting mass of wax embedded in investment goes into the bake oven to “lose” the wax. At ﬁrst, liquid wax melts out. Then chemical wax molecules must burn out of the investment. The big ones take days.

2. Portrait of a polo player

Santa Rosa, Anacortes, 1967

In the fall of 1966 Bob and I had been married in Portland, taking only the minimum of time oﬀ because of the workload. In spring of 1967 we left on a trip I called our “late honeymoon.” The previous summer a customer had asked for a portrait of her husband on his polo horse in action. We had promised to travel in May to their ranch in Santa Rosa. It was an expensive commission and Bob was full of nerves. But we got oﬀ to a good start when we stopped for gas in Ritzville, Washington, and the service station owner got so excited by the bronzes we were carrying along to show to galleries that he insisted on calling the local newspaper. The reporter showed up in a trenchcoat with his hat-brim turned back, just like the movies. He whipped out his little notebook and began to ask questions. “Would you say that art is always the product of suﬀering?” he demanded, moving a frayed toothpick to the other size of his stubbly lips. “It’s like – the agony and the ecstasy, right? This fellow here, look how he’s suﬀered!” He picked up No More Buﬀalo, the old warrior standing with his useless spear. “Now show me one with ecstasy!” Bob was enchanted. They talked a long time while I sat on a curb in the sunshine and enjoyed listening. Ritzville is high plateau country, dry land wheat farming, and clouds unhurried and ﬂuﬀy as proverbial sheep wandered across the sky. Not quite ecstasy, but very pleasant. In the wind-scourged Columbia River gorge we were on territory that I knew very well but Bob had never seen before. I guided him to what used to 196

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

be our favorite family Sunday afternoon destination: Maryhill Museum, just a hundred miles east of Portland. The land is sun-blanched except for green lawn irrigated from the nearby river so that Maryhill stands as an oasis of Lombardy poplars and smooth lawns. Built originally as a mansion for Sam Hill’s beloved wife, Mary, it was never occupied because of Mary’s death. Sam, from the same railroad family that built the Great Northern through the Blackfeet Reservation, had a friend, Mrs. Spreckels of the sugar fortune, who persuaded and funded him into creating the museum. An early coup was the acquisition of the jewelembroidered cloth-of-gold robes and throne room furniture of the Queen of Roumania. The rest is an eclectic hodgepodge of surprises, much inﬂuenced by the taste of Mrs. Spreckels. I guided Bob up the stairs into the room of Rodin castings. Who would expect them here? Mrs. Spreckels had a lot of connections and a great feel for the notorious. There was no guard and Bob gingerly put his hands on the plasters, which had been made in Rodin’s studio and undoubtedly handled by the master. We tipped up the bronzes and peered underneath to see what we could decipher about the casting. There were no heroic-size pieces, but many familiar ones. Downstairs again, I had almost forgotten the small Theodore Riviere bronzes and still know very little about the sculptor, but Bob liked them almost more than the Rodins. Two bronze entourages of Bedouins in ﬂowing robes and their elegant Barb horses, possibly scaled an inch to a foot, had captured someone and were carrying him away in a cage on the back of a camel. It had to be a historical or literary event, but we didn’t know what. When we got to Portland, my mother agreed to take us on a quick tour of the major heroic bronzes of the city: A. Phimister Proctor’s equestrian Teddy Roosevelt, Rough Rider downtown in front of the Art Museum, George Fite Water’s Abraham Lincoln in the South Park blocks, Pompeo Luigi Coppini’s George Washington, Emmanuel Frémiet’s Joan of Arc in Laurelhurst,1 Roland Hinton Perry’s preposterous elk statue in the horse and dog watering fountain by the Multnomah County Courthouse, Gutzon Borglum’s Harvey W. Scott on Mount Tabor, Alice Cooper’s Sacajawea in Washington Park, and, not far away from her, the Hermon A. MacNeil sculpture called The Coming of the White Man.2 At the Portland Art Museum we came into a gallery space where docents were being trained. Eager, female, and terribly well-dressed, one of them was asking breathlessly, “Don’t you think that art is a series of essences?” After that, when we wanted to seem pretentious, we would ask each other, “Don’t you think art is a series of essences?” One day Bob turned to me thoughtfully and said, “Y’know – art really IS a series of essences!” When it came to heading south, we had a battle. Bob wanted to explore gold country and I was yearning for the ocean. We tussled our way along until we got to Santa Rosa and stopped at a pay phone to make a courtesy call to my cousin. Bob ﬂipped through the phone book – I thought randomly – and came up with the phone number of Jeanette’s sister, Hélène. My cousin wasn’t home, X L O S T W A X : C R U C I F I X , P I E TA , A N D M A R G A R E T

197

but the sister-in-law was, and nothing would do but that we come to spend the night. It was her husband, the hockey star, who insisted. The house was elegant, very Marin County, and dominated by two huge abstract paintings by Maurice, Jeanette’s brother. Hélène, the sister, as Bob had said, looked like a more slender, less experienced Elizabeth Taylor. Maurice was the focus of attention. He had just ﬁnished a European bicycle tour and was in terriﬁc shape, tanned and with a small beard. Bob exclaimed, “He looks just like Jesus must have looked!” Now he was resting before returning to Quebec, where he was a professor of French. He had reformed his family name, returning from Caouette to Chaillot, the older version. Everyone was united in criticism of Jeanette, that ﬁery and opinionated woman who got everything she ever wanted, except Bob. She had spent a good part of her life persecuting her sister, according to Hélène, and I heard many unﬂattering vignettes about her outrageous behavior. It seemed to be a family pastime. I began to have a sneaking fondness for her. Bob had once showed me a botched portrait of Hélène in a long purple robe that he had tried to paint years ago. The fact that he had kept something so amateurish and still had the intention of ﬁnishing it someday – so he sighed – meant that she was still important to him. The unobtainable princess, perhaps. After that she haunted our marriage, just as she had haunted Jeanette’s and would haunt Lorraine. At the Walters’ Bob was beginning to have nerves. We turned into a long drive lined by eucalyptus trees and geranium beds. When we passed the stables, a bony, long-eared old horse was standing in the sun, his lower lip hanging down in slap-happy relaxation. “If that’s the famous polo horse we’ve been hearing so much about,” Bob declared, “We’re going to turn right around and go back.” The Walters were delighted to see us and showed us our room, which opened with sliding glass doors directly to the swimming pool. We went down to the stables and lifted the mockup of the sculpture out of the van. The resident cowboy showed up with his ﬁve sons. All of them were skinny and redheaded, and it was obvious that dad was handing down his big black cowboy hats as they wore out. Each hat hovered at a descending height and each was increasingly disreputable, until the last little fellow had a very dubious hat indeed. It also had a great deal of newspaper in the band to make it small enough for him to wear. They stood in a row and exclaimed in unison, “Goooollleeeeeee!” But the next person to appear was the trainer with that ugly horse, drooping along in good-natured cooperation. The trainer, bent on demonstrating his expertise in the area, looked at the mockup and stated ﬂatly that the “lead” (the foot which the horse tends to step out on most strongly, something like being right-handed) was all wrong. In no time we were embroiled in a major argument about leads. Bob grew more and more exasperated. Finally he said, “Well, that’s it. I’ve had it. Put the mockup back in the van and go get the suitcases, Mary. I’m not doing this.” 198

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Mr. Walters scuﬀed dust with his toe and pondered over his folded arms. He reminded me a bit of Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh. “Would you give me just a half-hour?” he asked at last. “After this long drive down here, surely you could just give me a bit more time. If I can’t change your mind, we’ll call it even.” We had a rather healthy advance tied up in this commission. “Oh, all right.” “Go saddle Why Worry? “ Mr. Walters instructed the trainer. That was the horse’s name: Why Worry? It suited him. Mr. Walters himself disappeared to change into jodhpurs. We stood around in the yard, trying to look conﬁdent, while the row of redheaded lanky males in graduated sizes squinted at us and spat expertly into the dust. At last they directed us over to the polo ﬁeld. Mr. Walters mounted up and walked his relaxed horse out along the fence. Pretty soon he broke into a gallop, then gradually built up speed. Round and round the ﬁeld he went, while we all leaned our elbows on the white-painted board fence and squinted into the perpetual sunshine. Round and round again and now he was traveling. The horse’s lower lip had pulled in, and huge nostrils ﬂared out like the mouth of a trumpet. His tail was up and his gut was sucked in. Great veins raised under his skin and his feet drummed the ground. This was a GORGEOUS horse, full of life and intelligence! “See why I like the old fellow?” asked Mr. Walters, pulling up in front of us and working to keep his seat on the pancake saddle while the horse danced powerfully under him. He was a big man, but the horse acted as though he weighed nothing. “There are other horses that are prettier, but this one is the one that likes to play polo!” “Yahoo!” yelled Bob. Overcome with relief, he threw his hat on the ground and stomped – actually stomped on it! I never had seen anyone actually do it. The redheaded boys were respectful. But they didn’t stomp on their precious hats. “Get that mockup back out of the van, Mary. We’re going to start work this very minute!” And we did. I sat on a stool and held the horse, sometimes supporting his head on my shoulder when he conveniently laid it there for a rest, and ﬂicking his lower lip to keep it pulled in when Bob worked on that end. When the light went bad, we returned to our room for a swim, then had an elegant supper in a dining room graced by Scriver sculptures Mrs. Walters had bought the summer before. Bob discovered chutney and declared it wonderful. Feeling very daring, we went for a quick skinny dip in the dark before collapsing into bed. Early in the morning we lay listening to the California quail calling outside, feeling this must be the height of luxury and wondering if we had time for another swim before breakfast. A heavy padding of feet and whooshing of breath came through the slightly open sliding doors: “Sagacious Sagamore” – “Saggy,” naturally – the basset hound pushed through. Like an insolent butler, he looked us over and went around the room checking our luggage as though he suspected we had hidden some table silver. Then he went to the door and scratched to be X L O S T W A X : C R U C I F I X , P I E TA , A N D M A R G A R E T

199

let out. I hurried to do it, afraid he’d mar the paint. The next two mornings he followed the same routine. The second night we ate out at some elegant place and discovered what a sommelier was. (A wine steward, complete with a little tasting spoon on a string around his neck.) When we got back to Browning, Bob played the part with Coca Cola for the ediﬁcation of the locals. The last day was tense, as Bob was struggling to get a likeness on a head the size of a walnut and Mrs. Walters didn’t think it was quite right yet. It was hard to get her husband to hold still. Finally he just came in and took a nap ﬂat on his back in the dining room. That did the job. We qualiﬁed for the next step in the commissioning process and Mrs. Walters wrote us our check. “You know what I’d really like to have,” she said, softly. “It sounds kind of funny, I know, but what I’d really like is a Cruciﬁx. Do you ever do religious things?” Bob’s enthusiastic response threw her. “Sure! I could do it! And I know just who can pose for Christ, too! Would you like to meet him?” “No, no, no! That’s not necessary.” Bob saw he had derailed her and calmed down. “Do you have speciﬁc ideas about how this ought to be?” “Yes, I would like him still alive, not hanging dead, and at the point where he says, ‘Eli, Eli, lamach sabachthani! ‘: ‘Father, Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?’“ So it was a deal and we drew up another contract. Then we stopped back in Santa Rosa to arrange for Maurice to come pose.

3. Bob’s daughter dies

Anacortes, 1967 and 1968

On the way home I INSISTED on going out to the coast and found a detour on the map that looked as though it would be short. In fact, it was a twisty, winding, coast range road overrun by barreling logging trucks. We went on and on while it got darker and foggier and our mood deteriorated. That night we slept in the van above the sea lion caves on the Oregon coast but couldn’t really see them, only hear them yelp. The tourist facility wasn’t open. When we found a phone and called Anacortes, we learned that Bob’s daughter was scheduled for surgery. She had had symptoms before leaving Valier in the summer of 1964 and had gone to the doctor with no result. Over the next months, she was waiting for health insurance from her new job to kick in. She never had a job better than waitressing in a supper club, so it couldn’t have been very generous insurance. 200

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

When Margaret and the kids had come for Christmas in 1965, she told me that she didn’t think things were right, but the doctors couldn’t ﬁnd anything. About this time she married Ken Paul and they came on a trip together to Browning to tell Bob and visit some of Ken’s relatives. Ken was an enrolled Blackfeet Indian, mixed-blood, and Margaret was worried about what her dad would say, but Bob made no complaint to her or to anyone else that I heard. In fact, May Paul, Ken’s mother, was an Augare, and Calvin Augare had always been one of Bob’s best friends. Ken was big and smart, someone Margaret couldn’t dominate, which I think was a relief to her. Her doctors had told her that her abdominal pain was basically psychosomatic, due to the stress of her life as a single mother with four small children and limited income. Margaret’s pain continued without a diagnosis until she was taking many codeine pills in a day just to get her work done and, if she were bumped, she cried out. Ken called the doctor and told him very deﬁnitely that he was sending Margaret, and he didn’t want her to leave the doctor’s oﬃce without knowing what was wrong. This time, they found the cancer. It was at this point that we called from the Oregon coast. We didn’t stay for the surgery, but took Lane home with us. Rory was still a baby and stayed with his mom. Jeanette took the two girls. In photos that Jeanette took of the girls, they sit side-by-side, looking miserable and scared. August 21 was the “Night of the Grizzlies” when two women in Glacier Park, one on the east side and one on the west side, were killed and eaten by grizzly bears. This was totally unexpected, devastatingly gruesome, and unaccountable. Somehow it became entangled in our minds with Margaret’s cancer. Bob was upset that no one asked him what he thought about grizzlies, since he considered himself an expert, but the Craighead brothers in Yellowstone and Chuck Jonkel in Missoula had already moved the subject to a higher level with their more scientiﬁc approaches. When Margaret came to get Lane, hitching a ride with a girlfriend, she was much thinner and very quiet. She sat on a grassy hillside at the cabin, wearing a white shirt and white shorts, sun in her red-gold hair – already otherworldly. She said she could feel the cancer growing back. We pretended that it was only her imagination, but it was clear that she knew more about her body than the doctors did. Oddly, it was Hélène who called us the day after our ﬁrst wedding anniversary to say that she had heard through Jeanette that Margaret was in very rough shape again. This time we took the train to Anacortes, thinking that it would be the fastest and easiest way. In fact, there had been a derailment near Troy so that we had to transfer to a crowded bus to be portaged across to intact track. There was a single mother with four little kids who reminded us so much of Margaret and all her trips with the kids for Christmas that Bob and I each adopted a child to hold. In the middle of the night they disembarked in some

X L O S T W A X : C R U C I F I X , P I E TA , A N D M A R G A R E T

201

small eastern Washington town and we were relieved to see the family swept up in the husband’s arms. That was the ecstasy. It was strange to sit in Margaret’s kitchen eating peaches she had canned the summer before, visiting with Alice, Jeanette, Jim, and Ken. Jeanette had not seen Bob since his show in Los Angeles in 1961 and she shook with emotion. She was very deﬁnite about everything. At one point she and Alice got into an argument over which one of them had gone duck-hunting with Bob out to Buﬀalo Lake, leaving the car on what seemed solid ground on that frozen fall morning. After hiking clear around the lake, they returned to ﬁnd that the ground had thawed, becoming a bog that sank the car to the tops of the wheels. Digging it out took all their energy – whichever “they” were – and the last of the light. Bob was noncommittal, saying he couldn’t remember which of them it was. Maybe it happened twice. When Bob and Alice were both in Margaret’s hospital room at the same time, she took their hands, one on each side of the bed, and said, “I’ve been dying to get you back together.” Margaret had been unable to take Sacraments since she was divorced. Now Jeanette applied for an annulment of the ﬁrst marriage and she was successful. The local priest was faithful in supporting Margaret. He told her that she was becoming more and more beautiful as her eyes became larger and larger in her thinning face. He said her eyes were windows to her soul. Alice had a lot of theories about what started the cancer: maybe it was when Margaret, three years old, had her appendix out. The old doctor had let Alice stay during the operation. She talked about how he lifted out the tiny mass of her baby intestines and put them on her chest while he found the appendix and how he was smoking a cigar the whole time. “Maybe the ashes fell in there.” Other times she thought it was the spinal Margaret had during labor with Charmaine. It seemed to all of us that there should be some cause for the cancer. I thought maybe environmental pollution in Anacortes, an oil-reﬁnery town where ﬂares were not far from Margaret’s house. They said another young woman up the street had developed the same cancer. None of us had heard of Gardner’s Syndrome and the doctors never spoke of it. It is a genetic predisposition towards intestinal polyps, which makes people vulnerable to carcinogens. Margaret had it, Michelle discovered in the medical records years later. At one point while Margaret was still at home, she had needed a pain shot (the cancer involved her spine) and the nurse who was supposed to give it to her didn’t come. She tried to give it to herself, but couldn’t, so she asked Charmaine, who was very young – under ten years old. Charmaine couldn’t do it either, and the two of them were weeping in agony when Alice came and gave the shot. Finally the kids were sent to Butch, their biological father. Margaret’s strongest wish was that the children stay together. There was another crisis and we went to Anacortes in the van so we could take clay. Setting up a studio in Margaret’s room, Bob made a bust of her, much 202

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

To See Eternity – portrait of Margaret Scriver DeSmet Paul by Bob Scriver, 1967. Photo: Mary Scriver.

to the fascination of the hospital staﬀ. Her hair had been cut for the hospital and she asked for it to be long again. Bob was saying he might call the portrait Prairie Daughter, and made her hair blowing in the wind. When he brought it back to the house, both Alice and Jeanette wept because they hadn’t realized how much her face had changed. By the time we got the bust home to Browning, its name had become To See Eternity, and the wind in her hair was a cold death wind, but we never told her that. Chemotherapy was in its infancy, and the particular drug given to Margaret was violent in its side eﬀects, but it did shrink the tumor down and give her more months of life. She was able to be home for Christmas. Then another emergency call from Ken. She was receiving one c.c. morphine per hour and it wasn’t enough. She begged for the morphine for the last ﬁfteen minutes of every hour. Alice would go out to the nursing station and demand that a nurse respond. This time we ﬂew, with Ken picking us up at Sea-Tac. Margaret’s weight had fallen from 165 pounds to 93 and she was very weak. We were there for the actual operation, because they thought she might not live through it. The doctors said they took her intestines out and hung them up on a stainless steel rack, sorting through to see what could be saved, but they were like wet facial X L O S T W A X : C R U C I F I X , P I E TA , A N D M A R G A R E T

203

tissues and could hardly even be handled. They packed back what they could save. The doctor wept. When Margaret came out of surgery, she was ﬁghting to get the oxygen mask oﬀ her face, though she was barely conscious. “I don’t NEED that!” she insisted. Ken and Alice got into a shoving match over who should comfort her, actually pulling her back and forth on the gurney. Margaret said faintly, “Can’t you just leave me alone?” She died on Mother’s Day. Bob’s folks had taken me aside and said they didn’t think I should go with Bob to the funeral. The more I pushed Bob to tell me what to do, the more he clammed up and pulled away. In fact, this was the way he responded to grief: turning away, becoming silent, a shapeless stone. It seemed to me that everyone would be relieved if I were just gone. I was going to join Margaret – or maybe exchange places with her. This was when I slashed my wrist, then relented. No one said anything about it. This time we drove in the little red van. It was gorgeous spring weather and all the orchards were in bridal bloom. We took the baby pet fox, wearing a silver harness. The ﬁrst night we stayed in Ken’s house, sleeping on the kids’ bunks. I had been supposed to put in the sleeping bags, but forgot, so it was my fault if we were cold. There was no bedding, but I found a mattress pad and put it over the two of us, wrapping us tightly together. We hardly slept – there were too many dreams and strange sounds in the cold house. Girl Scouts and others kept bringing food to Margaret’s house, but there was no one there to eat it. On Friday was the Rosary and we, non-Catholic, ﬂed to Arlene’s. She took us through the Boeing plant where they were just building the ﬁrst 747s, and we were impressed. Arlene’s cats tolerated the fox, so we stayed overnight. She slept on the couch so we could have her bed. Alice’s emotions came out as anger. I was not to be allowed to ride in the family car and I don’t remember how it was resolved. One of the half-sisters from Alice’s second marriage was extremely pregnant. When we got to the graveside, Bob wanted me to sit beside him but there weren’t enough chairs and I thought the pregnant half-sister ought to sit. He was white with rage and I remember his foreﬁnger on the chair, bent backwards with force. Jeanette appeared at the funeral wearing a mink stole though it was quite warm, because she wanted to annoy Bob. They had had a quarrel over mink skins once. (He noticed and was annoyed.) In the cemetery she marched around examining the ﬂowers to see who sent what. Bob had chosen a white gardenia cross with a spray of red roses, as well as a heart of pink roses on behalf of the kids. Ken had ordered an expensive casket and the funeral director was concerned about who was going to pay for the funeral. Bob wrote him a check for half of the cost, ﬁguring that it would cover the man’s expenses and Ken would be responsible for the proﬁt part of it, but that was the last of our money. 204

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

We left after the funeral, anxious to get home. Bob drove as long as he could, but ﬁnally was overcome with exhaustion somewhere past Idaho. Then I drove, hallucinating, determined to cope, occasionally drifting over into the shoulder gravel or across the yellow line. Luckily, there was no traﬃc. Finally, to keep me awake, Bob began telling me every detail about every woman he’d ever gone to bed with. Both of us were out of our minds with fatigue and emotion. I tried to remember for later, and we kept breaking into hysterical laughter. By the time we got to Kalispell, neither of us could drive. It would have been suicidal to try to cross the pass through the Rockies. I was in favor of just sleeping beside the road, but Bob didn’t think it was proper. I suggested a motel, but there wasn’t enough money. (Neither VISA nor ATMs existed yet.) At last I saw a campground that didn’t cost much, and we stayed there, sleeping on the ribbed ﬂoor of the van with nothing but coats and some cardboard for cushioning. Again, we wrapped tightly together to keep warm. We woke up stiﬀ and sore and made it home by 10 AM. Bob had a kidney infection. I never could remember what he told me that crazy night, except something about a woman he had had 29 times in hotel room number 35–or maybe it was 35 times in room 29. I never suspected that it was an old joke among bragging men.

4. Maurice poses for Jesus

Browning, 1967 and 1968

Maurice came to pose that summer before Margaret died. It became obvious that he would have to pose really hanging from the cross, not standing on a stool or shelf. Therefore we dragged in timbers and lashed a rough cross upright from the beams of the studio. Though we teased about using real nails, stirrups on the cross-piece let him hold himself in position. He was only able to suspend himself for seconds at a time, but in that short time his whole body changed. Veins stood out, his skin stretched taut over bones and straining muscles, and his face became suﬀused with blood. Bob had to work quickly. Even so, Maurice had some permanent damage to his shoulder. Maurice wove a story. At one time, raised a Catholic, he had wanted to be a priest. But a year before posing, while studying French in Paris, he had fallen in love with the beautiful niece of Yves St. Laurent, the French couturier. Just as they had begun to plan a life together, she was killed by a bus. His faith, indeed his sanity, was shaken by this tragedy. Now, experiencing the Cruciﬁxion of Jesus through both the spiritual concept and his strained body, he began to ﬁnd meaning again. (Maybe all this was true – maybe not.) We had been doing research on practical matters, drawing on doctors, ministers, priests, an Egyptologist, and stacks of books. Mostly we discovered X L O S T W A X : C R U C I F I X , P I E TA , A N D M A R G A R E T

205

that few actual facts are known though many traditions exist. It is possible that the cross was T-shaped as El Greco painted it. No one knows whether Jesus was permitted a loincloth. It may be that because of the scarcity of wood, he carried only the crosspiece of the cross while the upright remained erected on Golgotha where it had been used for previous Cruciﬁxions. Whenever we were in doubt, we used common sense. All the doctors agreed that nails driven through the palm of the hand would not support the weight of a man. But if they were put through the wrist between the two bones of the forearm, they could not tear out. The early accounts of the Cruciﬁxion use a word that can be interpreted to mean “near the hand,” so we decided to put the nails in the wrist. We found that in order to breathe Maurice had to pull himself up. Medical opinion is that death in cruciﬁxion comes largely from asphyxiation because the chest muscles are drawn so tight. To live, a man must try to pull himself up to ﬁll his lungs until he is too exhausted to lift himself. The Corpus became a struggling, tormented ﬁgure – even his toes and ﬁngers curled with pain, only his upturned face was touched with hope as he strained for breath, the metaphor for Spirit. Browning, Montana, is a small town and soon people were beginning to ask about what was happening. A photo of Maurice hanging on the cross appeared in the local paper and the next morning there was a little knot of Blackfeet children standing across the road, whispering, “That’s where they did it! That’s where they cruciﬁed Jesus!” A high school girl brought in a poem she had written about the Cruciﬁxion and we received an anonymous letter containing what purported to be the only authentic description of Jesus. Sculptor and model, working together from breakfast until dusk every day, kindled between them a mood of creativity that brought them to a rare harmony of minds. In the evenings Bob completed two busts of Maurice – one an impressionistic study of Christ’s head and one of Maurice himself, severely classic. The two sat far into the night with a strong light shining from the side of a bust while they turned it slowly, watching the movement of the line and mass as the edge of shadow traveled over the surface. They discussed endlessly whether the line of a shoulder should be broken by a lock of hair or if the curve of a wave in the hair echoed too obviously the curve of the ear. Bob was never so happy: THIS was being a sculptor! One of the locals cracked, “I hope Scriver knows enough not to put Jesus on a horse!” All that summer people asked to see the Cruciﬁx. It is small, about eighteen inches long, and people seemed disappointed at ﬁrst. They expected something life-size.3 When they held the ﬁgure in their hands to look closely, they began to respond. A Catholic priest from Rome expressed his approval through an interpreter and hand gestures. His tactful comment was that he was relieved to see that it was “beautiful and understandable instead of the jumbled ugliness that seems to swamp us sometimes.” 206

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Christ Head, 1968. A study for the small cruciﬁx called “Eli, Eli” for which Maurice Chaillot posed. Photo: Mary Scriver.

The veins, the tiny thorns, the facial expression were eloquent. The chased and burnished bronze was given a light green-brown patina so that all detail would be readily apparent. In fact, Bob kept making me do the patina over, which I couldn’t understand, until it was Christmas and one came to me as a gift. Somehow, even though I had helped pour bronze and patinaed all the castings, I hadn’t known we cast that many. Bob loved fooling people right under their noses. He hid the casting in the mop bucket (“You’d never look there, I KNEW that!”), and the do-overs had been new castings, not repeats. When Maurice was through posing, we drove him up to Calgary for the return ﬂight. That last night we stayed at the St. Mary cabin to save an hour’s driving on the way north. Our supper was chunks of meat on sticks, roasted in the ﬁreplace and eaten folded into bread. Lane was dubious about such casual cooking at ﬁrst and set his meat on ﬁre a couple of times because he was in a hurry, but soon he got the knack and a taste for it. Meat juice was running X L O S T W A X : C R U C I F I X , P I E TA , A N D M A R G A R E T

207

down his chin, and we teased him, but he didn’t care. He and Maurice decided it would be better to sleep out under the tall tree in the yard than in the little loft over the front room. Bob and I slept in the doorless bedroom. We were all exhausted. In the darkest part of the night I woke up. We had not wired the cabin for electricity yet and no lamp was handy. I was drawn to the front door, which was standing open. Out there in the moonlight on the ground were the big and little ﬁgures of Maurice and Lane in their sleeping bags. Over them stood a small black bear, licking Lane’s face. She looked at me standing in the doorway in my long white nightgown. I don’t know how I knew it was a female bear. She made no sound and neither did I. Somehow our minds seemed attuned. Pretty soon, she moved away into the darkness of the brush. I went quietly back to bed. In the morning I thought I had dreamt the incident, but a week later someone shot a small black she-bear at a nearby dump. Since it was summer, meaning the hide was worthless, she was just left there. It must have been the same bear. I grieved. And I wondered what it meant. Was it Margaret? There is a photo of Margaret’s mother, Alice, under that very tree. Next to her a small black bear, shot by Bob, is hanging from the tree. Between the idea and the delivery of this bronze, perhaps eight months passed, an unusually short time. Completion of the polo player ran parallel, and that piece also turned out beautifully with the horse extended and the graceful arc of the long polo mallet sweeping overhead. In part, Bob was hurrying the Cruciﬁx because he wanted to give a casting to Margaret before she died. When we spoke to Mrs. Walter about reproduction rights, she thought carefully. Her decision was that since the portrait of her husband was a personal thing, she wanted the reproduction rights to be hers, but because a Cruciﬁx has meaning to many people, she didn’t feel she should limit reproduction. We took Margaret’s casting to her just before her third surgery on December 9, 1967. They told us that it was put into her casket when she was buried, but that might not be true. By then Bob had already made arrangements for Maurice and Hélène to return to pose for a Pieta, as a follow-up for the Cruciﬁx. There was no commission for the Pieta. It was meant to be a memorial for Margie. Though Bob knew the Michelangelo Pieta, he also knew that the term refers to a whole category of sculptures that show the dead Jesus in his grieving mother’s arms. On some deep level, this was a portrait of himself holding Margaret. I wish he had actually made that sculpture – himself with the dead and emaciated daughter in his arms, more King Lear than Pieta. It could have been a breakthrough into an entirely diﬀerent level of creation and would have escaped the speculation that in some sense he was making a self-pitying portrait of himself in his own mother’s arms. Hélène, a devoted Catholic, was just enough older than Maurice to make her credible as his mother instead of his sister. I had made a costume for Mary (“Della Robbia blue”) that according to my Lucy Barton costumer’s reference 208

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

book was historically accurate, though it was heavy polyester crepe so it would drape nicely. Hélène could not sit in one position long enough for Bob to get all the folds just right, so I made a surrogate from my dress dummy, rolling up towels to create thighs. One kitten took to sleeping in “Mary’s lap.” One whole day was taken up with meeting airplanes in Great Falls as Hélène, Maurice, and the two receptionists for the summer ﬂew in. Maurice came from Quebec, looking very much the elegant tweedy professor. He had shaved his beard oﬀ, leaving the mustache, which shook Bob up a bit, and he had marijuana in his pocket but had not been challenged by immigration. That shook Bob up even more. We had a shortage of bedrooms – or rather, beds – that I couldn’t quite solve. We had our own bedroom with a double bed and in the front room the foldaway double sofa bed. My idea was to put Hélène on the sofa bed and Maurice on a pallet in what we called “the Indian room.” Seeing the look on Maurice’s face at bedtime, Bob didn’t think a pallet was good enough. A professor needed a real bed. Hélène announced Maurice could sleep with her – after all, he was her brother and much younger. It would be entirely innocent, like their childhood. No one even considered a motel. In the end Hélène somehow ended up in bed with Bob and I – me in the middle. One of the favorite Jeanette stories was about her inserting herself into Hélène’s marital bed “to talk.” The way I remember it, Hélène did stop in the doorway to talk to us on the way back out to the front room after her turn in the bathroom, then sat on the end of the bed, and pretty soon got chilled so came under the covers on the other side of me. I could see that once again I was going to pay the piper for Jeanette. It was an interesting night. Not much sleep. I kept thinking about how this would sound when I came to write it in a book. It struck me as funny, like being a sophomore in college again. The next morning I plunged oﬀ to Cut Bank to buy a rollaway for the Indian room. When I look back on all this, it strikes me how devilish we thought we were and how silly in reality. The four days of posing were very tense. Hélène was in the bathroom for over an hour every morning, doing her facial exercises and macquillage, so the rest of us got used to traveling to the shop basement bathroom, gruesome though it was. One night we listened to records and Hélène ended up in tears because she couldn’t hear what she presumed the rest of us heard. The remainder of the evening was devoted to explaining the music to Hélène. She was utterly charming at all times. We had talked to the Browning coroner about whether the body of Jesus ought to have veins standing out on it and he told us that as soon as blood pressure was lost, they disappeared. All day we talked about such macabre but practical artistic problems while Bob worked, and then in the evenings we ate what we thought of as gourmet food (pressure-fried chicken from Angie’s), drank Cold Duck in little personal bottles which Bob thought were the height X L O S T W A X : C R U C I F I X , P I E TA , A N D M A R G A R E T

209

Pieta, 1969, to memorialize the death of Bob Scriver’s daughter. Photo: Mary Scriver.

of sophistication, and talked. Under the inﬂuence of a little too much Cold Duck, Bob demonstrated how eagles mate – at 3,000 feet above the ground with their talons locked as they free-fall – by leaping from the back of the sofa. I’d never seen him drunk before. The resulting sculpture was exquisite. Everyone was quiet in front of it. For years Bob was afraid to try to transfer it to plaster. This Pieta, the Cruciﬁx, the portrait of Margaret, and the two busts of Maurice – one in classic style as himself and one romantic as the suﬀering Jesus – were a special small category of personal work. They were the very best Bob could do, worthy of Malvina Hoﬀman or Daniel Chester French or even Augustus Saint-Gaudens. They never sold – they were not cowboy art. At the end the four of us – Bob, Maurice, Hélène, and I – went up to East Glacier to have a blowout celebration. Bob wore his wedding suit and his To Tell the Truth! silk cravat, Maurice did his fancy college professor role, and 210

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

both of us women dressed in our most elegant black dresses and “diamond” earrings. (Hélène’s were real.) We all had much champagne, getting tiddly on relief as much as alcohol. Afterwards in the dark we walked across the hillside golf course that fronts the Big Hotel and noted that the long slope was perfect for rolling on the grass. Somehow, Bob managed to orchestrate a rolling race between Hélène and I – oﬀ we went like spinning logs with Bob and Maurice cheering us on and running ahead to see who would win. It felt wonderful on that plush grass under a mountain night sky full of summer stars. We could have rolled on and on forever like a scene out of a post-modern short story – gathering no moss. But the police came along and ﬁxed their spotlights on us. “What’s happening here?” Bob the Judge went over to ﬁnesse the oﬃcers while Hélène and I sprawled breathlessly on the lawn with grass in our tousled hair, checking for lost earrings. Maurice became invisible somehow. That moment was one of the happiest times of Bob’s life. In the last months of his life he kept telling people about it. Danger, triumph, glamour. And TWO women, neither of whom was mad at him just then. We drove Maurice back across the border to catch the plane in Calgary. He wore one of my broad-brimmed straw hats and a blue shirt I had bought at Goodwill because it reminded me of a French peasant’s smock. This time the oﬃcials turned out his pockets at the port of entry, but he had used up his stash in Browning discreetly. Bob and I exchanged glances, still not worldly enough to stop being scared of demon drugs and suddenly aware of how much presentation counts in the world. Once the dishes and sheets were washed and the furniture was back where it belonged, I took a box of tissues, drove far out on the prairie, and sat crying for over an hour. Too many realizations about Bob, including his continuing infatuation with Hélène; too much role-playing in order to keep the peace; not enough sleep; not enough reassurance. If we were waxes, surely there ought to have been more vents to let the emotion escape. The pressure built far too high. A lot of illusion burned oﬀ. At the time I didn’t notice that Arlene, who had seemed such a likely rival and evoked such bitter jealousy from me, was beginning to fade from Bob’s iconography. Now it was sweet Hélène who increasingly featured as the wide-eyed child-woman, the unconditional admirer, the exquisite proof that he was a man of consequence and power. By this time Arlene had moved to Texas. He was always dependable about helping her, but the demands did have a cooling eﬀect. Hélène’s elegance made him restless about my appearance. If I had time at the end of the work day, I used it to read – not to do pedicures. I wore work shirts and jeans and went barefoot in summer. I was gaining weight and cut my own hair. One day in the middle of a quarrel, he burst out, “Look at you! You have a pot belly and your feet stink!” It was true. And I really didn’t care.

X L O S T W A X : C R U C I F I X , P I E TA , A N D M A R G A R E T

211

After the completion of the Pieta. Left to right: Mary Scriver, Bob Scriver, Hélène DeVicq, Maurice Chaillot. Photographer unknown.

5. Lost in grizzly country St. Mary, 1969

In the ten years I was with Bob, he changed in his relationship to hunting, one of his few philosophical shifts. In youth he had been proud of being a sharpshooter so strong he could pack out a quarter of elk by himself. But late in his ﬁfties and with his cornea scarred by an infection, he couldn’t compete with his own younger self. Now – identifying with the animals – he wasn’t even sure he wanted to kill. He would really have rather gone hunting alone, but I trusted 212

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

him – thus boosting his conﬁdence – and probably could go for help, if necessary. With me along, he felt he could risk a few more times out there where he wanted to be, revisiting favorite spots. In particular he had been yearning to go up into Glacier Park above St. Mary Lake to an elk lick he had often visited as a kid. (Probably he hunted there as a young man – not for elk but for grizzly. It was, of course, illegal, but less well enforced in the days before airplanes and radio contact.) Now he just wanted to see the place again and maybe to hear the elk bugling. When we unloaded the horses, a thick pea-soup fog rolled in, so we couldn’t get our bearings by looking at the peaks above us, but Bob felt sure he was on the right trail, which thinned and branched as we went; in a hour or so he wasn’t so sure. It had been decades since he was there last. All sounds were muﬄed. The horses were hyper-alert. It seemed to be getting colder. Mostly we were listening for grizzlies. Bob had packed his breakaway .22, which comes apart so as to be easy to hide, but it would have been no protection. A .357 magnum pistol would have been better. By afternoon we’d blundered into an old burn and the deadfall was entangled in every direction. The path was gone, so lost we couldn’t even double back. Silvered old snags with sharp-ended stubs lay like jackstraws, and the horses’ feet went down into brush that gave way suddenly, so that a snag in the wrong place would pierce their bellies and pull out their guts. I wondered whether the .22 would dispatch a horse in agony. By now we weren’t thinking of bears and knew it was cold enough – beginning to convert the fog into snow – that the bears wouldn’t be thinking of us, but groggily ﬁnding their dens. Still, fresh horse blood and guts.... Bob began to have leg cramps. He got down and limped around in a small cleared space, but then could hardly get back on. This was not a place where I could hike out for help or even get out on one of the horses, because I didn’t know where to go. We had no ﬂares or even a space blanket. I had no matches – maybe Bob did. The snow was making a backtrail for us, but then obliterating it in a few minutes. In the end we found a trail and came out, not quite where we thought we might. The fog lifted to cloud and broke apart enough to see landmarks. Bob was so chilled when we got into the pickup that he shook too hard to get the key in the ignition, so there was ﬁnally something I could do to help. But we both knew we’d been dancing on bones, and not just bones of the forest.

X L O S T W A X : C R U C I F I X , P I E TA , A N D M A R G A R E T

213

Part Two:

Crescendo

XI Investment: New York City

1. Old-fashioned plaster investment Investment is refractory plaster – that is, a heat-resistant variety of gypsum – that is used as a mold by embedding a wax version of a sculpture and then melting it back out. This one-use mold – a second waste mold – will be destroyed when the wax has been melted, burned out, and the resulting empty space reﬁlled with molten bronze. Once the bronze has cooled, the investment is simply knocked oﬀ. It is soft, sometimes mixed with insulating materials like vermiculite or perlite. The earliest prehistoric investment molds were probably mud of some kind, maybe mixed with manure to keep it cohesive. The alternative would have been to chip a mold in stone. Once again, haptic versus glyptic – soft substance shaped or hard substance cut. Investing the wax could be back-breaking. We had devised a big drum mixer for preparing the dry powders. In an unheated back shed mixing was lonely, dusty work that no one liked to do. Harvey Heavy Runner did most of it and often did not wear his mask because the work made him pant. There didn’t seem to be anything toxic in investment, it just clogged up your nose. We didn’t know that one of the ingredients, Zonolite from Libby, Montana, was the kind of vermiculite that is contaminated with cancer-causing asbestos. In those days we thought of asbestos as a benign substance and used both vermiculite and straight asbestos for all sorts of things. Bob would mush a handful of asbestos with water and slap it on something he wanted to insulate when welding close to it. Harvey was a heavy smoker: he died young of lung cancer. The men felt no responsibility for checking supplies. Many times, right in the middle of investing a big mold, they came from the back shed to announce there was “no more” plaster or perlite or grog. The stuﬀ had to be shipped in from Seattle with long delays and many chances that things would go wrong: 217

the railroad would send it to the wrong place or the containers would break open or the wrong thing would be sent. We had so many big drums of material around that it was hard to tell what was where and which was full or empty. One afternoon Bob sent a man into the basement with a felt-tip marker to look into every drum and box and mark the empty ones clearly on the outside. When we looked later, he had carefully drawn “MT”. He was illiterate, but had gotten someone else to show him how to make this “brand.” (I color-coded all the ﬁle folders – green tabs for this and red tabs for that – so that the men could put folders in and out with some approximation of order. Once in a while I re-alphabetized within a color category.) When a wax of a sculpture is ready to “invest,” clear a space because the ﬁnal mold is often quite large, several feet across. At the beginning of building the investment mold, the wax replica of the piece stands on a sheet of plate glass with stubby feet made of wax attached to the bottom. From its top, which will be the bottom when turned upside down for baking, rise long rods of wax from each high point that converge in one thicker piece of wax where the melted wax will run out. Investment mixes like plaster: sprinkle the powder into the water and mix from the bottom to make no bubbles. But it looks diﬀerent. We used gray dental investment, ﬁercely expensive because it was intended for dental use in very small amounts. It took ﬁne detail, was durable enough to bake a long time at high temperatures, and must have had something metallic in it, because silvery paisley patterns form on the surface like oil sheen as it is stirred. When it begins to be creamy, paint it onto the wax with a small paintbrush, then – as it thickens to pudding – pile it on, until the wax is coated for a thickness of half an inch or so. Follow gray investment with layers of plaster/perlite/grog mixed according to ancient recipes. Bend expanded metal lathe into a cage to ﬁt over the increasingly bulky “package” of investment, and then begin the urgent, spine-straining work of mixing the investment, pouring it in, and using hands as squeegees up the sides of the wire to keep the stuﬀ inside until it thickens enough to stay. A wire prong, especially where the metal lathe was cut, often gashed our hands, so that we left streaks of blood. Gloves don’t allow enough control. Our hands dried and cracked from the lime. For a small tabletop bronze, the resulting block of refractory plaster might be a couple of feet tall. A little button of wax at the top (about to become the bottom) is a hole when the wax melts out of it. Attach a short length of pipe, a six-inch nipple, where the wax drains. Before pouring in the molten bronze, close it by screwing on a cap. At the bottom (about to become the top) attach a cone to make a funnel shape for pouring in the metal. Take the ﬁnished investment mold out to the foundry. You might need a hand truck. In the foundry oven the mold heats very slowly, then gradually gets hotter until the melted wax runs out. At 1200 degrees, the water in the investment bakes out, the wax residue burns out, converts to chemicals and gases, and ﬁnally everything but dry investment is completely gone. By then the mold glows cherry red. We used an old hollow car aerial as if it were a straw to taste the air from the mold to see if it were 218

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The second Bighorn Foundry. The bake-out ovens and the electric hoist. Photo: Buster Ruetten.

X I I N V E S T M E N T: N E W YO R K C I T Y

219

ready. If the mold is too hot too long, it begins to crack and ﬂake. In winter, which is the best time to cast, the snow melts back from the foundry walls and green grass grows in the warm ground. At night Bob woke every few hours, as though we were ranchers calving, and went out to make sure everything was secure. When the time was right, the mold, sometimes so heavy that it required a chain hoist, was carefully moved over to the sand pit where it was buried in damp sand to within inches of the top. Now we would have to hurry to cast or the damp would go into the mold. In those days the ceramic shell or silica slurry method had not yet developed, but even after it was available, we stuck to old-fashioned plaster investment because of concern for the quality of the surface. Silica shell investment sometimes has to be sandblasted oﬀ, which destroys edges and pits surfaces. The graininess of the silica persists on the surface of the bronze and is sometimes polished oﬀ. This interferes with the artist’s intentions. Nevertheless, silica slurry, developed for space age industries, is so much easier that it has changed the whole nature of the sculpture business. The wax is dipped in slurry, rolled in pulverized silica (glass), and dipped in slurry again until a shell is built up. (I call it “chicken-fried casting.”) The thin shell burns out quickly, fusing into a hard but gas-porous surface. No struggle with sprues and vents. No days-long bake-out. People need very little practice to succeed. Because of the ease of this technique, small art foundries sprang up everywhere. (Kits are available.) Bronze casting lost much of its mystique and expense so less skillfully conceived and executed sculptures were cast and sold for less money. (One former foundryman told me that several times he had to kindly advise people that their sculpture really needed a bit more work.) The diﬀerences in the quality of the ﬁnal bronze were subtle enough that most people couldn’t see them. But the diﬀerence will always be detectable to an educated eye. Or ear. Shell-casting might not “ring” so true. The rigid glass investment resists the shrinking of bronze as it cools, which forces the metal to either pull apart or become honeycombed, especially in slender places like legs. Given a fall or blow with enough force, weak spots could even break,

2. To Tell the Truth! and Malvina Hoﬀman New York City, 1965

In 1965, the same year that the Cowboy Artists of America were forming in Arizona unbeknownst to us, New York City called – Bob was asked to be a contestant on To Tell the Truth! The groundwork had been laid in 1964 when Bob had begun to exhibit bronzes with juried New York City shows. Lone Cowboy went to Audubon Artists, Fighting Elk to the National Academy of Design, The 220

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Last Warrior to Academic Artists, Fighting Elk went again to Grand Central Galleries, where it sold. We kept a big scrapbook in the museum, which was encouraging to customers who wanted some kind of assurance about what they bought. New York City impressed Montanans. An article about Bob written by me had appeared in American Artist between an article about Maurice Sendak and an article about Norman Rockwell, which we thought was pretty good company.1 The photo story by Irwin Bauer with the sculptures out on the landscape had appeared in True.2 Even my school principal was impressed and let me take a few days oﬀ without pay so I could go along, though Bob and I weren’t married yet. It was the ﬁrst time Bob had ﬂown since the U.S. Army Air Corps days of being hauled to Alaska with no parachutes. (When Bob had inquired about them, his sergeant said, “Look out the window. You don’t want to land down there alive.” It was solid unmapped mountains.) The wheels, right under our seats, retracted with a “whomp” that made Bob jump. In New York, the hotel the TV producers had put Bob in looked sleazy to us. Bob directed me to stand by the suitcases and face the opposite way from him while he checked in, so I could guard our stuﬀ. There were a lot of rather strange-looking people around and a lot of African-Americans. (We didn’t know to call them that.) Bob was wearing his cowboy boots and hat, which attracted stares and comments. (Also, he wore a money belt which he was afraid people would know about.) One squat little lady with apricot hair and eyelashes as long as my ﬁngers cooed, “Hiya, cowboy! You busy later?” Neither of us could tell whether she was kidding. Bob blushed and stammered. When it came time for me to get my own room, I wanted to pay in advance for fear of spending my money shopping and not having enough for my hotel bill. Strangely, the desk clerk resisted. “Really, ma’am, I don’t think you want to do that!” At motels out west one always pays in advance because the car will be packed at dawn and you’ll drive oﬀ at 6 AM, leaving the key chucked through a slot. I insisted. We went oﬀ to rehearse for the show. We had been told that Bob was not to wear a white shirt, and I had talked him into two silk shirts, one black and one peacock blue, but these were rejected right away. They said silk shirts would be a dead giveaway that Bob was an artist. Someone was sent out for a blue and white striped shirt. They had to take Bob’s shirt partly oﬀ to see what size, since he didn’t know. His mom always bought his shirts. Then we were free until the next day. We called George and Sandi Gray, our painting partners, who took over the rest of the evening. The go-go craze was at its height so we went to a place that featured go-go cowgirls: topless table dancers in white boots, fringed miniskirts, and holsters with silver six-shooters. George had thought we’d enjoy the irony, but Bob hated it. At midnight we claimed exhaustion and went home.

X I I N V E S T M E N T: N E W YO R K C I T Y

221

Crossing the lobby where we’d seen the “sinister” dark faces, Bob stopped short. He heard music coming from the club on the other side of the block, which connected through to the hotel lobby. “Duke Ellington!” he breathed. A galvanizing surge of energy went through him. “Cat Anderson! Hey! I recognize these guys! These guys are GREAT MEN!” The club was packed but Bob produced a quick series of bills and suddenly we were sitting right by the band, exhausted no longer. We even stayed when the comedienne came on, an unknown named Joan Rivers. We thought she was awful – no chance of success. And then the band was back. We tottered oﬀ to bed at 3 AM. Early in the morning Bob came tapping on my door. His room was impossible. He only had a shower with no tub and his closet didn’t have a lock like mine. Could he shave in my tub (he always shaved in the tub) and put the suitcases in my closet? We dressed together. At the studio, wearing my homemade pink Chanel suit, I stood by with my clipboard ready to run errands for Bob, but the production staﬀ took me for one of their own go-fers and sent me out for coﬀee. I was proud to manage that without a hitch – I found the coﬀee shop and didn’t spill – but Bob was panicky without me there. The two “phony” Bob Scrivers turned out to be pretty nice guys, one a shoe salesman (so he would know about leather and tanning) and the other one an amateur hunter (so he could talk about animals). Bob had brought gifts for them and was soon busy coaching them on how to impersonate him. In all the spare moments I slipped oﬀ to the pay phone to try to arrange a meeting with Kennedy Galleries, which we had decided ought to be our target. Or maybe the Bartﬁeld. The big moment arrived. The three “Bob Scrivers” stood up very high with bright lights shining into their faces so that the real Bob squinted and blinked and teared until he was in danger of tumbling down the steps. Orson Bean, who cleverly asked a contentious question about why it was that taxidermists never give a person back the right deerskin but always one that is smaller, made Bob angry enough that his real self ﬂashed through. Orson was the only one who guessed correctly. Kitty Carlisle Hart insisted that Bob was NOT a real sculptor because he said that the famous statue of the drooping Indian on the rack of a horse called The End of the Trail was done by Fraser and she just knew it was Remington. At the end of the show where everyone mingles on the set she was still arguing about it. I myself wanted to ask Orson Bean about his experiences with the Orgone Box, but didn’t dare. All too soon we were past the moment of glory and out on the street with galleries to visit, though I hadn’t gotten any ﬁrm appointments. The TV people refused to let us carry any of the big bronzes around with us because of insurance liability, but we had the small ones and photographs. Rudi Wunderlich at the Kennedy was very nice, but he was already handling Harry Jackson. Perhaps in the future.... We couldn’t get into the Bartﬁeld gallery because it was closed, 222

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

but we almost dislocated our necks trying to look through the windows at the wonderful jumble of stuﬀ inside. At the Bernard Black Gallery we saw for the ﬁrst time the French Animaliers, a whole school of very ﬁne bronze-makers who specialized in animals – sometimes exotic and sometimes familiar – usually in agonistic poses like a jaguar strangling a deer. I had been reading about them but they were far more wonderful in actuality. Bob ended up buying a Barye, a gorgeous bronze, so we could study the patina, he said.3 The patinas on these animals were quite diﬀerent from what we were used to on Russell bronzes, which tended to be almost matte and very dark. These were glossy and near iridescent. Bernard Black described them as being like the peel of an apple, a deep glaze of subtle color. Then we taxied oﬀ to our ﬁrst real art foundry, Modern Art, where John Spring ran things. It was a huge, dark, old warren of buildings full of hidden doors and peculiar spaces. The men were mostly Italian, it seemed, and we were there when they poured, cursing and yelling – turning to apologize to me in English when they realized I was present. Instead of using pig molds, they poured the excess bronze into hollows in damp sand around the mold, which caused a lot of exploding pebbles and spitting hot metal which, in turn, provoked another round of cursing and yelling when the hot spatters hit the men. Bob Spring, the son, was patining – steam rose in clouds as he heated the bronze, painted on the chemical solution, waited for it to react, and then repeated the sequence, squinting to see what was happening. A little ray of sun from somewhere helped the dangling light bulbs and glanced oﬀ Spring’s blazing red hair. These guys were the best in the business, masters of the trade. It all seemed very nineteenth century to us, probably because everything had begun then and hadn’t changed since. These foundrymen had served all the great American realistic sculptors, the people Bob revered. The biggest event of the whole New York trip was arranged quietly with a simple phone call to Guldie, Malvina Hoﬀman’s companion. We were to visit at “157 Sniﬀen Court,” which we already knew about from books. Hoﬀman’s autobiography, Yesterday Is Tomorrow, had just been published and we each were carrying a copy. Shaking with anticipation, we stopped at a ﬂower stall where Bob bought a dozen long-stemmed red roses for Malvina. I chose anemones for Guldie. When we got to the door of 157 Sniﬀen Court, we stood for ten minutes before ringing – not because we were afraid, but to make the moment last. Guldie let us in, saying it was fortunate for us that “everything” had just been brought back to the studio so as to decide on some ultimate fate. Malvina was dying from emphysema, caused by years of inhaling dust while sculpting stone, and Guldie begged us not to tire her by staying too long or getting her too excited. We promised. We would have promised anything. In the bit of time we had to wait, we walked wide-eyed among the many sculptures, large and small, so familiar and yet all new – most of them being seen by us for the ﬁrst time as solid objects instead of photographs. It was dark in the high, deep space and X I I N V E S T M E N T: N E W YO R K C I T Y

223

pieces were half-in, half-out of the light so that the experience was like dreaming, things coming and going from perception. My clearest memory is the small portrait of Anna Pavlova dancing, kept safe under a glass bell. Upstairs, Malvina lay on her monument de repos, the big divan that took up a corner of the room. Our impulse was to fall to our knees beside her, but we managed to oﬀer our ﬂowers in a civilized manner. Guldie went oﬀ to get tea and cookies. Bob and I stumbled all over each other trying to tell her how much she and her work meant to us. The moment Bob cherished most was when he asked her about using calipers, a practice that was mocked by Montana peers as somehow cheating. He complained, “They make fun of me for doing it.” “Oh, tell it to the Marines!” she snapped. (I thought of Alvina Krause, the acting coach who required us to study Hoﬀman bronzes. She would have snapped just that way.) Malvina praised Bob’s horses’ feet and fetlocks. “So few get them right.” She seemed pleased by us and signed our books for us. But then she began to fade and Guldie very ﬁrmly ushered us out. We stood out in the darkened mews, once the courtyard of stables, again trying to prolong the evening. How could we tell people about it? How could we bear to share such an experience with anyone else, even in retrospect? It was a sacred moment. When we got to the hotel, my room had something stuck in the lock so my key couldn’t get in. “Someone has tried to break in and their key broke oﬀ in there,” I decided. “Come on to my room. We can call the front desk from there.” But when Bob used his key, which worked, the door came to an abrupt halt against the safety chain and a hoarse terriﬁed voice cried out, “Who’s there? What do you want?” We backed away fast and ran for the elevator. At the front desk the clerk listened to our stories and called the manager who sat us down for a fatherly chat. “You paid for your room in advance, am I right?” “Yes. But I didn’t pay for tonight in advance, because we were going to the galleries and there wasn’t time and....” “Ahem. How to put this? You see, in New York when one stays in a hotel one doesn’t pay in advance unless one only intends to stay ... well, part of the night, if you see what I mean?” Very slowly it dawned on me that paying in advance meant that one was using the room for sex, perhaps professionally. Bob’s room was explained more simply. All his eﬀects had been moved to my locked closet, so the cleaning staﬀ assumed he was through with the room. There was no indication that he would be back. We went oﬀ to bed feeling a little dizzy. Bob sent Malvina a casting of Prairie Buck, the lively little pronghorn antelope, and she admired it. He had ordered a casting of the Semang Pygmy with the long blowpipe she had done for the Hall of Man in Chicago. When it came he took No More Buﬀalo out of the niche made for it in the ﬁreplace of the studio and put the Semang Pygmy in. It had been cast at Modern Art Foundry and had a pleasant brown patina. The hair was full of tiny bubbles made when 224

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

the wax was invested. This is called “pearling.” If we had cast it, someone would have spent an afternoon with a tiny chisel knocking them out, but they weren’t oﬀensive. A year later Malvina Hoﬀman died and we had a note from Guldie to which we never responded. It was ungrateful and negligent of us, but the truth was that we simply didn’t want to admit she was dead. We wanted to imagine her forever there on that pillowed divan, saying “Tell it to the Marines!” Nothing very deﬁnitive came from being on To Tell the Truth!, though everyone locally was impressed and ﬁnally saw Bob as a Real Sculptor instead of a clever taxidermist. The Browning bank that had turned down Bob’s request for a loan to buy the original Rungius moose painting, saying art was not worth anything, had closed so they could watch the show. The Montana Historical Society began to take an interest and that’s when the little committee came up from Cody, where the Buﬀalo Bill Museum and the Whitney Museum of Western Art formed a cultural center. It was clear that New York City was still the location of the Gods and Temples, even for Western art.

3. A Moose hunt

Swan Hills, Alberta, 1969

In the late Sixties there was a vast area of northern Alberta that was about to be ﬂooded by a new dam. The government wanted as many animals as possible to be hunted out before then, so moose permits were easy to get. John Hellson knew a naturalist at the Provincial Museum who he said was a master woodsman and tracker. We went FAR north, north of Whitecourt, north of the Swan Hills, where the last remnants of the prairie grizzlies were seen. Prairie grizzlies were monsters – made into necklaces their claws arch from neck to shoulderpoint on a big man. The new Provincial Museum was just being completed and we were impressed. Doors tall enough for a giraﬀe or a totem pole led to the workrooms. In one hallway was a wire-mesh-lined box labeled “Danger – dermestids! DO NOT OPEN!!” Dermestids are the little beetle/spider creatures who quickly scuttle away when one turns over a dead animal. They are kept to clean bones but will eat entire collections of Indian artifacts. The naturalist was not ready and would meet us up north. We put up camp in a last grove of aspens and alders before the vegetation became hunched-over sub-arctic conifers, dark and twisted, with straight roads bulldozed through in a grid pattern for the seismologists. As we sat by our ﬁre, yellow alder leaves drifted on the wind into Bob’s hot water mug, which he claimed tasted better than the ﬁnest China tea. The naturalist told about some X I I N V E S T M E N T: N E W YO R K C I T Y

225

friends who had slept in their station wagon and woke up in the night, rocking around as though in a boat at sea. A grizz was standing there with front paws on the roof, trying to roll their car over to get them out. Luckily, it was a big old heavy car that wouldn’t quite go over. I had a little trouble getting to sleep, even though Bob slept with his riﬂe. He had put me on the outside so I wouldn’t sleep next to the naturalist. It was lucky that we’d scouted around a bit and found a place where a moose had been regularly crossing one of the minimal roads, because it turned out this was the naturalist’s ﬁrst moose hunt. Before light I warmed some canned Franco-American spaghetti in a frying pan to get us moving. We had been walking a short while when we heard gunﬁre. When we got to the moose crossing, there was only a steaming gut pile. Back at the campﬁre, a little covey of ptarmigan had surrounded the remains of the spaghetti and were speculating on its edibility, using ﬁrst one eye and then the other. The naturalist left. After a nap, we packed up and decided to just cruise the cut-lines, but as they thawed, they became muddier than we anticipated. Bob had to chain up. Then we came to a worse patch and the sounds and handling of the pickup told us we had lost a chain. Looking back, there was only mud. The chain had been left at the bottom of the muck. We would need both chains to get out, but how could we ﬁnd the lost one? I had a brainstorm and set out bare-footed in the rut, squishing through the cold mud until I stepped on it. On the paved road out, a ﬁne, healthy coyote crossed the road in front of us, leaping at a glossy raven who was dive-bombing him. It was hard to tell whether the bird was after the coyote or vice versa, and also hard to tell whether the attack was serious or just play. The vignette was so vivid that we often recalled it years afterwards. Both creatures are notorious trickster symbols. Were they us? What I didn’t know until the writing of this book was that Bob was retracing old trails. This was where he had come with Jeanette’s uncle, long ago when he was a soldier, young, strong, and invincible. We hadn’t just driven into the north but, for him, into the past. We even drove through the little village where Jeanette grew up and where he was “Jeanette’s Americain.” Then the whole future had stood before him. But he had gone back to Browning. Jeanette said, “If only Edmonton had been a big enough city to have an orchestra. If he could have been ﬁrst chair, we would still live there.”

226

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

XII Casting Bronze: The Buffalo Bill Historical Center

1. Casting bronze: a review

Browning, Montana, 1962–1999

When bronze was hot enough to melt, we felt we had captured a comet by the tail and treated it with enormous respect. As well we might: anything that hot will go through ﬂesh as though it weren’t there. The spirits of ancient people breathed over our shoulders. It was a ceremony in which the crucible became a chalice. Not just the prerogative of industrial giants, bronze casting is done by small groups in Third World countries all over the planet and has been for millennia. Malvina Hoﬀman spoke of inventing a bronze-melting furnace in the ﬁreplace of a studio in Paris. In Browning a local teacher and a border patrolman who were making antique riﬂe replicas managed to cast metal by rigging a hairdryer with a charcoal barbecue to make a furnace. The resulting long Kentucky riﬂe with elegant bronze butt-plate and trigger-guard had a tiger-maple stock, so handsome Bob ended up buying it to hang on his ﬁreplace in the studio. If something that basic would work, Bob felt sure that a small furnace he and Billy McCurdy had built in the garage of his mom’s duplex would work. It held a twenty-pound crucible, so we could cast only something small. He chose a pony head with the reins made of very small cord and invested the wax, complete with the cord. In 1962 we ﬁred up for the ﬁrst time, Bob’s mom watching from across the street with her hand on the telephone in case of ﬁre or even explosion. But the little furnace didn’t seem to get hot enough. The pony head investment mold had been burned out and buried in the sand, and the metal had turned to liquid – reluctantly – but it wasn’t as hot as we thought it had to be. We called Joe Evans, a sheet metal and furnace man, and he came to see what he could do. 227

After more adjustments, none of which raised the temperature, we went to the drugstore across the back alley to have root beer ﬂoats while we brainstormed. We hadn’t thought to get ingot-molds for excess bronze and we didn’t want to pour the molten bronze out but we couldn’t let it set up in the crucible because when it cooled it would expand and crack the expensive graphite vessel. The consensus was to go back, see if the temperature had gone up any more after our last reading, and if it hadn’t, just pour the bronze into the horse head mold and ﬁgure on making another one, since it would probably fail. So that’s what we did. The metal was about 1850 degrees. It went in like pouring cream: no steam, no smoke, no explosion, no perceptible change in the mold. We had the exact amount of metal necessary. It was an anti-climax. We didn’t have any idea what might have happened inside the mold, but it seemed important to “let it set.” The next morning Bob was up at dawn knocking the mold apart with a hammer. After a bit of cleaning it was apparent that the pony head was perfectly cast.1 Even the cord had been reproduced exactly. There was no sign of gas, shrinkage, or any of the other hobgoblins that haunt foundrymen. “Huh!” said Bob. “This is a lot easier than I thought.” Behind the museum across town, we went ahead with the reconstruction of the coal shed into a proper foundry and bought or made the equipment to support a sixty-pound crucible. The next eighteen castings poured in the new foundry were total losses. A diﬀerent major mistake every single time. Only blind “stick-to-it-ivity” and a lot of expensive phone calls to Richard Randall, an artist and foundryman in Minneapolis, kept us going. Being able to cast our own bronzes was an advantage, both because of the cost and the quality, but it was also a limitation, because Bob’s energy could only go so far. Regrouping mentally to try again took more energy than any physical task. Industrial smelters and casters were as near as Great Falls or Calgary, but when Bob started, no one except Charlie Beil in Banﬀ had an art foundry. A foreman named Kalafat in Black Eagle, across the river from Great Falls, agreed to show us around his industrial sand-casting operation. He assured us he could “ram” and cast a teacup in a damp sand mold with no breakage and perfect reproduction. Bob took measurements of Kalafat’s bake-out ovens, which seemed very simple: rows of tubes centered over holes in pipes with space for air to join the gas – essentially a rank of Bunsen burners. We went home and tried to duplicate them but discovered that welding the apparatus together made it writhe and curve so that the tubes were no longer over the holes – it wouldn’t work. It took a couple of local rancher-welders a couple of days and a certain amount of whiskey to achieve an approximation. Then we could bake out our molds. But the furnace for melting the metal was even harder. We knew to sink the furnace into the ground, so that if the crucible burst in the heating chamber (a steel barrel lined with refractory brick), our feet would be safe. An ancient 228

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Kirby vacuum cleaner motor pumped air into the bottom of the chamber. It wasn’t hot enough. We got the Petrolane gas man to come take a look and give us a professional opinion. “Wal,” he opined after long thought, “You’ve either got too much gas or too much air in there.” Gas and air was ALL that was in there. But we had no way of calculating the relationship between them. We ordered the gas line enlarged. It still wasn’t hot enough but the gas bill was horrendous. We added a second Kirby motor, but still it was not hot enough. Finally, consulting and discussing, we came to the conclusion that the key was the way the gas and air were mixed. Bob made a circular collar with holes in the top for the gas to come out and changed the angle of the air stream so that it shot in on a slant and set up a whirlwind. Then it was hot enough. An intense green ﬂame spun in the vent hole of the ﬁrebrick lid – it looked like a neon sea anemone from a strange hellish planet. The pyrometer was a major investment, probably the most high-tech thing we had. After all, the crucible was just a graphite pitcher and the cradle and tongs we used had been made by Bob welding up scrap steel. The pyrometer handle had a meter mounted on it, and then there was a long jointed rod with a thermocouple in it that had to have its tip dipped into the molten metal, but not too deep. A chart told us what various colors meant in terms of temperature – cherry red is not molten, maybe 1700 degrees, and the whitest hot at 2300 degrees is too hot to pour, on the edge of vaporizing. The “right” temperature was about 1950 degrees, give or take, depending on the ﬁgure being cast. We tried to match the readings we got oﬀ the pyrometer with the color equivalents of the molten metal. The old-timers would look and say, “Oh, yellow – that’s 1800 degrees.” It didn’t matter how many little charts we found in books, only experience could teach us. I was the pyrometer operator and, leaning over a little too carelessly, ﬂash-burned my bangs oﬀ more than once. The top of the metal had a kind of glowing foam on it that had to be skimmed oﬀ. Then you had to knock the skimmer against the ﬂoor so the hot glop would not harden and stick. Slag. That’s what they called it. We wore galoshes so that if we stepped on it, the burning would stink so bad that we’d know to step oﬀ before a hole burned in our boot. Bob loved to skim slag. We wore canvas coveralls, plastic face masks, and knit stocking caps in case of exploding metal. There was a theory that if you broke up a Coke bottle to get pieces and threw them in on top, they would melt but ﬂoat and form a seal that kept air out. Air was an enemy because molten metal reacts and transforms, making gas, which will create bubbles in the casting. We tried the glass trick. It was fun, though it’s harder to break up an old-fashioned Coke bottle than one might think. And it seemed to make no diﬀerence in the quality of the metal. At ﬁrst we thought of mixing our own bronze by combining copper, tin, lead, and zinc. Scrap was pretty cheap, and all went well until it was time to X I I C A S T I N G B R O N Z E : T H E B U F FA L O B I L L H I S TO R I C A L C E N T E R

229

put in the zinc, which was in thin sheets. We had read about all this and sort of knew that zinc had a melting point much below bronze, and yet we didn’t see how to mix the metals without getting the bronze molten. Bob tossed in some zinc, which immediately vaporized into green smoke. Knowing it was poison, we dove for the outside door. Now how could we know what our careful proportions amounted to in the crucible? Bob crawled in on his belly and threw more bits of zinc in, but the result was the same. We ﬁnally settled for bronze made of copper, tin, and lead. “There are many formulas,” we assured each other. And told each other again the story of Cellini, who couldn’t get the proper alloy of copper until he rushed into the kitchen and seized the pewterware to add to the bronze. Richard Randall, our advisor, told us we were silly and endangering ourselves to use scrap anyway. Unknown exotic metals could be deadly. We should go to silicon bronze and resign ourselves to buying pigs. Maurie Weissman, Great Falls scrap entrepreneur, came up with a huge load of scrap silicon bronze. It was originally meant to be gun cartridge casings and was in ribbons about an inch wide wound into a ﬂat disc a couple of feet across. We had to unwind the ribbon, make it into a bundle, and then toss it through the hole in the lid. This was a high labor enterprise, but it didn’t take brains. One advantage was that it melted quickly. When this stuﬀ was gone, we went to Herculoy pigs that could take an hour or two to melt. It would seem as though it would never melt, just getting redder and glowing more – then suddenly it converted to a shining puddle. When we had reached the point where our system actually worked, a couple stopped in the museum who were English engineers doing post-doc work at MIT. Their specialty was foundries, so we took them out to inspect. “It’s raaaly QUITE preposterous, but it seems to wouk!” exclaimed the owlish man to his wife. We so enjoyed mimicking them all winter. They’d been in Mexico and wore serapes and sandals made of old tires. We loved them.

2. One hundred bronzes

Browning and Cody, 1969

At the end of the nineteenth century a symbiotic triangle formed among railroads, national parks, and ﬁne landscape painters.2 Railroads urged the development of grand national parks and promoted them as “the Cathedrals of Democracy” so they would be destinations for tourist travel. Then railroads subsidized artists to portray the parks in the most grandiose terms: Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), Edward Moran (1829–1901), John Fery (1859–1934) and others used huge canvases and the newly developing impressionistic techniques of painting light and mist to give the long vistas and waterfalls transcendent qualities. The ﬁrst 230

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

national park and one of the earliest to be sanctiﬁed this way was Yellowstone. Glacier was developed later and had a dark sub-theme, which was the evasion of Prohibition possible because it was on the Canadian border. The popular Glacier artist featured by the Great Northern Railroad was Winold Reiss (1886–1953), who portrayed Blackfeet from reservations on both the Montana and Alberta sides of the border. Yellowstone and Jackson Hole, Cody, all in Wyoming, were “old money.” Many of the ranches had been founded or owned by the big industrialists when they ﬁrst made fortunes in the nineteenth century. Ernest Thompson Seton and Teddy Roosevelt were down in Yellowstone interfering with the bears before the Blackfeet had agreed to “sell” Glacier National Park. (They were starving at the time.) Buﬀalo Bill, with his many east coast and European contacts, made Cody into a “society” town, sophisticated in terms of the arts. The Whitney Museum of Western Art began very simply with a huge portrait of Buﬀalo Bill on horseback, done by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), the granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt himself. The idea was suggested by W.R. Coe in 1922 and was welcomed by Mrs. Whitney, who had seen Buﬀalo Bill’s Wild West Show. In fact, her children had ridden in the stagecoach as it was “attacked by Indians.” (Cody died in 1917.) She was a horsewoman, and men were often the subjects of her sculpture. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney3 was one of several New York women of the upper classes who became sculptors in that period. Anna Hyatt Huntington and Malvina Hoﬀman were fellow students at the Art Students League and in Paris, where they studied with Rodin. In childhood Gertrude was the subject of a bas-relief by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and she studied with both James Earle Fraser and Daniel Chester French. One of her studios was in the Greenwich Village mews emptied when horses were replaced by motorcars. For a while Malvina Hoﬀman was working in Proctor’s studio just down the way. This was the Gilded Age and American bronzes shone. Mrs. Whitney had earlier completed a memorial statue for the Titanic, featuring a young man with arms outstretched (meant to suggest Jesus on the Cross) which became the Leonardo di Caprio pose in the movie. Mrs. Whitney bought the land in Cody on which her portrait of Buﬀalo Bill stood but did not attend the dedication because her daughter was being married at the time. Eventually the museum itself was built on this land. Mrs. Whitney’s son Cornelius, called “Sonny,” donated money for the actual museum building, which ruﬄed the feathers of the female members of the family who thought he should have been putting his money into the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Maybe he thought of it as more of a “guy” sort of museum or maybe he was thinking of a Montana ranch not far away where his father often took refuge. It was an important “New York-type” institution where Harold McCracken, THE expert on Remington, ran the show. Looking back, he wrote of being X I I C A S T I N G B R O N Z E : T H E B U F FA L O B I L L H I S TO R I C A L C E N T E R

231

handed the keys to a huge shell with an apparently endless terrazzo ﬂoor, which he was able to ﬁll with the help of the Knoedler Galleries, Rudi Wunderlich of the Kennedy Galleries, the Coe family, and a collector named Weiss. When we became involved, a small pre-existing Buﬀalo Bill log museum full of memorabilia was about to merge with the Whitney Museum, beginning a transformation into “the Smithsonian of the West,” which eventually included a museum of Plains Indian materials, a natural history museum, and a ﬁrearms museum. McCracken, when we knew him, was a small bald man with ears that stuck out and a cigar always somewhere around. Between chutzpah and clever reckoning (the two basics for directors of art establishments), he had parlayed a writing career based on exploration and wildlife into a slightly plusher occupation as an art expert. His nineteenth-century point of view about the exceptional white man conquering nature contributed to the Remington/Russell paradigm that has controlled much of Western art ever since. Many Western art experts have entered the ﬁeld through traditional history rather than aesthetics. They have been ready to supply additional narrative to image, especially portraits and events already storied. Their attention was on the subject, not the technique. Or possibly they looked to the artist himself to be the exceptional hero. One late spring day in Browning, 1968, a little scouting party arrived from Cody: Richard Frost (curator of the Buﬀalo Bill memorabilia), Nick Eggenhofer, and a younger artist (meant to do the bulk of the driving). Frost was an enormous friendly man who said all the right things. He was especially impressed by the bust of Bob’s daughter Margaret, called To See Eternity, which had just been ﬁnished in the clay. Nick Eggenhofer (1897–1985) was a classic old illustrator, specializing in pen-and-ink sketches of horse and mule transportation. Bob listened spellbound while Nick explained how he dealt with the IRS when they questioned his deductions for books and papers to use as research resources. They asked for an itemized list but he ignored them until one day an auditor showed up in person and demanded to know exactly what Nick had bought that year. So Nick got a good-sized cardboard box, emptied all his jacket pockets and dresser drawers of the miscellaneous receipts that had accumulated there, and handed the box of paper bits to the auditor. The IRS decided to accept Nick’s estimate. The visit must have gone well, because after a while we got an invitation from McCracken and then some strong hints – well, DEMANDS – that McCracken be allowed to attend our impending Thunder Pipe Bundle Transfer. It was clear that he thought of this as some nineteenth-century event and himself as an adventurer privileged to attend, like Osa Johnson in deepest Africa. We had intended the Transfer to be private. But Bob agreed and from then on there was a series of high-handed “requests” based on not-quite-correct assumptions that somehow put the spotlight on McCracken instead of Bob. In the end McCracken wrote an essay about the event, published in a booklet along with an essay by Paul Dyck, whose expertise cannot be ques232

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

tioned. In fact, Paul and Star Dyck were in Browning during the Transfer and also attended. McCracken’s short, poorly edited and politically incorrect piece hardly mentions Bob and features McCracken’s ordeal in the hot tipi (he claims the temperature went to 120 degrees – maybe confusing it with a sweat lodge) despite his spiritual response to the sublime experience. The frontispiece of this small publication is a photograph of Bob’s sculpture The Opening of the Medicine Pipe Bundle, which McCracken insisted on calling a diorama. But the reward was major. McCracken asked Bob, “How many bronzes can you have for me by next May when we dedicate the new building?” Bob blurted, “Oh, a hundred!” In the year after Margaret’s death, we cast 107 sculptures for the new Buﬀalo Bill Historical Center, incorporating the Whitney Gallery of Western Art. Now we were getting into the big time, we told ourselves. On May 22, 1969, the governor declared “Bob Scriver Day in Montana.” The pride was extended to the whole reservation when Bob held an open house. I baked cupcakes for weeks beforehand and dumped them unfrosted into the freezer. Unfortunately, because I didn’t freeze them separately on cookie sheets beforehand, they came back out as sacked-up gummy masses of cake in pleated pastel cups. My mother (who came for the event) and Wessie stood in the little galley kitchen piling up frosting on top of each glob until they could pass for party food. (We needn’t have worried – they disappeared in about ten minutes.) Timberjack Joe, a contemporary mountain man, came in his buckskins, shooting oﬀ his old black powder gun, and claiming that some Blackfeet kids had oﬃcially given him the name “Beaver Tooth.” In Browning terms it was truly a gala event. Afterwards, when everyone was gone, we realized that in the museum we could hear water running somewhere underneath. Bob, my mother, and I went out to the access to the crawl space under the museum, which was in the fox’s cage so she could take shelter. The sound was deﬁnitely coming from the hole. A ﬂashlight revealed a black lake with skulls (fox food) ﬂoating everywhere. The fox’s eyes glowed from where she’d taken refuge in the ﬂoor joists. She was constantly overturning or defecating in her water dish, so I had trouble keeping her supplied with clean water. In the confusion she had been neglected long enough to become desperate from thirst and gnaw through the plastic supply pipe to the ﬁshpond. Bob’s voice was shaky. “The shut-oﬀ is in there – underwater – in the deepest part. It’s about six feet deep in that corner.” We stared at each other. He said, “That water is right oﬀ the Rockies – ice cold.” His bad heart meant he couldn’t possibly go in there. Over my mother’s protests, I crawled in, waded down into the hole, submerged, and found the shutoﬀ underwater. It compensated for my guilt at imagining the poor fox so thirsty. The trouble was that feats like this made me seem too powerful to Bob. He felt less proud than indebted. A big truck came from Cody to get all the bronzes. Bob and I drove down for the May 31 dedication and opening. We stayed in the guest house of the X I I C A S T I N G B R O N Z E : T H E B U F FA L O B I L L H I S TO R I C A L C E N T E R

233

Mary and Bob Scriver at the Buffalo Historical Center in Cody, 1969. Photo: Jack Richard.

Richard Frosts, a garage converted into a wonderful clubhouse stuﬀed with collectible objects. The diplomat Frost supported, suppressed, and smoothed over situations one after another – always with intelligence and good judgment. He made an excellent foil for the volatile little McCracken, who drove things to their conclusion. Bob took both his suits. I had made myself two dresses for the occasion: one white and one black, and brought a lot of costume jewelry to get through the four-day marathon social schedule. The ﬁrst event was a dinner party with 234

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

the Frosts. Other guests were Joe and Mary Back of DuBois, Wyoming; Mr. and Mrs. Jess Frost; Mr. and Mrs. Nick Eggenhoﬀer of Cody; and Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rockwell and daughter of Corning, New York. Joe Back was a real cowboy packer and self-taught artist who also wrote humorous books for tourists. Jess Frost (Dick’s brother) was a Cody taxidermist, Nick Eggenhoﬀer was already our friend, and the Rockwells were and are among the solid collectors of Western art. Wild stories ﬂew and we had a wonderful time. Dessert was one beautiful éclair each. Neither Bob nor I had never eaten an éclair with a fork before – we were more used to maple-frosted Long Johns from our ﬁngers. The next day there were pre-lunch cocktails to honor McCracken and Frost. After lunch was another champagne reception and preview for the major contributors and the board. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney (“Sonny”) and his wife, Mary Lou, were there. They had begun painting in the previous year and had asked that their artwork be shown in the museum. This caused a little panic among the staﬀ, since the landscapes were about what you’d expect from beginners – a good start. The dilemma was solved by hanging them on a “special” balcony out of the way. An anticipated “shoot out” with Harry Jackson was staged at this reception without us having any idea what was happening. We’d hardly heard of Harry except that his work was handled by Kennedy Galleries in New York and was similar enough to Bob’s that Rudi Wunderlich thought it would cause a conﬂict of interest if he represented Bob as well. As it turned out, the Coe family – major supporters of the Center – were personally fond of Harry and tended to push his work, which put Harold McCracken’s back up. Someone told us McCracken was so intent on having Bob’s work for the opening because he was hoping the rodeo pieces and The Opening of the Medicine Pipe Bundle would trump Harry’s big stampede and range burial bronzes. Of course, feuds are good for business when one needs publicity. Harry was a long-time veteran of the New York art scene. A friend of Jackson Pollock’s and student of Thomas Hart Benton, he famously raised grub money by selling his authentically worn jeans to Bob Dylan. Harry had been traveling with the abstract expressionists, then the most dramatic and American of painters’ “schools.” He knew about the famous rivalry between Pollock and de Kooning, buttressed with Life magazine stories about both outrageous geniuses. In fact, he’d had his own major Life magazine story. And he knew a dramatic moment when he came to one. A hush fell on the huge reception space. People cleared an aisle between Harry and Bob as Harry strolled across, his boot heels ringing on the terrazzo ﬂoor. Bob raised his head from conversation to see what was going on. Harry looked like a smaller version of Bob – built much the same, bearded, with an attitude. He came up, stood eye-to-eye with Bob, pulled out his hand in a “draw” motion, and said, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “My God, man! I’m damned happy to meet you! Your work is so goddamn good!” X I I C A S T I N G B R O N Z E : T H E B U F FA L O B I L L H I S TO R I C A L C E N T E R

235

The two men shook hands. Harry threw an arm over Bob’s shoulders and suggested, “Let’s you and I go talk someplace private, pard.” People stepped back to let us out. We spent the afternoon in one of those tall, old-fashioned booths in a café, talking and whooping and pounding the table in agreement on almost everything. The shootout was a big bust. On Friday evening there was a barbecue supper at the Two Dot ranch home for 250 of H.P. Skogland’s closest friends. As it happened, Skogland had once owned the 3C-Bar Ranch near Browning, and Bob found Dick Curtis, the foreman, whom he knew, so he felt he belonged. It was another hard-drinking party, as much out-of-doors as in, and I was beginning to develop a bad cold. Saturday morning we all gathered at the Cody High School Auditorium for speeches of dedication. McCracken declared that everything at the Center had been ﬁnanced by private money and, by God, they would dig trenches in the lawn and ﬁght the government hand-to-hand to keep them out. (This was before Vice-President Dick Cheney was on the Board of Trustees.) Bob was seized by this attitude right down to the moment he wrote his will, which stipulates that NOTHING go to any federal museum. Then we all trooped over to the brand new center with its high glass entry full of Scriver bronzes, and Peter Kriendler, member of the board of directors and owner of Club 21 in New York City, cut the ribbon, accompanied by a fusillade from Timberjack Joe, professional mountain man. It had been Kriendler’s inspiration for the Winchester corporation to issue a special riﬂe to ﬁnance the wing of the building to house the Buﬀalo Bill memorabilia. From then on Bob used Club 21 as his badge of privilege – he would say, “We were in New York at Club 21 when we decided that.” Later Bob made a sculpture for Winchester and remained on good terms with Kriendler. In fact, I think Bob really felt that Club 21, with its rather raﬃsh history as a speakeasy, was more his style than the Salmagundi Club with its hushed voices and ﬁne paneling. Lunch was in the Cody Auditorium, and this time we were seated with Marquita Maytag (the closest Bob ever came to a patron), Dr. and Mrs. McCracken, and Mr. and Mrs. Wolf Pogzeba of Denver. Wolf, also a Western artist, was beginning to cut a deal with Bob for one of the big rodeo bronzes. Any selling was very low key. Except for Bob’s bronzes, the art on exhibit was borrowed from museums or from the Whitney collection. And these people had enough money that they didn’t have to ask about prices. Wolf’s determination to have a rodeo bronze was the exception. Back at the Center afterwards there was a huge open house. Timberjack Joe hung around on his horse with his pet fox and Tuﬀy, his dog, who sat on the horse with him. Mary Lou Whitney went to pet the little fox and ﬂeas from it hopped down the arm of her elegant pink suit. That night there was yet another supper dance, this time given by Mrs. Henry Coe for 125 guests at Pahaska Tepee, Buﬀalo Bill’s hunting lodge, now 236

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

a tourist resort. The cocktails were served in Buﬀalo Bill’s historic log hunting lodge where Prince Rainier’s grandfather had stayed when he came from Monaco to hunt. The ﬁreplace was a huge stone aﬀair with the hors-d’oeuvres on a steam table in front of it. By this time, between alcohol and cold remedies, I was losing mental traction. I stood in front of the ﬁre, longing to hike up my skirt in back to toast my legs. I could see Bob talking to someone but shooting warning glances at me, since he knew that’s what I wanted to do. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney himself came over and invited me to have another cocktail wiener in barbecue sauce. “They’re really quite delicious,” he assured me. I was so goggle-eyed, he probably wondered if I were one of the many taxidermy specimens. This was the Vogue magazine crowd. Photographers and a ﬂurry of pretty girls raced up and down the stairs in a cloud of scent and excited whispers. The photos were printed some months afterwards. But the real action was the men. Bob leaned in with them, their brandy and cigars, though he rarely drank and had given up smoking. Deals were being made. Power was being ﬂexed. And there was a lot of gossip, but not about art. The men discussed land, commodities, and the stock market. The whole thing was worthy of Edith Wharton and probably the characters were roughly the same – New York transplanted for the season only. What we didn’t understand at the time – and I didn’t learn until I read Flora Miller Biddle’s book about the Whitney Museum of American Art4 – was that this is the way one “grows” a major institution that needs millions of dollars and a very special combination of personalities to guide it. The seemingly random talk and socializing was really a way of sorting through who was serious about the goals of the museum, who could contribute much-needed millions to the endowment, and who could lend the directors prestige and respect in the political context. Bob and I were blissfully ignorant. By the time we got to supper, about 9 PM, I was staring with my mouth hanging open and could hardly eat. Thyra Thomson, Wyoming Secretary of State, had come with us and sat across the table. She was wearing an exquisite emerald satin dress that was just a teeny bit too tight around the décolletage so that her soft bosom swelled over it just slightly. I would have liked nothing better than to have laid my head on it and taken a nap. Mary Lou’s entourage was having a noisy time.5 It was the period when the St. Laurent “gypsy look” was big – she was in blue with big dangling earrings and very beautiful. She ﬁnally sent someone over to tell me to stop staring at her. By popular demand, Harry Jackson took up his guitar to sing cowboy songs. We went back to the Frost’s for a nightcap. I can’t remember a thing anyone said and I doubt Bob did either. The next morning there was a fancy Sunday brunch, complete with booze in the orange juice, at the Irma Grill, a restaurant at Buﬀalo Bill’s Irma Hotel. Then we headed north. Paywindow, Bob’s explosive bucking horse on one foot, had been on the cover of the oﬃcial event program. There had been a huge article X I I C A S T I N G B R O N Z E : T H E B U F FA L O B I L L H I S TO R I C A L C E N T E R

237

on Bob in the Billings Gazette the week before the opening. And McCracken said, “Bob Scriver is the best Western sculptor in America – bar none.” It was a great quote, which we immediately seized and took to the bank. Of course, McCracken in turn went around saying, “Bob Scriver was nothing until I gave him exposure.” Like a bronze ingot, Bob’s reputation had gotten hotter, not seeming to do anything until suddenly it went molten, capable of taking on a new shape. We had been working hard in the shop, ﬁlthy and longing for suppertime, trying to understand how to recover from some error or how to invent a way to do something we hadn’t done before, getting angry over some small matter, or panting with exhaustion after some feat of strength. There would be a rap at the door announcing people whose names we knew, but whom we’d never met, people who had the power to make or break a reputation. They might oﬀer a fabulous opportunity, or they might take oﬀense over a blunder on our part and ﬁrmly close a door we had depended upon to be open. On that June 13 Bob was awarded the Gold Medal purchase prize for Buﬀalo Runner at the Cowboy Artists of America show in Oklahoma City. Fred Fellows accepted the award on behalf of Bob. We were too exhausted to go, too tired to care very much. A lawsuit came out of the order taken the night we sat by Wolfgang Pogzeba, the artist. He had ordered Layin’ the Trap, the big rodeo piece depicting team roping. Somehow Pogzeba and Steve Rose, owner of the Biltmore Gallery in Scottsdale, were connected and Wolf was acquiring the bronze by trading a Rungius painting of an elk through Rose. We tried not to take orders at the show, because it was all so confusing and because we had acquired a huge backlog while we put everything else oﬀ in order to create “100 bronzes” for the opening. But during the cocktail party at Colonel Cody’s old log ranch headquarters, Bob was somehow talked into a trade. Or maybe not. It was all rather fuzzy. It was particularly fuzzy to me. We’d been much handicapped by an environment where all the napkins were cloth, so could not be used to record information. Steve Rose was easygoing, a businessman and outdoorsman who seemed straightforward and clear-headed. It was Wolf Pogzeba who was hard to pin down. He was part of a younger crowd, a bit of a jet-setter, and what we called a “wheeler-dealer.” Things fell apart. Wolf’s bronze had been sent COD, he didn’t have the money to get it, it was returned, and Bob sold it to someone else. Wolf sued, claiming that was HIS numbered casting of the bronze, though he couldn’t pay for it right then. Probably he had a buyer for it whom he may have lost because of the complication. The most dubious thing Bob did was grind oﬀ Wolf’s number and cut in the next number. With modern technology it was impossible to tell in what order the castings had been made. Bob’s next problem was that by the time this case got to court, he had divorced me, his star witness. I was in Portland, Oregon. My testimony probably 238

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

got him oﬀ, though the judge complained that he would have to deal with at least seven diﬀerent issues in diﬀerent parts of the Montana business code in order to reach a conclusion. (There was no jury.) He did decide in favor of Bob – that he had a right to resell the bronze once the original party had refused the COD and that sending things COD was not some kind of outlandish practice. The part about the numbers was of no matter to him. What the trial uncovered was the incredible complexity of the Western art scene. Many buyers were industrial capitalists and speculators pushing around money in great quantities through all sorts of manipulations, mostly involving credit. Wolf didn’t have actual custody of the painting that he had proposed to trade, nor had the arrangement been recorded. There was a long chain of swaps, agreements, and exchanges that had to take place before he could actually ship the painting.6 The case was ironic since one of the rules Bob had developed was a strict policy of sending people their bronzes in the sequence that they were ordered. Otherwise, it was a temptation to cast the big important stuﬀ to get the money out of them, until the little pieces were very late, which seemed unfair. In 1970 the waiting list was almost two years long, but the alternative would have been to expand or use another foundry, and Bob didn’t want to do either because it meant losing control and quality. In subtle ways his insistence on control may have choked oﬀ the risking that would have taken him into the art big time. Most people were patient, but McCracken would call and storm that “his” clients wanted their work NOW and that meant TODAY. They were important patrons of the Whitney and he was only doing his job, but it felt like an attack on our integrity. Bob could not bring himself to stand up to McCracken. It wasn’t just that he controlled Bob’s reputation now, but also that pleasing McCracken felt like pleasing his pop. We hadn’t been able to ﬁnish The Opening of the Medicine Pipe Bundle, which McCracken had ordered in a hand-painted version, in time for the grand opening exhibit in Cody in 1969, so we had substituted a casting sprayed red ochre, the same as the artist’s copy Bob kept for himself. The next April, after the Cody show, Bob was in the hospital because of his near-fatal heart attack. He annoyed the hospital laundry folks by painting Cody’s set of these ﬁgures with oils while in his hospital bed. In the record-setting April 30, 1970 blizzard, driving our poorly maintained little red van, I delivered the naturally colored version just in time for a May 1 seasonal opening. I begged to postpone leaving Browning with thousands of dollars worth of bronzes in the little van with slush up to the hubcaps and no visibility. But Bob was too intimidated to call and say the works would be coming a few days late. So out I went, do or die. After a major, life-threatening adventure, I made it. On the way home, a U-bolt broke and the drive shaft fell out of the van. Luckily, I glided to a stop by a phone booth, standing alone in miles of empty X I I C A S T I N G B R O N Z E : T H E B U F FA L O B I L L H I S TO R I C A L C E N T E R

239

country. (No cell phones then.) In a minute a cowboy rode up on a horse with my drive shaft across the front of his saddle. I oﬀered to trade him the van for the horse. Again, Bob was more threatened by my success than he was admiring or grateful. Maybe because it was clear that we were both overmatched by the Cody scene, with its emphasis on old money and high society, he found me lacking. I knew better than he that some of my resistance to all that elegance was oldfashioned Protestant Irish contempt for pretense and snobbery. He needed one of the Caouette girls. Or his mother, who had expected to join such society.

3. Harry Jackson

Cody and Browning, 1969

Harry Jackson did indeed charter a plane and ﬂy up. No fooling around with amateur foundries in the West – his foundry was in Italy. We were impressed, though his plane was no Lear Jet – just a small hired plane such as ranchers use. In the taxidermy years, we often met such planes out at Starr School, where there was a level ﬁeld and a windsock. The pilots would contact the sheriﬀ in Cut Bank, who called us on the phone to alert us to drive out as quickly as we could to chase the inevitable cows oﬀ the ﬁeld. Harry’s plane was met by us and a small crowd of Blackfeet kids, whom the pilot eyed nervously. He threw out Harry’s bag and promised to return the next day after spending the night in Cut Bank where he could refuel. Clearly Harry was sizing us up to see if he should worry about Bob as a rival. We took him up to East Glacier for supper, driving the spectacular loop over Looking Glass Pass, which is like a small version of Going-to-the-Sun – long vistas through jagged mountains. At the top, an eagle joined us, soaring over the van. We took this to be symbolic, a blessing, though we all sort of knew the bird was hoping we’d provide a little road kill. At bedtime we opened up the folding sofa for Harry, but when he went past the bedroom door with his toothbrush, he was still talking and he ended up sitting on the foot of the bed talking to Bob until birds began to sing outside. He did not get under the covers. There was no drinking. Harry couldn’t drink because of his wartime head injury, which sometimes pitched him into epilepsy. He had a natural outrageousness that Bob envied. In an infamous article in Fine Art Collector, Harry announced, “I’m the most unhobbled, fence-jumping bastard the art world has produced in ﬁfty years. Many have tried to rope me; all have failed.” Harry could name-drop famous New York artists, Wyoming cowboys, and movie stars. In this article he drops Bob’s name as “one of the few whose works brighten my life.” 240

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Both Jackson and Scriver were constant winners with the Cowboy Artists of America, but neither of them really ﬁt the organization all that well. Harry ﬁnally resigned, but Bob was too cautious to quit, though he never went to the shows and trail rides unless they issued an ultimatum. When CAA went its own way, both sculptors accepted an invitation to join National Academy of Western Artists. In 1973 Jackson and Scriver collaborated on a seminar about bronze casting to accompany the exhibition. It must have been a humdinger. But the one thing they had in common became more marked over the years, and it was a tragic feature to share: both suﬀered from brain damage. Harry’s was straightforward – a battle-inﬂicted head wound from his war correspondent days that earned him (technical) total disability for the rest of his life. Bob’s was far more subtle, at ﬁrst only a small shift in personality after his heart attack, hardly perceptible and easily attributable to a diﬃcult temperament. By the Nineties he showed an inability to come to decisions or to control his mood swings – and an increasing terror of death. People assumed he was drinking a lot. Customers for expensive art are mostly people who make money through the management of capital, however they got it. Thus, investment is the lens through which they see art and by which they judge it. People still insist that if equal amounts of money had been invested in the stock market and the paintings of Remington, the better return would have been made on the Remington art. The advantage of bronzes over painting is that a painting is fragile and might be destroyed before one could cash it in except through insurance. But bronzes are too easy to copy – some refuse to buy Remington bronzes because of the ﬂood of unauthorized castings. In art there is always an element of gambling. After the big Cody show, Bob was fond of saying, in a quote from Charlie Russell, “Any time I cash in now, I win,” but he wasn’t talking about money. He just couldn’t imagine anything more triumphant than coming home from an event like Cody where his work was alongside the bronzes of major American sculptors like Fraser and Remington. We used to say to each other, “What would you do if you had a million dollars?” and then answer ourselves, “Oh, build a museum and studio in Browning, Montana, and make bronzes.” But later, when Bob actually did have milliondollar sales, he discovered that the feds got half the money, the state got 11 per cent, and if the remaining $400,000 were invested at 10 per cent, the result would be roughly a beginning schoolteacher’s annual income. When I had been in acting class back in the Fifties, we had played a diﬀerent game, called “What’s Your Price?” It was meant to build resolve to face the hardships of a theatre career. Would you give up this part if it meant you could go to Europe? Would you become a movie star if it meant you lost your wife and children? We knew the truth was that sometimes a person would come close to missing a key audition if it meant having time to drink a hot cup of coﬀee. In retrospect it seems that Bob’s price was four marriages, his children, and his health – at least. X I I C A S T I N G B R O N Z E : T H E B U F FA L O B I L L H I S TO R I C A L C E N T E R

241

4. A jubilant hunting trip

East Front of the Rockies, 1969

Decades ago, when A.B. Guthrie, Jr. was still unredeemed from destroying his health by drinking, we went horseback hunting with Bill McMullen and his son at Two Moons, Guthrie’s ranch. The terrain was foothills with jack pines in mosaic, covered with maybe a foot of snow. Bill was in favor of strategy, so we split up – you go here, you go there, and we’ll all meet again over on that ridge in the distance. Finally it was getting late, I was seeing tracks everywhere heading in every direction but no actual animals, and I was wondering if I were lost for sure. Then Zuke, my goofy horse, took over. He stopped obeying any sign I gave him, put his nose to the ground and – sniﬃng like a hound dog – decided where he thought we should go. Pretty soon I could hear the others. Just as we broke out of the trees, a dozen elk came thundering by with Bob in close pursuit, swinging his lariat over his head. We had no tags for elk and I have no idea what he thought he was going to do with one if he roped it, but both he and Gunsmoke were committed to the chase. Gunsmoke was originally broke for bulldogging, so no doubt he expected Bob to jump oﬀ onto the elk as soon as they got close enough. Lagging behind, the McMullens came along laughing. We wound in and out of the scattered pines – Bob turning so sharply that sometimes his stirrup touched the ground – until a fence stretched across the space. The elk went on over and for a minute I thought Bob was going to try to jump Gunsmoke, too. But he didn’t. He was euphoric for days afterward. I don’t remember whether we ﬁlled our deer tags. If Bob had never been a sculptor, this would have been life for him. If he had been asked to give this up, even for something like the Cody show, the price would have been too high. With his career, as with this roping exploit, he spent all his time thinking about the chase and none thinking about what he was going to do when he achieved his goal.

242

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

XIII Molten Bronze: Cowboy Hall of Fame

1. Moment of truth Actual pouring of the molten bronze was the payoﬀ for weeks of careful preparation and an inﬁnite number of tiny details – the alloy of the metal we were using, the temperature of the investment when we mixed and applied it, the attentiveness of the person painting wax into the mold, the quality of the mold and its setup – all the way back to the original conception and design of the plastilene. If the mold had been burned out bone-clean, and if the metal was exactly the proper temperature, the melted bronze slipped in like fate itself. But even a small, abrupt turn in a sprue-channel, creating turbulence in the stream of metal, might lose a leg or half a face. We could only see the stream enter the mold and then had to imagine how it was ﬂowing, whether it was cooling, where a small pocket might have formed. Atoms and molecules, dancing and interlocking in ways beyond human comprehension, were acting according to rules we novice foundrypersons – like all the centuries of craftsmen before us – had to obey, no matter whether we knew them or not. It was important to move slowly, to let the forces interact at their own speed. An Indian crew was helpful, because they were instinctively deliberate, waiting for the right moment, and they moved smoothly. That twisting iridescent stream of 2,000-degree metal was without mercy. If a pour failed, all the planning, eﬀort, time, materials, and care were simply gone. Deadlines missed. Customers angry. Maybe even orders cancelled. As Bob said, “All you can do is the best you can do.” Or later, he would say, “You can only give it an honest try.”

243

The second Bighorn Foundry. These are the two furnaces sunk in the ﬂoor. The homemade tongs are the originals that Bob welded up. Photo: Buster Ruetten.

244

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

2. The Western art boom But he wasn’t in control of everything. What had been a solitary calling in a small reservation town was now being swept up in a whirlwind across the nation, a fascination with what it meant to live in the West. An artist must live in his own time and place, at the mercy of larger forces.1 As the ﬁeld of Western art grew and deﬁned itself through the Sixties and Seventies, not only artists appeared and came of age. At the same time wealthy people created ﬁne collections, which often developed into institutions, and then new careers formed around the development of those institutions. The older galleries such as Knoedler, Bartﬁeld, Kennedy, Grand Central, Graham, and others contributed their accumulated expertise and inventories of ﬁne American artists. Work that had gathered dust for decades was now brought out to claim recognition as the brilliant historical archive it was. In those days before the Internet, it was all managed via phone calls and mail – or when things got close to a climax, someone had to catch a plane and go see. Even the value of contemporary Western art skyrocketed in the Seventies. By 2004 the money in Western art impressed everyone. In July the Coeur d’Alene Auction in Reno sold a large landscape by Thomas Moran called Mists in the Yellowstone for $4,928,000. The 2004 total Western auction sales was eighteen million dollars, a jump from the 2003 total of ten million. Total sales on the opening night of the 2004 Cowboy Artists of America show in Phoenix was $2.6 million. That same October Alterman Galleries in Santa Fe at their auction posted more than four million. At the Cowboy Artists of America show one artist, Howard Terpning, sold a painting of three Indian women, Three Generations, for $200,000. (He would also sell 550 prints of the same painting.) At the Makers of the American West Show at the Los Angeles Autry National Center, the museum bought from Terpning a large painting of Indians at a waterfall called The Force of Nature Humbles All Men for $800,000. At the 2004 Alterman Galleries auction Terpning’s Time Stands Still sold for $222,500. R. Brownell McGrew, a contemporary painter of Navajos, saw Salah-Tso Goes to the Sing sell for $288,500. An historical painter of Indians, Joseph Henry Sharp had painted Hairy Moccasin, which sold for $222,500. To put all of this into perspective, Charles Saatchi, a trendy British art collector, the following January, in 2005, sold to an American Damien Hirst’s Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living for a rumored thirteen million dollars. Saatchi had bought the “work” in 1992 for $93,000. It is not a painting, but an actual dead shark ﬂoating in formaldehyde. One cannot help hoping it will not end up in the Whitney Gallery of American Art. It WILL NOT end up in the Whitney Gallery of Western Art.

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E

245

3. C.M. Russell Museum Beneﬁt Auction Great Falls, Montana, 1970 to the present

Sometimes marketing strategies came together through insight and acts of courage, creating a new paradigm that lasts for years afterwards. Someone would just be struck by “the way to do it.” At a time when many were questioning the nature and goals of human beings and the very sanity of art, realistic Western paintings and sculptures of earlier days provided a rallying point. The American Renaissance sculptors, after all, had based their work on the great Greek classics, the source of democracy. One couldn’t say Western artists were Edwardian, though that was the right time period. Perhaps they were Teddy Rooseveltian. Certainly Teddy knew many of them and posed for several of them. More than anything else the artists and buyers of the Gilded and Progressive Age saw themselves as part of “the Grand Narrative” of the American West: Lewis and Clark, mountain men, Indian “wars,” open range ranching, homesteaders, prospectors, the railroads, and so on. We all know the books and the movies with their swelling symphonic scores as the hero prevails in the end. In Great Falls, where Charles M. Russell had established his studio (a log cabin made of telephone poles that his resourceful wife built for him next to their home), a small museum contained the collection of a neighborhood friend of Russell, Miss Josephine Trigg. Besides paintings, the objects she had accumulated were small and charming: letters, dinner party placemarks created of paper and wax, heads of walking sticks – the kind of thing that Russell constantly produced. The idea took hold in the community that the place ought to be developed to show major paintings. In 1970 the Great Falls Ad Club accepted the charge of raising money to expand this museum and inaugurated an annual auction on Russell’s birthday, March 19. The ﬁrst one was an evening in the Rainbow Hotel, prefaced by a champagne reception because it was feared that unless people were a little tiddly, they wouldn’t bid on the art. After all, many of the attendees were used to livestock auctions where their livelihood depended on shrewdness. It is generally accepted that the driving force among a circle of dynamic people was Norma Ashby, a television personality. All the art had been donated by Montana artists, including Stan Lynde, creator of the comic strip Rick O’Shay. His wife at the time, a pretty little blonde, and myself, a buxom redhead, were surely among the youngest guests and the most aﬀected by unaccustomed champagne. In our elegant clothes we were playing tag in the huge open basement of the hotel until a scandalized manager caught us and returned us to the auction. It was an innocent time. Bob refused to donate art for auction because he had a horror of no one bidding and was afraid that a precedent of low prices would be set. Therefore, 246

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

he oﬀered to donate a bronze casting of his buﬀalo skull, suitable to be mounted on a plaque and awarded to someone with a close connection to Russell. In the early days these were friends and relatives of Charlie. This practice continued for forty years, until the recipient had to be someone who, for instance, had written about Russell. Today this auction, enormously successful and key to the growth of the C.M. Russell Museum, is a complex week-long festival with half-a-dozen auxiliary shows and auctions. Drawing people from all over the continent, it is sited in a sprawling motel in which all furnishings are removed from the guest rooms so they can be converted into galleries for individual artists. The main auction costs a hundred dollars just to attend and bids come in from around the world over the telephone and the Internet. Related shows and auctions occupy other motels. After thirty-ﬁve years of development, they say that interesting side deals are made in the private rooms, not always involving art. Scams have developed, like agreeing to buy each other’s painting for an inﬂated price to establish a high value. (An old racehorse owner trick.) Or setting a high “hold” price on a piece so that no one buys it in the auction, and then selling it for slightly less in the hallway “oﬀstage” so that no percentage has to go to the Ad Club. In spite of such shenanigans, the event is so glamorous and prestigious that it is imitated across the continent. Young women in evening gowns carry the art across the catwalk and the newspaper breathlessly adds up the money. These days Western art auctions and purchase shows spring up like circuses, then disperse when the horse trailers of bronzes and paintings head out afterwards. Determined artists with good connections and cell phones can travel the continent around the calendar, just like rodeo cowboys. Buyers who don’t care to hit the road can participate in auctions live over the Internet. Gallery and organization websites provide transient catalogues, as well as selling the traditional ones that become valuable archives, while other websites track prices and availability. AskArt.com notes the highest price per square inch for each artist. Slick Western art magazines depend upon the income from full-page ads. The C.M. Russell Museum is now an elegant complex occupying a city block and exhibiting major national artists. Miss Trigg would be ﬂabbergasted. I’m not entirely sure she would be pleased.

4. Dean Krakel, cowboys and Indians Oklahoma City, 1965 to the end

An illustrative case of a person inventing a career based on American Western art might be Dean Krakel, a mild-mannered history professor who evidently X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E

247

stepped into a phone booth and emerged as a super-developer of art museums. His ﬁrst big Western museum director job was with the Thomas Gilcrease American Institute of History and Art, which grew out of the vision and collections of a one-eighth Creek Indian whose government-allotted land happened to be in the middle of an oil patch. Krakel attributed much of his Western art education to soft-spoken, courtly Tom Gilcrease (1890–1962). As a young man already wealthy, Gilcrease had decided on the spur of the moment to go see what Europe was all about. An ocean liner trip later, he was walking the streets of Paris, learning everything, but especially how to value ﬁne art and history. Collecting both major historical documents and early TransMississippi Western art beginning with Catlin, he endowed a building to house his collection in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Before his death he gave it all to the City of Tulsa, where at ﬁrst it was treated as a commodity rather than the vision it was. The Gilcrease has remained a landmark collection. After Tom Gilcrease’s death, Krakel moved on to the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, now called the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. At that point – 1965, about the time Bob Scriver was entering New York City juried exhibits – the Cowboy Hall of Fame was little more than a shell of a building, some major debts and a concept. Krakel energized it with the worldview and experience he brought from the Gilcrease. One of his ﬁrst acts was buying a collection of C.M. Russell paintings and sculpture for $500,000. The board balked until an appraisal of the collection came in at $1,050,000, which suddenly made the price seem a bargain. It also shifted the deﬁnition of value to dollar amounts, not aesthetics. In 1963, when still with Gilcrease, Krakel had visited Laura Gardner Fraser (1889–1966) in her Westport, Connecticut, studio in pursuit of a bas-relief, twenty-one by four feet, called Oklahoma Run. The Frasers were part of the American Renaissance of Beaux Arts sculptors rather than the Remington and Russell action-genre types then coming into popularity. Laura was a younger member of the group of female sculptors that included Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Malvina Hoﬀman. Laura had made a bas-relief of the reckless Oklahoma Land Rush that ensued when Indian lands were opened for white settlement. Her husband, James Earle Fraser (1876–1953), was the sculptor of an image that lives on in the American mind: The End of the Trail. Many a person in the United States has owned a Fraser sculpture, because he was the designer of the Indian head/buﬀalo nickel, but most people, like Kitty Carlisle Hart, don’t recognize the name. He was also an important early mentor to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Returning from the 1892 Chicago Columbian Exposition, Fraser, a North Dakota boy, had been inspired to make his ﬁrst small version of The End of the Trail to illustrate what an old trapper once prophesied: “The Indians will someday be pushed into the Paciﬁc Ocean.” Laura Fraser (thirteen years younger 248

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

than Fraser) was his student and then an instructor under his direction until he married her. When the San Francisco Panama Exposition opened in 1915, Fraser replicated The End of the Trail two-and-a-half-times life-size. The image was enormously popular, appearing on ashtrays, postcards, china plates, bookends, and so on. Said Fraser wrily, “I have been told more than $250,000 worth of prints and photographs were sold of the statue. Who got the money, I don’t know. I do know that I didn’t get any of it. As a matter of fact, everyone knew of the statue, but no one seemed to know its sculptor.” At the end of the exposition, all the statuary, which was simply made of hard plaster, like the sculpture in Chicago at the Columbian Exposition, was pushed aside to disintegrate into rubble. Without Fraser’s knowledge, another man – for $400 in shipping costs – managed to get the plaster statue to Visalia, California, where it joined a sculpture called Pioneer by Solon Borglum. While Krakel was still working to raise money to acquire the entire Fraser studio contents, Laura Fraser died. The Frasers’ executor contacted him and they were able to reach an agreement. Included in the sale to the Cowboy Hall of Fame were individual heroic portraits of Lewis and Clark, as well as a major statue of Lincoln and some small originals of The End of the Trail. Then word came to Krakel about the original Panama Exposition plaster casting slowly disintegrating outdoors in a Visalia park. Reclaimed, it would be a magniﬁcent image to stand in the huge peaked windows of the Cowboy Hall of Fame. Krakel thought of it as the Pieta of the American West. (Actually, it became a rallying image for militant Native Americans declaring, “We’re not dead yet!”) The rest of the story is worthy of a book its own, which Krakel wrote.2 Krakel’s impassioned, push-the-envelope approach to the Cowboy Hall of Fame ﬁlled it with top-notch “Western” art ﬁnanced by wealthy men without them quite realizing what they were accomplishing. He invented all sorts of strategies, displacing money from one pocket to another, telling one man the other would pay for half if the ﬁrst would put up the other half – then going to the second man with his ﬁngers crossed to work the deal the other way. Krakel was strongly convinced that irreplaceable art was just then becoming available for one crucial moment and one had to act fast or lose it forever. This was the same conviction has controlled much of American understanding of the West, especially Indians.3 It is also crucial to auctions, which have sustained “one crucial moment” through the decades. Sometimes Krakel created partnerships, such as the one with the Cowboy Artists of America. But he had a tendency to push his views hard and to put his institution’s welfare ﬁrst. So did the Cowboy Artists of America. Inspired by a good time on a working ranch (followed by a evening of bonding in a pub) they had joined together in 1965 to promote and protect each other. Their criteria had to do with being working cowboys and social buddies. Krakel wanted “great art,” which he tried to encourage with awards and purchase prizes. At ﬁrst the X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E

249

mixture of grand new museum and colorful cowboy artists worked wonderfully, though many were sober artists with many years of illustrating magazines but no horseback time. Gradually the independent-minded CAA got crosswise and pulled out so they could control their own shows and membership. Krakel simply organized a new institution, the National Academy of Western Art, which included only the cream of CAA (those who had won awards) plus other outstanding Western artists. It was possible to belong to both CAA and NAWA. Bob Scriver and Harry Jackson joined this second organization, as did Clymer, Lougheed, and Eggenhofer. Harry stepped out of CAA and so did Ned Jacob, who had begun his career as a skinny teenager in Browning, Montana, and had continued under the wing of Ace Powell, Bob’s lifelong friend, until Ned left for the Southwest. Eventually Ace’s son David was admitted to membership in 2004. The Cowboy Artists of America exhibited together once a year and sold their work through a bidding system, which stirred up a lot of excitement and signiﬁcantly boosted the prices – in fact, higher than a hawk’s nest. The auctions became glitzy events where people wore tuxes and Stetsons, beaded chiﬀon, and Dolly Parton hair, all carefully recorded in slick lifestyle and Western art magazines. Competition for the best art was ﬁerce. The feel is more Hollywood than high society New York.

5. Bill Linderman

Denver and Browning, 1967–1970

The energized Cowboy Hall of Fame stimulated the Professional Rodeo Cowboys’ Association, which had been evolving into a powerful body of professional athletes, to commission a heroic-size bronze portrait of Bill Linderman, one of their founders who repeatedly won the All-Around Rodeo Championship year after year. Once again something that had happened in the past aﬀected Bob’s career. A phone call came from Eddie Costell, a former employee and rodeo hand from the early Fifties. In spring Bob had bought the inevitable dead calves for their hides, which he tanned and sold. Whenever a dead calf was brought in Ed would jump into the pickup, tie up the calf’s legs as though he had just roped it (not easy when the calf was frozen), untie it and throw it out of the pickup, jump down and tie it, untie it and throw it up on the porch, run up and tie it, untie it and throw it through the front door, pounce on it and tie it up yet again. When he began to compete at calf roping again, he won more money than he ever had. 250

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Now he saw a chance for Bob. Someone had done a trial sculpture of Bill Linderman for the PRCA, but no one liked it. Why didn’t Bob hurry up and submit one? It was like a replay of the Russell statue contest, except that this time Bob was prepared. In no time he had mocked up two statues, one of Bill holding his saddle alongside and the other leaning over to buckle his chaps. Our favorite was the latter, because it was graceful and natural looking and we thought his face would be closer to the viewer. Bill Cochran, who kept Bob’s freezer operating, was another local rodeo hand who came onto the team as advisor. He turned out not just to be technically accurate, but also a terriﬁc source of ideas. He saw rodeo as a kind of art form, with names for animal temperaments and strategies. Rodeo people stopped by regularly. They were tough critics who fell in love with getting the saddle just right, supplying props and posing. Linderman, three-time All-Around Champion in the days when cowboys were rough and unshorn, had grown up near Red Lodge, building up huge shoulders by mining underground coal. One hot day, hoeing rows in the sugar beet ﬁeld, he had thrown aside his hoe and gone to rodeoing. More than merely tough, Bill had insisted that rodeo cowboys clean up their acts and get a little class. He had been an original member of the “Turtle” Association which preceded the PRCA. (The version Linderman joined was a reincarnation of one organized in Boston, of all unlikely places, as a kind of cowboys’ union.) When he became the head of the PRCA he said rodeo hands would have no credibility until they dressed nice, talked nice, and paid their bills. He made it a point to set an example. People constantly told us stories about his generosity – money lent, good deeds done – and his gallantry. Once some ill-advised hand got smart with a waitress and Bill, whose arm was broken, knocked him out with his cast – which also smashed the plaster. The ultimate story about Bill was that of his death. He’d eaten in the Denver Piggly Wiggly, a favorite spot, and had paid with a check. The cashier had asked him to put his address on the check, so Bill jokingly wrote “Heaven.” In a matter of hours he may have gone “home,” for he left to catch a plane that crashed on takeoﬀ and burst into ﬂames. They say that Bill was seen to come out once, but he heard others screaming inside and went back to rescue them. He never emerged again. No movie cowboy could top Bill Linderman. We were more than a little nervous in the air when we ﬂew to Denver, but more in danger in the Denver taxis, especially since we were carrying the two carefully done portraits of Linderman, still in fragile plastilene until all changes had been made. Once, the taxi swerved like a steer and Bob made a quick grab for the little statues, while I was thrown across the seat. He knew his priorities. The committee liked both maquettes, but – as we had suspected – loved having the paraphernalia of the saddle in the portrait, so that was the one chosen to be enlarged. X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E

251

Gene Pruett, President of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, and good friend of Bill Linderman, tries his hand at a sculptor’s calipers, 1967. Photo: Mary Scriver.

Costell met Scriver at the PRCA oﬃce and they started to work. Before long everyone in the oﬃce was stopping by to watch Bob, and as the afternoon wore on even Gene Pruett, the president and one of Linderman’s closest friends, was working on the clay, making tiny changes with a slender steel modeling tool. When we left for home, the chosen portrait stayed at the PRCA oﬃce to be judged with three other sculptures. Bob’s portrait of Linderman was unanimously chosen by a committee: Gene Pruett, Dean Krakel, George Williams, and one other whose name didn’t get recorded. The contract was signed. The statue was to be heroic-size (life-size plus one-ﬁfth). The ﬁnished bronze statue, of course, would be slightly smaller due to the shrinkage of the metal when it was cast, but it would seem life-size. This time Bob knew the importance of a strong, well-proportioned armature to support the hundreds of pounds of clay he would use. Research on enlarging methods identiﬁed two alternatives: an elaborate machine called a pantograph; or a scaled framework built in proportion around each of the statues so as to form a three-dimensional set of reference points for measuring. He decided on 252

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

the latter approach as more apt to be accurate and began to measure. With his grandson’s help – six-year-old Lane made a good welding torch holder while Bob pounded on the metal – he soon had a provisional skeleton which was to be changed again and again as the work went on. Using a battery of step-ladders, we started piling clay on. This was the summer Margaret, Bob’s daughter, had her ﬁrst cancer operation and Lane stayed with us. During the August week she was in Browning, Margaret helped by locating points of reference on the small sculpture with straight pins, writing their location in a notebook – 2 down, 1 left, 6 deep – until she had what appeared to be a dictionary of secret code. Then Bob began ﬁnding the same points on his clay mass – end of nose, shirt buttons, belt buckle – marking each with kitchen matches. He left the heads of the matches sticking out, mostly because they might react with the clay in some unforeseen way. Tourists observed all this from the Dutch door into the front and one cleverly guessed, “Well, when the clay is ﬁnished, I guess you’ll light all the matches at once and that will bake the clay – right?” Bake is what plastilene exposed to open ﬂame will NOT do! With an oil and wax base, it burns! Every time Bob was making progress, it seemed, the armature would come poking out in the wrong place. To keep from starting over he would strip back as little clay as possible to get at the iron with the cutting torch. Even with wet asbestos packed around the iron, the clay would splutter, burn, and drip ﬂaming gobs onto the ﬂoor. Lane now became head bucket boy, pouring water where it was needed. Sometimes Bob had to yell at the museum receptionist to help. When the statue was ﬁnally pointed up, it looked like somebody, but not Linderman. To the sculptor’s chagrin, people kept taking photos and publishing them without explaining that the sculpturing had only begun. People are naturally a little suspicious about portraits anyway and some assumed the worst. Friends of Linderman stopped in constantly to give advice – which Bob took seriously until he noticed that their descriptions conﬂicted. Gene Pruett made arrangements for us to receive photos and Linderman’s clothes, boots, and hat. We never did ﬁnd any one person with shoulders wide enough, hips narrow enough, or head long enough to ﬁll Bill’s clothes. But one fellow had a back like Bill’s, and Calvin Augare had hands like Bill’s, even to a knuckle knocked down in a ﬁstﬁght. The Levi people sent an enlarged photo of the championship buckle that Linderman had worn in the plane crash, since the original buckle was melted. In the end Bob simply had to lock himself into the shop at night with the best photos and work until photos of the statue and photos of the real man matched, without losing the personality. The Turtle Association saddle Linderman was holding proved to be more work than any other part of the statue. Turtle Association saddles have no horn, some say because it’s safer without a horn to prong the cowboy in the gut and some say because the early cowboys could pack more saddles into a car or plane X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E

253

for traveling between rodeos. Bob found a saddle in the local saddle shop that had actually once belonged to Linderman. For extra luck, it had a broken tree, which meant it had to be completely dismantled for repair. The saddlemaker, named Bell, let Bob do the dismantling. As the sculptor removed each piece of leather, he made a scale drawing. notes on construction and a pattern one-and-one-ﬁfth life-size. Each leather section was duplicated in plastilene, even down to a basket weave pattern oneand-one-ﬁfth life-size. Then as the saddlemaker reassembled the real saddle on a new tree, Bob assembled the clay saddle around an angle-iron tree. The results were so realistic that people kept thinking it was leather and leaving ﬁngermarks on it. A few ultra-realistic touches were added by scraping a one-and-one-ﬁfth life-size spur rowel over the seat. Pruett drove up from Great Falls in a blizzard on Thanksgiving, 1967, to check the rough clay model . The next spring, when the clay was nearly done, he brought Rusty Spaulding, Linderman’s mother, to give the ﬁnal approval. Bob had made the statue’s head detachable so he could work on it without standing on a ladder. The head was on a table in the house, and when it was obvious Rusty was trying not to look at it we began to worry. Finally Bob asked straight out what Rusty thought. For a long moment she looked at the face and her eyes ﬁlled with tears. “I just don’t know what you could do to make it better,” she said. “I never noticed before, but he had eyebrows just like mine!” Then we understood why she hadn’t wanted to look. When the clay was ﬁnished, Bob decided to make a plaster piece mold, impressions of the clay in a series of plaster sections keyed to ﬁt back together. One day sculptor and crew started at the statue’s feet and by ﬁve in the afternoon it was entirely encased in what appeared to be a giant plaster cast. In real life Linderman had no doubt worn his share of casts, but not all over at once. The plaster sections became molds into which were painted layers of hot wax 3/8" thick. The thickness was critical and had to be kept even. We bent paper clips so they had a kink at 3/8" and pierced the wax to test it as we went along. When the wax sections were separated from the plaster, they were stuck back together to form a replica of the clay statue in hollow wax. For ease of handling, Bob kept the sculpture separated at the collar and the belt. The saddle was kept separate, too. We had used brown wax. At one point, while the sections of Bill were standing in the closed museum to stay cool, some tourists talked their way in there, and one evidently thought the brown wax was chocolate – he took a big bite out of the belt buckle. We didn’t ﬁnd the damage until after they had gone, or we could have identiﬁed him by his teeth. Bob’s daughter, Margaret, who had helped him begin the statue, died in May of 1968. He had not dared to start his furnaces to cast when he might have to get to his daughter at any moment. In May all the copper companies went on strike so it was impossible to get any bronze. Then the weather was too warm to start the small foundry without ﬁre danger because the roof was so low. 254

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Someone told us about a foundry in Regina, Saskatchewan, that would pour the metal in a couple of months. We loaded the wax in the little red van and drove the 600 miles. Bob decided to chance it, though he hardly knew the foundry people, and left the wax in a potato cellar to be kept cool until it could be invested and poured. Every time we called to ask, the foundry assured us the rough metal casting would be ready very soon. But it never was. Finally, Pruett called to say in a few days he was coming to see what progress we had made. We hadn’t told Pruett about the Regina foundry and weren’t sure what his reaction would be, so I was sent to pick up whatever the foundry had done. They had done nothing. The wax was just the same. Bob wanted it back as quickly as possible. I drove back on rough roads, and vibration began to crack the wax. At every small town I stopped to buy more electrical tape (Duct tape wasn’t invented yet.) to try to hold it together, until the wax looked like a mummy. The only course of action was to enlarge our foundry so we could cast the statue ourselves. We ripped up the ﬂoor to install another melting furnace and replaced a wooden wall with cement block so we could extend the bake-out ovens. We had to ﬁnd more reliable burners for the oven and install a more elaborate electrical hoist system to handle the 150-pound crucibles of molten bronze. Most important, the roof had to be raised at least three feet. We waited for calm weather, cut the roof loose and jacked it up enough to lay three more courses of cement blocks on the supporting walls. Just about the time the roof was teetering on the jacks, wind hit: gusts up to seventy and eighty miles per hour are not unusual in Browning. For a day the only thing that was keeping the roof more or less on the foundry was the long-suﬀering neighbor’s tool shed and a telephone pole in the alley, which prevented the roof from moving sideways. As soon as the foundry was functioning again, Bob had to cast some orders to pay the bills. When the below-zero 1969 January weather settled in, we decided to make a test run with both crucibles on two three-foot busts of Buﬀalo Bill for the Buﬀalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming. The bust investment molds were each four to ﬁve feet square, weighing a thousand pounds. They had to be made in the unheated foundry as they were too large and heavy to move from the shop, but we had to go straight from making the mold to putting them in the oven, so they wouldn’t freeze and crack. The sand pit in which we packed the investment molds was not big enough, so we tore up some ﬂoorboards to dig another pit during the two weeks the molds were baking. The temperature had been so far below zero so long that even with the ovens going it took two men with a jackhammer three days to dig down four feet. Then we were short of investment without knowing it. Only the outside cage was covered with investment when we ran out. If we turned on the ovens to keep the foundry warm, the wax would melt and distort. If we left the mold incomplete until we could pour the investment into the cage, the outside would X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E

255

freeze and crack so the molten bronze would escape. Finally we wrapped them in electric blankets and insulation and hoped for a quick delivery of more supplies. The molds were baked until all traces of wax and moisture were gone. They were hoisted to the pit for packing, but one was jarred and cracked slightly. When we poured in the bronze, the molten metal escaped through the crack, pushing aside the wet sand packed around it, easily penetrating the metal lining of the pit, and setting the ﬂoor of the whole shed on ﬁre. Half the crew kept pouring metal while the other half pried up ﬂoorboards to ﬁght ﬁre. In their excitement they spilled water on the other big mold, causing it to crack. We dared not call in the enthusiastic volunteer ﬁremen, who would splash water everywhere and demolish the building. We melted and poured three times – nearly a thousand pounds of molten metal. Not until 1 A.M. were the cracks full enough of cold metal for the molds to ﬁll up. Our practice run had been a disaster. Only weeks of welding and grinding – all of it done by Bob – saved the busts. After a lot of planning and tinkering to eliminate some of our problems, by spring 1969 we were ready to try a big pour again. Holding our breaths, we invested, baked, and poured the big Linderman statue’s head. When we broke away the investment, the face emerged smiling and ﬂawless. By August the sculpture was nearly all cast. The last mold, which held the base and the legs to above the knees, weighed two tons. It took ﬁve men, one wife, and three grandchildren two days to put the investment on the wax and two house movers (J.T. Ingram and helper) two more days to roll the mold into the oven. After weeks of baking, temperatures were so intense that the brick ﬂoor of the oven turned to glass. Because all the Indians had gone ﬁre-ﬁghting, our crew by this time consisted of friends and relatives, sweating and gulping salt pills with water. We heated both furnaces twice so as to have a little extra metal. But when Bob went to lift out the last crucible, it suddenly split in half, dumping 150 pounds of bronze into the bottom of the furnace. The glowing metal hadn’t quite ﬁlled the mold, but we couldn’t do any more. We left the mold to cool overnight. The mold had been too big for the sand pit, so we had enclosed it in oven lids with a chain around them and packed wet sand between. Next morning Bob alone, too anxious to wait for help, cut the wires and released the chains holding the lids together. Several hundred pounds of brick, steel, and sand caved out on his leg, all but breaking the bone. But the metal had ﬁlled the mold just to the bottom of the base – Linderman was cast! What everyone had told us was impossible was accomplished. Bob, lying on his back with ice packs on his swollen leg, didn’t feel so bad after all! As each rough casting was chipped out of the investment, it was lightly sandblasted. Every gas pocket had to be braised and every protrusion ground oﬀ. Thirty-dollar steel rotary ﬁles lasted only minutes on the hard silicon bronze alloy. Miraculously, the sections that had been cut apart in wax ﬁt back together 256

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

perfectly when reassembled as separately cast pieces of bronze. With ropes and chain hoists holding him up, Linderman was welded together until he stood alone. The sculpture, now too big for the door, had to be moved out into the light for patining, so Bob tore out one side of the foundry and called in his house movers again. By September the ﬁrst blizzards hit. The men put up a plastic tipi with a plumber’s pot for heat and went on working. On November 4 the moving van came and Linderman was carefully hoisted aboard with a forklift. The trip to Oklahoma City should have taken only three days but a week passed without any word. When we couldn’t stand it any longer and called, we heard that the van was evidently lost in Texas – possibly hijacked. Finally someone spotted an item in the Great Falls paper noting that the statue had arrived safely. No one had thought to tell us. The heroic statue of Bill Linderman was dedicated at the annual Rodeo Historical Society luncheon at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City during the National Rodeo ﬁnals in 1970. Charlotte Linderman Parsons unveiled the statue of her father. Mike Linderman Galley, Rusty Spaulding, and Walt Linderman were all special guests. There stood the real King of the Cowboys with a row of ﬂags and a blue sky behind him through the glass wall. He looked down on the crowd with that quirky little smile, a bit younger than some remembered him. The annual trophy awarded by the National Cowboy Hall of Fame to the National All-Around Rodeo Champion became the one-ﬁfth-life-size version of Scriver’s portrait of Linderman. The ﬁrst winner of the trophy was Larry Mahan. His name and the names of the other winners went under the larger-than-life portrait in the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Mahan eventually accumulated a whole row of the statues. Bill Linderman, larger than life and now immortal, stands there with his saddle. But the memory I cherish most is his mom, Rusty, in her old family ranch house near Red Lodge. We stopped by to visit one day and caught her just ﬁnishing up the chore of bagging chicken carcasses for the freezer. Not a young woman, she had raised the poultry, killed and picked them the day before and was now whirling around her kitchen in bare feet, racing the clock to get them frozen. With a little help from Lady Clairol, her hair was still red, glowing in the sunlight streaming through the high old-fashioned windows. On the hard-worn table was a big oxalis plant, its green shamrocks also glowing. A cowboy hero’s mom in a classic ranch kitchen: it was worthy of a painting. The Linderman dedication had plunged us back into the excitement of an institutional gala. At the Rodeo Historical Society luncheon we found that many people were genuine old Westerners and their stories were absorbing. Spotting Jim Shoulders, another legendary rodeo hand, Bob was suddenly struck with the idea of making his portrait and pitched the concept to him. Shoulders, feeling it was much too “previous,” objected “I’m not dead yet!” (The sculpture did X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E

257

eventually get started in plastilene, was burned in the museum ﬁre in 1976, and then reconstructed and cast in bronze.) What really seized our attention was the huge rescued statue of The End of the Trail. While the Linderman was being dedicated, the two-and-a-half-times life-size original plaster from Visalia was in a temporary building where Cesare Contini was making the plaster piece mold to send to Italy for casting. Contini was from that guild of ﬁne workers the Frasers and their fellow sculptors (including both Malvina Hoﬀman and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney) depended upon for help. In fact, Cesare’s father had worked with James Fraser in the Twenties. Bob was enthralled by the whole project and could hardly prevent himself from getting up there on the scaﬀolding to help Contini. He had a thousand small questions about technique and Contini was delighted to have someone ask, but Krakel wanted us out circulating with the guests, charming the money. Bob used to say, wryly, “Making sculpture is not show business, but selling sculpture is.” Still, Contini working on that huge plaster was as close as Bob could come to his ancestral spirits. It was a little ironic that nearly forgotten careers, showing up here in the bastion of the CAA, changed his relationship to his own work, lending it dignity, and pushing aside Charlie Russell. He was more of an American sculptor than a cowboy sculptor. To him from then on, monumental commissions were proof of accomplishment. Krakel had captured another studio, that of Charles Schreyvogel (1861– 1912), a rival of Remington’s who had lived in Browning for a while. When we went into the hall where the studio was replicated in a huge case, Bob gasped and bumped me with his elbow. A small painting, beautifully done, portrayed the Rocky Mountains, just as they appear from the picture window of Bob’s studio in Browning.

6. The National Rodeo Finals Oklahoma City, 1970

At the National Rodeo Finals in Oklahoma City: we were ecstatic. Linderman had become an entry point to the whole world of professional rodeo, one of the most authentic communities we ever shared. Competitions were impossible to fake. Everyone understood that you might fail, might be badly hurt, even killed, but also you might make top dollar. The only way a person could fall short was by not making an honest try. One might think competition would keep people apart, but these people were always watching out to help the other guy. They were generous about including Bob. 258

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

As a kind of show biz gimmick, Freckles Brown – a bull rider from way back – had been scheduled to ride “Tornado” – an old-timer champion bull about to be retired. The bull had only been successfully ridden for the full allotted time once, and that was by Freckles. Darned if Freckles didn’t manage to ride him to the buzzer again. Bob decided he had to make a portrait to commemorate the ride. He scared up a tape measure somewhere and we went around to the pens.4 Normally, bucking bulls are pretty docile between rides. As a little girl, I’d loved to feed them handfuls of grass through the fence of the pens of the Livestock Exposition in Portland. But Tornado was not feeling either docile or retired. Bob made a quick sketch of the bull on a tablet and then I was supposed to get the measurements. “What’s the width of his shoulders, Mary?” Clinging to the top of the not-too-tight pen, I leaned back as Tornado surged right straight up, knocking my steel tape aside. At some point I lost my earring down into the chute under the bull’s feet but decided it was wise to just consider it an oﬀering to the rodeo gods. Then we went over to the hotel and measured Freckles, which was a lot easier. Later I was behind the chutes waiting for Bob and spotted Ben Johnson not far away. I stared like any starstruck idiot. Ben, noticing, sauntered over with his hand out and said, “Hello there. I’m Ben Johnson.” No one told me to stop staring. He was a prince of a man and a terriﬁc actor. Bob wasn’t impressed then. But in the last years, when he was in and out of the hospital, I sent him a videotape of My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys in which Ben Johnson played an aging man who resists being trapped in a retirement home. THEN he appreciated the actor. Since the Cowboy Hall of Fame awarded prizes for the best Western movies, books, and so on, it was natural for Ben Johnson and other cowboy movie stars like Joel McCrea, Tom Selleck, and Bill Farnsworth to attend events. By the turn of the millennium the whole thing had woven together into a “lifestyle” complex that supported several slick magazines like The American Cowboy and Cowboys & Indians. Real estate out West, their appropriate furnishings, and elegant clothing were part of the mix. Everyone enjoyed it and the exposure was good for business, but it was expensive. Industrial Cowboy Art, complete with moguls and entrepreneurs. Because of the rodeo connection, Bob began a series of major bronzes, extravagantly romantic in style, one sculpture for each event plus portraits of the contestants, both human and animal. These are the bulk of the “hundred bronzes” shown in Cody. They are itemized in Bob’s book, which he called An Honest Try, the title of the bull rider piece. Bill Cochran posed for the bull rider, since it had been his event, and the bull was “White Lightning,” from the Reg Kessler rodeo stock.5 We went over to Reg’s winter ranch to measure the bull, who didn’t even have to be run into a chute. The whole bunch of bulls stood around in the snow, peacefully grinding up their hay. The biggest problem was that the light was so X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E

259

poor in the foggy weather that they became two-dimensional silhouettes. It was impossible to make out the muscling on the dark animals. Bob brought home a Brangus calf and a doggin’ steer which both lived in the backyard to be handy for modeling. The calf made my life miserable by butting me every time I crossed the yard, so that I had to carry a stick with me. The steer had lovely manners but developed a big lump on his jaw, which required the veterinarian. We ﬁnally sold them, which was a relief, both because I could cross the yard and because I wasn’t awakened by the calf ramming the house under our bedroom window at dawn because she was out of hay. I was grateful that Bob wasn’t quite crazy enough to buy a bucking bull – or maybe he just didn’t have enough money, since they cost a fortune. When we attended the Flathead Rodeo, following the Kessler stock, the grandkids were with us. To keep them from being bored, Bob bought them a white rabbit, but he turned out to be allergic to it, so I bought baby shampoo and food coloring. Every day the kids washed the bunny and dyed it a new color, which kept them interested. On the way back through Marias Pass after the rodeo, Bob sat on the ﬂoor of the van to hold onto the plastilenes and keep them upright while I drove. The kids and rabbit had gone to sleep, even with the pet magpie hopping around on their heads. It was late and someone began tailgating us, probably reacting to the Glacier County license plate, which is widely recognized as being from the Blackfeet Reservation. They came dangerously close. At the last turnoﬀ before a long downhill stretch with no guardrail, I became fearful that we might be knocked over the edge. Yelling, “hang on,” I swerved oﬀ the road. Bob must have been dozing or maybe was just hanging on to too many things – one horse went over on its nose, mushing it ﬂat. Bob was enraged. It took days for the adrenaline to wear oﬀ, but at least he was alert for the rest of the trip and the kids woke up to help hold on. The rodeo pieces were explosive and extravagant. This was a major change in Bob’s style, which had always been too peaceful and detailed for some people. But only the action pieces were rough and impressionistic. The portraits of the individual contestants, human or not, were detailed and at rest but alert. Personality shines out of that ornery Brangus calf. In 1981 another smaller set of bronzes, one for each event, was made depicting rodeo events of the early 1900s for the High School Rodeo Association. Bob, with Bill Cochran, sat with bits of clay and made squeeze-ups of typical bucking strategies which were later developed into small bronzes: Twister, Hooker, and Spinner. Over the years a steady stream of commissions came from the PRCA in Colorado Springs, many of them portrait busts.

260

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

7. Asger Mikkelson

Browning, 1970–1975

As Bob became better known, fans became more persistent. One evening Bob and I were piling bricks from the bake-out oven and hurrying so we could go eat supper when there was a great scrambling in the rubble chute to the alley. In clambered a distinguished-looking man in a suit. We stood with our mouths hanging open while he introduced himself as Asger Mikkelson from Bozeman, an admirer. Bob found his voice and read him the riot act about admiring an artist so much that work was interrupted and the artist was prevented from creating. “Oh,” exclaimed Asger. “I see what you’re doing here. Let me help.” Taking oﬀ his jacket, he went to piling up bricks. Bob couldn’t resist that. It turned out that Asger was a ﬁne photographer and he became the key to Bob’s ﬁrst book, An Honest Try, in black and white. The bronzes were taken outside to be photographed and Bob wrote an explanation for each. The book won a prize from the Professional Printers. By the time it was published in 1975, I had moved back to Portland. The events described here mostly happened through the late Sixties – the CAA invitation to join came in 1967 and NAWA in 1973. Bob continued to exhibit and win prizes throughout the Seventies and Eighties. The rodeo series remained in circulation at shows around the country, including one at the Montana Historical Society in Helena, Montana. An Honest Try, the bullrider piece, was reproduced at one and one-half times life-size in Kansas City, Missouri, commissioned by the J.C. Nichols Co. to stand in front of the Board of Trade Center. In 1973 the Glenbow Foundation in Calgary, Alberta, in its persona as the Riveredge Foundation, purchased the entire thirty-three-bronze rodeo series for a quarter of a million dollars. The money made possible the purchase of the Flatiron Ranch. Rodeo brought Bob some of his best friends and proudest moments. The contestants were people who obeyed the protocols, did their best, but sometimes couldn’t help bursting out of all bounds, becoming destructive. They abused themselves more than they intended to hurt others. But they were changing, like everything else. The old-timers who broke an ankle, splinted it with a motel pillow, and drove a heavy old road car full of sleeping buddies and shared gear to the next rodeo where they doped up on veterinary drugs and competed on no sleep and a little whiskey – those men were being replaced by young family men, athletes who might not be able to ride a horse unless it was bucking and who got investors to spot them for a small airplane, so they could conceivably compete in two simultaneous rodeos if they weren’t too far apart, thus boosting their potential winnings considerably.

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E

261

Bob was commissioned to do many portraits of the old-timer rodeo hands for the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association in Colorado Springs. This was an “ethical society” of a sort, and the ethic was to give your all, do your damnedest, but to help the others. It went a lot deeper than the Cowboy Artists of America taking a trail ride together, because it grew out of real physical danger and the necessity of an occasional violent life-risking chance in order to make a buck.

8. Meltdown of a marriage Up until now I’d been conscious that my politics were quite diﬀerent from Bob’s, but I’d just kept quiet about my liberal ideas. Now he began to harangue me about them. I’d sit as close to the pickup door as I could and wish I could put my ﬁngers in my ears. He ached, his heart felt funny, his legs were stiﬀ – he complained to me, as though I were withholding the power to heal him. If I suggested he go to the doctor, he scoﬀed and belittled. Neither would he take medicine beyond 222’s, a blend of aspirin, caﬀeine, and codeine available over the counter in Canada that was probably keeping him alive by thinning his blood. The doctor said he had too many red blood cells and should give blood as often as he could, but most of the phlebotomists hurt him too much. One, a little nun in Kalispell, was almost painless and Bob was so thrilled that he declared he was going to give her a big kiss. She disappeared and a big male intern came back with his orange juice. She wouldn’t come near him again. Finally he did go to the doctor, who warned him he was in imminent danger of a heart attack. (Harold had already had one a couple of years earlier.) Then the doctor called me into the oﬃce and explained heart attacks with a plaster model. He emphasized that if I didn’t do EXACTLY what Bob said, to always sooth and humor him, he would die. After that, every time I showed signs of being an independent human being, Bob would clutch his chest. And I’d do what he said. What saved us for a while was a trained chef at the supper club attached to the new motel. We’d stagger up there late in the evening, too tired to do more than wash our hands, our clothes ﬁlthy and our hair full of plaster dust. The friend would seat us in the most remote dark corner and cook for us: steak, lobster, Baked Alaska. Luxury food, beautifully presented. While we ate, he’d come sit with us and spin all sorts of wild adventures. The doctor gave Bob a stress test. He had no treadmill so he got Bob to step up and down on a little stool. “You need to get more exercise,” he said. So Bob came home, made a little stool, and stepped up and down on it until he had a heart attack. I tried to stop him. 262

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Harold and I almost could not get him to go to the Cut Bank hospital. I don’t know why we didn’t call an ambulance or take him to the Indian Hospital. It was a long forty-mile drive in a heavy snowstorm. That night he nearly died. The doctor said if we could see his heart, it would look as though it had been struck by a bullet. He was hospitalized for a month. I visited every evening, taking him airplane and rocket models to keep him busy and the newest kittens, tucked under my coat. Once the doctor came back unexpectedly and Bob shoved the kittens under the covers where the short hospital gown revealed a new “mouse” for their play. The doctor never did ﬁgure out why Bob was making such strange faces. In the late Sixties, when the money began to come in, he would accuse me of wanting to clean out the bank account and leave. Or after we got the little Two Medicine ranch, which he bought without consulting me, he accused me of wanting to take it. I did love it intensely, but his fears were totally unreal, much like his accusations that I played bridge too much when in fact I didn’t know how to play bridge. Jeanette played bridge. He was getting his wives mixed up with each other. At least once in 1969 I really meant to go and loaded everything into the van. I begged, “Just tell me that you love me,” and he answered, “If you can’t tell whether I love you, then you don’t love ME. If you truly loved me, I wouldn’t have to explain anything to you. You’d just know.” So I left and visited relatives in Oregon for a few weeks. My mother was angry at me. My aunt said, “Men are all children. He doesn’t know what he wants. Just go home.” I bought three books about how to save a marriage and sat along a stream in Idaho to read them. Then I went back, and caught him with another woman. Other times he said sadly that I had simply outgrown him. That was closer to the truth. It was his sheltering of me, his challenges, his demanding that I ﬁnd out things for him and always be there for him, that had made me grow. One of the essential and paradoxical patterns in the West is that in order to survive the struggle a man needs a strong woman, but because he must always keep her under control, he must be even stronger. Now that Bob had a reputation as a sculptor the quarrels were more public and more people felt free to intervene for their own reasons. Often Bob and I fought on a Saturday, when the crew wasn’t around, because they were uncomfortable with our wars. Once I was out in the house, in the bedroom, my face red and swollen with crying, when I heard Bob come in with other people. I knew who they were: a dentist and his wife who intruded almost every Saturday the weather was good. I did NOT want to be quizzed by them, so I got into the closet and hunkered down among the shoes. Damned if they, led by Bob, didn’t troop right into the bedroom, open the closet door and stand there in a row, gaping at me.

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E

263

Earlier in the relationship I’d gone to a psychiatrist in Great Falls. At this point we went back to the psychiatrist together (though Bob said, in a very small voice, “Don’t you think it’s kind of ... weak to go ask for help?”) He showed the shrink the adding machine tape of what we’d sold that year: a quarter-ofa-million dollars worth of bronzes. Of course, that was gross, not proﬁt. But it impressed the shrink, who sort of fell in love with Bob and explained to me that Bob was trying to get his father’s approval. I knew that. When the divorce talk came, Bob said, “Now, Mary, I’ve spent all this time teaching you everything I know. It was like a college course or an apprenticeship for you, so actually I shouldn’t have to pay you any alimony. Instead you should pay ME tuition! But I’m willing to call it even.” This actually made sense to me. I think it seemed digniﬁed. (I didn’t point out that I’d worked in the shop without wages for four years or that my writing had helped his career.) We agreed that I would need some startup money when I went back on my own, and he wrote me a check for $1200. Then we went hunting, and ended up stuck in the mud with our arms wrapped around each other, crying desperately, and he called the divorce oﬀ. He told me to put the money in a savings account in my name, because he might not have enough money to divorce me later. A year later we had another terrible quarrel and this time he threw a can of bamboo sprouts so hard it went through the kitchen window, the storm window over it, the porch window and the window of the pickup parked outside. We were out of control. I went to bed and didn’t ever want to get up. But I was afraid to get drunk, so I took four of his Nembutals. He took two every night to sleep since his heart attack. The next thing I knew, he and a nurse friend of his were walking me around. They decided I was okay and put me back to bed. I woke up in a day or so and the Nembutals were still there, so I took four more and went back to sleep. I had a doctor’s appointment in Lethbridge, Alberta, in a couple of days. Bob paid the nurse to take me up there, which must have been like escorting a helium balloon. I was on a great binge of euphoria. The doctor was Chinese and scolded, “You must obey husband! Very bad to quarrel!” What I didn’t know was that Bob had instructed the nurse to check me into the hospital and leave me. She bought me a nightie and housecoat, gave me a ﬁve-dollar bill and left. About the third day I called Bob to see when he was coming for me. “I’ve divorced you. I forbid you to ever come back to Browning.” Then they gave me a shot to put me back to sleep again. I had a psychiatrist in the hospital, a blue-eyed Scot with a beard, very Sean Connery. I told him what Bob said and he laughed and laughed. I was amazed. “He can’t do that,” said the doctor, rolling his r’s. “You can rrreturn to Brrrowning.” I called the country clerk who conﬁrmed that Judge McPhillips had granted the divorce, though the papers were a year old and I was un-represented. 264

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

I called Bob who ﬁnally said, “Well, it’s Pop’s birthday tomorrow. I’d better come get you so you can wish him happy birthday.” His pop was paralyzed from his ﬁnal stroke, unspeaking. We took some kittens down to show him and he smiled. Bob’s mom seemed not to know what had happened, but she was only pretending. We just went on as usual. Finally Bob’s mom objected to me living with him, so I went out to the Two Medicine ranch and spent the winter with the horses and cats. That saved me. Every day I walked the fence around our property, a couple of miles of barbed wire, and then came back to write and draw alongside the wood cookstove. I had no car but Bob brought me groceries. Every day was full of grace. In February he took me to Las Vegas with him to visit Billy Byrne, his favorite student, and the Woody Herman band with which he played. If it was meant to be seductive, it didn’t work. I wondered if this were what Bob thought of as success: threadbare glamour, low-grade addictions, tired stage shows, and sordid motels. I sat in the bathroom and watched a cockroach roam around in the tub while Bob snored, exhausted. Louis Armstrong was playing and Bob was suddenly inspired to go backstage. Louis was backstage, all alone, cleaning his horn. Suﬀering from his own heart ailments, he was obviously tired to the bone. (Some said his handkerchief was full of cocaine to kill the pain, that you could occasionally see white powder on his face.) Bob began a pitch to make a portrait bust of him and Louis kindly resisted. Bob pressed harder, saying he’d had a heart attack and wanted what might be his last sculpture to be of Louis. Louis said, “Then you know how I feel, man. I just can’t do it.” I tugged Bob away, still protesting, “It would only take a little while to make measurements....” Louis shook his head sadly. Towards spring Bob was paying a trapper to catch pregnant bobcats live and store them in the ancient chicken house. He wanted the kittens for pets. He didn’t remember to get food out to them very often, so clearly he had no background in prenatal care. The cats were terriﬁed, anguished, starving, freezing. If any of them had given birth, the others would have eaten the kittens. The so-called food was mostly skulls, so it looked like a charnel house in their dark, reeking prison. I talked to them through the window but it only made everything worse – they’d bounce frantically oﬀ the walls. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t free them because I was still dependent on Bob. I saw myself as one of them. He let them out when it was clear there were going to be no kittens, though I don’t know how well they could do with their trap-maimed front feet. By then the season was so late that they were no good as fur, which is what saved their lives. At his mom’s prompting, Bob gave me the little red van. When the gumbo road dried up so I could drive in and out, I got a job with the school. When I

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E

265

Bob as Legendary Sculptor, about 1975. Photo: Buster Ruetten.

266

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

had rent money, I moved up to East Glacier and he would occasionally come to take me out for dinner. Many years later I was in Helena at a gas station when a woman from Browning stopped me. She had been in court the day Bob got his divorce. She told me that afterwards Bob went to a bench in the hallway, sat, and cried harder than she’d ever seen a grown man cry, so hard she was a little frightened. It was important to her that I know. I took a lot of comfort from that. She said she went home and told her husband if he ever divorced her, she’d take him for every penny he had and then beat him black and blue. In 1971, after the legal divorce, I was living up in East Glacier. I had stayed out on the ranch that winter but in the spring a neighbor had gone into the pig business. It was Calvin Augare, Bob’s hunting partner, whose life was drifting a little out of control. The trouble was that the pigs were unconﬁned. Some of them got into the habit of coming upstream and rooting around in the ranch yard. They could get so eager around the edges of the house that they actually lifted the little cabin oﬀ its railroad tie foundations. Bob lost his temper at the constant destruction. One day he shot several good-sized hogs, then realized that Calvin’s temper was just as intense as his own and he was likely to get “thumped” at the very least. But he was not strong enough to drag the hog carcasses into the pickup so he could dump them up in the mountains for bears to eliminate the evidence. He called me to come to the ranch and help. I turned him down. That was probably the real moment of divorce. I felt I had given the marriage an honest try. I left East Glacier in 1973 and returned to Portland, where I became the ﬁrst female animal control oﬃcer in Multnomah County, the second in the State of Oregon. Bob wrote the recommendation that got me the job. I was thirty-four and immediately started on coursework at Portland State University, but in the end I went to the University of Chicago to become a Unitarian Universalist minister.

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E

267

Part Three:

Diminuendo

XIV Chasing: The Thunder Pipe Bundle

1. How to “chase” a bronze When the investment is knocked oﬀ the rough casting of a bronze, what emerges is not anything anyone would recognize, but rather a blank, a potential. The bronze encagement of the sprues and vents must be cut oﬀ, the places where they were attached must be ﬁled down, and every ﬂaw must be searched out and addressed. This is not exciting or particularly rewarding – just a hard job that has to be very carefully done. In the Fifties when Bob ﬁrst began trimming small models in plaster, he used a little Dremel tool, a handheld hobby grinder and drill. Often it overloaded, stalled, and burned out. Pretty soon he had three of them: one in use, one being sent for repairs and one coming back from repairs. Ten years later when the Bighorn Foundry was really operating, the grinders were ﬂexible shaft industrial equipment that would cut steel and that rarely failed. To operate them, one needed ear-protecting headgear, goggles, and a good deal of muscle. When we were only doing taxidermy, the shop was a quiet place where we visited as we sewed and pasted. We sang along with the radio, learning the words to the songs. Now each of us worked in noise-imposed isolation with no chance to exchange news or ideas. By quitting time we were much more tired and a little cross. On the early small plaster animals it had been possible to trim ﬂaws with little rasps and knives. Holes were ﬁlled in using a paintbrush and a saucer of water with a tiny island of dry plaster in it. But on the bronzes, one used a set of chisels and the big grinders. Holes had to be welded or brazed, then ground down to match the surface around it. (Brazing uses high-temperature solder, welding does not.) This was arduous, exacting work – a little too much pressure and the surface was cut too deeply, had to be re-welded. The cost of a mistake was high and we were always under time pressure. Sharp bronze slivers crept into one’s clothes and hair, miserably working their way into skin. It was necessary to wear goggles or a face visor as well 271

Chasing the cast ﬁgure of The Winchester Rider with an industrial ﬂex shaft grinder. Photo: Buster Ruetten.

272

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

as the ear covers, so we got sweaty and couldn’t hear the phone or intruders. After we rigged the phone to a loud bell, anyone working late on quiet projects was harshly startled if it rang. The hardest task of all was getting the investment out of the inside of the casting so the patch could be welded shut. We used hoses, crooked wires, dental picks, sandblasting and everything else we could invent to get the hollow really clean. Otherwise the leftover investment would react to moisture by starting an eﬄorescence over the outside. Mostly the job took persistence. These are the kinds of foundry tasks people don’t like. We never did much with little mallets and hammers to take advantage of the malleability of bronze, though in the past some artisans were masters of the technique. Many writers about sculpture spend time talking about the quality of the surface: what sort of materials will yield what kind of responsiveness, how the surface will aﬀect the patina, how light ﬂows along it and leads the eye. The best sculpture photos will show this.

2. Blackfeet religious ceremonies Browning, 1963 to 1999

“Chasing,” in the sense of working on the surface of metal, is the second dictionary meaning of the word. An even earlier meaning is in the root word, the French “ciseleur,” literally chiseler, which in English slang means one who cheats or swindles. The ﬁrst meaning is pursuit, and in this sense Bob ordinarily loved the game of “chase.” But his pursuit of fame began to be entangled with swindlers. Far from being a peaceful, protected place, a reservation – especially an American reservation – is so much in conﬂict among the people that it is like stones on a lakeshore, rolling and tumbling against each other. Poverty and trauma paralyze some, but drive others to ﬁnd a new way to be in the world. By 1965 the pressure and risk of being a sculptor was crushing Bob. We no longer talked or took time oﬀ to paint or ride. Customers and tourists were always underfoot. The phone rang constantly. Life was about only one thing: bronzes. Desperately needing a source of personal inner strength, Bob turned to traditional Blackfeet religion, in part because he could understand it – more than that, felt it in his bones and heart – and in part because the Old People among the Blackfeet had always been his friends and protectors, literally from the moment of his birth. If Douglas Gold is correct when he says that in 1914, when Gold arrived on the train and “Robert” arrived in his mother’s bedroom, there were about forty white men on the reservation, then Bob must have been one of the ﬁrst white births.

XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

273

Since he came to the Amskapi Pikuni as an infant, to him the only “real” Blackfeet were the ones he knew as a child. Blackfeet love children. This is so basic that any Blackfeet who abuses or despises children is that much less a Blackfeet. Bob grew up with Blackfeet buddies, in and out of their houses, eating at their tables and “sleeping over” in their beds. His hunting partners were Blackfeet. As an adult he taught the children, so they could lead the whole reservation with their music and he formed his pickup bands around Blackfeet musicians. He was a veteran of World War II, just like Blackfeet young men. His employees were always Blackfeet. Then there was the oddly intimate relationship between a judge and his clientele. Even I, acting as informal bailiﬀ, got to know all the street drunks in town, and a jolly, friendly, mostly harmless bunch they were. But Bob’s mother made the taboo on Indian wives stick: he never dated Blackfeet girls.1 As Bob grew older and the publicity about his art career became more feverish, the younger warriors began to feel resentful and then competitive. By the time AIM rhetoric ﬁlled the air, some people had settled down to hate Bob Scriver, even as others attached themselves to get a little reﬂected glory. Fewer and fewer really knew Bob or what he did. They saw him in the cafés and in the newspaper. It’s a truism around Browning that almost everything successful gets attacked and tested – Bob no less than other projects. Our understanding of Blackfeet religion was hard-won, gradually achieving deﬁnition and detail as we converted from readers to participants. I hesitate to describe anything because immediately there will be an outcry, some of it from people who think they know better, some from people who feel it should be secret, and some oﬀering money to be included in it. Far too many people romantically believe it to be a mark of distinction, a way of being better than others, and there are always opportunists ready to accommodate them. The most “high church” ceremony might be the Horn Society, which we were able to attend only for a few hours with special dispensation. The Blackfoot reserves in Canada have been able to sustain their old ways and language more successfully than the people on the United States side, because the Canadians (historically, the Throne of England) were not afraid to paternalistically shut the borders of the reserves – no whites in without permission and no “Aboriginals” out without permission. This both protected and conﬁned them. In the past, Horn Society “doings” were discussed by anthropologists in Latin, so as to protect the uneducated who might get the wrong idea. Nowadays, anthropologists like Alice Kehoe simply state the facts, which are not so shocking to today’s ears. The ceremony is meant to encourage fertility in grass, bison, and humans – in part with ritualized coition. We didn’t know that and didn’t ﬁnd it out there. What Bob and I saw was a huge circle of people with their lodges pitched behind them. At one point the holiest of the men ran around the outside perimeter of the circle, carrying signiﬁcant long staﬀs with a curve on the end, and we 274

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

could see that it was hard on some of the older ones. Louis Plenty Treaty, one of the most conscientiously religious people I’ve ever met, was a runner. We were told that if one of them tripped, it would be a terrible sign. Louis, over eighty, was struggling heroically to keep his feet. He is one of the Bundle Keepers Bob portrayed, and he sometimes turned up in Methodist or Catholic brochures because of his face and braids. Bob and I had our faces painted in a huge lodge created by stretching several canvas “skins” over poles erected with two “centers” at the top. Sunlight ﬁltered through the colored canvas as through stained glass, falling gently on the women sitting below. Our faces were painted sulphur yellow with two vermillion stripes, one across both eyes and one through the mouth and out to the jawline. We were told not to wash our faces oﬀ until after sundown. Then we were excused to leave. We drove south along the Rocky Mountains, along the route of the Old North Trail, the long landscape slipping through our memories of the day. Several hours later we got to the border, having rather forgotten about our faces. The border agent came around to the window to ask the usual questions, Bob turned his head at the last minute, and the agent’s shock was very satisfactory. We kept poker faces and let him be the disconcerted one. Medicine Pipe Bundle ceremonies and Beaver Bundle ceremonies are described and photographed in The Old North Trail by Walter McClintock.2 In the early Sixties, no one paid much attention to whatever it was that happened on Moccasin Flats or in the houses of the more traditional people. In the opinion of many, the participants were old and backwards. The conservative Baptists and Pentecostals called them Satanic and would have burned the Bundles, or so they said.

3. Blackfeet ceremonial objects European precious objects are made from materials that are hard and shining, which means they are often metal ornamented with gemstones. The qualities of metal are the chill, the “ting” sound, the sharp points and edges for needles and knives, the ease in heating liquids. Blackfeet clearly treasured needles, awls, hatchets, and knives. Lewis and Clark carried small scissors and medals for gifts and trade. After millennia of heating water by dropping hot rocks into a puddle made by lining a hole in the ground with rawhide, how those old women must have loved their copper tea billies with neatly ﬁtted lids and bails for hanging over a ﬁre. Just a few minutes over the coals boiled water for an “infusion” of whatever herb they fancied. And buttons – what an innovation were bright metal buttons XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

275

on clothes, not for closings so much as decorations. Metal thimbles for punching a needle through leather. Big three-edged needles that would even penetrate thick leather. The people made cases of rawhide or tanned hide, fringed and decorated, so as not to lose these precious things made of metal and so they could be kept handy, identiﬁed as their own. Even now the appeal of glass beads in strong colors is quick and sharp, especially the blue of sky and the red of blood. Brass beads and the dusty pink ones – almost mauve, the color of the inside of a mouth. Faceted beads and bigger red beads with white insides. Sometimes sewn on black velvet or rough red wool, Stroud cloth from Stroud, England. Glass beads and brass falconry bells were traded to the Blackfeet long before white men actually appeared, just as Paciﬁc Coast dentalium shells and red Sioux pipestone had been traded across the continent. Blackfeet holy objects are mostly organic: bone, wood, hide, ivory. When one takes them in hand, they are soft, warm, easy to hold, without sharp edges or points that bite. Stones might be iniskum that look like miniature buﬀalo and ﬁt into one’s ﬁst (baculites) or are coiled like a snail (ammonites). They were rubbed with red ochre until they were like skin, silky and red. Porcupine quills were ﬂattened between the teeth and woven into embroidery, ﬁtted around the shafts of eagle feathers. Eagle down, orange ﬂicker feathers, the skins of whole birds and small animals so old that some are extinct or endangered, like kit foxes. Some hollow bird bones were for sucking out illness, some were made into whistles, and sets of Hand Game (also called Stick Game) might have markers made of human ﬁnger bones, cross-hatched with the same marks as the red ochre stones of Blombas, Africa, seventy thousand years old. The oldest Bundles include scalps. Everything smells of tobacco and sweetgrass, included to discourage insects as one would put lavender in a linen closet. In the old days Blackfeet were used to hours of tedious, arduous, repetitious work with their hands – chipping and scraping hides, rubbing plants into ﬁbers for spinning into ropes, making ﬁre by friction, chipping arrowheads, and drilling holes in bone by twirling something hard and sharp. They did it quietly, daily, together, telling stories and jokes or smoking small pipes. No one complained. It was habitual, taken for granted, like our crew doing taxidermy work. Perhaps you have knit a sweater and know how everything that happened while you knitted becomes part of that garment. Maybe you knew who the sweater was for and pictured that person wearing it. That’s how it was for Indians. The small daily incidents of their lives were worked into their tanning. The face of the family member shone up through new moccasins as their relation’s ﬁngers beaded them, for each pair was ﬁtted to a speciﬁc person. Sometimes there was a tragedy, a turning point, a conversion or decision, that became part of an object, maybe something ceremonial that needed to be commemorated, given power. Then the object was Sacred. Paul Dyck associates the ﬁrst Thunder Pipe Bundles with the ﬁrst smallpox epidemics. 276

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

A Thunder Pipe Bundle is a pipestem three feet long, a “calumet,” made on a white man’s lathe. It is decorated with the entire tail of an adult golden eagle, fanned out and beaded or quilled along the spines of the feathers. Brass falconry bells, round and shanked, made in England, hang clustered to represent the Pleiades. There are bright silk ribbons, ermine skins (white is a sacred color – they never used the dun summer skins) and usually the entire skin of some colorful bird. On one it is a ﬁghting rooster. On the Little Dog pipestem it was a green parrot, complete with glass eyes. The Last Star Pipestem has a wood duck, an exceptionally striking bird. Religious objects were gathered into themes, rolled up in cloth, swaddled in buckskin and enclosed in rawhide cases for transport on horses. They were never in wooden boxes, as white people would keep them: drawers, cupboards, trunks. White authorities sometimes do not treat Bundles with respect – to them it signals lack of value. Scientiﬁc instruments are kept in boxes. Silver ﬂatware is stored in lined boxes. Jewelry goes in jewel boxes. But to the Nitzitahpi, the soft Bundles – often the size of babies – are alive, to be held tenderly against the body. Only the modern dead are boxed – the ancient dead were Bundled. Bundles, especially personal Bundles for one’s own use, are likely to include small strange things cast oﬀ by whites, like tiny porcelain dolls (were they to induce a miscarriage or to encourage fertility?) mixed in with actual scalps and little drawstring bags of paint. One startling Bundle contained a handful of surgical hemostats. This Bundle turned out to be less than sacred – it was a quilling kit. The hemostats made it much easier to ﬂatten and insert the quills. Cast or stamped metal stars from jewelry or furniture, coins, and medallions, small metal boxes for pills or matches, ﬂints and strike-a-lights, all might be in Bundles. Bundles had bearing on the welfare of the whole band as well as the Keeper. A Bundle came to have its own songs and dances and to require certain obligations and restrictions from its Keepers. Since the Plains Indians were nomads, all their possessions had to be portable, so early Bundles were limited in size to what a person or dog could transport. Late Bundles (like the Beaver Bundle, possibly honoring the fur trade as a source of wealth) could be as big as a horse could pack.

XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

277

4. Bob cuts the rawhide Browning, 1963

Maybe the beginning of Bob’s sense of Sacred Doings goes back to Sun Lodge Ceremonies he witnessed as a child and never forgot. He could still sing the song of the men on horseback bringing willow branches to the big round Sun Lodge with a forked tree in the middle. Maybe it continued when there was a Sun Lodge Ceremony in Browning in 1963. Darryl Blackman was the sponsor of the ceremony and he was close to Bob, often did bits of work for him or sold him artwork. That year his grandmother had become ill and Darryl pledged to sponsor a ceremony if she recovered, which she did. She was too young to be the Holy Woman, only Bob’s age, but she probably qualiﬁed in terms of virtue. An ancient lady, totally irreproachable, came down from Canada. The age and virtue of this person is the key to the ceremony – if she is ﬂawed, the consequences will be played out in a year of disasters and deaths. But there is risk for the woman, because she must fast for days. When the big framework is assembled, someone must cut rawhide strips for bindings from a stinking soaked hide by starting a knife at the edge and carefully paring oﬀ a continuous concentric shape. Joking, the managers of the ceremony came over to Bob and insisted that he do the nasty job. Pressing the town judge into service was pretty funny, especially since some of them had done the equally repulsive job of cleaning skulls for him. Since he was a taxidermist, they could be conﬁdent that he had the skill to handle the slimy stuﬀ. Despite his pretended reluctance, he was moved to be included in the ceremony, even in such a lowly role – which some experts claim is quite important. More than anything, he wanted to belong to these old-timers he’d known so long. He loaned them a buﬀalo skull (after it was painted it stayed on his hearth in the studio) the same way he often loaned them back their big drums after they had pawned them to him.

5. Cree healing ceremony, Blackfeet bundle opening Browning, 1967–1999

A few years later, when we were under enormous pressure to turn out work for Cody, as well as worrying about Margaret’s cancer, the wall of one of the bakeout kilns collapsed onto Bob’s leg and bruised it to the bone. His leg swelled and was intensely painful, but he would not go to the doctor. Hearing of this, some old Indians came quietly to ask Bob to participate in a healing ceremony. It was a Cree ceremony and Bob never did get the name of it right. A telescope? 278

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

A rocket? He never could remember. But he went with them and was amazed by what happened. The little house they took him to was sealed with blankets taped over the windows so it was totally dark. There was singing and drumming, the wings of something brushed his face, objects moved noisily around the room, and he was prayed over. After that, he began to heal. We had been quarrelling and I remember sitting in the dusk on the outside back steps up to my little space under the Museum eaves when he came home. He said quietly, “I prayed for you, Mary.” I think he meant it as a gift, and I took it that way. For a while he had a quiet heart. The grandkids came and, even though he had been sworn to secrecy, Bob re-enacted the healing ceremony for them. He covered the windows so it was dark and had an eagle wing to brush faces and make ﬂying sounds. Shoes hit the wall. The kids were big-eyed. They were already spooky, worried, even shocky from their mother’s death. Maybe it helped them, but maybe it just scared them more. Such ceremonies have their dark side. Bob never did participate in a sweatlodge, which has become a popular initiation ordeal for white people who want to participate in Indian religion. So far as I know, he was never asked, but if he had been, he would have said that his heart couldn’t stand it. That might have more than one meaning, especially in terms of sweat lodges run as psychological confessionals, like AA meetings. Besides the old people who were the actual practitioners, Bob was getting a lot of advice from John Hellson, a curator of ethnology at the Manitoba Provincial Museum, and from Adolf Hungry-Wolf, who also had been acquiring Bundles but made a living by producing books about Blackfoot life. Both men had acquired Bundles through transfer. John – short, bearded and toothless – was an ex-pugilist and amateur anthropologist from Cornwall, England. Adolf – a handsome slender man – was Austrian, raised in California. Both men had married Blood women from excellent families and used them to get access to material. (Both are now divorced.) Both had children from their marriages and both lived in Canada. Other than John and Adolf, no other whites seemed aware that ceremonies were still practiced. Bob had been friendly with the two early curators at the Museum of the Plains Indian next door, Claude Schaeﬀer and John Ewers, the recognized experts on the Blackfeet, but they talked about horses and war. Tom Kehoe, the third curator at the Museum of the Plains Indian, was interested in tipi rings and buﬀalo jumps. Alice Kehoe, later in life, wrote about ceremonies. Warily, Bob accepted Hellson and Hungry-Wolf. Over the decades the careers of John Hellson and Adolf Hungry-Wolf separated sharply. Adolf remained a member of the community and gradually learned every song still left in existence. John Hellson began to make a little money, got a set of dentures, and from then on seemed changed. Bob felt close to John Hellson and trusted him more than he ought to have. It was John who got him more and more XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

279

excited, then wanted to sell him sacred objects. Adolf was a participant/expert with no intention of sharing his prestige or selling objects, but Hellson was interested in turning a proﬁt – ﬁnally to the point of breaking the law. In the Eighties and later, through contact with Hellson, Bob bought objects from a man named Flaherty, whom he acknowledges in his book, Blackfeet, Artists of the Northern Plains. This man was a very dubious character indeed, even more so than the coyote artifact buyers who constantly slunk around the reservation. I believe that Bob’s need to be privileged, to be “the one who knows,” even magical, and his yearning to be admired, blinded him to the swindles that entangled these people or made him think he wouldn’t be drawn in to share some guilt. He was especially anxious to somehow overpower the Neo-Traditionalists in order to end their attacks on him. When we ﬁrst were involved in Bundle Openings, those youngsters were still in grade school, so a decade later he felt they were both usurpers and disrespectful. By the Seventies the Neo-Traditionalists were often the ones who interacted with government oﬃcials, especially when repatriation began, so materials were restored to them as representing the tribe. In fact, when Curley Bear Wagner, the cultural director, began to bring back the skeletons of Blackfeet that had been in museum drawers back East, the old people wanted nothing to do with them. So far as they were concerned, those people were still “alive” and maybe angry. “Sun Worship” is a view of life that requires people to live in harmony. In fancy terms, it is a religion that is “omni-theistic” (sees God in everything) and “ecosystematic,” (organizes the world according to the ecology). To the early Indians all of nature – land, water, sky, and creatures – was infused with Power and Mystery. The closest one can come in terms of Christianity is probably “process theology,” devised by Alfred North Whitehead as a way of reconciling Christian categories with quantum mechanics. Of the ceremonies evolved by the Plains Indian to dramatize their attitude toward Nature, the opening of the Sacred Thunder Pipe Bundle is one of the most signiﬁcant because it is a spring ceremony, a kind of Easter celebrating the return of abundance. But there are other Bundles. All had materials drawn from the land, known to tribal senses, carrying poetic concepts. The patterns of the ceremony were deeply human, to be found in ceremonies everywhere: coming together, marking a special time and place, sharing food and song, perhaps dancing (slow and digniﬁed), and going apart. If it were done rightly and intensely, the people left renewed, restored to harmony with life. Over the years since these various Sun ceremonies were born and practiced, they had been forbidden by the government, suppressed as immoral (the most important rituals address coitus and birth), labeled the works of Satan, given up as old-fashioned and irrelevant, and just ignored out of lack of interest. Probably the most serious damage has come from the People gradually separating from the land itself. No longer do they take small stones and animals in their hands. 280

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

John Hellson and Bob Scriver discuss ﬁgures from The Opening of the Sacred Thunderpipe Bundle, 1969. Photo: Mary Scriver.

No longer are they dependent on the hunting that taught them animal lifeways. No longer do they catch eagles from camouﬂaged pits. Many have given up horses altogether and ride in pickups. Even if they participated in ceremonies, the deep poetry has fallen away. But it was there for Bob. In the spring of 1968 he began to mock up a sculpture of a “medicine man,” portraying Charlie Reevis, with no idea that the piece would develop into the detailed, ethnologically accurate, and large-scale work called The Opening of the Sacred Thunderpipe Bundle. Because Indian ceremonies often invoke spiritual powers for the purpose of healing, the white man has mistaken the part for the whole and lumped all religious performance as “medicine.” Disease is not the only enemy from which an Indian sought protection through his religion. He XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

281

also sought to guard against battle losses, ﬁnancial misfortune, quarrels, and generally what an Indian friend called “unluck.” In Bob’s book, The Blackfeet, Artists of the Northern Plains, I recognize speciﬁc beaded shirts, leggings, gloves, moccasins, and horse regalia. I know those brass-studded knife scabbards and guns. They are the materials that T.E., Harold and Bob had acquired before Bob met John Hellson. T.E. kept the shirts and beaded riﬂe scabbards tacked (heedless of holes in the buckskin) to the wall of the glassed-in front porch where he sat to smoke in the evening, until one day – for fear of inviting theft – he took them down. They were beautiful objects that attracted all eyes. Plains Indian religious artifacts, small “pokes” and rawhide cases to be kept hidden away, were very diﬀerent. Only the initiated even knew that they existed, much less what they were. Some of the smoky, funky old packets of strange materials that Bob had bought from local people over the years were actually from Sacred Bundles, but he had no idea of that. The people who sold them had stopped caring, or needed the money, or had stolen the objects anyway. They usually had elaborate cover stories. There are two ways of “owning” a Bundle. One might buy the actual physical aggregation of objects and say he “owned” a Bundle. But according to Indian ways, the only way to really “own” a Bundle is to have it transferred with its power in an elaborate ceremony. This is a safeguard in case it is captured in battle – so the enemy cannot use it. Traditional people felt that the real power was not in the objects but in their use and understanding, the same as the real power of Communion is not in the chalice and platen. The new “Keeper” not only gives valuable horses and blankets to the old Keeper, but also assumes all the obligations and restrictions (as does the wife) and learns all the songs and rituals belonging to the Bundle. Often taboos were meant to protect against modern intrusions, for instance, our Bundle required that one not turn over meat in a frying pan with a fork. I use metal tongs, but the real old people used tongs that were a forked branch from a willow or sarvisberry bush. (Probably better for nonstick pans anyway.) The Bundle used as a prototype in the ceremony portrayed was the one collected by John Ewers in 1943 for the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning. Called the “Blood Medicine Pipe,” it had belonged to Makes-Cold-Weather, a Piegan Blackfeet, and it had been displayed for decades. The models for the people were the last Amskapi Pikuni Pipe Keepers still active that we knew. The ﬁrst Opening we attended was in the Sixties at the home of George and Molly Kicking Woman. The large main room was newly repainted and cleared of furniture. Directly opposite the door side of the room hung the Bundle, from a nail rather than from a tripod as used in a tipi. George Kicking Woman sat on one side of the Bundle and Molly sat on the other. The men ranged themselves along the wall next to George, the ones of greater importance, such as Keepers of other Bundles, next to George.3 The women sat along the wall next to Molly in a similar 282

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

order. Four drummers sat in front of the women. Visitors sat in the remaining space along the door side. Most people had brought the cushions out of old sofas to make sitting on the ﬂoor a little easier. There were chairs for older folks. Molly – as woman of the house and guardian of the Bundle – lifted down the shawl-draped shape. (At some point in history a trader had convinced the people that a plaid shawl was a necessary part of a Bundle.) Dick, George, Molly and a helper woman (Margaret Many Guns) knelt beside it and began to unwrap, singing the songs and making the movements for each layer. Inside the ﬁrst wrappings, the contents were individually swathed. As each item was revealed, Dick stood to dance with it in four directions to four songs, so that he always ended in front of Molly and handed the object to her. As Molly took each item, she held it to each shoulder in turn and prayed over it before returning it to the pile of wrappings. Then there was a break for a meal, but even that was part of the ceremony. Sarvisberry soup was served and each person picked out the biggest, plumpest berry he or she could see to hold during a prayer and then handed it forward to be placed on the altar as insurance against a good berry harvest the next year. The menu included oranges, hard tack, boiled ribs, fry bread, donuts and black coﬀee with lots of sugar in it. At the end of the meal, plastic sacks and empty Cool Whip or margarine tubs with covers were handed out and many took food home to their families. When the food was cleared away, the men prepared to dance with the Bundle contents. Only the most important men asked for the Pipe itself. They “counted coup” to establish their credentials. In the old days they would have told war exploits but now stories tended to be trips to Washington, D.C., and political victories. A Canadian Indian with a crippled foot from a rodeo accident directed us Napikwans to cross our arms on our chests to show we took the prayer to heart. Related persons stood in place to dance and the women punctuated the songs with ululations of triumph and pride. Mary Grounds, over a hundred years old but alert, gave the most blood-curdling cries. After a man danced, people gave away money to show how generous and prosperous their family was. The Canadian with the crippled foot turned out to be the best orator of all and when he had danced, he thrilled Bob by giving him money. Some people represent Bundle Keepership as a great honor and tend to brag, but the Real People know that the importance is in the obligation of protecting the People by behaving carefully and protectively. For this reason Bundle Keepers are chosen carefully, not because of high status.

XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

283

6. The Thunder Pipe Bundle transfer Browning, 1969

That fall Bob had a dream. He was a small boy sitting on an elk hide and a bear hide in a tipi, watching the warrior boast as he smoked a sacred pipe. “I am very powerful,” bragged the warrior. “More powerful than any other man!” It was spring and a passing rainstorm blotted out the sun ominously. Thunder rumbled over the prairie. “I am so powerful, I am even stronger than Thunder himself!” shouted the warrior. The people gasped, for Thunder was one of the most powerful forces in nature. But before they could reprimand such conceit, there was a tremendous ﬂash and a strong smell. The little boy was stunned, knocked unconscious, and while he was unconscious he had a dream inside the dream. He saw Thunder coming towards him, a tall, dark warrior. “Boy,” he commanded, “You must make a Sacred Pipe for me. I will give you all the instructions. You must keep this Pipe in a Bundle with other objects, as I will explain to you, and only open it in the Spring when you hear my voice. You must not smoke this Pipe. Only I will smoke it and when I smoke, I set the hills and plains on ﬁre.” Thunder told the boy how to make the Pipe and Bundle and what songs and duties must be performed. When the boy came to himself, he found the tipi and all the people in it had been destroyed. Only he had survived, perhaps because the elk hide and bear hide on which he sat had insulated him. The boy made the pipe as he had been told, with many decorations of ermine and ribbon, a cluster of brass bells to represent the Pleiades, and the full tail of an eagle, each feather shaft reinforced with intricate quillwork. When he wrapped it along with the other skins of birds, he made the outer wrapping of an elk hide and a bearskin. That was the end of Bob’s dream. When he woke up, lying there beside me, he told it to me. I thought it was signiﬁcant that in the dream he was a boy, not a grown man. This story had been with him for a long time. When he told the old people in town, they said it was a dream meaning he should become a Bundle Keeper, and suggested the Little Dog Bundle since Richard had no wife. Bob began to go through the necessary steps. Wearing a blanket as instructed, he went in the traditional way to present Dick with a common smoking pipe as a formal request. In accepting the pipe, Dick acknowledged the request. They saw that Bob was sincere in his wish to make the Pipe Bundle a part of his own life. They also knew he had enough money to pay for both the Bundle and the ceremonies.

284

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

From the Glacier Reporter: At a solemn and ancient religious ceremony on July 31, Richard Little Dog transferred his Sacred Pipe Bundle to Mr. and Mrs. (Bob and Mary) Scriver. The day long ceremony took place in two tipis put together on the Indian Days campground. George and Molly Kicking Woman assisted and directed the Scrivers in their preparation and Margaret Many Guns acted as Richard’s assistant during the ceremony. Tom and Margaret Many Guns had been custodians of the Bundle since Richard Little Dog was widowed. At least two hundred local people were fed the traditional berry soup, boiled ribs, fry bread, hard tack and donuts. ... No photographs, tape recordings or notes were allowed and tourists were discouraged... The ancient ceremonies of the Blackfeet are beautiful and digniﬁed and should be preserved, not just on tape or ﬁlm, but in the hearts and on the tongues of young Indian people. There is a great movement among young people across the nation to become closer to Nature and her laws, especially as understood by her children, the Indians. May the young Blackfeet not be the last to rediscover their own heritage. –Mary Scriver August, 1969

I couldn’t resist preaching, but maybe this was encouraging the aggressive NeoTraditionalists. I envisioned them as like obedient teenagers sitting with their elders to learn. I ought to have known better. To follow the old ways of doing the Transfer, Bob had gone to great pains. Out on the campgrounds next to town he put up a lodge and hired Crazy Dog Soldiers to keep drunks, tourists, and gawkers out. The two of us learned a prayer and provided new clothes for Richard Little Dog and Maggie Many Guns, as they did for us, since part of the ritual entailed exchanging clothes so that the “Power” would know to follow us away afterwards instead of the old Keepers. Cecile Horn and Molly Kicking Woman were hired to supply berry soup. A young horse was bought to give to Richard along with money, tobacco, and blankets. Bob was particularly concerned that we be painted – not just him and me, but also the dog, Buckshot, and his beloved horse, Gunsmoke. When the door of the lodge was pulled back so we could go out while Richard painted the horse, Richard mischievously pretended that Bob was giving him Gunsmoke in exchange for the Bundle. Bob believed the ruse and was so alarmed that he began to interrupt the ceremony, paralyzed by the prospect of losing either the horse or the Bundle. But then Richard began to laugh and everyone relaxed. We had to have Blackfeet names so Richard named Bob for his ancestor, Middle Rider, whom Bob had known. The name was “Sik-poke-si-mahp”, which means, roughly, “He who likes his backfat burned black.” Not one of those XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

285

Hollywood names. Normally the wife would receive the name of Middle Rider’s wife, but her name was “Slim Woman.” Richard looked at my ample ﬁgure and made a tactful segue to “Iron Woman,” “Meek-skim-yah-kee,” which probably had something to do with my iron-rust-red hair, though Bob always claimed it referred to my disposition. In the next years when the pressure was high – and it almost always was – Bob would smudge the Bundle and say his prayers. We kept the traditional routine of the Bundle as it rested on its tripod by the hearth, right under the television where it was easy to look at, which some folks thought incongruous. Many late evenings Bob spent fussing over a smoking pipe, trying out mixtures of kinnikinnick and tobacco, shredding cottonwood bark on the kitchen stove burners for smudge. It was a sensory way of being mindful, pre-verbal concepts working deep in the mind, a form of prayer he continued the rest of his life.

7. Counting coup

Browning and Edmonton, 1976–1990

In 1990 the United States passed an act requiring that all public museums repatriate – that is, return to the makers – all sacred objects and human skeletons from their collections. When Red Empowerment and AIM began to develop a political approach to the Old Holy Ways, reclaiming them and excluding whites, Bob did not ﬁnd that easy to accept. He was an old white man who – from the point of view of young bulls – was unreasonably wealthy. Things had gotten worse after there was a ﬁre in the taxidermy shop and museum on September 11, 1975. It was about the time of the second Wounded Knee, and the FBI pronounced solemnly that AIM did the deed as an act of terrorism and claimed they had proof – but nothing went to court. The Red Crow Café became a dueling ground where AIM sympathizers sat in small clusters plotting and snickering, while Bob, Lorraine, and other white folks sat in a diﬀerent cluster, sneering and patronizing. In town on vacation from Portland, one morning I sat with Bob’s group for a while, then went over to talk to the AIMsters. At least half were former students of mine. This “crossing over” of mine outraged Bob, who felt a person was either a friend or a betrayer. The Neo-Traditionalists tended to be Blackfeet Community College students, quite sure the way to a better future was by capitalizing on their identity. The college provided a forum for big ideas. I always thought of the “Red Man’s Literary Club” that was formed by the ﬁrst returning Carlisle students, unfortunately stiﬂed by government agents. As the twentieth century ended, young Blackfeet went to their older family members and challenged them about their heritage. Where were the family 286

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Holy Objects? Or the beaded suits, for that matter. Why hadn’t they been raised to speak Blackfeet? What about their family history? The elders found this unsettling and blamed Scriver. They needed the love and respect of their children. They said, “Those white men stole them.” To Bob Scriver and some other whites, the college was a source of trouble and a force for dissension. Years later Bob told me – in a voice that I learned to recognize as his “sane” voice – that the museum ﬁre had not been arson. In the Sixties we had hired a man who had mistaken the ﬂoat valve in the sewer drain in the basement of the shop for an obstruction. He had smashed it with a crowbar, reporting this cheerfully as an accomplishment. The valve was never replaced because that could only be done by jackhammering up the cement basement ﬂoor. At the other end of the block from the Museum was a service station with a leaky gas tank. Evidently fumes from that crept into the shop basement and ﬁltered upstairs. When the gas hot water heater in the darkroom came on, the fumes exploded. If there had not been a ﬁre in the studio, the dynamics between Bob and the Neo-Traditionalists would probably have developed in a similar way, but they might not have been so intense and divisive. When Bob Scriver died, he had been considering the transfer of the Thunder Pipe Bundle to Okan, the half-Indian son of Adolf Hungry-Wolf. He had watched the boy grow up and liked him, but a Bundle is supposed to be kept by a married couple, and Okan was single. As soon as Bob was gone, Lorraine took the position that the Bundle was dead. No one has seen it since. She might even have destroyed it, as she sometimes threatened. In November 1999, I published a plea in the Glacier Reporter asking Lorraine to return the Bundle to the tribe, not through the Tribal Business Council, but through the Council of Elders, who could choose a worthy new Keeper. I proposed that until a new Keeper was found, it not be kept in a vault or closet, but as a Bundle suspended up in the high rafters of the Browning Catholic Church of the Little Flower where it would be seen as safe by all who came and where it could receive incense and prayer as reconciliation between two cultures. She made no reply and died in November 2002, without restoring the Bundle to the Amskapi Pikuni, the Montana Blackfeet.

8. The million-dollar artifact collection

Browning and Edmonton, 1990 to present

After Bob’s death an art auction presented for sale a casting of Bob’s large round piece called The Opening of the Thunder Pipe Bundle. It was not the hand-painted casting that I drove to the Buﬀalo Bill Historical Center in a terrible blizzard, but the red ochre one that had been sent down as a “spacer” until the handXIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

287

painted one was ﬁnished. I had been supposed to pick it up, but left it behind so it could be removed more slowly and carefully. The buyer of the sculpture had no notion of what it all meant. His idea was to cut it up into individual portraits to be cast in bronze and sold. Thinking I was Lorraine, who was alive at the time, he told me all this and asked for my endorsement. I told him to contact Lorraine, but also informed him that I thought the provenance of the piece was clouded unless someone could explain where it had been and how it had left the Buﬀalo Bill Historical Center; that it would be a breach of copyright law to saw up the sculpture and – in fact – separating the portrayed people would destroy the very thing that made it valuable, which was its record of the Ceremony. Also, the Blackfeet might have something to say about the destruction of a piece depicting a Sacred Ceremony. He never wrote back. Bob had never anticipated such a thing. He kept his own casting of this piece alongside the sculpture of a Beaver Ceremony in a glass case with sweetgrass braids. They were part of a whole series of portrayals of Blackfeet life, just as he had discussed with Iliﬀ McKay and Blackie Wetzel back in the Fifties. But the Neo-Traditionalists were oﬀended. The Repatriation Act, the prospect of having all his artifacts seized, made Bob crazy. He never did understand that the law did not say private property could be repatriated – only material in government institutions – but confused it in his mind with the right to bear arms and other right-wing concerns about “takings”. He sent then-Senator Metcalf a letter full of raving, summed up as a claim that anything white men had accumulated over the years was properly theirs. Repatriation to him meant that the Scriver family’s life on the reservation was invalidated. He became paranoid that the U.S. Government would come with troops to seize the artifact collection consolidated from his father’s, his brother’s and his own acquisitions over the years. Or that someone would do a better job of setting a ﬁre: the Museum appeared to be stone, but that was only a facing. It was actually very old, dry wood with no sprinkler system, which meant no insurance. Nothing was on display – he kept it all packed up in the house, which was guarded by an attack dog, an electrical fence, and an elaborate alarm system. He had “forted up.” Philip Stepney, curator of the Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton, became interested in the Blackfeet materials and coaxed Bob to sell them to the Provincial Museum. If they were in Canada, they could not be repatriated by the United States government. But before Stepney could acquire them, he had to raise funds. In the process the Scriver Collection was gloriﬁed as the most signiﬁcant and inclusive set of artifacts ever assembled, worth a million dollars. This brought media attention from across the continent. By contrast, the Sherburne collection – which was much more extensive – had gone without publicity to Gonzaga University where it quietly disappeared. What is left is at 288

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane. (The Carberry Collection, the most signiﬁcant of all, is in both the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Museum of the Plains Indian, in Browning, Montana.) In the late Eighties a movie called Warparty was ﬁlmed on the reservation. The cynical plot revolved around young men stealing back –”liberating” – artifacts from a museum, which for the movie was actually the Museum of the Plains Indian but stocked with Bob Scriver bronzes. I doubt that they really explained the plot to Bob before borrowing the bronzes. Bold talk about “raiding Scriver” went around. There were rumors about plans to rope him oﬀ his horse during the North American Indian Days parade, in which he had traditionally ridden. Nearing eighty, Bob might not have survived being roped and dragged, but he had no intention of not riding. He asked Carl Cree Medicine to ride alongside him, which Carl was happy to do. No one messes around with Carl Cree Medicine. Aggressors stayed back. That’s about when Bob Scriver decided to sell his artifact collection to the Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton. A leaked inventory of objects that had been used for insuring the collection did amount to a value of about a million dollars if one included the value of two unrelated sub-collections, one of RCMP materials and the other of guns. Political attacks came from all sides, but the collection was sent up to Edmonton to the Provincial Museum. Montana Blackfeet followed to Edmonton and “put a curse” on the curator of the museum. The Alberta Blackfoot prayed it away, or so they said, but the curator developed a rare cancer which proved incurable and in a few years he died. People, both the curser and onlookers, were startled. I think everyone was operating in a kind of dream world and never thought an actual life was at stake. In June 1990, the Browning Mercantile burned to the ground. The old wooden building with its oil-soaked ﬂoor had been bought by a local Blackfeet family, who were using it for storage. In Heart Butte I heard about the ﬁre on the radio and drove to Browning just in time to see the last of the smoking ruins being drenched. The ﬁre chief, one of my original mixed-blood high-achieving Blackfeet seventh-graders from 1961–62, came over in his big rubber coat to oﬀer sympathy and the opinion that “It wasn’t arson – we’re sure it wasn’t arson.” That building was older than some of the artifacts Bob had sold. A Blackfeet woman came and put her arm around me. “We’ll all miss that place,” she said. “It was part of our past. I feel sorry that it’s gone. Don’t cry too much. Times change.” The more superstitious Blackfeet said that the Thunder Pipe Bundle was punishing Bob Scriver for selling his artifacts. More modern folks spoke of insurance. I thought of Mrs. Old Man Chief, ancient tiny lady, sitting on a straight chair in the front of the store all day until she went home in the delivery van. One day I saw her lifting her tiny moccasined foot from under her six or seven calico skirts to get into the high “Jimmy” and put my hand under her elbow to try to lift her up but, without meaning to, I nearly threw her onto the seat. She was no XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

289

heavier than a wren and even that weight must have been mostly skirts. Maybe in the Sand Hills she is sitting in the front of the ghostly Browning Merc. Before sending the collection away, Bob had paid a ﬁne photographer, Marshall Noice, to make plates for a book, The Blackfeet, Artists of the Northern Plains, that included everything he sent. Up at the Blackfeet Community College the old people were seen poring over the artifact book, recognizing objects and trying to remember who had them last. When they were pressed very hard to say that Bob Scriver had done something evil and shouldn’t have a Thunder Pipe, they said that the Blackfeet way was for each man to guard his own conscience. They would not judge. The essence of a Holy Object is that it has the power to protect itself. The book has become a valuable reference for craftsmen and curators, but more importantly it means that any member of the Blackfeet Tribe can buy a virtual version of the whole collection. The ﬁrst pages are a Scriver family album of early years, evidence of their early presence in Browning. John Hellson is disguised as “Yellow Fly.” Bob had paid Hellson to explain the artifacts so notes could be taken along with the photos. When Hellson left, he took without permission some of the most valuable objects, including a grizzly bear claw necklace. Bob sent the law after him (unlike his father so much earlier after the bank robbery), and a second necklace, amulet, dagger, and scabbard were recovered. A warrant was sworn out for Hellson’s arrest, but was never served. It was dismissed when Bob died. Mercifully, Bob never knew that Ralph Klein, who was elected premier of Alberta in 1992 when the controversy was still hot, and who had strong support among Alberta Indians, took the position that Sacred Objects should be returned to their original Keepers or their families, thus kindling bitter arguments within the families over which branch was more legitimate. All the agony Bob went through in separating himself from his artifact collection had been in vain. After Bob’s death Klein sent the Holy Bundles to the elders of the Treaty 7 Indians on the Canadian side. (Canadians identify their Aboriginal people according to the numbering of the treaty they signed. The Cree signed Treaty 6, the Blackfoot signed Treaty 7.) I count in the book photographs of thirty-six Bundles. Few have the importance of the Beaver Bundle, the two Thunder Pipe Bundles or the three Natoas headdresses. The Little Dog Thunder Pipe Bundle is the one that Lorraine had last, though since her death I’m technically the last Keeper of it. The Last Star Thunder Pipe Bundle came back to Bob Burns, a Babb restaurateur and rancher who had once lived with Bob and worked in the shop. Burns, a tribal member, is conscientiously caring for the Bundle and keeps it ceremonially alive. His prosperity makes that possible and hopefully his observance will maintain his prosperity. The great majority of the Bundles were small, personal, and not particularly impressive. No ceremonies are known for many of them. I’m curious about one 290

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

of the truly spectacular, the Bear Knife Bundle, which is a blade of frightening dimensions connected to a bear jaw bone, feathers and many falconry bells. It is transferred by the old Keeper throwing the knife at the head of the prospective Keeper. If he can catch it, the Bundle is his. So whose hand caught the knife this time? Or was it a checkbook? Over the years the Scriver collection was broken up in small ways. Now only the book includes it all. In the Nineties the Blackfeet began to have a solid middle-class: people with regular jobs, nice cars, and lawns to mow. When Bundles were repatriated from museums for those who were interested to become Keepers, the new Keepers were not the old-time “backwards” people from up in the foothills. Instead they were the new middle-class people who could aﬀord the ceremonies. One of their problems was reconciling the demanding schedule of Opening ceremonies in the spring with the athletic schedules of their children. The irony of this was not lost on the “Indian-looking” tribal members who couldn’t “talk good,” as one complained in a letter to the editor of the local paper. They had felt that at least they represented the old-time people, but if the old ceremonies had become status symbols among the Blackfeet young professionals, where did that leave them? Every group has three parts: those who go ahead, those who try to stay the same, and those who try to go back. Somehow, those who go ahead had doubled back. In part because of the Neo-Traditionalists and in part because of Bob Scriver, famous sculptor, Bundle Keeping had become prestigious, a sign of status once more. The obligation part seemed very muted.

9. The Badger Lodge

Browning and Two Medicine, 1971

Bob attended the openings of the new Bundle Keepers but the tension spoiled it. After a while he only went to George and Molly’s Opening on Mother’s Day and then said he was too busy for the others. But he needed another ceremony, one that was simply his and could not be claimed by anyone else. Included in The Blackfeet, Artists of the Northern Plains is an account of Bob’s Badger Lodge dream. He was on Gunsmoke and noticed a small badger trying to pull a big piece of moose hide, maybe half of the whole thing, down a hole. He oﬀered to help the badger but it refused. A couple of thirteen-lined spermophiles – striped squirrels – were standing by, making comments. Then a large black animal, maybe a wolverine, and several big black birds came and tried to interfere with the badger. Bob ran them oﬀ. When he made a sculpture of this, he portrayed himself as Indian. We were still married when Bob had this dream. If I were a therapist interpreting it, I would say that it is a fair representation of Bob’s feeling about his XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

291

own life: making a great eﬀort, unappreciated, unaided, and unprotected from danger. In other words, I think Bob and the badger are the same person. But to Bob, the badger was his father, who was lying trapped by a stroke in his hospital bed, refusing all help, and slowly struggling down the big hole in the ground called Death. There are similarities to classic Blackfeet stories, for instance, the story of Scarface, who has to ﬁght oﬀ threatening birds. (Bob made a sculpture of this as well.) He hoped this was a tipi dream, for he very much wanted a unique lodge of his own. He told the story to the old people. They thought maybe it might be a tipi dream, but they said they had lost the ways of making a proper lodge design and bundle. Bob kept asking and mulling through that winter. In the summer of 1971, through John Hellson, Bob consulted experts from the Blood Reserve: Brown Chief Calf, Black Plume Sr., and Joe Gambler. They came to agreement that it was indeed a tipi dream. The day after receiving the new canvas skin that Cecile Horn had made him, he left with the grandkids for the Marias Fair. A badger crossed on the road in front of the pickup. That night there was a terrible windstorm with thunder and lightning. It was taken as a sign. Bob’s heart had continued to give him trouble and his new internist had put him on a walking schedule. On one of these walks Lane spotted a dead striped squirrel. The second striped squirrel showed up ﬂoating dead in the swimming hole at the ranch. Bob skinned both animals and prepared them for the Bundle. On the way to Big Sandy for the Cowboy Artists of America trail ride, Bob spotted a road-killed badger. It had been dead for a long time, which was ﬁne because what Bob needed was its claws to make a Keeper’s necklace for the Tipi Bundle. He found among his own things: two magpies, one raven, one Clark’s crow, and a wolverine hide. In addition, he rounded up all the iniskum, or buﬀalo stones, he had accumulated over the years and made a proper pouch for them to go into the rawhide case. When Bob went out to the ranch to start drawing the design, a badger crossed the road in front of him. There was badger sign at the ranch, lots of fresh diggings. As the next week or so unfolded, Bob’s dream took ceremonial shape, partly through his own ability to see signs. On August 14, 1971, Bob’s dad died quietly at home. On the next day, Bob would be 57. (It was almost exactly ten years since I had met him.) He called me in East Glacier and I came directly to Browning. Beside the road was a small badger, dead, which I stopped to bring along. When I gave it to Bob, he immediately felt that it was a token of “badger-power” being given to him by his father to use as a “ﬂag” to ﬂy from the top of the poles. We spread the canvas tipi cover in the grass at the little Two Medicine ranch. In the Badger Tipi dream it was fall – so the tipi would be yellow for the leaves and the grass at that time. The hills at the bottom edge would be 292

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

red because many hills in the Rockies are indeed red argyllite. There were the vertical stripes, like the striped squirrel, and four horizontal stripes which on one side of the door stood for the four birds and on the other side stood for the four animals. Of course the badger would be on either side of the door, facing the door in both cases, and with its vital organs marked. Also, the badger’s hole would be represented, not with a black circle as it would appear to look into the hole, but blue circles, front and back, the way the sky would look if you were down in the hole like the badger. The smoke ﬂaps would have the dot patterns that meant the Seven Stars (the Big Dipper) on one side and the Bunched Stars (the Pleiades) on the other, as is conventional among the Blackfeet. Bob would be entitled to a dream moth at the top of the back, which normally has a horsetail in the middle if the dreamer still owns the lodge – but Bob thought it would be better to have a badger tail. Of course, the painting of faces would imitate a badger. The ceremony took three days and was attended by a family of anthropologists, Tom and Alice Kehoe (who had courted while employed at the Museum of the Plains Indian, and had been married by Bob) and their sons. Alice settled herself to take minute-by-minute notes. When Bob went to put the badger hide into the tubular rawhide case, he was putting it in headﬁrst, but Diane Melting Tallow Hellson protested that badgers always back into their holes. Seeing the justice of this, and willing to share the creation of this Bundle, Bob immediately said that the badger must hereafter always be backed into its case. He knew that it is these little rules and analogies that make the ceremony come alive, especially if it is based on the real living experience of having watched badgers. Early on Saturday, all the Canadians backed out. They said they didn’t know what to do and were afraid of being sacrilegious. Anyway, there was a good Pipe Dance they wanted to attend. On Sunday morning early the Kicking Womans appeared and Molly went to the kitchen to begin making a ceremonial meal. George began to pray in Blackfeet: “Long time ago the old-timers all believed that these spirits lived in these hills, rocks, that when they went to sleep the spirits appeared.” Across the creek the cliﬀs of Two Medicine valley rose up in steep ramparts that had killed buﬀalo, sheltered corpses in caves, housed swallows and small mammals, and tempted small boys to climb. Bob announced that only this morning he had “caught” the last few songs that were needed, so it was time to move over to the new lodge. Towing the heavy buﬀalo robes behind us, we reassembled in the new tipi, where the painted badger seemed to ﬂoat just over our heads, rather ghostly seen from the inside. Joe Old Chief and Richard Little Dog sat on either side of the tripod. A little more towards the center, Joe No Runner chopped together Bull Durham and kinnikinick leaves on the old tobacco board with its brass tacks. Bob ceremoniously brought in the birds and animals of the dream, swaddled like babies in bandannas. XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

293

Alfred Heavyrunner had made a ﬁre outside and now Joe No Runner brought from it a hot coal with tongs made from a chokecherry branch. Kindling a smudge of both sweetgrass and sweet pine, Joe Old Chief prayed some more in Blackfeet. The reason Bob decided to use both sweet pine and sweetgrass was not written down. By this time he was taking blood thinner, coumadin, which is the same ingredient that gives sweet pine, sweetgrass, and sweet clover their characteristic scent, so in a way he had sweet blood–an aﬃnity with both smudges. Bob exclaimed over Molly’s sarvisberry soup, which he loved, and we feasted jubilantly. We had ﬁnished without embarrassment or intervention by the Gods. Gifts of cigarettes and Bull Durham were in order and, quietly, the ceremonialists got their pay in cash. Soon everyone had disappeared but family and the anthropologists. Stretched out on the buﬀalo robes, we already began to reminisce and reﬂect. The ﬂag jingled softly overhead. The Kehoe’s youngest son had gotten bored and whiny late in the afternoon and had been told to entertain himself a little longer, please. Now in the twilight he came out of the tall grass to announce that he also had been opening a Bundle. It was a Bumblebee Bundle and he told us about the parts of it and sang us one of the songs. Play, worship, art – they braid together as we journey from risk to comfort. That night after dark, when the ﬂag had been packed away and the cases had been taken into the house for the night, there was a sudden summer storm with rain coming down straight from above and lightning but no thunder. It was a brief but drenching downpour, breaking the hot spell. The next day the Indians said such a rain often follows a powerful ceremony, to bring life back to the prairie grass. After Bob’s death, when everything had been given to the Montana Historical Society, federal agents appeared there and tried to impound the Badger Lodge as an Indian artifact. They took many things, which were eventually returned to “representatives” of the Blackfeet. Individuals kept the most valuable objects and the rest were sent to auction. I have no idea where the lodge and Bundle have gone. Bob Scriver never studied anthropology, never had a humanities background, and was not well read. He knew music, art, and his home ground. The Indians he portrayed – with few exceptions – were pre-industrial, the people of his childhood. He himself was pre-industrial. Even in the foundry he clung to the old lost wax investment methods invented by the Romans rather than the space-age ceramic shell casting. If it hadn’t been for his hired men, he would never have remembered to change the oil in his pickups. The very idea of computers enraged him. Bob’s father was not progressive. Once the Browning Mercantile was built, it stayed the same. Until the day it burned down, the ﬂoor was bare oiled wood. The refrigeration and heat were modernized, the roof was patched and the walls 294

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

were repainted the same color. That was about it. No plans for expansion or moving out to the highway. Harold also made few changes. Maybe that’s what kept the business alive so long while others failed and left. Or maybe that’s what destroyed it in the end. The event I remember the most personally and deeply was very simple. One Indian Days we had put up our lodge and slept out at the campgrounds. It was the summer I served everyone orange juice with 7-Up in it, which Molly Kicking Woman said made it taste “all diﬀerent ways,” because of the carbonation. The grocery store sold real buﬀalo meat, which we roasted on sticks over our tipi ﬁre and folded into bread instead of using plates. Bob had rounded up Indian paraphernalia for us and I had made the girls red ﬂannel dresses with “silver” thimbles and brass grommets for decoration. He wore his buckskins, originally made for him when he conducted the Tribal Band. It was one of the last Indian Days to have a real bonﬁre in the middle. Indian Days was simpler then. It was darker and there were fewer people. When the dancing was getting close to the end, we dressed up and went to the circle. An Owl Dance, the equivalent of “Good Night, Irene,” was just forming. Everyone made a big circle with their arms around the persons on either side of them and everyone stepped sideways to the beat of the drums. Nancy Tailfeathers held out her arm to invite us into the circle and we danced as equals with everyone else. It was exactly the community Bob sought.

XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

295

XV Torch: The Prince of Peace

1. Welding bronze

Browning, 1963 forward

Using a welding torch demands two skills: knowing the proper proportions between gas and oxygen to get the perfect lean ﬂame and understanding the complexity of that ﬂame, which is a ﬂame within a ﬂame, one hotter than the other. There are two huge clanging tanks, each with a rubber hose that ends in a slender wand with a bent nose. The mixture is controlled by a little wheel at the bottom of the wand. The ﬂame is visible and audible, but don’t look directly at a welding ﬂame, any more than look at the sun. Wear a hood or welding goggles. When the wand is burning, there is a hiss. When it goes out, it makes a “ﬂup” sound – a suddenly ended ﬂutter. Little black soot spots ﬂoat in the air. A kind of empathy for the objects being welded together guides just how much and where the heat should be focused to make both metals melt at the same moment. The rest is rhythm, a kind of ﬂame-music that can be seen in the bead produced when the melted metal unites, a line of small even waves. Bob loved this and did it well. Welding is like having a furnace in one’s hand, creating molten metal a tiny bit at a time. People respect it, stand back, give the welder space. Bob never allowed anyone else in the shop to weld, though the government had taught dozens of Blackfeet this skill. There may be the addition of a third source of metal in the form of a thin welding rod, which is “brazing” as distinguished from welding. It always fascinated us that ordinary bailing wire can also make do for some welding. The fourth possible ingredient is a substance called “ﬂux,” often a form of borax, which makes the metals “ﬂow” (that’s what ﬂux means). The molten metal reaction responds in some molecular way. Strangely, powdered borax was also the substance Bob used on hides and skins to kill insects. 297

Joe Evans and Bob Gordon, local tradesmen, were master welders. Joe did all sorts of metalwork, gas piping, sheet metal for home heating ducts, and so on. Bob Gordon had been a Navy SEAL and could weld underwater. Both of them taught Bob to draw his mind into the focus it takes to do such a thing as welding – total concentration that shuts out everything else. That formidable focus plus the intense sound and light make interruptions impractical. No wonder Bob loved doing it, even when the chore was some miserable repair job on a piece of bad casting. Even when he was inventing a hinge for a gate. Harold McCracken had asked us to cast two huge busts of Buﬀalo Bill. On one of them, half of the hat brim had failed to ﬁll with metal. There was no time to recast, so Bob, desperate, had to basically sculpt with welding rod. When he ﬁnished, the problem was undetectable. Now he knew it was possible to weld a naturalistic ﬁgure from scratch that would seem to have been cast with a crucible – but why? Such a feat took a huge amount of energy, breathing strange metallic fumes, getting smutted with carbon and wearing deep dents in the face from the welding goggles. All Bob’s clothes had little burn holes in them and his hair was like wire from the dirt. The heliarc, the big electric welding machine, helped a lot because it was so quick and clean, though no less noisy and bright. Aﬀording one was a major advance. When the shop burned, the heliarc was destroyed. Bob grieved for it almost as he did for Eegy, who also died in the ﬁre. When he was still learning, Bob made two big welded sculptures: in 1967 a life-size bull buﬀalo for Great Falls High School and in 1969 a twelve-foot-tall rustler for C.M. Russell High School. They were made in Corten steel, which “rusts” in a certain way that doesn’t eat it full of holes but becomes stable like bronze. Before making the steel models, he worked out the ﬁgures with cardboard – abstracted but still recognizable. I always thought it would be fun to plant petunias in the belly “trough” of the bison. They tell me that when it’s placed outside in the rain (the school moves it now and then), water drains in an anatomically correct manner. In winter the Rustler develops long mustache icicles.

2. Losing family members 1976 forward

In albums at the Montana Historical Society, where all Bob’s archives are stored, there is a little handful of snapshots taken on the day Bob received his Carroll College honorary doctoral degree, May 2, 1976. Lorraine and his mother are with him in his cap and gown – Mother in the middle. She is wearing a ﬂoorlength red dress with a matching ruﬄed jacket and absolutely glowing with pride and happiness. At 88 years of age she and her 62-year-old son are plainly 298

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

sweethearts, with Lorraine as handmaiden. According to Laurel, her granddaughter, Wessie had ﬁve years of Merry Widowhood, zooming around in a new car. When she died, her assets amounted to little more than a few thousand dollars, some rental houses, and the old foundation-less home. But no matter what other girls her son had ﬂirted with, she was always and ﬁnally Bob Scriver’s earliest and deepest love. Ellison Westgarth Macﬁe Scriver died on February 16, 1977. I know of no sculpture that arises from that grief, but I’m sure she had received the traditional box of chocolates two days earlier. Already Bob had made portrait busts of the four family members. Harold and Hazel were taken aback when Bob took a photo of his mother in her casket, but the photo of her he hung in the shop was a studio portrait in her string of big costume pearls, looking like Barbara Bush. She had had nothing to do with Bob’s sculpture career directly, except for loaning money, but she had guided his daily life – told him when to change his clothes and get a haircut. Now he became disreputable unless Lorraine got after him. By the Eighties, Bob was seriously aging. The east slope weather was hard on him, so he bought bits of land in the Flathead Valley, a hundred miles away on the west side of the Rockies, but then sold them again. He negotiated with the C.M. Russell Museum, where Lorne Render and other board members went so far as to look around Great Falls and locate a building where his works could be displayed. But nothing clicked. The truth was that deep down he needed to stay in Browning. Also, I believe he had had enough small strokes to destroy his ability to make decisions, much less withstand the rigors of moving. It was never easy for him to choose. In the Sixties one of the main uses of the long evenings he and I spent sitting with his folks was turning decisions over and over with them. Philip Stepney, a resourceful man, had to use all his skills to get Bob to surrender the artifact collection, literally working on him for years as he teetered back and forth. Bob’s oldest granddaughter, Charmaine, died June 27, 1980, aged 34. She had been in the military in Florida but was on disability after being in a car accident. Over the years she had been in many car wrecks, and the last one killed her. She was alone. Her grave is in the Portland, Oregon, military cemetery. She lived three more years than her mother did, but had a far more sudden and merciful death. Bob attended the funeral and called me in Chicago where I was attending seminary to see if I would come, but I couldn’t. I was at the most crucial part of my training, a student chaplaincy in a hospital. He made no sculpture connected to Charmaine except that when she was a toddler he had made a small portrait of her called First Easter Bonnet. People around town thought of Harold as the stable, sane Scriver son, and so he seemed. He’d always liked to drink and ﬁght, and enjoyed the kind of hunting camp where men sat by the ﬁre cussing and yarning, which seemed X V TO R C H : T H E P R I N C E O F P E AC E

299

normal in Browning. In fact, Harold was better known than Robert and Bob said he grew a beard so people could tell the two apart. When the Scriver folks were gone and after Hazel, Harold’s wife, died in 1982, Harold became a little crazy. He ended up remarrying, but it was a bad choice: the opportunistic daughter of one of Bob’s high school classmates. Then he was diagnosed with lung cancer. When decades earlier the doctor had told him to give up brandy and cigars, he had merely changed doctors. Now he and Bob became close as they worked – for the sake of the estate – to get Harold’s divorce completed before death came. Even so, many things were lost to the second wife, mostly Hazel’s treasures. Harold died in 1984, aged 72. In 1985 Gunsmoke, AKA Gunnysack, Bob’s most faithful partner, died, and Boyd Evans, operating a backhoe, buried him at the Flatiron Ranch. Bob asked George Kicking Woman to come and perform a blessing ceremony over his faithful beloved horse. He made Boyd promise to bury him alongside his horse. Then he painted a fantasy of Gunsmoke with wings, ﬂying oﬀ into the sky in his bright red horse blanket to chase cloud bison. Mel Ruder took a photo of Bob with the painting and printed the story in the Hungry Horse News.

3. The Prince of Peace 1982 forward

Tall and handsome, balding 72-year-old John R. McAllister was evidently a lifelong single man. When he retired from the Air Force at age 42, he certiﬁed to teach, and then taught Latin for twenty-three years, the last thirteen of them in Sunburst, a little reﬁnery town in the rimrocks just east of the Blackfeet Reservation and nearly on the Canadian border. In the nine years of his retirement in Sunburst he had masterminded a public library for the town and energized them to completely pay it oﬀ. In his youth “Mac” had worked on a WPA project just out of Red Lodge in spectacular Beartooth pass, far down in the southeast part of the state. As a devout Catholic with an ecumenical point of view, he was inspired at that time by the idea there ought to be a statue of Jesus in that fabulous setting. His concept was a seated granite ﬁgure four hundred feet high on a tall stone base. The vision came back to him occasionally. After World War II he thought of it as a possible memorial to the fallen soldiers. When Bob attracted attention for his heroic-size Lewis and Clark ﬁgures, John McAllister and his friend, John Barrett, remembered this idea of a huge Jesus. McAllister still had a calendar picture he had saved that showed Jesus on Mount Olive, his prayerfully clasped hands dropped to his knees as He gazed around Him at the mountains. After the buddies came to see Bob, the latter 300

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

made them a little mockup in which Jesus unaccountably looked like Willie Nelson, though none of the three aging men noticed. Bob told the media, “This may be the best thing I ever do. John’s idea has set me on ﬁre.” Oﬀ the record, he also acknowledged that it might be the last thing he ever did. A committee organized for what they called the World Peace Memorial, which was to be 210 feet tall, 336 feet square at the base, and situated on two and a half acres of grounds. In no time the committee was designing the parking lot, framing up contracts, and planning a “peace award” of a few hundred thousand dollars to be given out every half-dozen years as well as a schedule of lectures and classes. The proposed statue had by this time become bronze, because Bob didn’t know anything about cutting stone. The size had somewhat diminished, and because it appeared that the highway department wouldn’t allow any statues on Beartooth Pass, the massive granite platform had been replaced by a system of pillars and arches, roughly pyramidal, that could be anywhere. All they needed was a lot of money. When Bob got some estimates, it appeared that the statue would cost as much as twenty-two million dollars, a ﬁgure that wasn’t spread around publicly. His fee would be ﬁfteen per cent, or $3,300,000. But ﬁrst, the little organization had to raise $10,000 to buy letterhead stationery, postage, and lunches for the meetings. For the next four and a half years, things went along slowly, mostly building castles in the sky. Their logo was incredibly complex, featuring a head-on dove with empty eyes like Little Orphan Annie. Bob interviewed a professional fundraiser, who was cautiously optimistic and wanted to begin with a list of the richest landowners in the state, but the little group didn’t know those people. Pretty soon things began to go wrong. The Independent Record wrote an editorial opposing the statue on grounds that the money ought to go to starving people, and it was reprinted in the Great Falls Tribune. Bob had assumed all Christians would get on board, but they didn’t. In fact, some were oﬀended, seeing it as cynical on Bob’s part. The secular people of the state just shook their heads. In the Montana Historical Society archives is an undated letter by Bob warning McAllister that one of three “newcomers to the group” was inhabited by Satan. Bob was always inclined to do a little “gas-lighting” (especially with wives), but this was a full-on psych-out letter saying that because Bob could recognize Satan’s evil ways, he was able to spot Him, while McAllister was too inclined to see only good and therefore was in dire danger. By this time the plan had dawdled along for more than four years. The town of Geraldine, the most likely prospect for a location, had dropped out, but Cut Bank was alive and interested. In February 1986, Bob heard that the group was considering a diﬀerent sculptor, the ultimate insult. After an ultimatum, Bob resigned from the World Peace Memorial. McAllister demanded the destruction of all connections. Bob, X V TO R C H : T H E P R I N C E O F P E AC E

301

terriﬁed that the “other sculptor” would copy his work, reminded the group that HE had the copyright on the statue. He’d been giving small versions of the portrait of Jesus to possible patrons and now he demanded them back so they couldn’t be copied, but the recipients were aghast! They’d become attached to them. The lowest blow of all was someone’s letter to the editor saying that the portrait of Jesus looked like an “old man straining at his stool.” Probably the death blow to the ﬁrst version of the project really was as simple as that letter to the editor. No one could look at the pondering Jesus after that without thinking of the comparison. The International Peace Center, Inc., Bob’s new organization, was incorporated on April 15, 1986. A ground-breaking ceremony took place just east of Cut Bank on August 15, 1986 (Bob’s 72nd birthday). It was explained to the media that part of the reason for splitting oﬀ from McAllister was that the latter had insisted on that calendar picture, “a sentimental depiction of no artistic merit” which suppressed Bob’s ﬁner artistic instincts. Now there would be a new and improved pose. Bob’s new version of the pedestal featured twelve steps for the twelve Apostles, ten pillars for the Ten Commandments, and so on. He talked about how a person could go up inside Jesus’ head and look out. The comparison was to the Statue of Liberty. On the day of the ground-breaking it was hard to envision such a thing standing on the prairie just east of Cut Bank. Wind was blowing from an overcast equinox sky. At most, a dozen pickups were parked in a line. A new shovel sprayed with gilt paint and decorated with red, white, and blue ribbons was handed around and the dignitaries, which included Bob Spring from Modern Art Foundry in New York City, chipped at the hard dirt, making dust ﬂy. Everyone tried to look important and then they all left. That was it. A billboard went up on the highway, but nothing further. By that time the Christian politics of the area had begun to intensify. Glacier County had attracted small Bible-based groups who wanted to be left alone but felt they had the True Word. They saw no reason to waste money on graven images. Bob didn’t know enough about churches to realize how schismatic and competitive they are. He could hardly tell one denomination from another, much less the various factions within each. For a decade before this, Bob had been searching for some way to perpetuate his own museum. The hostility of some of the reservation people made Browning seem a poor long-term choice. Bob wouldn’t give up control and wrote propositions that required guaranteed perpetual care. All across America today there are small museums going broke because of similar restrictions and stipulations. Even country ranchers and small town businessmen know enough to avoid a contract that would require perpetual care in a world where nothing is perpetual except change, and not always for the better. 302

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Now Bob had an inspiration: he would conﬂate the eﬀort to build the Jesus statue with his own struggle to create a building to house his work. The pillars and arches under the statue became a complex of spaces which were sometimes described as galleries and other times as chapels. There was a certain amount of confusion. I don’t think it was deliberate – just muddled. John McAllister died in 1987 with his dream unfulﬁlled, but his torch still ﬂickered. His friend, John Barrett, wrote wistfully in November 1988, asking about the ﬁnal disposition of the estate, in particular a collection of gold coins. A good share of the estate was supposed to have gone to the World Peace Memorial. I saw no answer in the ﬁles. Gradually McAllister’s Prince of Peace was co-opted as Bob turned it into something else: a building to house the sculpture of Bob Scriver – but with Jesus on top. Bob suddenly declared that he didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, but only that he was a great man who stood for peace. The peace aspect gradually expanded until the pyramid on which Jesus would sit was supposed to have a phrase celebrating peace engraved on it in all the world’s languages, for all the peoples. Other religions were to be included with symbols. And yet it would be ﬁlled with full-mount big game animals and rodeo sculpture. While everyone was arguing and angling, someone made a huge white ﬁberglass statue of the Virgin Mary that towered over Butte. It was put in place by a giant helicopter, which got national media attention. Cut Bank ended up with a thirty-foot cement penguin wired for sound so it seemed to be talking. Out on the West edge of Cut Bank, at a campground overlooking Cut Bank Creek, someone quietly put up a gentle welded version of Jesus, evidently blessing the highway. Not long after that all the enthusiasts went crazy for dinosaurs – even the Blackfeet (so recently incensed over losing their heritage) wanted to convert the Museum of the Plains Indian into a dinosaur exhibit. By the time of this writing, everyone has moved on to the idea of Lewis and Clark and how the anniversary of that exploration would make them rich. One can’t help but feel cynical about the whole blunder. Yet I feel there is a sculpture among Bob’s works that deserves to be enlarged and set upon a hill. One could say it was a personiﬁcation of Peace. Sculpted in 1967, it’s called The Sheepherder. One could think of it as Jesus and his Faithful Dog. Of course, Jesus would be pronounced the Spanish way – “Hay-soos.” If it were up to me, right next to it I’d start a classic sheepherder’s cairn and let people add stones to it when they came to pray for peace. If you ask the businessmen of the small white towns about Bob Scriver, they will say that they admire his promotional skills. They know little or nothing about the sculpture collection as a whole. The promotion of Bob’s projects has eclipsed the work itself. At one point he proposed that a foundry for casting the monument be built on site, employing eight people to be hired locally, a familiar political ploy in a job-starved place. It wasn’t enough.

X V TO R C H : T H E P R I N C E O F P E AC E

303

The Sheepherder by Bob Scriver, 1967. Photo: Mary Scriver.

304

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Worried about ﬁre recurring and about running out of room for all the bronzes, Bob ﬁnally just bought a steel building, a warehouse. He assured everyone that when he ﬁnally located the perfect spot and received the proper oﬀer, he could easily move the whole thing. Almost incidentally, behind the steel Hall of Bronze, he built a two-story foundry capable of major casting. David Cree Medicine had the skills to run this foundry. In 1986 the Amy Grant Show taped a Christmas production called Headin’ Home for the Holidays and included Bob. That gave him a good boast to paint on the outside of his new steel building: “As seen on the Amy Grant Show!” They were Christian-focused people, easygoing and admiring. Bob was especially impressed with Dennis Weaver, who wrote a nice letter about how the world needed peace. They didn’t play his kind of music, but they were professional and competent musicians. During the performance the camera often looked for Bob Scriver’s face and his faded blue eyes ﬁlled with tears of emotion.

4. Trying to rekindle the ﬂame Browning, 1985 forward

Hélène, Jeanette’s sister, who had posed for the Pieta, was the woman for whom Bob “carried a torch” the longest. To him, Hélène was beautiful and compliant, innocent and loving, but she was married and – he sighed – she was a good Catholic who would never divorce. (He didn’t seem to think his own marriage to Jeanette was a problem.) Hélène had made what seemed the “perfect” marriage to a handsome, popular, hockey player, successful enough in life to pay for her elegant houses. Things were diﬀerent behind the scenes. Once Jeanette had insulted Bob by admiring a sleek black ceramic panther and suggesting that he ought to do something similar. Later she gave the big panther to Hélène, who used it as an accent in an all-white room. When Stan came home late and drunk one time too many, Hélène smashed it over his head. He dropped as unconscious as Bob did when Jeanette slung the alarm clock at him, but there was blood. Hélène was afraid she had killed her husband and called her dad to rescue her. Stan survived, but the white carpet had to be replaced. By 1968, when Hélène posed for the Pieta, she was still married but not happy. Toward the end of our own marriage, Bob was secretly meeting her when he went to California, claiming to be working with a foundry there. A while after Bob divorced me, she gave up her thirty-year marriage as hopeless. Except for a brief marriage to a millionaire in Hawaii, life was not easy for her until her sons were mature and established enough to help her. Bob phoned her to talk late at night and she compared him to Sinatra, calling him “Old Blue Eyes.” She X V TO R C H : T H E P R I N C E O F P E AC E

305

was careful to deﬁne herself tactfully as his “muse.” She was also straightforward about NEVER intending to live in Browning. In 1975 Peter Stremmel, of Stremmel Galleries in Reno, had arranged for a show of Bob’s rodeo bronzes at Security National Bank during a big rodeo and had been able to get Bob appointed the parade marshal. Bob had gone down with Gunsmoke in the pickup, met Hélène there, and had a marvelous time. At the time Bob was – in theory – married to Lorraine. Or maybe he wasn’t. There would be long periods when she seemed to vanish. She lived with Bob more than long enough to count as a common-law wife. If you ﬁgured from the time she began sleeping over in 1972, it was twenty-seven years. Bob remembered the excitement and praise from the original cruciﬁx and Pieta he had made and the intense weeks when Maurice and Hélène were in Browning to pose. In 1987 he oﬀered each of them $2,500 “for expenses” to come stay for two weeks while he redesigned the Jesus statue and frankly tried to recapture the mood. They agreed and in July, Hélène and Maurice come to pose for the statue of Jesus. The next week is recorded on video. In the shop, Bob, Hélène, and Maurice worked at the portrait of the Prince of Peace. Should the feet be this way or that way? Should there be a staﬀ? Which shoulder should it go over? Bob insisted in the middle of this that they talk high philosophy about the meaning of life and art. George Montgomery, a faithful friend of Bob’s since the earliest days, had provided an authentic Jesus costume from Hollywood. One hem of the gown insisted on falling in three even folds and Hélène suggested that it symbolized the Trinity. She got brushed oﬀ. Maurice, a little embarrassed by the other two calling him “Christ” and “My Lord,” couldn’t resist joking but he said the more outrageous things in French, which made Hélène sputter. Bob didn’t catch them. The faithful plastic skeleton was pressed into service once again to wear Jesus’ robe. The eﬀect of the skull over the Jesus robe was gruesome. Bob joked to the skeleton, “Your people don’t seem to feed you very well.” David and Jody Cree Medicine looked bemused, unsure what reaction to have. Jesus/Bones was given a cigarette and a cowboy hat and Hélène was worried they were edging close to sacrilege. In the end the skeleton was stuﬀed with excelsior and wound with cloth, a mummy. Maurice had a little shoulder damage from posing for the Cruciﬁx more than twenty years earlier, so he begged for a respite now and then. One of the recurring complaints in letters to the editor about the Prince of Peace was that he appeared to be a spent, arthritic old man. Maurice would be ﬁfty in October on the Feast Day of Saint Francis of Assisi. He was married with two children (and, by this writing, three grandchildren). His demographics no longer ﬁt Jesus. Toward the end of the video is a meeting with the burghers of Cut Bank. Bob had ﬂown in one of his earliest sponsors, Ruth Beebe Hill, who had lived through a ﬁrestorm Native American response to her novel Hanta Yo! Now widowed and retired, she had brought along a professional fundraiser. Bob asked 306

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Maurice to repeat some of the insightful things from the evening sessions. In his professorial clothes with his charming accent, Maurice eloquently expounded on a breakthrough in his conceptualization of peace, which was summed up in the sentence: “I stand at the Center and the light shines all around me.” He got this from a Sioux Indian via Ruth Hill. (It might be from Black Elk Speaks.) He proposed that this be inscribed in many languages around the base of the pyramidal building. He envisioned a series of statues around the base of the pyramid, each illustrating “peace:” a mother feeding her child, a boy with his calf, a wounded soldier being given water on a battleﬁeld – he was improvising on the spur of the moment. The audience really warmed to this idea, but there was no conclusion, no motion to proceed. No sale. At the end of this video Bob took his two almost-siblings out to his small, secret, not-quite-ranch, the sixteen-acre patch of sacred land along Two Medicine River that he bought from Cecile Horn. Gingerly they waded through the tall grass and wolf willow while Bob pointed out the circle of stones from his last Opening ceremony and the circle of stones from a sweat lodge that wasn’t his, oﬀering his kind of gift, access to a secret peaceful place connected to his deepest self, his “true” religion. The cliﬀs rose behind them, the river wandered along in front of them, and the old cottonwoods reared up over their heads. Light and wind sluiced through the leaves turning bronzy-yellow. When he spoke of Christian matters, he kidded around and sounded almost mocking. But when he spoke of Indian religion, his voice was ﬁrm and conﬁdent. He believed. Later, after his heart bypass surgery in 1996, Bob called both Hélène and Maurice, asking either of them to be the executor of his estate. (They declined, feeling it would be an overwhelming job.) Sometimes he called weeping and declaring his love for Hélène. They didn’t know quite what to make of it all, but tried to comfort him. In the end the Prince of Peace maquettes went to the Montana Historical Society with everything else. The sculpture had changed subtly since its original version. At ﬁrst it was naturalistic, modeled in a ﬂuid way, and quite human – maybe a little too human. By the time the largest model was done, it had become stylized, with the robes nearly pleated, ending in a ﬂuted edge. It was as though the small beginning were haptic, clay molded in hands. But the large version was like a Middle Eastern glyptic stone ﬁgure, hair made ornamental, skin smoothed, ﬁgure subtly elongated. The face is stern, almost cold. If I were more theologically minded, I would say he had moved from the Jesus persona, the human being of warmth and forgiveness, to the Christ persona, God on Earth who has come to judge. Or if I were of another turn of mind, I might say that age and wealth were turning Bob himself to stone. There was another portrait of Jesus commissioned by Carroll College in Helena about the time Bob received an honorary doctorate from them. The maquette he submitted was profoundly silly. It showed Jesus holding up his foreﬁnger as if testing the wind and wearing a long pleated gown which looked X V TO R C H : T H E P R I N C E O F P E AC E

307

as though the hem ought to be turned up like one of those Art Nouveau ladies whose skirt becomes a nut bowl at the bottom. One can easily imagine the opportunities for satire, if only by changing which ﬁnger is upstanding. Luckily they turned it down. It took a long time for me to remember that it reminded me of a seated woman ﬁgure in the Bernard Black Gallery with a similar pleated gown. I think it was a portrait of someone’s mother. Black had praised it, said it was among the ﬁnest sculptures. In fact, he said, “Nobody else could make a statuette this beautiful.” That must have stuck somewhere in Bob’s head.

308

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

XVI Cooling: Lewis and Clark

1. The journey slows

Fort Benton and Great Falls, 1974 forward

Working in a foundry, where everything is potentially hot enough to brand a cow, makes a person cautious. Don’t lean against any surface or object without testing it ﬁrst. You’ll hear a ping or tick at unexpected moments as materials expanded by heat begin to contract. The big investment molds, several hundred pounds, take a long time to cool, even in a below-zero Montana winter. A Montana winter teaches that extreme cold can also leave a mark. Nothing stays extremely hot or extremely cold. Everything moves toward a temperate peneplain where extremes no longer exist. Cooling is not something you do, it’s something you stop doing, a state of rest while you wait. After the core of bronze is cooled, shrinking slightly and compressing the investment around it, then it can be revealed. Sometimes it is nothing like what you expected. The metaphor of a life as a lost-wax bronze casting process now comes to the test. The soft clay of the small boy Robert has been pressed into a shape by a nineteenthcentury reservation town. The mold of music seems wasted and cast oﬀ, revealing the blank shape of Bob Scriver, sculptor. His new vocation forms around him, impressing him with the shapes of wives, models, institutions, colleagues. And the mother mold, while supporting, sets limits. Through mid-life, Bob is wax still hot with passion, and then as he ages, fame packs him in place, hollows him out, and leaves him cooling. Now the investment falls away to reveal his ﬁnal shape. What should I say about the land? Was it the foundry? The crucible, the grinding? I choose to say it was the Ground of Being, a theological phrase coined by Paul Tillich to include both Being and Non-being.

309

2. Lewis and Clark begin

Fort Benton, 1974 forward

In Bob’s autobiographical notes he says: In 1974 I received a rather crude looking letter on a yellow piece of paper that had no logo or identiﬁcation to show who the writer was, asking if I would be interested in doing a statue of Lewis & Clark for Fort Benton. I pitched it in the waste paper basket, feeling that it was written as a childish prank. On second thought, I retrieved the letter and answered it.... I did get a reply. This time it was very ofﬁcial and came from the Community Improvement Association of Fort Benton.... “Lorraine and I went to work immediately by reading the daily journals written by Lewis & Clark.... The situation that I chose to illustrate was when the Corps of Discovery came to the junction of the Marias and Missouri River. Both rivers were at ﬂood stage, so they sent scouts up each river to ﬁnd out which one was the Marias branch and which one was the mainstream of the Missouri. They decided on the one that had the large falls on it, because they knew of this geographical feature from talking with Indians and trappers. It was there that they had to portage ten miles around it to continue their journey. “The falls, where now stands the City of Great Falls, lies eleven miles upstream from Fort Benton. The forks of the two rivers, being ten miles downstream from present day Fort Benton, was close enough to be a valid location for my statue.”

Lewis and Clark became Scriver’s central preoccupation until the end of his life. They were historic, both national and local, major heroic ﬁgures in a classic exploration saga. The story was about white people without being about plowing up the grass or eating dust behind cows. A strong fan base met regularly and maintained networks. Unfortunately, Lewis and Clark was also about killing Blackfeet, not that white people paid much attention to that. The Blackfeet themselves did not forget. Halfway between Browning and Cut Bank is an historical turnout and signboard marking the approximate location of Camp Disappointment, where Lewis could see that the headwaters of the Missouri were turned back by the Hudson’s Bay Divide, which is named that, of course, because north of there the land drains northeast to Hudson’s Bay. Jeﬀerson had hoped for the 50th parallel, but this was the 49th. A small sandstone obelisk stands on a hill along the road. It is much neglected, except by teens looking for a quiet place to park and neck. Vandals have carved and painted graﬃti onto it. Bob got a double “hit” from the place. On the one hand, his father was on the original Lewis and Clark highway 310

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

marker committee and helped place the sign. On the other hand, one of the ranches “Pop” had lost in the early years was nearby. These chapters have been organized in a one-strand-at-a-time way that doesn’t reveal what a braided path Bob’s life had followed. Though he worked in “themes,” he didn’t do one thing at a time. Circumstances like the Bicentennial letter from Fort Benton turned his attention to one subject or another, while in the background he continued with other strands of his life. By this time he needed a new destination, which he found by doubling back. In the winter of 1962–63 Claude Schaeﬀer, the curator and director of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, had been identifying points of historical interest on the Blackfeet Reservation. This merged with a Boy Scout project to organize a tour. Mostly both groups had wanted to locate the infamous “ﬁght site” where Lewis and his party camped with a small group of Blackfeet and, in a dawn skirmish, killed two of them, the only Native American people killed on the expedition. Lewis was not looking for Blackfeet – in fact, he hoped to avoid them since their reputation for ferocity was well known. The brief version of the episode, as recorded in the Journal, is that Lewis, the Fields brothers, and the intrepid Droulliard went up the Marias to where Cut Bank Creek joined it, then followed Cut Bank Creek past where Willow Creek (the stream that ﬂows through Browning) joins it. This was July 23, about a week later than the modern annual Blackfeet Indian Days. Since their horses had sore feet from walking on gravel, they came down along the creek and camped for three days. The game animals were spooky, which meant they had recently been hunted, and the weather was lousy – chilly rain. (“The wind also has blown all day with more than usual violence from the N.W.” – clearly a sign they were near Browning.) When Droulliard – looking for meat – explored to the place where Holy Family Mission was eventually built on Two Medicine River, he found among the many old camp rings some recent tipi poles still leaning together. On July 26, better rested and fed, the foursome left to rejoin the rest of the expedition waiting at what is now Great Falls, ready to head for home with their mission accomplished, only weeks away from St. Louis by boat. After crossing Badger Creek, they followed Two Medicine River. Then they met eight young Blackfeet traveling with horses. The two groups agreed to camp together for the night in a kind of natural corral along the river where good grass would keep the horses nearby. Just after ﬁrst light J. Fields was supposed to be on watch but carelessly put his gun down behind him. A Blackfeet youth picked up that gun and then the gun of the until-then sleeping R. Fields. At the same time another Indian took the guns of Droulliard and Lewis. R. Fields pursued the ﬁrst man and stabbed him to death. Lewis pulled his pistol and forced the second man to put down the guns he had. Suddenly the Indians split into two groups and drove the horses up the trails out over the bluﬀs. Lewis pursued the men closest to him and shot one. XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK

311

Twelve horses were left, a mixture of the explorers’ travel-worn horses and the Indian horses, which turned out to be much sturdier. The four left for the “Great Falls,” travelling as hard as they could, and by the time they reached the mouth of the Marias to rejoin the rest, the men were among huge herds of buﬀalo. In the Sixties, Boy Scout leaders in Cut Bank, Robert H. Anderson and Ed Mathison, were in charge of determining where all this had occurred. Since Anderson was a pilot, they were able to check terrain and compass bearings from the air. (No GPS in those days.) When they felt they had it all sorted out, Wilbur Werner, a local attorney, history buﬀ and Boy Scout leader, escorted a party that included Bob and me out to the remarkably unchanged campsite. A cluster of three cottonwoods still grew in the center of the meadow. Bob continues writing about the commission for his heroic statue: Six months of our time was spent in research before the actual modeling of the statue began.... Two local men of the right age and build posed for Captain Lewis (Boyd Evans) and Captain Clark (Jim Brousseau).1 It so happened that at this time a young Indian girl was working here at the museum as our receptionist.2 She was the right age for Sacajawea and was of Shoshone blood, but stranger yet was that her sister was married to a French-Canadian and had a baby exactly the same age as Pomp.

To get a consensus on what the explorers wore, Bob prepared a twenty-page questionnaire with drawings which he sent out to all the experts he could think of. Ned Jacob, expert in these matters, helped him to interpret and sometimes overrule the returned questionnaires. Ned had lived with Bob once, back in the bachelor years, and they had been estranged, even though Ned was also a Cowboy Artist of America and National Academy of Western Artists member for a while. Now they collaborated. Once the probable design of Lewis’s buckskins was settled, a suit of them was made and Boyd wore them for weeks, on horseback and oﬀ, while he went about the work of his small ranch. Soon they had been soaked, dirtied, greased, and creased into authenticity. By that time Boyd had a new appreciation for the invention of the modern trouser ﬂy – his buckskin britches had a breechclout and leggings construction that was highly inconvenient. Bob goes on: One of the questions to be answered was about the clothes of Sacajawea, Mandan-style or Shoshone? We settled on Shoshone, as she was of that tribe. What arms did the explorers carry? We found out that the Harper’s Ferry Armory was commissioned to build twenty-four good heavy riﬂes that could knock down a buffalo or a grizzly bear, each of which were plentiful along the route. The actual telescope that Clark used was located at the Denver 312

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Fort Benton, July 4, 1976. The Parade. Bob is riding with Angus Monroe and his great-grandson (with braids). Photo: Mary Scriver.

Museum, Denver, CO, along with the square-shaped compass he used. The style of leggings used by the men were made from the advice and sketches by a famous historical painter, our good friend, Tom Lovell.3

When the deadline approached for the casting to be done, Bob called the Modern Art Foundry in New York City. Bob Spring, the head of the foundry, assured him everything was ﬁne. Then, pressed harder, he said the casting was ready for Bob to come to weld the straps on and make a ﬁnal check. When Bob got there, the casting was “done” in the narrowest sense: cast but lying in sections all over the foundry! For the next week, Bob lived at the foundry and with Spring’s crew welded, ground, and patined desperately. They barely made the deadline. The Fort Benton statue of Lewis, Clark, Sacajawea, and the baby, Pomp, was dedicated on June 13, 1976, with a major parade. Charmaine and I drove over from Oregon to watch Bob dance Gunsmoke up and down the street, waving at the folks with a huge grin on his face. “Buﬀalo Bob,” people remarked. There were Mounties, bagpipers, Uncle Sam on stilts, and “Lewis” on horseback. (Boyd’s brother, Corky, wearing those buckskins.) Bob “unveiled” the statue and there were many speeches. XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK

313

Fort Benton, July 4, 1976. Unveiling the Lewis and Clark Monument. Bob is at lower left. Photo: Mary Scriver.

In time, the Fort Benton statue led to a second commission for a heroic-size statue in Great Falls to commemorate the state Centennial. This time Sacajawea would be dropped out and the dog, Seaman, plus the slave, York, would be added. An actual Newfoundland dog posed for Seaman, but I didn’t discover who modeled for York. This statue, at Overlook Park where the Sun River joins the Missouri, was dedicated on July 4, 1989. Bob made a custom composite ﬁberglass statue with all six ﬁgures, half-life-size, which he gave to the Lewis and Clark Overlook Museum in Great Falls not long before his death. From the ﬁrst Fort Benton commission in 1974 to the end of his life in 1999, Bob was constantly working on something about Lewis and Clark. Bob loved all this research and becoming an expert on gear, so he could hold forth with great authority. There is a videotape of him addressing the Lewis and Clark history buﬀs only weeks before his death. In fact, earlier in the day he had been in the emergency room. The stories of the struggles to ﬁnance, model, and cast these statues are too long and complex to be told here. One of the people who attached himself to Bob during these projects was Phil Scriver, a military retiree. At ﬁrst he kidded with Bob that he was a distant cousin (no connection was ever found beyond 314

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

the name), then became a closer and closer “cousin” (partly so that he could check Bob out of the hospital against doctor’s orders) and ﬁnally got into a terrible quarrel with Bob, who believed that Phil had actually impersonated him. Money ﬁgured into the quarrel. Bob’s bond with Boyd Evans became very strong, especially since he’d been underfoot since way back when his father, now passed on, had helped build the original foundry. Boyd asked his wife, Lila, to begin helping Lorraine, especially when Bob was in the hospital in Great Falls. Lila, an enrolled Blackfeet, did what she could, which was quite a lot. In fact, she was the daughter of the valedictorian of the graduating class of Browning High School the year that Bob was salutatorian. In the yearbook photo of the 1930 Browning High School Sophomore Class, Lila’s mother is sitting right next to Bob. It was on her ranch that Bob and Hiram Upham (also in the photo) went rattlesnake hunting as recent high school grads. As the Bicentennial of the expedition approached, Lewis and Clark became a major preoccupation in the State of Montana. For a while most of the excitement was caused by Stephen Ambrose’s book Undaunted Courage, which was published in 1996. Bob read this carefully, calling it a “keen book – the best I’ve read for a long time.” Ambrose hit exactly the right complex of assumptions in him: that the pre-industrial times were the really good times, that progress was inevitable but tragic, that white men had somehow earned their Manifest Destiny to claim the frontier, and that all of this was tied up in heroism worth commemorating. In short, it was what some scholars now call “the Grand Narrative.”

3. Distinguished Achievement Great Falls, 1990

The Governor’s Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Arts was presented to Robert Macﬁe Scriver on February 3, 1990. A prelude of excellent jazz was played. Earl Old Person sang an “honor song” and said a prayer in Blackfeet. (I ﬁgure that over a lifetime Earl, who was a member of Bob’s early Blackfeet band, probably did this to honor Bob on several dozen occasions, including his funeral.) A blossom fell from the bouquet on the table. It was rather like a bit of eagle plume falling from an object when someone is dancing at a Bundle Opening, which is usually taken as a sign of an impending death or loss. A grim thought for such an occasion – but then again, I got the impression that the choices for awards are made on the basis of who doesn’t have much time left. David E. Nelson, Montana Arts Council Executive Director, gave an unimpassioned but XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK

315

Cree Medicines at the Governor’s Award ceremonies at the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, 1990. Left to right: Carma, Carl, David, and Rosemary. Photo: Mary Scriver.

stubborn talk against censorship of the arts, a reference to the ﬂap set oﬀ by Mapplethorpe. I thought how appalled Bob and most of the other people in that audience would be by an exhibit of Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic black-leather photographs. Then Mike Logan, cowboy poet in wide hat, leather vest, boots, bolo, and big belly, said he wasn’t really supposed to have composed a poem for the occasion, but that after reading about Bob the words had just come into his head. THE SHAMAN’S HANDS Ghost winds howl oﬀ the Great Divide To shape the Blackfeet lands. Their wild, free, sculpting symphonies Inspired the shaman’s hands. This artist’s hands and fertile mind, Known through the world today, Have captured, in patinaed bronze, Lovesongs composed in clay. 316

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

They’ve sung of “No More Buﬀalo,” Of old ways doomed to die, Uncompromising ﬁerceness in A cowboy’s “Honest Try.” These wondrous hands have wrought, for us, Two captains and their men And tiny, brave “Bird Woman” Who came to be their friend. They’ve spun us tales of mountain men Who rode up trails unknown To seek the wealth of beaver plews In mountains hewn from stone. This night, we join in homage, Through all Montana’s lands, To Robert Macﬁe Scriver And his mystic shaman’s hands. Bob rose to his feet clapping to acknowledge the honor. He said in a little voice, “This makes me feel funny.” He was telling the truth. In spite of his hunger for homage, he didn’t know how to accept it. Which is why the need remained. The reception was at the Russell Museum. They presented him with a gooseberry pie, which was an “in” joke. To tease waitresses he would listen to the pie list and then ask for gooseberry, because it sounds funny and they never have it. But when he was someplace with Lorne Render, he asked for gooseberry pie and they DID have it! Luckily, he loved it. (Mrs. Stone used to bake it.) So on this occasion they had baked him a gooseberry pie, beautifully presented in a red-and-white cloth-covered basket. (Gooseberries are the only sacred food allowed to dancers in the Sun Lodge. Bob said, “Isn’t that amazing? It’s been that way all my life.” Meaning fateful coincidences.) When I went by the shop with my photos a week or so after the event, Bob was wearing his fancy medal with his work clothes.

4. Long quiet days in the shop Browning, 1988 forward

In 1988 I was serving the Unitarian Congregation in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and kept having a strange intuition that I should call Bob, so I did. But the XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK

317

person I got was a young woman trying to hold the shop together. “Help!” she pleaded. Bob and Lorraine had had a big ﬁght. She was holed up at the ranch, drunk, and Bob was in Great Falls with a major stroke. I called Bob and asked whether I should come. “Hell, yes!” he said and then fell out of bed. By the time I’d found someone to take my pulpit for a Sunday and driven down, he had changed his mind. Too late. I stayed a week, getting an AA representative out to the ranch to talk to Lorraine, making sure Bob ate properly and didn’t drive – which he was determined to do, though he could barely control his own body. I listened to all Lorraine’s complaints, which were the same as mine and Jeanette’s before me, and then I listened to Bob’s, which were also the same as before. When we were in cafés, he’d write lists of the perfect qualities of a wife on the paper napkins in order to identify where we all fell short. I told Lorraine that if she wanted to leave, I’d help her get to the airport, help her pack, call her brothers. I also told her that if she didn’t stop drinking, I’d come back and move in with the two of them. Finally I went to Bob and asked him what he really wanted. He said he wanted Lorraine back, that when she was sober, she was the very best. Then there was a pause and he said, “Of course, she’ll never stop drinking.” In that pause, the die was cast. When I got back to Saskatoon, my congregation was very angry that I had “gone oﬀ to the States.” They forbade me to ever do that again. I resigned. I did move back to the reservation, teaching at Heart Butte from 1988 to 1991. It seemed as though Bob and Lorraine had stabilized in those three years. In 1991 the Superintendent ﬁnally succeeded in ﬁring me, and I went back to Portland, Oregon. In the summer of 1991 Bob had four young goslings in his shop. He seemed to prefer them to the springer spaniel puppies in the back yard. The four fowl walked, as scientists now think that dinosaurs walked, with their heads poked out ahead and their butts waggling along behind. They were big, almost ready for feathers, but still downy and gray. Around they went, walking single-ﬁle and squirting green goo on the shop ﬂoor. Eventually, they came to their water dish and went into ecstasies of admiration. “How wonderful! Exactly the thing!” they seemed to gabble, while they dipped in their beaks and then pointed them ceiling-ward so the water would run down inside. Each in turn splashed water, dipped a foot, all the while exclaiming to each other. Then one became distracted and set oﬀ again on another perambulation, the other three hastening to get in line. Big ﬂat feet carefully ﬂopped down on the plaster lumps, wood fragments, clay globs, rocking along in perfect conﬁdence of purpose. And soon enough they came again to the water dish and went into exactly the same arias of praise as before: “How wonderful! Exactly the thing!” And the whole play-cycle began again. I watched for a half-hour without seeing any variation and made cynical but private comparisons with the steady stream of admirers in the front room. 318

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

While the geese walked around, Bob stood at the table casting plaster – horse’s legs, someone’s arm, a ﬂaring tail, the stirrup leather of a saddle, the head oﬀ a moose. Bits and pieces, as we are used to seeing remnants of Greek sculpture. This is what he seemed to do day after day, work at bits of sculpture in the habitual repetitions of a lifetime’s occupation. But he depended upon tourists coming to the shop door to exclaim, “How wonderful! Exactly the thing!”

5. Facing death

Browning, late Nineties

Bob’s son, James Robert Scriver, called Jimmy, was diagnosed with cancer. He died in Kalispell in August 1993, aged 51. He had been making bronzes of his own, mostly wildlife. Towards the end he identiﬁed with his Marine veteran community and drew his support from them. Bob attended the funeral, though he wore work clothes. At least he didn’t wear bloody buckskin as when long ago he had taken Jimmy to his uncle’s funeral. In 1994 Bob’s health, problematic for quite a while, began to seriously deteriorate. One day he felt nauseous and didn’t eat until evening. Then he ﬁnished oﬀ a bag of cookies while soaking in his hot tub, the only place he was really comfortable. Suddenly he went into a seizure. Lorraine called 911, panicked so badly she could hardly manage the door locks and alarms, and forgot to turn oﬀ the electric fence. One intrepid tribal oﬃcer managed to get through all the obstacles and start CPR. It was not another heart attack but a diabetic seizure brought on by the sudden change from too-low to too-high blood sugar. Now, added to the rows of prescribed pills plus vitamins and oﬀ-the-shelf cures, Bob had to have a blood sugar check before every meal. Lorraine stuck his ﬁnger with a lancet and put the blood drop in the little machine. He ﬂinched but submitted. In the cafés the waitresses and cooks arranged fruit and cheese plates for him instead of the usual fried food. After a while he had been so conscientious about his diet that he could go oﬀ that particular medicine. Especially in public situations, he grimaced and mugged involuntarily. The newspapers printed photos that showed him making faces, sometimes looking peculiar. He had always been described as “internationally renowned,” but now the reporters said “legendary.” The old-timers had been replaced by young folks from the city who saw him as slightly ridiculous. In 1997 Bob ﬁnally agreed to a heart bypass that had originally been suggested twenty years earlier. After the surgery, for the rest of his life, he occasionally had to hurry to Emergency because his internal chemicals were out of balance. Several times he ended up in the new Browning Indian Hospital, which he much preferred. He had made a statue of Earl Old Person to put in it and had XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK

319

given a speech at the dedication. The doctors would bring their children to meet the famous artist. Boyd, Lila, and their kids took him healthy frozen yogurt, but told him it was ice cream, because he insisted that he hated yogurt. He began wearing an oxygen cannula sometimes. “Only when he feels like he needs it,” said Lorraine. Often it was clear to me that he was mentally diminished. Bob’s grandchildren had gone oﬀ to their own lives, starting businesses and raising kids. He didn’t conﬁde in them nor did they feel they ought to ask. He could not decide how to write his will or whether he ought to make some arrangement while living. The natural receiver would have been the C.M. Russell Museum where Bob had been on the board for many years and Bob felt warmly towards Lorne Render, the director. But he could never come to a ﬁnal agreement and then Render left for another job. Bob’s lawyer had a foundation planned, which the lawyer would administer. The lawyer already had a large collection of Scriver bronzes which he had accepted in payment of Bob’s bill. In a hasty will before his heart bypass surgery, Bob made Lorraine his executor. When he survived the surgery, Bob “rewrote” his will with scissors and tape until it was practically unreadable. When he died, all those revisions were ignored and the lawyer activated the one written before heart bypass surgery. In the years immediately after Bob’s death, and then after Lorraine’s death in 2002, everything was dispersed. Nothing of Bob Scriver remains in public Browning. One fall day in the early Nineties I had been driving back out to Heart Butte on the “inside road,” which follows along the prehistoric Old North Trail, when I saw Bob shoot a teal at a little pothole along the way. I parked and walked over. He plopped the dead duck into my hand and went to pick up another that had fallen into weeds at the pond verge. I watched him, hungry for him, while a cold wind blew hard. My one hand was full of warm duck feathers and the other hand held nothing but arctic wind. In the distance rose the timeless stone ramparts of the East Front Lewis Overthrust. We visited a minute. Then he left. Often we encountered each other like that. I remembered the many months twenty years earlier when he was trying to rebuild his heart through a walking program his internist suggested. He was supposed to walk a certain distance in a certain amount of time. Even when the weather was cold and snowy, he fulﬁlled the chart’s requirement. To walk two miles, he had me drive him two miles – exactly, as measured on the pickup odometer – up Highway 89 toward the mountains, and drop him oﬀ on the nearly nonexistent shoulder of the road. Then I went back to the studio and stood in the big picture window watching for him, holding the pickup keys in case I could see he was in trouble or in case he didn’t show up on time. The regimen must have worked: two decades later he was still here. When he came into money, he didn’t buy cowboy sculptures, but rather the animal bronzes he’d always loved: Rosa Bonheur’s wonderful bull, a double handful of Malvina Hoﬀman animals in plaster, a wild turkey, and bronze surg320

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

ing rhinos by Sherry Sander. He bought Beaux Arts sculptures, a monumental Indian chief by James MacNeil and a seated Abraham Lincoln by Gutzon Borglum. And a double dozen John Rogers vignettes, fragile and nostalgic. In summer of 1998 I had driven up to St. Mary, then to Babb, and back on the Duck Lake road. I saw a dead badger by the road and picked up the solid, heavy body, double-bagged it, and put it in the pickup bed. It was relatively fresh – no maggots, no wounds. When I got to the museum I carried it in. Bob was in the shop and I went on through. As soon as he realized what I had, he backed up, saying, “Oh, no, no! I can’t touch it! It’s my totem animal – you understand.” He wasn’t angry – he really DID want me to understand. Then I saw that I had made a huge mistake. I carried it back out to the pickup and drove toward the mountains, trying to settle and think what to do. It was true. Bob should not be handling a dead badger. The badger meant his father, persistence, honor, and friendship. He didn’t want to change his relationship to those things. Then what did this badger mean? I decided the message was not for him but for me. I had no impulse to create a Bundle. Driving along Willow Creek until I came to a broad camas ﬁeld, deep purple under the sun, with many ground squirrels. I thought, “This looks pretty close to a heaven for badgers.” So I packed the carcass out to the middle and arranged it to look like a live but sleeping animal. I stood quietly for a moment and said prayers, including the one in Blackfeet that I’d learned for the Thunder Pipe Bundle. I knew what it meant. Bob was going to die. And I was not going to be with him. I had been fantasizing deathbed scenes, last words, but this badger was going to be the only body to which I had access.

6. Death on Bob’s terms Browning, 1999

By the late Nineties Bob would be glad to see me, then try to impose some kind of control or ownership, and ﬁnally pick a ﬁght to restore distance. Once I found him working on his autobiography, partly because he knew I was coming, I think, and hoped for my help. He’d had the same problem ﬁnding someone to write a biography as he’d had ﬁnding a town to build a museum for him. Simply, he wouldn’t surrender enough control to give a writer any elbow room. So he was doing it himself. At this point he was writing about the Sixties, when I met him. We worked on Bob’s legal pad of memories all day. The next day I remarked oﬀhand that it would be a whole lot easier if we could do all this on a computer. He broke into a raving tirade about computers, XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK

321

based on the enormous struggle he’d had with the publishers of his artifact book. Pretty soon we were in a full-ﬂedged quarrel, told each other oﬀ, and I left. I glanced back at the last moment. Bob was making the sign-talk gesture of breaking a stick (or arrow) in half, meaning the end. In 1998, when it was clear that Bob had very little time left, I had brought him a Japanese carved nut, ballyhooed as “nature’s ivory.” It was netsuke style, about the size of a walnut, and portrayed a nude woman and an ape hanging onto each other for dear life. The tiny woman wore a minute comb in her hair and the ape had a teeny scrotum. It reminded me a little of a sculpture Bob had once made of bear cubs grappling together so they formed a ball. (He’d intended to get it cast in hard rubber for a tourist toy. “It’d make me rich – for about six months until it’s copied.”) When we were brieﬂy alone, I had slipped the carving to him and he was delighted with it. After that when I called on the phone, I’d say, “Hang on like that ape with the lady.” And he’d laugh. He carried it in his pocket. I don’t know where it ended up. I’m not sure hanging on was the right advice. By the end the men had to carry a chair beside him when he crossed from the studio to the shop, so he could stop and rest on the way. But he insisted on walking under his own power. January 1999 was a restless month. My mother had died in April 1998, but her estate was not being ﬁnished up in a timely way. Then a friend in Browning called to tell me Bob had died. How much devotion was enough? Once, while we were married and I thought Bob was asking too much, I complained, “You must believe in suttee like India where a husband expects his wife to throw herself on his funeral pyre to be burned alive with his body.” Bob drew himself up and said with great dignity, “I should think if you really loved me, you wouldn’t want to live on without me anyway.” When he died, I thought about that quite a bit. I was a sucker for the “if you really love me” line. But better to stay alive and write a biography. When Bob died on January 29, 1999, his and Lorraine’s lives fell open. The little studio house was a wreck. The bathroom plumbing had failed, the kitchen appliances were worn out and inoperable, and no one ever cleaned. The windows were never opened so everything was coated with Lorraine’s cigarette smoke. She immediately returned to drinking. In Browning just before Bob’s funeral – it must have been Ground Hog Day – Lorraine sent the “grandkids” (nearing forty years old) out to stay at the ranch. Luckily, Lane’s four-wheel-drive was capable of drift-busting through the access road. Once there, they got into a quarrel and Rory stormed out into the darkness. By the faint ranch light he confronted some huge dark hulk and, spooked, went back to the ranchhouse for the gun he had packed. Next morning the hulk turned out to be a pile of fenceposts. I think it was really “Grandpa.” 322

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The wake, funeral, and “feed” were organized by Boyd and Lila Evans, with the help of old friends like Barbara Weathered who had helped with so many open houses in the past. At the wake Lorraine stayed only a short time, leaving abruptly to avoid George and Molly Kicking Woman, who came to pray and smudge her in cleansing, because she was afraid they might intend to reclaim the Thunder Pipe Bundle. Boyd stayed with the body and received the visitors. At ﬁrst the thought was that the crowd would be so big that the funeral should be held in the gymnasium of the high school, but then, considering blizzards, plans were scaled back to the library/auditorium. Boyd asked the Tribal elders to sing, and they were happy to do so. Earl Old Person spoke. Father Mike oﬃciated. Michelle read a eulogy she had written. Teddy Williamson talked about how Bob Scriver put Browning on the map. Someone read Mike Logan’s poem about the Shaman’s Hands. Paul Kingston repeated the thoughts about an artist’s creativity being like God’s that he had used at John Clarke’s funeral. Lorraine went through the ﬂowers and threw out all wreaths and bouquets from people she disliked. Instead of on the ranch next to his beloved horse, she buried Bob in Cut Bank with his parents and brother. Crown Hill Cemetery is just north of town, across the highway from an auto wrecking yard. At the edge is an oilwell rocker pump. The subzero wind was blowing hard. Boyd had gathered all the ﬂowers – rejected or not – and brought them along, but when he tried to put them on the grave, they blew away. The three grandkids from Oregon weren’t used to cold weather and could hardly bear it. Jim’s two daughters arrived, quarreled, and left. The inheritors went to a bar for a stiﬀ drink, then everyone went to the lawyer’s oﬃce to hear the will. Each grandchild, plus Bill Byrne, Bob’s trumpet student and excellent friend, was to get $10,000. The rest was to go to an institution, all of it at Lorraine’s discretion. At some point in those days, all the paintings by Bob that had been stored at the ranch mysteriously disappeared. An attempt to keep the museum open failed. Lorraine ﬁred the original lawyer, and hired a second lawyer with political connections who guided Bob’s work to the Montana Historical Society and converted all the other artists’ work and the real estate to cash which disappeared untraceably, though it was also supposed to have gone to the Historical Society to help pay for a building to house the bronzes by Bob. For a year or so a pair of dubious characters guarded and sequestered Lorraine from everyone, friends included. More than once, people called the Elder Abuse Hotline about her. (It wasn’t me.) Laurel gave me the phone number of Max Caldwell’s sister and I called her to try to contact Lorraine’s half-brothers. The sister wouldn’t give me their numbers, but called them on my behalf. Then Laurel herself called the half-brothers. I went to the local district judge, who claimed his hands were tied, even if her life was in danger. Ironically

XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK

323

Lorraine was saved when she fell and broke her hip. The hospital stay put her in objective medical hands and sobered her up. Since she was a Canadian citizen, she returned to Nanoose Bay, close to Vancouver, B.C., where she built a house near her half-brothers. When she died on November 3, 2002, the family had her cremated, and scattered her ashes on the beach. They inherited the house, art, and artifacts in the house but not whatever was left of the money. Interest from a mysterious “Scriver Family” foundation was directed to Carroll College for an art “bursary,” which is like a scholarship.

7. “The Man in Buckskin” Valier, 2002

Recently I went out to the Boone & Crockett ranch, west of Dupuyer, to see the equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt that they had commissioned Bob to make in 1988. Snow squalls drifted through the peaks of the East Front, creating those misty atmospheric scenes so beloved by impressionist landscape painters. I took my sculpture books so the staﬀ and I could look at other Teddy Roosevelt portraits. On the East Slope of the Rockies, the main principle for successful hunting is to time it with the fall snows. The idea is to get up into the foothills when there is enough snow in the highest country to push the game down, but only a few inches of snow on the lower meadows for tracking. Too early and the animals would outsmart the hunter. Too late and there was a risk of being caught in the snow and killed by the cold. In terms of hunting, Bob sometimes cut it close. In terms of his life, he refused to give up, simply kept on. Never give up. Make an honest try. Go to the utmost limit. This is the Western ethic. It is the “undaunted courage” that took Lewis and Clark to the Paciﬁc and back. In the mountains the snow ﬂags ﬂy oﬀ the peaks and the wind is sharp. Sun, Natoosi, sinks quietly into a shadowed horizon against a sky streaked with cloud. Sometimes there is color at sunset, but often the sky is silver and then suddenly dark. Almost always the wind persists. The temperature drops. The lawyer represented Bob’s death as near-idyllic, a quiet death in the foundry while he contentedly watched the “boys” pour bronze. The story from other sources was quite diﬀerent. Someone had persuaded Bob into doing a portrait of Mike Mansﬁeld, the long-time United States Senator from Montana, whom he had always disliked because of Mansﬁeld’s gun control stance. Over eighty and frail, Bob had no business doing any such sculpture. It’s hard for me to believe he would have 324

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

willingly undertaken the job on his own. There is a sound tape of him preparing a pitch to the Mansﬁeld committee, telling them he could convert the heroicsize plastilene of Meriweather Lewis into Mansﬁeld – or if necessary “the boys” could do that, and he would do the face. On the last day, the contract was unsatisfactory ... again. The Mansﬁeld committee knew Bob was close to death and I suspect they were stalling in that expectation. They had just faxed a copy of the latest version of the contract and he was enraged. He went to the foundry to calm down and watch a pour. Evidently, while he was there he felt uncomfortable and went to the basement shop bathroom. It was an hour before anyone missed him, the foundry crew thinking he was upstairs and Lorraine thinking he was downstairs. In the end David had to break down the bathroom door. He had died – privately, secretly – in roughly the same position as his ﬁrst Prince of Peace statue. The compartment was the oldest, roughest part of the complex of buildings. I think he sought it out, like an old bear looking for a cave. In some ways Bob Scriver was too much of an individual to be put into a social category. Maybe he was a throwback of some kind. Certainly he was not a “cowboy” in the sense of the Cowboy Artists of America, men who rope and ride, brand and herd, organizing their lives around beef. (The Stone ranch, where he spent his boyhood, raised horses rather than cows.) Though he admired rodeo cowboys, he wasn’t really a rodeo hand either. The Indians themselves are ambivalent about the idea of him being an Indian sculptor, though he was so close to them all his life. In some ways, though he never lived in the East, he had a lot of Eastern ideas mixed into his understanding of the West. He was contemptuous of homesteaders (part of my roots) but admiring of the early national patriots. The answer jumped out from a recent seminal book by Daniel Justin Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination.4 Herman describes a particular kind of frontiersman and suggests the category of “American Native” in contrast to “Native American.” The marker is the buckskin shirt, which distinguished the man who hunted. At one time buckskin shirts were even suggested as the uniform of the Revolutionary War soldiers. They had the advantage of not being woven in Europe and they were tough. Examples of “American Natives” include Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and the inventions of James Fenimore Cooper. Close to Indians, even living with and learning from Indians, these men were nevertheless family men rather than military men, goal-oriented explorers rather than drifters. Herman also proposes Buﬀalo Bill, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lewis and Clark, all of whom have been repeatedly pictured in their buckskin shirts. Herman suggests that these men, greatly admired and lionized heroes, have a social/political contradiction in their assumptions. American hunting is still haunted by English hunting, which was closely controlled by social class. To XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK

325

be “landed” meant not only that one had an income, but also that one owned hunting rights to that land. The extreme poor and the rebellious, like Robin Hood, were forbidden to hunt, even in order to feed their families. When Europeans emigrated to America, they were of two types: those who intended to seize territory in order to become the new landed gentry, and those who expected democracy to eliminate the old hierarchy and allow every man the freedom to depend upon his own skills in a broad wilderness. The two streams have been in conﬂict right up to the present, easily traced in our political parties. Both ideas were alive in Bob Scriver. On the one hand his ranch was posted “no hunting” as a nature preserve and on the other he felt entitled to hunt in Glacier National Park. On the one hand he thought of himself as Scots gentry and on the other hand he described his Pop as a middle-class farmer ready to defend independence and self-reliance. He identiﬁed with Blackfeet, Cree, and Métis and yet was proud to be small-town white. Sometimes he was the moose and sometimes he was the wolves. Herman also suggests a religious problem, the one A.B. Guthrie Jr. so indelibly described in The Big Sky. Guthrie has the original mountain men (standing in the same place Bob often hunted, up Blackleaf Canyon) mourn, “Why do we kill what we love?” Hunters love animals, know them deeply in unexpected ways, even as they endanger whole species. We all love wilderness, whatever we imagine it to be, even as we invade it. And we love ﬁne artists, but often destroy them.

326

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

XVII Patina: Overview

1. How patinas are formed Bronze patinas are possible because copper is a metal that attracts salts and other minerals, reacting to what is in air or water until it has created a protective skin on the surface of the copper. Iron, by contrast, rusts away – the iron molecules combine with oxygen and leave, until eventually there is no iron left. Bronze antiquities are brought up from ancient shipwrecks with thick crusts of oxidation, but when the encrustations are knocked oﬀ, the original object is still there. If the foundry applies no patina, the bronze will draw its own from the air. In fact, the metal must be waxed or otherwise sealed to keep it from continuing to add color. Rather like ceramic glazes, patinas are subtle and sometimes gorgeous. The most obvious is the verdigris of public statues and copper architectural detail. For a while that color was popular because fashionable green antiquities were being recovered from the Mediterranean. Some of the rarest patinas are on bronzes that were left sealed into tombs with decomposing bodies, so that the surface of the object was gradually colored by the gases produced by those corpses. Many patinas are produced by mild acid, so one strategy is to bury a bronze in sand and over a period of months urinate on it. Artists claim that their urine has a “signature” eﬀect which they can vary by eating certain things. Craftsmen can be as protective of their patina formulas as a good cook might be of prized recipes – which patina solutions are, in a way. Nowadays one can simply turn to the back pages of an art magazine and order bottles of patining mixtures, but in 1962 we felt lucky to have located one ancient book of potions, like wizard’s spells.1 In the days before the Internet the next problem was to ﬁnd sources for the mysterious sulphates, nitrates, and so on. By long distance phone suspicious pharmacy supply wholesalers would ask, “WHAT? WHAT are you going to do with this stuﬀ?” 327

When we tried to patine, swarms of questions arose, all of which had to be resolved by experimentation. Finally, in the summer of the 1964 ﬂood, since there was no museum traﬃc, Bob decided to go to Minneapolis and ﬁnd out how to do it, once and for all. I went along to take notes. Richard Randall, who cast Bob’s ﬁrst bronzes and coached him through the creation of the Bighorn Foundry, was literally a “high-impact” artist. This was the Vietnam Era and he was after social comment. In a typical work, he might take the door oﬀ an abandoned boxcar, run over the door with a tank (borrowed), machine gun it (special permit needed), and then spray paint it with dayglo graﬃti. Taken to the elegant Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis and hung on a high white wall with a spotlight, the piece looked, well, smashing! It was high-octane political art. But in his foundry Richard was a meticulous workman and experimenter. He and a friend had cast an old cow bone with such detail that it was hard to believe it was bronze until one tried to pick it up or noted the little thread where the parting of the mold had been. They had invested and cast a small dead bird, slightly decomposed, and it emerged a work of delicate ﬁligree and thin blades of bronze. Quickly Randall mixed up some patina colors – me scribbling measurements madly in a notebook – set out some little bronze “pigs” (ingots) for us to practice on and lit an ordinary propane hand torch. “Don’t get the bronze too hot – just enough to steam. That will mean it’s reacting.” Scribble, scribble. “Don’t make the mixture too thick or it’ll just ﬂake back oﬀ. You want a reaction, not a paint job.” Scribble, scribble. “Do it gradually, a little bit at a time.” Scribble ... and then, hey! He walked oﬀ, calling over his shoulder, “You’ll ﬁgure it out.” His studio was on acreage with a motorcycle racetrack. He hopped onto his Harley and began circling the track. We tried heating and painting. I was a little distracted because Randall’s wife was a ballet dancer and she had a studio at the house. The music drifted out to us while she practiced. What a civilized way to live! Bob wanted to see my notes. “What does this say? What’s that word?” That evening we went to the Guthrie Theatre to see a Shakespeare play (I forget which) because some of my former classmates were in it. I had made myself a beautiful dress out of some textury brown material with blue ﬂowers on it. I had bought the material at a fabric shop in Great Falls that sold both decorating and clothing fabric, and it turned out that the Guthrie lobby furniture was upholstered in the same fabric as my dress. Every time I sat down, I disappeared. Bob looked a little glazed. He was not a Shakespeare fan and I’m not sure he’d ever been to a play that wasn’t put on by a high school. He said he once played in the pit orchestra for a burlesque house and disgraced himself by arriving late and tripping over the cymbals. 328

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Because the railroad was washed out west of Shelby, we had driven the pickup to the Shelby depot and left it parked while we took the train the rest of the way. The train returned at 2 AM. The pickup was there, but Bob couldn’t ﬁnd the keys. Reeling with fatigue, knowing we weren’t thinking straight, we went through every pocket Bob had, plus his luggage. No luck. He shouldn’t have driven in an exhausted state anyway, and he hadn’t taught me to drive yet, so we went to the hotel. I didn’t know that this was where Bob used to live when he played in a Shelby band at the Sports Club full-time during the early Fifties. Jeanette had stayed in Browning and brought Jimmy on weekends. It didn’t make sense to rent two rooms, since we would be back up in a matter of hours, but before we went into the hotel, Bob cautioned me not to use our real names. “In Montana,” he explained, “If you present someone as being married to you, then the law is that they become your common-law spouse.” I was impressed. Bob signed us in under the name he’d made up, but I was too tired to keep my head straight and called him by his real name. He shot angry eye-arrows at me. The desk man had a little smirk. We didn’t take our clothes oﬀ or get under the covers – just fell across the bed sideways and went straight to sleep. When we got up again at the proper hour, Bob found the keys had been in his pants pocket all along. When we got home, I slipcovered a little corner knotty-pine room with white oilcloth (using up the entire Browning supply) to be the patina room. Bob invented a turntable out of an auto axle and hub and mixed up the potions according to my scribbles. They didn’t work. Again there were so many questions. Finally, Bob abandoned the attempt. Essentially – not actually – he told me to stay in that room until I ﬁgured it out and then he left. In the end, blundering and guessing, I did ﬁgure it out and was able to show the others. The reference for the patina we were trying to achieve was the Barye bronze we bought in New York City in 1965. The dark mottled green with a glossy ﬁnish was not common. Eventually we were able to duplicate it, but none of the other foundries could do it. Some didn’t try.

2. What is a “great artist?” Once I took an art class in Spokane. The professor said, “There are two ways to become famous and make money as an artist. One is to jump on every bandwagon that comes along as early as possible. The other is to do what you know best, do it as well as you can, and stick to it no matter what the fashion might be.” And then he added, “The trouble with the second is that you might not be famous until after you’re dead and people ﬁnally begin to realize what you’ve done.” X V I I PAT I N A : OV E RV I E W

329

When Bob and I were approaching divorce in 1970, our most bitter and crucial quarrels were over his strategy in what was clearly going to be a successful sculpture career. But we deﬁned success diﬀerently. He wanted money, a lot of it quickly, as though it might disappear if he didn’t cash in on his reputation. Steeped in my idealistic theatre background, I felt that he should use his energy to make fewer works of high quality – masterpieces. We were both aware that he might not have many years left. He wanted to impress people. He wanted, as Jeanette always repeated, “to be renowned.” With her French-Canadian accent, it sounded like “re-known.” He didn’t want to be Harold Scriver’s little brother any more. And he wanted his family vindicated. His unadmitted worry was that he might lose his talent somehow and would simply not be able to create masterpieces, no matter how much rest and focus he had. In evidence, the complaint against me in court from the divorce transcript: Q. “Although basically a good person, she is the type of person who destroys your peace of mind and you can’t carry on your work or live with her?” A. “Yes.” In other words, he felt I had killed his muse. More likely what he was feeling was the damage from being hypoxic during his major heart attack in April 1970. At that point he subtly changed and in the following years grew more and more diﬀerent from the person I originally knew. By the Nineties, I was more like he had been when I met him than he was. I told him so, which made him angry. After the divorce he began to make small ﬁgures for dealers, often subjects they suggested. Almost always, rather than deriving from inspiration to the artist, they were something the dealer had seen and thought would sell. These were sold with the right to reproduce, which relieved Bob from the struggle of copyrighting and keeping the record of certiﬁcates of authenticity. Once they went out the door, he was through with them, and therefore he didn’t have much emotional investment in them. In my judgment they are mostly trivial, often awkward, and sometimes below his previous standards. He had indeed lost some of his talent, along with much of his limited emotional stability and a little integrity. But in the Eighties he was at the peak of his reputation, in part because these dealers were motivated to promote him for the sake of their own proﬁt. The same forces were aﬀecting movies and books in the United States – repetition, mass-marketing in categories, popularity as the indicator of proﬁt. I talked to him while he was working on a National Guard Monument showing a guardsman with an eagle taking ﬂight from his arm. It had none of the kinaesthesia of Bob’s earlier work, the muscle-empathy that would put curves and tensions into the body of the man. He couldn’t grasp what I was saying. In fact, the lack was in his own body. By this time hugging him was like hugging a tree. Fashions come and go, technical means change, the social context of what is valued evolves, and personal taste is always the crucial factor in a purchase. 330

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

All of these inﬂuence the artist as well as the customers. Years of scholarship, museum curatorship, and analysis of Bob’s career will pass before there can be any ﬁnal verdict on his place in history among the American bronze sculptors, a better context for him than “cowboy artist.” The biggest danger is that the focus will be on only part of his work, whether action pieces or Indian portraits, instead of taking an overview of all of the nearly one thousand bronzes. In Bob’s case, the most passionate and carefully done pieces, like the “Pieta” or “To See Eternity,” will never get the exposure of the small works that constantly pass through auctions. Some say that the real period of creativity for any artist is about ten years long, usually early in life. For Bob Scriver, his best years probably began about 1959 and extended through the early Seventies, though there were a few excellent sculptures outside that span, and he kept working until his death at 84. Most remarkably, in those highly productive years he was middle-aged (45 to 60 years old). For comparison, Russell died at 62 and Remington at 48. Neither of them left anywhere near the huge number of sculptures that Bob created. Bob’s habit of methodically creating “sets” of subject matter, like the rodeo series or the Blackfeet Indian series, meant that he addressed many diﬀerent subjects rather than specializing in just warriors or only bucking horses. Because he made many sculptures for himself, out of love, like the bust portraits of women and his family or the religious pieces, we have unique access to his private self. The most private bronzes, a late series of small rough maquettes of nude couples making love, were melted up by Lorraine, who considered them “dirty.” Seen looking back, some of the bronzes that were startlingly new at the time – the bucking horses on one foot or the landing geese held up by the touching wing-tips – are familiar because so many people caught on and did the same thing – the better artists in their own way. But the sculptures keep their immediacy because they came from his own senses, what he saw and felt.

3. The artist as customer Eventually Bob was able to buy big “name” paintings – Russell, Remington, and Rungius plus others. This meant that the dealers treated him with new respect. He bought as many Fery paintings as he could ﬁnd – huge murals meant to be high on the walls of the log hotels in the railroad parks, but still undervalued. They hung in the museum, nearly shoulder to shoulder, making a rich and gorgeous background for the mounted animals. The “3 R” (Russell, Remington, Rungius) paintings had to be kept in a vault for fear of theft or ﬁre. Bob loved to lead people down into his vault. The really special visitors got to enter the vault

X V I I PAT I N A : OV E RV I E W

331

behind the vault! Other paintings were stored at the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls in their vault. Bob discovered that Joseph Henry Sharp (1859–1953) had spent several summers in Glacier Park, staying on the Horace and Helen Clarke ranch behind the Big Hotel. He found a number of the oil sketches Sharp had made around the reservation and copied them to learn what Sharp did. One of these copies was in the museum entry, up on the wall over the reception counter. Without knowing what it was, I admired it because it was the view out the window of the studio, except that Sharp probably painted it from a bit farther west, the same as Schreyvogel had. I asked Bob if he’d sell it, saying he was really getting good. He loved the deception – played coy and said he could actually do much better. But he wouldn’t sell me the painting. I wonder whether it was ﬁnally auctioned as a Scriver or a Sharp. When Bob’s collection was dispersed, the scatterings I regretted the most were the Ferys and the Sharps. Someone, somewhere, ought to reassemble them. It was one of the few occasions on which I wished I were rich.

4. The Flatiron Ranch Browning, 1980

When Bob bought the Doane ranch west of Browning, which he renamed the Flatiron Ranch, he would creep out to a pothole pond in the spring, ﬁnd a Canada goose nest, and steal a living egg. For days he would carry that egg around in his shirt – never breaking it while incubating it against his hairy chest – until the gosling emerged to believe Bob was Mom. The little critter would paddle around after Bob all summer, getting fed, talked to, and lifted into and out of the pickup to ride with Bob so that instead of the usual dog’s head in the passenger window one saw what was apparently a periscope. Often he carried the bird around like a waiter’s tray with his hand ﬂat under its breast while it slowly rotated its feet as though in water. One summer I dropped by the ranch to ﬁnd Bob putting the ﬁnishing touches on his goose house. He’d cut the goose door and was trying to get the tame geese to go up a gangplank to enter. But the geese were suspicious. Since the door was pretty big, Bob got down on his hands and knees and crawled through to demonstrate. The geese craned their necks – then looked away as though embarrassed by this old man in khakis. In the good times the ranch was a wonderful refuge. Bob and Lorraine spent most evenings out there, Lorraine doing laundry and needlework or watching television. The mouse problem was solved by cat holes cut in the bottoms of all the doors of the outbuildings. One back bedroom was Bob’s painting studio. 332

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

He had bought a little old log cabin and moved it to the ranch with the idea of making a studio out of it, but that was too big a project now. He was beginning to be so frail that merely planning took a lot of energy. One evening Bob and Lorraine saw that the horses had gathered into a cluster up on the hillside and were staring down into the beaver dam brush. Curious, they thought of walking out to look, but on second thought decided to drive in the pickup instead. When they parked alongside the horses and looked down, they saw two pairs of grizzly bear ears rocking in unison. The rest was hidden in brush, but they had a pretty good idea of what was happening. John Clarke, the famous Blackfeet carver of bears, would have loved it. In the bad times, when Lorraine was drunk at the ranch, Bob could go to the Cecile Horn place (across the river from our original ranch on the Two Medicine River), sixteen acres of grass and cottonwood, often used for ceremonials. He had a Blackfeet woman friend who sometimes went with him. Always he tried to make sure he had a backup, a vault behind the vault, a reserve woman behind the main woman. Evading, rather than addressing problems was his choice, maybe because of aging. He just didn’t have the time or energy to change. One summer he hatched a white Peking duck which followed him around the shop. By now Bob could hardly walk because of his hip and back, and sat on a big block of Styrofoam while he worked. Whenever he sat down, the duck would settle on top of his shoe, contentedly muttering to itself. If he stood up in a hurry, it went over backwards on its little duck butt. He’d hold up the duck to rub his cheek on it. I recognized that part of me would always be like that little white duck, content with nothing more than following Bob around. When he was often in the hospital, I sent him a video of I’ll Fly Away, about a little girl who learns to operate an ultralight plane and leads a ﬂock of handraised Canada geese south for the winter. There seemed to be little or nothing else I could do for him, short of invading Browning and displacing Lorraine, which would bring the law down on me – it was bound to be a violent scene – to say nothing of creating ethical dilemmas. My one attempt at intervening, when I came down from Saskatoon in 1988, was clumsy and only drove them underground. Towards the end I did ask him if he wanted me to come, but there was only silence on the line. I didn’t hear the worst stories until after he was gone. He was in bed so much that he developed terrible bedsores, and Lorraine couldn’t seem to cope. Lila Evans, Boyd’s wife, called the home nurses and, thinking that Bob might be embarrassed by a woman handling his bottom, asked for a male nurse. But when the man arrived, Bob was horriﬁed, thinking it implied something about his sexuality, and he wouldn’t let the nurse come close.

X V I I PAT I N A : OV E RV I E W

333

5. The last visit and goodbye Browning, 1998

Near Labor Day in 1998, Bob wouldn’t let me into the studio/home – he hadn’t since he’d had the stroke in 1988. Instead, I stood in the back door of the museum, opened in hopes of cool air, and looked over the fence. The green willow branches we’d cut by the creek and thrust into mud were now trees taller than the museum. Dry fallen leaves were ankle deep in the yard. A few hardy asters poked up through weeds. The light was smoky. I had come over from Portland knowing that Lorraine was scheduled for a repair operation on her groin. A year earlier she had been talking to Bob’s doctor when she began to speak “word salad,” unintelligible. Recognizing a stroke symptom, the doctor took her into surgery on an emergency basis and used ﬁber optic technology to place several stents to hold open the blood vessels that feed blood to the brain. In the middle of surgery she had to be transferred across town to a better-equipped hospital. She survived, but the point of entry had healed into painful scar tissue. Bob insisted that he was going to drive Lorraine down to Great Falls. I oﬀered to drive. No dice. The crew was all away, ﬁre-ﬁghting. A young woman friend who was writing a Blackfeet genealogy book oﬀered to drive. No. He was stubborn, erratic, and unreasonable. After waiting a half-hour for them to get a head start, I followed, expecting to ﬁnd them in the ditch along the way, but they made it. Lorraine was scheduled to be the ﬁrst patient into surgery, so when I thought she had gone in, I went up to the waiting room. It turned out that the doctor had shifted her surgery to be last, maybe recalling the previous ﬁasco, so no other patients would be waiting. She was in bed, prepared, and Bob was sitting alongside, holding her hand. They looked terriﬁed. The nurses, hearing my inquiry about them, decided I was family and should reassure these lonely old folks. I was only there in case Lorraine died and Bob needed help, but I couldn’t very well tell them that. When they wheeled Lorraine away, there was only one chair empty in the waiting area but Bob refused to sit in it. I felt gentle plucking at my sleeve, and here was Joe Old Chief’s wife – small, aged and generous. “Sit in my chair,” she said. “Then you can sit together.” They were part of the old-time Bundle Keepers. Joe, who had always worn dark glasses because of his eyes, was ﬁnally getting them ﬁxed. Bob walked oﬀ. He said he was going back to the motel to wait, so I went to Surgery Waiting. When they announced that the family of Lorraine Scriver should go to Intensive Care, I called Bob and guided him up to Intensive Care. As I left, the nurse was using pressure to stop Lorraine’s surgical wound from bleeding until a second nurse could come with another bandage. Bob stayed. The next morning very early I went to see Lorraine in Intensive Care. I offered any help she thought I could give, expressed support, and gave her a stuﬀed 334

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

bear with a guardian angel pinned onto its sweater. She seemed to be recovering (the nurses kept saying she was all right) but she talked about how terrible her life was, how much she suﬀered, how badly Bob treated her, how she would die soon. All the heart, blood pressure, and breathing monitors went wild. I backed out as the nurses came. At Bob’s motel he was just getting into his pickup. He seemed amazed to see me, but immediately assumed some kind of plot. He talked wildly about going broke, not having insurance, desperate straits. I put my hand on his arm, meaning reassurance, but he jerked away, saying, “This time is for Lorraine!” That was the last time I ever saw him. He was wearing the leather jacket he wore in his coﬃn. They also included his cowboy hat, a speckled eagle feather, and a braid of sweetgrass. That March, 1999, I decided to attend the C.M. Russell Annual Auction which was always held on Charlie Russell’s birthday. Surely there would be some sort of memorial service, but there was only a moment of silence at a luncheon. Norma Ashby, sparkplug of the Ad Club that organized the auction, told me this lack of acknowledgement came at the request of Lorraine. The attendees had circulated a big album in which people wrote tributes to Bob, and it was sent to Lorraine but she made no thanks. Norma managed to smuggle a memorial into a ceremony at the Great Falls Lewis and Clark statue later on in the year. Before driving north, I visited the Russell museum. A Blackfeet man was pacing in front of the entrance, upset. He was a good-sized, handsome man in ranch clothing and boots – not dirty and not drunk, though he undoubtedly had been both in the past. Accustomed to free entry to the Museum of the Plains Indian and the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife in Browning, he had been shocked to discover that admission here was ﬁve dollars, which he didn’t have. He had hitched down with friends to be part of the Indian art show adjunct to the main auction. The receptionist, a volunteer Junior Leaguer from Great Falls, had refused to let him in. Big-shot out-of-towners were going back and forth, clearly a little afraid of this man who could have emerged out of a Charlie Russell painting, the kind of man Charlie associated with all his life. “I’m part of this!” the Indian protested. I paid his admission, calling him “my friend” to make the point. When I went to pat his “paid” sticker onto his chest, he jumped back as though I would strike him. We divided to walk through the galleries. In a while I thought I should get his name, so I went back over and touched him on the arm. Instinctively, he jumped sidewise like a cat and began to apologize and defend himself. We chatted for a minute. He had worked for Bob and he had attended the funeral. He had no money for breakfast; could I give him a few dollars? I gave him a ten. The only other bill in my wallet was a twenty and I needed it to get back to Portland. Then, without warning, we both began to cry. I reached out to shake his hand goodbye, but his hand slipped past mine and we took X V I I PAT I N A : OV E RV I E W

335

each other’s wrists for a moment, like some kind of secret handshake, before we turned away to blow our noses. I felt guilty for not giving him the twenty. By then I felt guilty about many things. In June when my mother’s estate was settled, I moved back to Montana. Lorraine’s hangers-on prevented any contact with her or any entry to the museum or ranch from me or any other friends of Bob’s. Beyond trying to make phone calls a few times, I stayed away, thinking that after a while she would settle down. Sometimes my phone would ring in the early evening but no one would be there. Finally Lorraine’s lawyer called the Montana Historical Society and told them, “If you want this Scriver stuﬀ, you’ll have to get it out of here in ten days.” The Society employees rented a squad of U-Haul trucks, drove up in a convoy and packed everything – listing and noting as they went. For a while the materials sat in a rented warehouse in Helena and then a special steel warehouse was built for them. The estimated value of the collection was ﬁfteen million dollars, but since the acquisition coincided with a state budget crisis, it awaits future grants to be unpacked, curated, and displayed. The huge Symbol of the Pros bronze that had been in the backyard of the studio was installed in Helena behind the Historical Society Museum. The Blackfeet Tribe bought all the Browning buildings, including the Bighorn Foundry and Bob’s little studio home. Now the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife is completely remodeled into a Blackfeet Heritage Center that sells crafts. Lorraine gave the next-door house to David Cree Medicine, who had been living there, and she sold him one of the shop pickups. Eloise Cobell, the banker who bravely sued the United States Government over their handling of Indian trusts, realized that The Nature Conservancy could enter into agreements with the sovereign Blackfeet Nation just as it did with the State of Montana. Therefore, the ranch was sold to The Nature Conservancy and the Blackfeet Land Trust combined, who use it as a conference center and nature preserve. The ﬁrst manager was Norman Peterson, an enrolled Blackfeet and former cornet-playing student of Bob’s who had walked the same mountains. The little sixteen-acre Cecile Horn ranch along Two Medicine River was still for sale when Lorraine died. In the end Boyd and Lila Evans bought it. They will not interfere with ceremonial use. Many people have written about the big skies over Montana, the radiance of the sunlight and the magniﬁcence of the clouds. Others have recorded winter blizzards, the impenetrable wall of stinging white that disorients and kills those who can’t ﬁnd shelter. Not many write about the ordinary weather that comes through on the jet stream, day after day, year after year. Quick showers, long hot spells, gray, still days, wind, wind, and wind. We joke that there is only one valid forecast: variable. In the life of the sculptor called Bob Scriver, there was both heroism and wickedness, but the real meaning and worth of the man was 336

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

that he rose every morning to work to his limits, day after day. No matter what happened or what his emotional state, he gave it an honest try. Parts of Bob Scriver were shocking, intolerable, and transgressive. Usually they were the excesses of his best parts, like his ability to focus, which eliminated from his consciousness the people around him. He didn’t trust other foundries or other galleries, so he spent a lot of eﬀort, maybe too much, doing those things himself. Yet for me and others he was a doorway to the world of the nineteenth century and the Blackfeet. Bob Scriver was not a particularly ﬂashy sculptor, though he could make a bucking horse stand on one foot or a group of geese balance on their wingtips. His style varied from classical to romantic, harking back to Augustus SaintGaudens, Daniel Chester French, A. Phimister Proctor, Malvina Hoﬀman, and the Beaux Arts American bronzes. In the end he was more of a National Sculpture Society/National Academy of Design sculptor, than a Cowboy Artists of America or National Academy of Western Artists type. His work is not about movie images, but about his own primary direct experience. As such it should not be conﬁned to the Cowboy Art world. We don’t know what mordants and volatiles of theory, which historical warmings and coolings, will give his ﬁnal reputation a patina.

6. Four sculptors, four destinies Browning, 1929

I’m still making discoveries. Sometimes, because Bob liked elephants, I would tell him about the Oriental Theatre in Portland, Oregon, where the auditorium was lined high on both sides with rows of realistic life-size elephants, just the front halves, which as a child I imagined were somehow anchored behind the wall they had penetrated. I thought maybe someone back there was hanging onto their tails. When the theatre was demolished, the Oregonian ran a story about the sculptor, and I saved the clipping. The sculptor of the elephants was named Adrian Alexander Voisin (1890– 1976). Only recently have I learned more about this Paris-educated man whose father-in-law worked for the Bureau of Indian Aﬀairs and whose wife was expert at Plains Indian sign language. In 1929, responding to the suggestion of one of his Paris instructors, Voisin came to the Blackfeet Reservation and set up a studio in Government Square in order to make portraits of “old time” Blackfeet “ before they all disappear.” At that time there was a convention of sign-talkers which was recorded in a ﬁlm and also in a circle of footprints, cast in bronze, the very ones I stood in the ﬁrst time I came to Browning. I’m sure Voisin and his wife had something to do with this. X V I I PAT I N A : OV E RV I E W

337

Among the portrait busts Voisin made was that of a young man who also was a colleague: the Blackfeet woodcarver John Clarke, grandson of Malcolm Clarke whose murder provoked the Baker Massacre, which broke Blackfeet resistance to the United States. John was young at the beginning of the Thirties, as handsome and proud as he was more than thirty years later when he teased Bob for looking like a goat when we sat at the lunch counter in East Glacier. Since John was a deaf-mute due to a childhood disease, he was formally trained at a school for the deaf to speak sign language, and though there were diﬀerences from Indian sign-talk, he could have spoken with Voisin’s wife. (John was literate so he also wrote notes.) Voisin’s portrait busts, now at the Denver Art Museum, are classic to the point of severity: faces looking straight ahead, on a plain base, usually not including shoulders, and varying in size from six inches to two feet tall. Later he also did busts of people from other tribes, full ﬁgures, and at least one striking group of a hunter on horseback overrunning buﬀalo. When Charles M. Russell died in 1926, his horse had been led by one of his protegées, Charlie Beil. Beil had gone to East Glacier and now, in 1929, he must have found Voisin and Clarke in their studio. I’m quite sure that a fourth person was very much interested in what was going on: a 15-year-old boy called Robert Scriver. This was probably the year that he made a river-clay sculpture of his cousin Margaret sitting on the ground by the Scrivers’ little cowpony, Dayﬂy. Beil went on to become well known for his own busts of Indians, which he cast in bronze.2 Clarke carved his portraits of Indians in wood. Bob Scriver didn’t made his Blackfeet busts until 1978. All three sculptors addressed many other subjects and so did Voisin. In the Depression sculpture didn’t sell well enough to yield a living, so Voisin fell back on earlier training in architectural ornamentation, designing fabulous movie theatres – like Portland’s Oriental with its elephants – where the people went to escape their worries through the Thirties. I’m not sure Bob really understood who this visiting sculptor was or how Voisin’s life unfolded. He never mentioned the sculptor to me. Bill Harmsen’s self-published book, Illustrating the Lost Wax Method: Sculpture to Bronze, Featuring the Life and Sculpture of Adrien Alexandre Voisin, wasn’t available until 1980. The book includes sculptures of animals, very much in the tradition of the Animaliers, and re-creations of dinosaurs, which Charlie Beil also addressed, life-size in cement at the Calgary Zoo. Voisin had been a taxidermist and at one point created a small museum of full-mounts. (Beil married the daughter of the creator of the Luxton Museum, a collection of full-mounts in Banﬀ.) There is no record of Voisin knowing what had happened to that big-eared boy with hair ﬂopped over his forehead. The four sculptors who intersected in that Government Square studio in 1929 could not have been more diﬀerent: Clarke, a full-blood Blackfeet deafmute woodcarver; Beil, a German blacksmith’s son who built his studio/foundry in Banﬀ and supplied trophies for the Calgary Stampede; Scriver, a store-keep’s 338

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Bob Scriver self-portrait still in plastilene (1978). Photo: Mary Scriver.

X V I I PAT I N A : OV E RV I E W

339

kid who was supposed to be a musician; and Voisin, the son of a French horsetrainer who in 1873 drove Colonel John B. Stetson from San Francisco to New York City in a horse and carriage, and later set up a riding academy in Newport, Rhode Island, where he undoubtedly knew Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Even so do lives entwine in unexpected ways. Is the destiny of Bob Scriver glyptic, cut out of hard substance, or haptic, softly shaped by hands? To me it feels like both. It is as though Bob burned himself out in order to become bronze, exchanging his soft-as-wax ﬂesh for what he believed to be immortality. He teased me about being “Iron Woman,” hardened by determination, and yet he was far more unyielding in his intention to be a renowned sculptor. In the end it was as though everything had been knocked oﬀ, eroded away, except the part of him that was a sculptor. If I had the power, I would turn this book into a videotape now and send a camera among Bob’s sculptures. Let it pan from face to face around the circle of Bundle Keepers. Fade up with silhouettes of bears on their hind feet and wolves crouched into moose horns. Zoom in to look closely at the glossy patinas, the subtle texture of the horse’s hides, the hands gripping ropes or held out to the sky. Bucking horses and bulls bunch their muscles, making cowboys grimace. Women smile as their hair lifts on the wind. Imagine a montage for all the senses. The rich smell of horses. Shreds of cottonwood bark smudging on the kitchen stove. Eegy’s scream in the backyard. An elk bugling and another answering. The golden ﬂare of a trumpet blowing jazz licks. The heartbeat of Blackfeet drums. Wind tearing at the eaves. Hail hammering the studio skylight. And all through it Bob’s hands pushing and twisting the plastilene, thinking a thought, seeing a shape, making it come to life in the plastilena, Roma Plastilena, like a woman’s name. The crucible ready to pour, hot as a star, stinking of hot metal. Steam and patina chemicals, tangy and bitter. World-making. Auto-salviﬁc. Then ﬁnally the ancient peace of a sea of grass that we all come to, regardless of fame and fortune.

340

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Notes

CHAPTER I 1

This man was the Italian sailor ancestor of Turk Cobell, husband of Eloise Cobell who is the principal plaintiﬀ in the lawsuit against the United States for mismanagement of Indian trust funds. Eloise’s maiden name is Pepion, a family with many artists in it.

2

The Dawes Act broke up the reservations, which had until this time been held by the tribe in common, into “homesteads.” The consequences of each Indian owning his own piece of land were often tragic.

3

Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture (Macmillan, 1903 and 1924). This is a wonderful history of forgotten artists and sculptures.

4 5

The Baker Massacre that broke the Blackfeet took place in 1870. Adeline Adams, The Spirit of American Sculpture, written for the National Sculpture Society, New York, 1923, is an overview.

6

The sculptor of Paris Gibson was William Ordway Partridge (1861–1930), who also did a Pieta for the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

CHAPTER II 1

Though it would seem that the name might mean “scriver,” as in inscribe or write, some sources say it was originally “shriver” and more related to “shiver.” The occupation it referred to was cloak making.

2

I’m indebted for much of the family information to Doug Macﬁe, son of Bob’s cousin Murrray, and also the Canadian head of Clan Macﬁe.

3

“Sacred Paint: Ned Jacob” by Sandra Dallas, Fenn Galleries, 1979.

341

4

The photo book was William Farr’s The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984). Photo is on page 18.

5 6 7

Most of these stories were told to me by Wessie herself. From Bob’s notes for an autobiography. In The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882–1945 by William Farr, there is a photo on page 105 showing Sam Bird in hair chaps on horseback. One of the other riders is a Devereaux, but not Charlie.

8 9

Today the building is operated as a restaurant decorated with photos of the old days. Daniel Chester French’s ﬁrst sign of talent was carving a turnip to look like a frog in a jacket. Eventually he became the sculptor of the seated Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial.

10

A photograph of this classroom in the year 1913–14 is on page 60 of The Reservation Blackfeet: 1882–1945. In the Denver BIA records is the young male teacher’s list of pupils and their quirks, written up for the beneﬁt of next year’s teacher. There are two white boys in the class, the sons of Thad’s partner, Willets.

11

This was the famous Blackfeet writer, James Welch, Jr. Actually, the writer is James Welch the third, as Bob’s pal’s father was also named James Welch.

12

See E.E. Heikka, Sculptor of the American West by Vivian A. Paladin (Great Falls: Montana Art Investment Holding Company, 1990).

CHAPTER III 1

Quoted in Dale Burk, A Brush with the West (Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing Co., 1980), p. 128.

2

McClintock came to the reservation before the end of the nineteenth century as a government scientist and returned annually for many years. He is the author of The Old North Trail, which is illustrated with his photographs.

3

Weaver’s next position was with the Provincial Museum of Alberta in Edmonton, where he created the two major sculptures that ﬂank the grand staircase.

CHAPTER IV 1 2

New York: Crown Publishers, 1965. It was a sensitive point with the Blackfeet as well. Trachoma had aﬄicted them so badly around the turn of the century that other tribes called them “the one-eyed people.”

CHAPTER V 1

342

Malvina Hoﬀman, Yesterday Is Tomorrow: A Personal History (New York: Crown Publishers, 1965), 69–70.

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

CHAPTER VI 1

Edouard Lanteri, Modelling and Sculpture: A Guide for Artists and Students. In three volumes (Dover Publications, 1965).

2 3

Bill Ballantine, High West (Rand McNally and Co., 1969). Barnaby Conrad III, Ghost Hunting in Montana: A Search for Roots in the Old West (HarperCollins West, 1994).

CHAPTER VII 1

Lorne E. Render, The Mountains and the Sky (Calgary: Glenbow-Alberta Institute/ McClelland and Stewart West, 1974).

CHAPTER VIII 1

James Willard Schultz, edited by Keith C. Seele, Blackfoot and Buﬀalo: Memories of Life among the Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962).

2

In Canada the Blackfoot called them the “Bloodclot Hills.”

CHAPTER X 1

Many of these sculptures were donated to the City of Portland by Henry Waldo Coe, a doctor. I could not establish a link with the Cody Coe family, who were so generous with the Whitney Gallery of Western Art.

2

Years later Bob bought a heroic-size bronze casting of MacNeil’s chief from this group. It’s at the Montana Historical Society.

3

Gordon Monroe, who did Bob’s ﬁberglass work, made a heroic-size ﬁberglass Jesus on the Cross for the Browning Catholic Church.

CHAPTER XI 1 2

Mary Strachan, “Bob Scriver, Western Sculptor,” American Artist (September 1964). Pat Graves, “To Keep the Vanishing West,” True, the Man’s Magazine (December 1965). Photos by Irwin Bauer.

3

This bronze is also in the Montana Historical Society collection.

N OT E S

343

CHAPTER XII 1

The little pony head was never sold. It’s now in the collection of the Montana Historical Society.

2

For instance, “Paintbrushes and Pistols: How the Taos Artists Sold the West” by Sherry Clayton Taggett and Ted Schwartz. John Muir Publications: Santa Fe, 1990. ISBN 0-945465-65-3.

3

“Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, A Biography,” by B.H. Friedman. Doubleday & Company, Inc.: Garden City, New York, 1978. SIBN 0-385-12994-7

4

The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999).

5

According to Flora Miller Biddle, it was Mary Lou Whitney who ﬁnally mended the fences between Sonny and his sisters by persuading Sonny to put some money into the Manhattan Whitney and by exerting her own formidable charm.

6

Some years after the lawsuit he was tragically killed in a plane crash.

CHAPTER XIII 1

A good account of the booming of Western art is included in Fred Renner’s essay at the beginning of the book called Ten Years with the Cowboy Artists of America: A Complete History and Exhibition Record by James K. Howard (Flagstaﬀ, AZ: Northland Press, 1976).

2

End of the Trail: The Odyssey of a Statue (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973).

3

See Brian Dippie’s important book The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1982).

4

An account of this event is featured in W.K. Stratton’s Chasing the Rodeo: On Wild Rides and Big Dreams, Broken Hearts and Bones, and One Man’s Search for the West (Harcourt, 2005).

5

This sculpture, An Honest Try, displaced Lone Cowboy as Bob’s trademark image.

CHAPTER XIV

344

1

It was an irony that Lorraine, the fourth wife, turned out to be partly Indian. She had always “passed.”

2

The Old North Trail: Life, Legends, and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians, reprint ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).

3

For an excellent explanation of the importance of location within the circle, see Akak’stiman: a Blackfoot Framework for Decision-Making and Mediation Processes by Reg Crowshoe and Sybille Manneschmidt (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002).

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

CHAPTER XVI 1

Boyd Evans was the son of Joe Evans, who helped develop the foundry. Jim Brousseau ran a foundry in Kalispell.

2

Patty (Mrs. Don) Juneau posed for Sacajawea. The baby was ﬁve-month-old David Guardipee.

3

Tom Lovell was one of the noted illustrators who joined Cowboy Artists of America. One of his illustrations was in the December 1965 issue of True Magazine that printed the photo story about Bob and his bronzes.

4

Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.

CHAPTER XVII 1

There is no better contemporary book than Bronze Sculpture, Casting and Patination: Mud Fire Metal by Steve Hurst (Altgeln, PA: Schiﬀer Publishing, 2005). Included are samples and formulas for all patinas developed by Hurst over an extensive career.

2

Seven Piegans, all under eight inches tall.

N OT E S

345

Bob Scriver Timeline 1900–1910 1901

Thad Scriver comes to Browning to work for J.H. Sherburne.

1907

Thad Scriver and Horace Willits start a mercantile called “Willits and Scriver.” which evolves into the Browning Mercantile.

1910–1920 1911

August 9, Thad Scriver (34) marries Ellison Westgarth Macﬁe (23) at her family home in Clarenceville, Quebec.

1912

June 23, Harold Thaddeus Scriver is born in Conrad.

1914

August 15, Robert Macﬁe Scriver is born at home.

1920–1930 1920

Robert begins public school.

1922

Bank robbery destroys T.E. Scriver’s fortune.

1928

Robert begins high school. Plays ﬁrst chair cornet in the high school band.

1932

Graduates as Salutatorian.

TIMELINE

347

1930–1940 1932

Enrolls at Dickinson State Teachers’ College in North Dakota where he majors in education with minors in music and art. His art teacher is Zoe Beiler, later noted among midwestern female artists.

1934

Receives teaching degree. Enrolls at Vandercook School of Music in Chicago.

1935

Begins to teach in Browning.

1937

November 20, marries Alice Permillia Prestmo.

1938

June 19, daughter Margaret Alice is born.

1939

Summer graduate work at the University of Washington in Seattle.

1940–1950

348

1940

Resigns from Browning and teaches in Malta, MT.

1941

Master’s degree from Vandercook School of Music in Chicago.

1942

June 8, son James Robert Scriver is born.

1943

Enlists in the Army Air Force and is assigned to the Army Air Force Band, Alaskan Division as ﬁrst chair cornet.

1944

January 15, Alice is granted a divorce from Bob.

1945

November 7, he is honorably discharged as a sergeant. He has been playing lead cornet and doing arrangements for Bob Lyon’s band in Edmonton.

1946

January 4, marries Jeanette Germaine Caouette in Edmonton. In September he returns to teaching in Browning. Through the next few years he plays with Ted Weems, is accepted for Vaughn Monroe’s band, belongs to the Great Falls musicians’ local, plays in a theater pit in Great Falls, and at the Sportsman’s Club in Shelby.

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

1950–1960 1950

Opens ﬁrst taxidermy and curio shop and meets Ralph Crosby Smith, Brown & Bigelow calendar artist. Police magistrate for the Town of Browning and Justice of the Peace.

1953

Builds the ﬁrst section of the Scriver Taxidermy Studio.

1954

Meets John Clymer and Bob Lougheed, major illustrators.

1956

Enters the contest for a portrait of C.M. Russell and gets serious about sculpture.

1957

Meets George Phippen, a key ﬁgure in Western art.

1958

Main part of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife is built.

1959

April 24, Jeanette’s divorce from Bob is granted.

1960–1970 1960

Chosen to mount Big Medicine, the white buﬀalo, for the Montana Historical Society. Meets Warren Baumgartner, who gives him composition lessons.

1961

Two major Los Angeles shows in private homes. Opens the art gallery part of the Museum of Montana Wildlife. Invited to join “Society of Animal Artists.”

1962

Diorama room completed. Herpes simplex keratitis nearly destroys his eyesight. Builds studio home behind the shop. First bronzes cast at Mendota Foundry in St. Paul.

1963

Ends taxidermy business. Builds the Bighorn Foundry across the yard from his home.

TIMELINE

349

350

1964

Submits to New York juried exhibits: Lone Cowboy to Audubon Artists Fighting Elk to National Academy of Design The Last Warrior to Academic Artists in Springﬁeld, MA Fighting Elk sold through Grand Central Galleries. Panhandle Plains Museum requests bronzes for exhibit and sale. American Artist publishes article about Bob by Mary Strachan. Article in La Revue Moderne in Paris. Resigns as Justice of the Peace and City Magistrate. Major ﬂood on the Blackfeet Reservation closes down all tourist traﬃc for the summer.

1965

Elected to Salmagundi Club. Joins the International Art Guild. Boss of the Trail Herd accepted by Audubon Artists. Glenbow Foundation in Calgary, AB, purchases No More Buﬀalo, Transition, Ovis Dalli and Boss of the Trail Herd. Picture story in True magazine. Appears on To Tell the Truth! game show.

1966

Malvina Hoﬀman and Joy Buba sponsors for National Sculpture Society membership. Homestead diorama for the Hill County Museum in Havre, MT November 27, marries Mary Helen Strachan in Portland, OR.

1967

Joins Cowboy Artists of America Commissioned to do heroic-size portrait of Bill Linderman for the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. Commissioned by Mrs. Robert Walter to do a portrait of her husband on his polo pony and a cruciﬁx called Eli, Eli. Exhibits Buﬀalo Runner with Cow and Calf with International Art Guild in the Palais de al Scala, Monte Carlo, Monaco. Welds a life-size buﬀalo for Great Falls High School. Listed in Who’s Who in the West, the International Directory of the Arts, and the National Register of Prominent Americans.

1968

Margaret Scriver Skogen DeSmet Paul dies of cancer in Anacortes, WA. One-man show at Gallery ‘85 in Billings, MT. One-man show at the Montana Historical Society.

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

1969

Dedication of the new Buﬀalo Bill Historical Center, exhibiting a hundred Scriver bronzes. Whitney Gallery of Western Art purchases The Opening of the Sacred Medicine Pipe Bundle, Return of the Blackfeet Raiders, Whitetail Buck, and Into the Wind. Buﬀalo Runner with Cow and Calf wins Gold Medal at the Cowboy Artists of America show in Oklahoma City, OK. Welds steel 12-foot-high Rustler for C.M. Russell High School in Great Falls, MT. Transfer of the Little Dog Thunder Medicine Pipe Bundle to Bob and Mary Scriver.

1970–1980 1970

Near-fatal heart attack. Hospitalized all of April. Buys a small ranch on Two Medicine River. An Honest Try wins Gold Medal at CAA show. An Honest Try on cover of National Rodeo Finals program. Paywindow pictured in National Geographic book on the American cowboy. November 28, divorces Mary Strachan Scriver.

1971

Paywindow wins gold medal at CAA show. Diorama of surrender of Chief Joseph for the Hill County Museum in Havre. Marquita Maytag commissions a one-of-a-kind portrait of Chief Joseph. August 14, Thaddeus Emory Scriver dies at home after being bedridden for a year. Painting and dedication of the Badger tipi. Distinguished VIP Award from radio station KSEN in Shelby, MT.

1972

Not for Glory wins Silver Medal at CAA. June 3, Governor declares Bob Scriver Day in Montana. Show at Montana Historical Society. Designed Gold Medal for the Cut Bank, MT., Chamber of Commerce to present to the U.S. Olympic Basketball Team. One-man show of the rodeo bronzes at the Montana Historical Society.

1973

Layin’ the Trap wins the Silver Medal Award at the Cowboy Artists of America. Joins National Academy of Western Art and participates in show at Cowboy Hall of Fame. TIMELINE

351

Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City commissions a heroic-size statue of Jim Shoulders. Fort Benton Community Improvement Association commissions a heroic-size sculpture of Lewis, Clark, Sacajawea, and Pompey as a Montana Bicentennial Project. Buﬀalo Bill Historical Center commissions a life-size bust of Dr. Harold McCracken to present at his retirement on his 80th birthday. Riveredge Foundation in Calgary, AB purchases the 33 pieces of the Rodeo in Bronze series. Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association in Colorado Springs commissions a bust of Phil Lynde for the PRCA sculpture garden. Receives a World Championship buckle as the Cowboy’s National Sculptor. Included in International Biographies of the World. Commemorative medal for the Dempsey and Gibbons World Heavyweight Championship ﬁght in Shelby, MT.

352

1974

Honored guest artist at the Western Rendezvous of Art at the Montana Historical Society. Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association commissions a bust of Larry Mahan. Various persons commission small original bronzes for mass production by others, including Rex Brenneman, Darrell Peterson (Glacier Bronze), Stremmel Galleries, Inc., The Outlaw Inn in Kalispell, MT., and Robert Warden.

1975

Buﬀalo Bill Historical Center commissions a heroic-size statue of Buﬀalo Bill Cody and a ﬁve-and-a-half foot circular plaque for the entry. Self-publishes An Honest Try with photos by Asgar Mikkelson, explaining the rodeo series. Wins an award of excellence from the Printing Industry of America National Trade Association. Riveredge Foundation in Calgary, AB, commissions a bust of Eric Harvie. Paciﬁc Northwest Indian Center in Spokane tentatively commissions a heroic-size version of Transition. This institution later collapsed before the commission could be ﬁnalized.

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Stremmel Galleries sponsors Rodeo Series exhibit at Security National Bank in Reno. Bob is the parade marshal for the Reno Rodeo parade. Philip Morris commissions Marlboro belt buckle as a Bicentennial promotion. Paywindow and Layin’ the Trap shown at the Kentucky Derby and then included in a touring exhibit. National Sculpture Society exhibit includes Paywindow, the only work by a living artist. September 9, ﬁre destroys the workshop and part of the Museum of Montana Wildlife. Rebuilds by the end of the year. Heroic-size commissions must be started over. 1976

Stremmel Galleries sponsor an exhibit of Rodeo Series at Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco. National Finals takes Best of Show at the C.M. Russell exhibit. Diploma d’Honneur from the International Arts Guild in Monte Carlo. May 2, awarded Honorary Doctor of Art by Carroll College in Helena, MT. June 13, Fort Benton Bicentennial and Lewis and Clark statue dedication. Bob is parade marshal on his horse Gunsmoke. July 13, buys the Doane ranch, west of Browning.

1977

February 16, Bob’s mother, Ellison Westgarth Macﬁe Scriver, dies aged 89. Best of Show in Sculpture at C.M. Russell exhibit for The Explorers at the Marias. Captain Lewis and Dog Scannon commissioned by Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, Inc. Bust of Casey Tibbs commissioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association. Bust of Senator Burton K. Wheeler commissioned for the Montana Capitol buildiing in Helena. Featured in the ﬁrst edition of Art West Magazine. Old West Trail Foundation proclaims him America’s leading Western artist in All Media. Receives the “William F. Cody” Award. Buﬀalo Bill, Plainsman awarded Silver Medal by Cowboy Artists of America. Participates in “Show of Hands,” a documentary ﬁlm by Les Kramer. TIMELINE

353

354

1978

“Original Art Achievement Award” at the C.M. Russell Auction. Publishes No More Buﬀalo to record his series of Blackfeet bronzes. Grandfather Tells of the Horse awarded Gold Medal at Cowboy Artists of America. Included in National Register of Prominent Americans.

1979

Winchester Rider commissioned by the Buﬀalo Bill Historical Center and the Winchester Riﬂe company. Grizzly Head belt buckle commissioned by the Montana Fish and Game Department. Four belt buckles commissioned by the Lewis and Clark Festival committee: Explorers of the Marias, At Camp Disappointment, Near Cut Bank, Montana, and Lewis Meets the Blackfeet. Two belt buckles, The Cowboy and The Prospector, and one sculpture, Prospector, commissioned by Banco Northwestern in Helena, MT. Sacajawea commissioned by Marquita Maytag. PRCA logo commissioned as a small statue. Bridger bust and two Frisky Colts commissioned. Bust of Corrie Llewellyn commissioned by her husband, Leonard F. Llewellyn. Honored guest at the Calgary Stampede (both 1978 and 1979). Expands and rebuilds the Bighorn Foundry after buying the lot next door. Part of the Rodeo Series bought for the new Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame in Colorado Spring. Everett B. Bowman, famous RCA roper, commissioned for the Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs. Johnny Bench, baseball player and catcher, commissioned by the Cincinnati Reds. Part of Rodeo Series sold to Hong Kong customer. Participates in Society des Artists Independents exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, France.

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

1980–1990 1980

Charmaine Marie DeSmet, daughter of Margaret and granddaughter of Bob, dies in a car crash in Florida. She had been serving in the military but was on disability because of a previous car accident. Hugh Bennett, ﬁrst Secretary of the Turtle Rodeo Association, commissioned by the Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame. “Award of Meritorious Achievement for Outstanding Contributions to Bring this Nation a Greater Awareness and Appreciation of the Lewis & Clark Expedition” given by the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation on August 22.

1981

Selected by the Montana Arts Council as one of 22 ﬁnalists for the “Gallery of Outstanding Montanans Project.” One-and-a-half life-size version of the PRCA bucking horse logo commissioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association in Colorado Springs. A second bronze casting is at the Montana Historical Society in Helena and a ﬁberglass casting is in Babb, MT, at the elementary school, alongside a ﬁberglass casting of An Honest Try. Dale Smith on “Poker Chip” and a one-and-a-half life-size bronze of Bill Ward on “Sea Lion” commissioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs. A Saddle Bronc–1919, Wild Horse Race–1918, Single Steer Jerking– 1917, Bull Dogger–1916, and Steer Rider commissioned by the National High School Rodeo Association to raise money for High School Rodeo scholarships. One-third life-size portrait of Descent to be placed on his grave commissioned. Phil and Steve Mahre, World Champion Downhill Skier twins of Yakima, WA, portraits commissioned by White Pass Alpine Ski Association.

1983

Participates in a traveling show of sculpture in China. No More Buﬀalo, the 53-piece series of bronzes of Blackfeet culture and heritage, exhibited for the summer at the C.M. Russell Museum at Great Falls, MT; then for two months at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, MT; and then to the National Historical Museum in Denver, CO, for three months. TIMELINE

355

Bob adds “Hall of Bronze” to the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildife. Christ the Teacher commissoned by Carroll College in Helena, MT, but never completed. Earl Old Person, Chief of the Blackfeet commissioned for the Indian Health Service Hospital in Browning, MT. Two belt buckles: First Sight of the Great Falls of the Missouri, and Portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri

356

1984

One-man show at the Cowboy Artists of America. At this year’s Russell Auction, Bob does a quick-draw portrait of Senator Max Baucus. Harold Thaddeus Scriver, Bob’s brother, dies at 72.

1985

Two belt buckles: Lewis, Clark and Sacajawea, and Sacajawea and Pom.

1986

Explorers at the Portage monument (Lewis, Clark, York and the dog, Seaman) commissioned for Great Falls, MT. Featured in the Amy Grant “Headin’ Home” Holiday Special Christmas show, an NBC television special. Partly ﬁlmed in the Scriver Museum. Joins the National Advisory Board for the C.M. Russell Museum. An Honest Try, one-and-a-half life-sized bronze, dedicated at the Kansas Board of Trade. Ground-breaking in Cut Bank for a proposed giant statue of Jesus.

1987

Increasing health problems and a serious stroke. Concrete tipi which Bob had bought and moved across the street from the museum is now returned to the city and placed where it had been at the Duck Lake road crossroads.

1988

International Peace Center, an organization trying to raise money for a huge statue of Jesus, bases a lottery on bronzes of Buddies, two horses standing head-to-tail in ﬂy-time. Teddy Roosevelt portrait commissioned by the Boone and Crockett Club. One-third life-sized bronze is placed at the ranch outside Dupuyer. Heroic-size Guardsman commissioned by the Montana National Guard but never progresses past the maquette stage. No More Buﬀalo accepted to the 55th Annual Exhibition of the National Sculpture Society in New York City.

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

1989

Dedication of Lewis, Clark York and the Dog Seaman at the Portage in Great Falls. Scriver Museum belt buckle for the local high school rodeo champion.

1990

The federal Repatriation of Indian Artifacts Act is passed and Bob becomes convinced his collection will be seized. Sale of the Scriver Indian Artifact Collection to the Alberta Provincial Museum (now the Royal Alberta Museum). The materials had been recorded in a book Bob produced: The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains. The collection included a gun collection and early RCMP uniforms. The sale touched oﬀ an international uproar. Later the sacred materials were placed in the safekeeping of the North Piegan elders council. June 15, the Browning Mercantile burns to the ground. Governor’s Award for Achievement in the Arts awarded in a gala event in Great Falls, Montana.

1991

Hornaday Buﬀalo Group commissioned to raise money for the restoration of the Hornaday Buﬀalo taxidermy group.

1992

A series of 26 bronze panels depicting Russell’s life created for the C.M. Russell Museum.

1993

August 26, James Robert Scriver, Bob’s son, dies of cancer. He leaves two grown daughters.

1994

A convulsive seizure reveals Type 2 Diabetes. The Exalted Ruler, an elk, donated to the C.M. Russell Museum to raise money to keep the Russell painting of that name in Montana.

1997 1998

Heart bypass surgery Negotiations for a portrait of Mike Mansﬁeld which never got past the maquette stage. After a stop at a hospital emergency room for stabilization, Bob gives a speech to the Lewis and Clark Portage Chapter. Norma Ashby arranged to have it taped. A ﬁberglass composite of the two Lewis and Clark public monuments, reduced in size, was gifted to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center.

TIMELINE

357

1999

Dies on January 29. Funeral arrangements made by Boyd Evans. Memorial at Browning High School. Burial at Crown Hill Cemetery in Cut Bank, MT, with his parents and brother.

2000–2007

358

2000

Forty major art works from the estate sold at auction in Reno through Coeur d’Alene Art Auction. September 23, personal collection of works from the estate dispersed at auction in Kalispell, Montana, by Coeur d’Alene Art Auction. Museum, foundry and studio bought by the Blackfeet Tribe. The Museum was remodeled as the Blackfeet Heritage Center. Flatiron Ranch bought by the Blackfeet Tribe in cooperation with Nature Conservancy in order to create a nature study center. Remainder of estate, after much negotiation and in spite of the expectation that the C.M. Russell Museum would be the beneﬁciary, is awarded to the Montana Historical Society. Comprises all residual materials, including Bob’s castings of his own work, with temporary custody of all the Blackfeet bronzes going to the Royal Provincial Museum in Edmonton and all the mounted animals in the Museum of Montana Wildlife being put in the temporary care of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. The Thad and Wessie Scriver family home is bought privately. The Horn allotment on Two Medicine River, often used as ceremonial grounds, is bought by Boyd and Lila Evans. The Thunder Pipe Bundle disappears.

2001

“A Legacy in Bronze: The Sculpture of Bob Scriver” exhibit of 40 bronzes selected from the 800-plus bronzes in his estate, at the Montana Historical Society in Helena, MT.

2002

November 3, death of Dorothy Lorraine Holdren Caldwell Scriver, in Nanoose Bay, BC, Canada, where she had built a new house. She had inherited land there. Her will provided for her two brothers and niece to inherit part of her estate. A small annual bursary award was given to honor art students at Carroll College in Helena.

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

2006

March 20, Jeanette Caoette Scriver Chase passes away in Grants Pass, OR. “The Frontier in Bronze” exhibit of Scriver bronzes at the Royal Alberta Museum. Honored guest is Hélène DeVicq, sister of Jeanette, and model for the Pieta as well as several busts.

2007

Ed Mitch collection of Scriver bronzes donated to the C.M. Russell Museum and exhibited there for the summer. Mitch also gave them the rights to sell a DVD of Bob Scriver talking about his work, especially the Blackfoot series. It is called “Bob Scriver, A Lifetime of Creation.”

TIMELINE

359

Bibliography By Bob Scriver An Honest Try. Self-published, printed by The Lowell Press, 1975. No More Buﬀalo. Self-published, printed by The Lowell Press, 1982. The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains by Bob Scriver. Self-published, printed by The Lowell Press, 1990. Unpublished notes for an autobiography. Helena, MT: Montana Historical Society. Compiled and annotated by Mary Scriver.

Scriver Catalogues Coeur d’Alene Art Auction from the Estate of Robert M. Scriver, September 23, 2000. Montana Historical Society. Scriver. 1972. Catalogue. Render, Lorne E. Expressions in Bronze: Sculpture by Robert Scriver. Great Falls, MT: C.M. Russell Museum, 1993. Scriver, Bob, and Mary Scriver. A pack of postcards, each depicting a diﬀerent sculpture. Scriver, Bob. The Sculpture of Bob Scriver. Plastic spine. Self-published. Undated. Probably 1964. Scriver, Bob. Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife. A catalogue of exhibits. (Mounted animals.)

361

Scriver Videotapes “A Portrait of Charles M. Russell: Preserver of the Old West.” Seattle, WA.: High Hopes Productions, 1993. “An Evening with Bob Scriver.” Lewis and Clark Portage Route Chapter 61, Montana, Fall 1998. A self-produced video recording the visit of Maurice Chaillot and Hélène Devicq to Browning, MT., in order to pose for the Prince of Peace monument, 1984. “Bob Scriver, A Lifetime of Creation,” DVD available through the C.M. Russell Museum, Great Falls, MT, courtesy of Ed Mitch. A half-hour of Bob talking about his life and art. 1995.

Scriver in Montana Ballantine, Bill. High West. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally and Co., 1969. Pp. 128–41. Conrad, Barnaby III. Ghost Hunting in Montana: A Search for Roots in the Old West. New York, NY: HarperCollinsWest, 1994. Pp. 47–67. Kraft, Ernie. Untold Tales of Bison Range Trails. Stevensville, MT: Stoneydale Press, 2006. Zion, Scotty. Been Any Bigger I’ d Have Said So! No publication date. Self-published in Great Falls.

American Bronzes Adams, Adeline. The Spirit of American Sculpture. New York, NY: National Sculpture Society, 1923. Friedman, B.H. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1978. Fusco, Peter, and H.W. Janson, The Romantics to Rodin: French Nineteenth- Century Sculpture from North American Collections. Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with George Braziller, 1980. Gates, Sarah. From Neo-Classical and Beaux-Arts to Modernism. Eaton Fine Art. Catalogue. Goldstein, Malcolm. Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United States. Oxford University Press, 2000. Hoﬀman, Malvina. Heads and Tales. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936. Hoﬀman, Malvina. Sculpture Inside and Out. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1939. Hoﬀman, Malvina. Yesterday Is Tomorrow. New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 1965. Hurst, Steve. Bronze Sculpture Casting and Patination: Mud Fire Metal. Atglen, PA: Schiﬀer Publishing Co., 2005.

362

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Jackson, Harry. Lost Wax Bronze Casting: a Photographic Essay on this Antique and Venerable Art. Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1972. Janson, H.W., 19th-Century Sculpture. Harry N. Abrams, 1985. Longstreth, T. Morris. The Great Venture. Macmillan, 1948. About Daniel Chester French for young people. Mackay, James. The Animaliers: A Collector’s Guide to the Animal Sculptors of the 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1973. Montagu, Jennifer. Bronzes. Octopus Books, 1972. Reynolds, Donald Martin. Masters of American Sculpture: The Figurative Tradition from the American Renaissance to the Millennium. Abbeville Press, 1993. Richman, Michael, Daniel Chester French: An American Sculptor. The Preservation Press, National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1976. Symonds, John Addington, trans. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. New York: Washington Square Press, 1963. Taft, Lorado. The History of American Sculpture. Macmillan: 1903 and 1924.

American Western Art Ainsworth, Ed. The Cowboy in Art. New York: Bonanza Books, 1968. Anonymous. Powell. Kalispell, MT: Thomas Printing, 1978. Booklet. Boehme, Sarah E. Rendezvous to Roundup: The First 100 Years of Art in Wyoming. Cody, WY: Buﬀalo Bill Historical Center. 1990. Catalogue. Broder, Patricia Janis. Bronzes of the American West. Harry N. Abrams, 1973. Burk, Dale A. New Interpretations. Stevensville, MT: Stoneydale Press, 1969. Burk, Dale A. A Brush with the West. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing Co., 1980. Chatham, Russell, Russell Chatham. Seattle, WA: Winn Books, 1984. Monograph. C.M. Russell Museum. Montana 1880–1910 with Henry Farny and his Subjects. Great Falls, MT. Catalogue. C.M Russell Auction of Original Western Art. The Advertising Club of Great Falls. Annual exhibit catalogue. 1972. Cowboy Artists of America. Annual exhibit catalogues, which double as directories of the members. I had in hand 1968, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1979, 1981, 1982 (Scriver now listed as “emeritus.”), 1984 (directory expanded to include emeriti). Crowell, Dave. Montana’s Own. Missoula, MT: self-published, 1970. Dallas, Sandra. Sacred Paint: Ned Jacob. Santa Fe, NM: Fenn Galleries Publishing Co., 1979. Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1982. Dippie, Brian W. West-Fever. Los Angeles, CA: Autry Museum of Western Heritage, 1998. BIBLIOGRAPHY

363

Dippie, Brian W. Catlin and His Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Gelein, Frank. Harry Jackson. New York, NY: Kennedy Galleries, 1969. Catalogue/ Monograph. Goetzman, William H., and Joseph C. Porter, with artist’s biographies by David C. Hunt. The West as Romantic Horizon. Center for Western Studies, Joslyn Art Museum, 1981. Goppert, Deborah. Twelve Contemporary Western Artists. Selections from the Whitney Gallery of Western Art at the Buﬀalo Bill Historical Center. Cody, WY, 1978. Hassrick, Peter H. (preface), and Deborah Goppert. Twelve Contemporary Western Artists. Cody, WY: Whitney Gallery of Western Art and Buﬀalo Bill Historical Center, 1978. Hedgepeth, Don. Mountain Majesty: The Art of John Fery. Great Falls, MT: CM Russell Museum, 1998. Heminway, John. Native Faces: Winold Reiss. Bozeman, MT: Thomas Nygard Gallery, 1997. Hockaday Museum of Art. Winold Reiss, Artist for the Great Northern. Kalispell, MT, 2005. Includes an essay by Scott J. Tanner. Krakel, Dean. End of the Trail: The Odyssey of a Statue. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. Krakel, Dean. Adventures in Western Art. Kansas City: The Lowell Press, 1977. Lange, Dorothea, Edith Hamlin, and Daniel and John Dixon (His two wives and two sons). The Thunderbird Remembered: Maynard Dixon, the Man and the Artist. Los Angeles, CA: Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, 1994. McCracken, Harold, Richard Frost, Leo A. Platteter, and Don Hedgpeth. The West of Buﬀalo Bill: Frontier, Art, Indian Crafts, Memorabilia from the Buﬀalo Bill Historical Center. Harry N. Abrams, 1974. Museum of the Plains Indian. Forty and Five: An Exhibit of Paintings of Indians by Montana artists, past and present. Browning, MT, 1964. National Academy of Western Art. Oklahoma City, OK: National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center. Annual catalogue, 1982. Scriver is listed only as a prize-winner, not in the directory. Paladin, Vivian A. E.E. Heikka: Sculptor of the American West. Great Falls, MT: Montana Art Investment Holding Co., 1990. Peters, Gerald. The Taos Society of Artists: Masters and Masterworks. Santa Fe, NM: Gerald Peters Gallery, 1998. Peterson, Larry Len. The Call of the Mountains: The Artists of Glacier National Park. Settlers West Galleries: 2002. Price, Willadene. Gutzon Borglum: Artist and Patriot. 1961. Raczka, Paul. Winold Reiss: Portraits of the Races. Great Falls, MT: C.M. Russell Museum, 1986.

364

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Reiss, Peter. Native Faces. Bozeman, MT: Thomas Nygard Gallery, 1997. Render, Lorne E. The Mountains and the Sky. Calgary, AB: Glenbow–Alberta Institute and McClelland and Stewart West, 1974. Reynolds, Catherine A. Cowboy Artists of America. El Paso, TX: Desert Hawk Publishing, 1988. Russell, Austin. CMR: Charles M. Russell, Cowboy Artist. Twayne Publishers, 1957. Stauﬀer, Joan. Behind Every Man: The Story of Nancy Cooper Russell. Daljo Publishing, 1990. Steele, Ray. Joseph Henry Sharp and the Lure of the West. Great Falls, MT: C.M. Russell Museum, no date. Taggett, Sherry Clayton, and Ted Schwarz. Paintbrushes and Pistols: How the Taos Artists Sold the West. John Muir Publications, 1990. Taliaferro, John. Charles M. Russell: the Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist. Little, Brown and Co., 1996. Taliaferro, John. Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore. PublicAﬀairs (Perseus Books), 2002. Thomas Nygard Gallery. Recounting the Old West II: Important Paintings, Sculpture and Words on Paper. Bozeman, MT, 2003. Catalogue. Udall, Sharyn R. Contested Terrain: Myth and Meanings in Southwest Art. University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Wunderlich, Rudolf. Artists of the American West. New York, NY, no date.

Blackfoot Nation Crowshoe, Reg, and Sybille Manneschmidt. Akak’stiman: A Blackfoot Framework for Decision-making and Mediation Processes. Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press, 2002. Dyck, Paul. “The Thunder Medicine Pipe of the Blackfeet People.” In Dr. Harold McCracken, ed., A Blackfoot Sacred Ceremony, Preserved. Cody, WY: Buﬀalo Bill Historical Center, 1972. Gulliford, Andrew. Sacred Objects and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2000. Hungry-Wolf, Adolf. The Blackfoot Papers. Self-published in four volumes: Vol. 1, Pikunni History and Culture. Vol. 2, Pikunni Ceremonial Life. Vol. 3, Pikuni Portfolio: Glacier National Park, Dancing and North American Indian Days. Vol. 4, Pikunni Biographies. Skookumchuck, BC: Good Medicine Foundation, 2006. Stepney, Philip H.R., and David J. Goa. The Scriver Blackfoot Collection: Repatriation of Canada’s Heritage. Edmonton, AB: Provincial Museum of Alberta, 1990.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

365

Museums and Dealers Asma, Stephen. Stuﬀed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. Oxford University Press, 2001. Behrman, S.N. Duveen: The Story of the Most Spectacular Art Dealer of All Time. New York, NY: The Little Bookroom, 1951. Biddle, Flora Miller. The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made, a Family Memoir. New York, NY: Arcade Publishing, 1999. Goldstein, Malcolm. Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United States. Oxford University Press, 2000. Michalski, Sergiusz. Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997. London: Reaktion Books, 1998. Parsons, James. The Art Fever: Passages through the Western Art Trade. Taos, NM: Gallery West, Inc., 1981. Samuels, Peggy and Harold. Everyone’s Guide to Buying Art. Englewood Cliﬀs, NY: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1984. Weil, Stephen E. Beauty and the Beasts: On Museums, Art, the Law, and the Market. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983. Werner, Paul. Museum, Inc: Inside the Global Art World. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2005.

Rodeo Stratton, W.K. (Kip). Chasing the Rodeo: On the Wild Rides and Big Dreams, Broken Hearts and Broken Bones, and One Man’s Search for the West. Harcourt, 2005.

Magazines Burk, Dale. “The Artistic Stature of Bob Scriver.” Art West, Vol. 1, No. 3. Spring 1978. Butler, Ron. “The Big Boom in Western Art.” Arizona Highways, March 1972. Pp. 40–49. “Cowboy Artists of America.” No author credited (copy supplied by the artists – mostly photos). Southwestern Art Scene, Vol. 1, No. 7, March 1968. Dyck, Paul. “Lone Wolf Returns to that Long Time Ago.” Montana, the Magazine of Western History, Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter 1972. Pp.18–41. Edwards, Mike W. and Nicholas deVore III. “Should They Build a Fence around Montana?” National Geographic, Vol. 149, No. 5, May 1976.

366

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Farr, William E. “ Troubled Bundles, Troubled Blackfeet.” Montana, the Magazine of Western History, Vol. 43, No. 4, Autumn 1993. And Response to Farr: Letters to the Editor. Montana, the Magazine of Western History, Vol. 44, No. 3, Summer 1994. Pp. 88–94. Gildart, Robert C. “Creation: Robert Macﬁe Scriver and the Blackfeet Epic.” Southwest Art, July 1983. Gildart, Robert C. and Bob Scriver. “Bob Scriver and the Blackfeet Indians.” Montana Magazine, Holiday Issue, 1982. Graves, Pat. “To Keep the Vanishing West.” True, the Man’s Magazine, December 1965. Harvey, Betty. “Bob Scriver.” Western Art Digest, Vol. 14, No. 1, January/February 1987. Langley, Leonora. “George Montgomery’s Western Art Collection.” Antiques and Fine Art, October 1987. Mochary, Alexandra. “Great Public Western Art Collections.” Antiques and Fine Art, October 1987. Nelson, Van Kirke. “In Memory of Ace Powell: Don’t Shake Hands with the Devil, or He’ll Pull You into Hell.” A tribute to Ace Powell by Van Kirke Nelson. Paladin, Vivian. “A. Phimister Proctor: Master Sculptor of Horses.” Montana, the Magazine of Western History, Vol 14, No. 1, January 1964. Rhodes, Lil. “The Rainbow Hand of Paul Dyck.” Art West, Summer 1977. Rovetti, Paul. “Through the windows of my soul... Harry Jackson.” Fine Art Collector, Vol. 1, No. 12, December 1991–January 1992. Scriver, Mary. “The Art of Bronze: Everything You Always Wanted to Know.” Art West, Vol. 7, No. 1, December 1983. Scriver, Mary. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Bronze: Part Two.” Art West, Vol. 7, No. 2, February 1984. Scriver, Mary. “Buyer Beware: Bronze Rustling.” Art West, Vol. 8, No. 2, January/ February 1985. Scriver, Mary. “He Knows his Subject.” Montana Arts, Vol. 21, No. 3, February/ March 1969. “Scriver’s Linderman Statue.” no author credited. The Western Horseman, April 1968. “Society of Animal Artists.” National Wildlife, Vol. 6, No. 2, February/March 1968 (no author credited, mostly photos). Steele, Ray W. “C.M. Russell Museum: A Tribute to Montana’s Master of Western Art.” Art West, Summer, 1977. Strachan, Mary (Mary Scriver). “Bob Scriver, Western Sculptor.” American Artist, September 1964. Warden, J.F. “Montana’s Really Big Show: the 10th Annual C.M. Russell Auction.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

367

No Author (Newsletters, etc.) La Revue Moderne. “Bob Scriver.” pp. 19–20. 1 Janvier 1965. In French. The Montana Post, Oﬃcial Newsletter of the Montana Historical Society. “Scriver Models Gift of Actor George Montgomery.” Vol. 3, No. 2, February 1965. The Montana Post, Oﬃcial Newsletter of the Montana Historical Society. “Scriver Show Opens.” Vol. 10, No. 3, August/September 1972. National Wildlife. “National Wildlife Revisits the Society of Animal Artists.” Vol. 6, No. 2, Feb/March 1968. Pp. 21–27. Southwestern Art Scene. “Cowboy Artists of America” (overview and individual stories). Vol. 1, No. 7, March 1968. Pp. 24–45

368

A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Legacies Shared Series Janice Dickin, series editor ISSN 1498-2358 The Legacies Shared series preserves the many personal histories and experiences of pioneer and immigrant life that may have disappeared or have been overlooked. The purpose of this series is to create, save, and publish voices from the heartland of the continent that might otherwise be lost to the public discourse. The manuscripts may take the form of memoirs, letters, photographs, art work, recipes or maps, works of ﬁction or poetry, archival documents, even oral history. A complete listing of titles in this series may be found at www.uofcpress.com. Memories, Dreams, Nightmares: Memoirs of a Holocaust Survivor Jack Weiss · No. 13 The Honourable Member for Vegreville: The Memoirs and Diary of Anthony Hlynka, MP Anthony Hlynka, translated by Oleh Gerus · No. 14 The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary-Imperialism on the North Paciﬁc Coast Margaret Butcher, edited by Mary-Ellen Kelm · No. 15 The First Dutch Settlement in Alberta: Letters from the Pioneer Years, 1903-14 edited by Donald Sinnema · No. 16 Suitable for the Wilds: Letters from Northern Alberta, 1929-31 Mary Percy Jackson edited by Janice Dickin · No. 17 A Voice of Her Own edited by Thelma Poirier, Doris Bircham, JoAnn Jones-Hole, Patricia Slade and Susan Vogelaar · No. 18 What’s All This Got to Do with the Price of 2 x 4’s? Michael Apsey · No. 19 Zhorna: Material Culture of the Ukrainian Pioneers Roman Fodchuk · No. 20 371

Behind the Man: John Laurie, Ruth Gorman, and the Indian Vote in Canada Ruth Gorman, edited by Frits Pannekoek · No. 21 Missing Pieces: My Life as a Child Survivor of the Holocaust Olga Verrall · No. 22 Medicine and Duty: The World War I Memoir of Captain Harold W. McGill, Medical Oﬃcer 31st Battalion C.E.F. Edited by Marjorie Barron Norris · No. 23 Missionaries Among Miners, Migrants, and Blackfoot: The Van Tighem Brothers’ Diaries, Alberta 1875–1917 Edited by Mary Eggermont-Molenaar and Paul Callens · No. 24 Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver Mary Scriver · No. 25 Give Your Other Vote to the Sister: A Woman’s Journey into the Great War Debbie Marshall · No. 26 The Way It Was: Vignettes from My One-Room Schools Edith Van Kleek, edited by Thelma Jo Dobson · No. 27

– From the foreword by Brian W. Dippie, University of Victoria

Mary Strachan Scriver lived and worked with Bob Scriver for over a decade and was instrumental in his rise to international acclaim. Working alongside her husband, she became intimately familiar with the man, his work, and his process. Her frank, uncensored, and highly entertaining biography reveals details that give the reader a unique picture of Scriver both as man and as artist. Bronze Inside and Out also provides a fascinating look into the practice of bronze casting, cleverly structuring the story of Bob Scriver’s life according to the steps in this complicated and temperamental process. Mary Strachan Scriver lives in Valier, Montana, near the Blackfeet reservation, where she has worked as a teacher, a writer, and a Unitarian minister. www.uofcpress.com 978-1-55238-227-1

M A RY S T R A C H A N S C R I V E R



BRONZE Inside and Out

Bronze Inside and Out is a literary biography of sculptor Bob Scriver, written by his wife, Mary Strachan Scriver. Bob Scriver is best known for his work in bronze and for his pivotal role in the rise of “cowboy art.” Living and working on the Montana Blackfeet Reservation, Scriver created a bronze foundry, a museum, and a studio – an atelier based on classical methods, but with local Blackfeet artisans. His importance in the still-developing genre of “Western Art” cannot be overstated.

SCRIVER

“More than any other book that I can think of, Bronze Inside and Out puts a human face on Western art—indeed, all art. It invites us to ponder the very nature of the creative process.”

bronze Inside and Out A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver (Legacies Shared)

Harrier. Inside and Out

Harrier Inside and Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Volcanoes Inside And Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver (Legacies Shared)

Harrier. Inside and Out

Harrier Inside and Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Volcanoes Inside And Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out

Recommend Documents