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Lot Essay
One of the most famous Western American images ever conceived, James Earle Fraser's celebrated sculpture The End of the Trail captures the despair of Native Americans over the loss of their homeland, simultaneously drawing attention to their plight and poignantly celebrating their indelible character.
Raised on a family ranch in the Dakota Territory, present-day South Dakota, Fraser attended school in Minneapolis before his family moved to Chicago, where he attended evening classes at the Art Institute. In 1896 Fraser travelled to Paris in order to pursue his career in earnest and soon enrolled at the famed Ecole des Beaux-Arts. During his time abroad, Fraser met Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whom he would continue to assist upon his return to America, where he eventually established a studio of his own in New York in 1902. In addition to the present work, Fraser is also well-known today for his contributions to the design of the Buffalo Head Nickel, as well as for numerous public monuments in Washington, D.C.
First modeled in plaster in 1894, Fraser’s vision for The End of the Trail was initially realized in monumental scale to feature prominently at the 1915 Pan-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where it won a gold medal. Fraser acknowledged that the inspiration for the work was largely based on his own experience, expressing sympathy for Sioux Indians who would venture out from their confinement on the Crow Creek Reservation to hunt on their ancestral lands near his childhood home. Fraser further explained that he was inspired by a notion he overheard from trappers of his grandfather’s generation, professing that the Native American tribes were being pushed further and further from their homelands. Ultimately, after considering other sculptures in the subject, Fraser landed on the idea “of making an Indian which represented his race reaching the end of the trail, at the edge of the Pacific [Ocean].’” (T. Tolles, T.B. Smith, The American West in Bronze, New Haven, Connecticut, 2013, p. 50)
In his interpretation of the trail’s end, Fraser depicts an exhausted Native American warrior slumped on his mount. The pair visibly struggle against the elements, as seen in the positioning of the horse’s windblown tale and the rider’s robe and hair. From the earliest days, this dramatic positioning elicited a range of reactions from the American public. One period publication announced his subject as, “…the tragic figure of the last Indian, on Horseback. The horse crouched before the fury of the storm back of him, and the man’s figure bent halfway to the horse’s mane. They are indeed at the end of the trail, and the great storm that has driven them on is the national stupidity that has greedily and cruelly destroyed a race of people possessing imagination, integrity, fidelity and nobility. This monument erected would be to the nobility of the Indian.” (“A Sculptor of People and Ideals,” The Touchstone, New York, May 1920, vol. VII, no. 2, p. 93) Such sentiments represented early recognition of the role that non-Native Americans played in the demise of the country’s original inhabitants, while also building on an already widely established romantic notion of the American Indian.
The image’s popularity likely resulted in Fraser’s reducing his heroic plaster monument into two smaller sculptures. The larger reduction measures 44-inches, while the present version of the sculpture is a reduction in the smaller 33-inch scale. An entry for the present cast, number 10 in the edition, is located in the Roman Bronze Works ledger book for February 28th, 1919. Other editions of the sculpture in this scale are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming.
Raised on a family ranch in the Dakota Territory, present-day South Dakota, Fraser attended school in Minneapolis before his family moved to Chicago, where he attended evening classes at the Art Institute. In 1896 Fraser travelled to Paris in order to pursue his career in earnest and soon enrolled at the famed Ecole des Beaux-Arts. During his time abroad, Fraser met Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whom he would continue to assist upon his return to America, where he eventually established a studio of his own in New York in 1902. In addition to the present work, Fraser is also well-known today for his contributions to the design of the Buffalo Head Nickel, as well as for numerous public monuments in Washington, D.C.
First modeled in plaster in 1894, Fraser’s vision for The End of the Trail was initially realized in monumental scale to feature prominently at the 1915 Pan-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where it won a gold medal. Fraser acknowledged that the inspiration for the work was largely based on his own experience, expressing sympathy for Sioux Indians who would venture out from their confinement on the Crow Creek Reservation to hunt on their ancestral lands near his childhood home. Fraser further explained that he was inspired by a notion he overheard from trappers of his grandfather’s generation, professing that the Native American tribes were being pushed further and further from their homelands. Ultimately, after considering other sculptures in the subject, Fraser landed on the idea “of making an Indian which represented his race reaching the end of the trail, at the edge of the Pacific [Ocean].’” (T. Tolles, T.B. Smith, The American West in Bronze, New Haven, Connecticut, 2013, p. 50)
In his interpretation of the trail’s end, Fraser depicts an exhausted Native American warrior slumped on his mount. The pair visibly struggle against the elements, as seen in the positioning of the horse’s windblown tale and the rider’s robe and hair. From the earliest days, this dramatic positioning elicited a range of reactions from the American public. One period publication announced his subject as, “…the tragic figure of the last Indian, on Horseback. The horse crouched before the fury of the storm back of him, and the man’s figure bent halfway to the horse’s mane. They are indeed at the end of the trail, and the great storm that has driven them on is the national stupidity that has greedily and cruelly destroyed a race of people possessing imagination, integrity, fidelity and nobility. This monument erected would be to the nobility of the Indian.” (“A Sculptor of People and Ideals,” The Touchstone, New York, May 1920, vol. VII, no. 2, p. 93) Such sentiments represented early recognition of the role that non-Native Americans played in the demise of the country’s original inhabitants, while also building on an already widely established romantic notion of the American Indian.
The image’s popularity likely resulted in Fraser’s reducing his heroic plaster monument into two smaller sculptures. The larger reduction measures 44-inches, while the present version of the sculpture is a reduction in the smaller 33-inch scale. An entry for the present cast, number 10 in the edition, is located in the Roman Bronze Works ledger book for February 28th, 1919. Other editions of the sculpture in this scale are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming.