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This is Frederick Remington’s
Old Dragoons of 1850. The dragoons were the lawmen on the plains, beginning in the 1830s,
as settlers began to move west. Here is
a group of five horses and four riders.
It’s a frenzy of activity.
The horse that’s leading the group is riderless. We have to presume,
because it is bridled and saddled, that it has
been stolen by the Indians. So the dragoons are trying to
recapture the horse. The dragoons seem to have the upper hand.
The Indians’ horses are emaciated. The Indian
with the buffalo skin only has this shield to defend himself.
And the other is fending off this saber. There’s a synesthetic quality to this piece
where you hear the clattering of the hooves,
the horses bellowing,
the clashing of the sabers
and the tomahawks,
the shouts. Of the five horses,
only seven of
the twenty hooves
actually touch the ground,
like a freeze-frame, cinematic quality.
Because he was not trained as a sculptor, he was constantly
pushing the envelope. This is the most ambitious of all
his sculptures. He really pulled out all the stops:
the sabers,
the rifles,
the saddles, the bedrolls,
the canteens, and the little packs, and
the buffalo skins.
This particular cast came into the Museum’s collections
in 1907, just two years after Remington modeled it. And it really was
cutting-edge, contemporary sculpture at the moment.
We don’t know how the drama will unfold. Viewers
could finish the story for themselves.
It was almost an early form of entertainment.
These works were being created for an east coast, upper class, principally male, urban market. They fed
into stereotypes of what the old West was,
should be, should have been. Remington’s mythic vision
has become our vision. It’s really been canonized. This piece has
such an immediacy and freshness and dynamism to it, but is it
the real West? What is the real West?