The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West by Andrew R. Graybill

Author:Andrew R. Graybill [Graybill, Andrew R.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2013-10-06T13:00:00+00:00

IF IT DID NOT bring her riches, Clarke’s proximity to Glacier Park brought her visitors instead. In time, the house she shared with her brother became renowned as something of a rustic literary salon, where guests sat for hours with her in order to learn more about the Piegans, who thanks to Louis Hill had became famous nationwide as “the Glacier Indians.” However well meaning, her white visitors tended to exoticize their hostess, emphasizing—intentionally or otherwise—her racial difference. Of course, that seems to have been what drew many to her in the first place. Take, for instance, a letter from the prominent Montana suffragist Mary O’Neill, who in 1910 wrote ostensibly to invite Clarke to a statewide gathering of women’s organizations. “How are you, Woman with the Shadow eyes?” she began, before arriving at the true purpose of her letter: “One thing I want to see [is] if you and I can collaborate on a book of the Mystic lore of the Indians—and no one could know it better than you.”108 And if these were the sentiments of a suffragette, one can only imagine the extent of the racial caricatures drawn by people who were not so well meaning.

Even her closest friends tended to fetishize Clarke’s hybridity. One of them, Helen Fitzgerald Sanders, daughter-in-law of Clarke’s most loyal patron, spent extensive time with the Clarke siblings while researching her novel The White Quiver. Published in 1913, the book, according to its author, “is a story of the Piegan Indians before they felt the influence of the white man.” In this way Sanders’s volume resembled the contemporary pictures of the photographer Edward S. Curtis or the paintings of the Taos Society of Artists (whose most senior member, Joseph Henry Sharp, visited Clarke at Glacier), with their romantic and noble visions of an uncorrupted native past. Helen and Horace had been Sanders’s portal to that world, which the author acknowledged in her dedication: “To Helen P. Clarke, ‘Pi-o-to-po-wa-ka,’ in whose noble character mingles the best of the white race and the red.”109

What Clarke made of such patronizing oblations, however generous and heartfelt, is hard to assess. She was hardly a stranger to this kind of purple language, but it is easy to imagine that she experienced less internal conflict when visited by a second group of guests: needy Piegans. In later years “Aunt Helen,” as she was known, became a trusted source of emotional and financial support for Indians on the reservation, especially the elderly, who had experienced the most trouble in conforming to the assimilated ideal set forth in the Dawes Act. According to one friend, it was this generosity, more than any absence of business acumen, that explained the poverty of Clarke’s later years.110

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