Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West by Peter H. Hassrick (review)

This publication serves as the catalogue for a 2018– 19 exhibition organized by the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, which later traveled to the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The lavishly illustrated essays are anchored by discussion of a significant late-career subject depicted twice in 1888 by the nineteenth-century western landscape painter, Albert Bierstadt (1830– 1902, US, born Germany), The Last of the Buffalo.

The Last of the Buffalo, which showcases Plains Indians hunting an enormous herd of bison, has inspired essays exploring Bierstadt’s relationship to Indigenous peoples and to bison, and broader connections between these subjects and the West at the turn of the century. This framework of biographical, sociocultural, and environmental contextual research is stronger and more compelling than the melodramatic painting at the publication’s center. When Bierstadt painted The Last of the Buffalo his human and animal subjects’ populations were in severe decline, and most Americans believed the Indian and the buffalo were destined for extinction. Bierstadt paints man and beast locked in battle of mutually assured destruction rather than acknowledging that European Americans are the primary force decimating both populations.

Peter Hassrick argues that the painting represents the end of the Old West and rise of a New West focused on preservation rather than exploitation and extermination, due to Bierstadt’s concern for the endangerment of western places like Yellowstone National Park, where wildlife was not protected until 1894, and the people and animals who dwelt there. Hassrick believes Bierstadt’s intentions regarding Indigenous peoples, western wildlife, and western places were sympathetic, and that he approached these subjects from a preservationist worldview. This argument seems less productive and is less convincing than other lines of inquiry found in the publication, including considerations of the painting’s contemporary reception among actual American Indians touring abroad in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West where the painting was displayed. Twice newspapers published accounts of Indians almost reverently observing Bierstadt’s painting, and Emily Burns’s essay adroitly explores the accuracy of these accounts and potential significance of the encounters. Dan Flores’s essay balances emphasis on Bierstadt’s paintings of the Plains and the West with emphasis on the history of those places and the decline, but not extinction, of the buffalo. Most valuably, Oglala Lakota artist, historian, and educator Arthur Amiotte reminds readers in his prologue that the Native people Bierstadt painted were not extinguished, and that Native people continue to provide valuable perspectives on the West and its legacy.