THH 32: Giving Voice: Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee Tribe

Transcript of Giving Voice: Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee Tribe

Beckley: I’m Lindsey Beckley and this is Giving Voice.

For this installment of Giving Voice, I was lucky enough to speak with Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee Tribe. If you haven’t listened to THH’s two-part series covering the life of Tenskwatawa, I’d suggest going back to do that now, as I do reference those episodes a few times throughout the discussion and they give some good context for understanding where our conversation picks up.

And now, Giving Voice.

Beckley: I’m here today with Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee Tribe. I’m so happy that you had time to come on and talk with us today.

Barnes: Thank you very much, Lindsey. I appreciate the invite.

Beckley: Of course. We’re absolutely thrilled to have you on the show. So, I thought we would start off with a super basic question. I know we use the term tribe or tribal nation a lot and I’m not sure that people know exactly what that means, what all that entails, and what being a member of a tribe entails. If you could give us a little bit of insight into that, I would really appreciate it.

Barnes: It’s probably easiest to summarize it in the way the federal government defines it. The constitution of the United States states that there are three types of sovereigns. There is the federal government, there is the states, and there are the tribes. So tribal nations are separate inherent sovereigns within the United States similar in some ways to state governments. So, the constitution dictates that these three entities are sovereigns within each other in our nation. So, for a tribal nation such as the Shawnee Tribe, we are one of those sovereigns and we have been here since prior to the United States, identifying as Shawnee People. We’ve had numerous flags over portions of our area – Spain to the French to Canada to Britain and the Republic of Texas as well as the United States.

Beckley: And to be a part of the Shawnee Tribe or, I guess, any tribal nation, could you give us a little bit of insight into what it means to become a member and what it takes to become a member?

Barnes: If you’re a citizen of Italy, you know you’re a citizen of Italy. You were born, you met the standards of citizenship or Italy. It is much the same with tribal nations. You are a member of that nation. Your ancestors are a part of that community, you have citizenship within that nation. So the government of that tribe recognizes you as a citizen of that indigenous nation of peoples.

Beckley: So, to talk a little bit more about Shawnee history in Indiana, or in present-day Indiana – I think a lot of people think about Potawatomi and Miami maybe, if they think about Native history in Indiana, and they might not know much about the Shawnee connections here. Could you speak to that a little bit?

Barnes: I think you also have to define terms. You’re talking about Indiana. Indiana was much larger than in was at time of statehood. Indiana territory was also Illinois, so Indiana was a very large area. And even before that, Indiana was part of a larger western holding of colonial powers. So, inside what is the current state of Indiana, you have present-day Prophetstown, you have Shawnee villages along the White River. Fort Wayne is also known by other names – Kekionga by the Miami or Chillicothe amongst the Shawnee people. So, the old city of Chillicothe, which is the Shawnee town that was located at Fort Wayne. So, you have Prophetstown where Tenskwatawa the Prophet – he had a town that he lived in, and his brother. During the War of 1812, that was a stronghold for them and they even, prior to the War of 1812, Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa lived along the White River, hatching their plan for pan-Indian resistance to colonialism.

Beckley: Yeah, and if folks have listened to our previous two episodes, they know a little bit more about that, so I’m glad that you touched on that a little bit. I know that you’re still active in the state and that you’re still coming here and doing some work every once in a while. Could you speak to the sort of causes you work for when you come here and how folks can learn more about that?

Barnes: There are federal and state laws that require tribal interactions with the other sovereigns, the federal and the state. And amongst those is a law called NAGPRA – Native American Protection and Repatriation Act. Because Shawnee’s lived in Indiana, and the Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced eastern tribal nations to be relocated to western states like Oklahoma and elsewhere, those villages and the graves of those villages – there are people still buried there. So, as cities expand, as someone puts in a mini mall, as highways are built, occasionally graves are discovered. So, for the Shawnee and other tribes of historic Indiana, we engage in at the state and federal levels with those entities to make sure we’re doing what is best for those people there, and try to be as respectful to the people and make sure those remains are being treated as respectfully as possible, just like you would do with any other cemetery relocation. So, there are federal laws that mandate this for tribal nations and tribal cemeteries.

There is also an educational component that we work with as well. We have a great relationship with the Indiana University staff in various departments – folklore, anthropology, archaeology et cetera, we work very well with them. There’s an ethno-musicology archive of traditional music there at the campus in Bloomington. You know, we’ve known them for more than a decade. And early anthropologists called – a great many of them came out of Indiana University. A lot of that was because one of the early fathers of industry in Indiana, Eli Lilly, had an obsession with Indian artifacts and he hired teams of anthropologists, cartographers, linguists, et cetera to do research on tribal nations. He sent researchers out and one of the peoples that were rich in culture and language were the Shawnee, so Indiana University has known the Shawnee for a long time. And it’s been a pleasure for my tribe to become acquainted with them in the last ten or fifteen years and renew those relationships, but this time on our terms, rather than just having a bungee jumping anthropologist come into our communities, extract data for their own purposes, with no intention of reciprocity with that community.

Beckley: Yeah, we talked a little about that with Chris Newell. . . . about anthropologists coming into communities and using the knowledge of the people living there, and then creating a basis of work that is created out of the ancestral knowledge of these people. Basically, they’re building a career on the knowledge of others.

Barnes: That’s correct. Like, we can take an example- Eli Lilly hired a linguist, Charles Vogel [Voegelin], and [Voegelin] came into Shawnee communities and collected linguistic data, and the purpose of the linguistic data was not to preserve the language. It was not to make sure this language continued to be spoken in the Shawnee community. It was not to develop curriculum so that children could more easily learn the language of their ancestors as they were facing the pressures of assimilation. His goal was to bring that information back to Indiana, use it to create Masters and PhD’s and prove the richness of the university experience and part of the linguistics of Indiana. And so, untold careers were launched literally off the bones of our ancestors – the voices of our ancestors, with no thought for reciprocity towards the people that were contributing that knowledge. So that richness of these indigenous communities that lifted up these scholars, there was no reciprocity back to our communities to make sure that these cultures could benefit from the research that was going on. There has been a change in academia – largely because of pressure and interest from tribal nations wanting to engage with academics and journals and other academic publishing – to tell a truer story of early America. To make sure that Native voices are included in those narratives, that the context is not lost and that we can re-contextualize those old documents and put Shawnee voices back into them.

Beckley: Absolutely. We talk a little bit about that in our past two episodes. We’re using these colonized documents, but we have to find a way to contextualize them with Native voice and make sure that we’re telling as complete of a story as we can.

Barnes: That’s how it started for me . . . I initially got into tribal government, there was a couple of key issues and one of them was language preservation. So, quickly, when you do the work of language preservation, you come in contact with the archive. So, Indiana, there is this troika of institutions. The triad of institutions that hold the corpus of Shawnee language and one of them happens to be Indiana, and that’s because of Charles [Voegelin] and his time and tenure as a linguist in the employ of Eli Lilly.

Beckley: So, what sorts of things are you doing to promote the language, the Shawnee language? Are you doing curriculum? Is that something that you’re interested in? What kinds of things are you working towards?

Barnes: Curriculum and pedagogy methods. So, the world’s turned, and it’s changed and it’s becoming more digital and while we are able to, like, you and I are talking from a vast distance today, across a couple of computers. In prior generations, it was the telephone, and before that we had to send letters, so the method of teaching needs to adapt to become more like 2020 than 1920. And unfortunately, a lot of language teaching methods are still based in early-20th century teaching methodologies. Well, that doesn’t work in a diaspora community where people are spread across a continent. And so, we have to find new ways to deliver content and to deliver curriculum.

Beckley: I think that being here in a time when we are all separated by a distance and communicating through various methods – Zoom, Google Hangouts, and whatnot, I think that that has really opened our eyes to a few more opportunities as far as teaching methods and stuff like that. I know I’m taking an online baking class this weekend so it’s interesting to see how much people have kind of opened up different avenues for teaching different topics.

Barnes: Yeah, there’s a little irony for me . . . you know, we’re talking about these bungee jumping anthropologists that would jump into our communities and take data, you know, and they were observing our communities. Well, now, we find that the coin is flipped and we’re watching you guys in the glass bubble of academic institutions and seeing how you’re going to handle campuses that are closed. How are you going to be able to deliver curriculum? Universities have been loathe to move to an online learning model – they’re stuck in the Oxford method of teaching people. One person stands in front of a class and teaches forty or fifty people. Well, how are you going to accomplish that now with social distancing? So, it’s interesting and ironic to me. Now we’re watching you, instead of, a century ago, you were watching us.

Beckley: Hopefully we’ll be able to navigate it a little bit better than – I think we’ve pivoted a bit. It took a little bit, but it seems like people are slowly but surely figuring it out. Speaking of COVID-19 and the social distancing, I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to how the pandemic has hit your people and just Native populations in general.

Barnes: I suspect it’s much like other states. We’ve been watching other states and other locals deal with this and I see Kentucky responding differently than Tennessee, or I see this county respond differently than that county or this city compared to this city. So, each one has its own type of leadership. And it’s much the same in Indian country. One county’s more progressive in its measures, you know, they put in more restrictive methods. We have another county that wants to have the economic – has more economic concerns. They may have a tax issue in their city and there’s a real cash need to make sure that things go back to normal as quick as possible, seeing how those things are balanced. So, we’re watching those things.

But, at least with the Shawnee tribe, within our government itself, we find ourselves in an advantageous position that we are equipped financially to ride this out and keep our people employed. We’ve been lucky to secure food, and for Shawnee citizens, we have ShawneeRelief.org, where we’re providing food for the elderly to keep them indoors as much as possible. We try to keep everyone up to date. Language curriculum is now being delivered in an online – it’s forced us to move to an online format sooner than we wanted. We had a project that was in the planning process for 2020, to be deployed in 2021, to deliver online language classrooms to our citizens. Well, we’re finding ourselves having to do that now and we’re not even halfway through the year.

Beckley: It sounds like you guys are, along with all of us, pivoting well. I’m glad to hear that.

Barnes: We’ve been really lucky. We’ve found that some of our best resources have been our tribal citizens. I found a epidemiologist that is a tribal citizen and she lives in Norman [Oklahoma] and works at the University of Oklahoma, and she’s an epidemiologist. So, actually being able to have someone who is able to interpret some of the details that I just don’t understand, I don’t have the education to interpret. . . . And to be able to draft policy at a governmental level, send it to an epidemiologist, and have them give me professional advice on what that should look like and on what areas we can do better, what steps are unnecessary – that is invaluable. So, we are very fortunate that we have the citizens that have the skill sets to be able to contribute to their tribal nation in this difficult time of social distancing.

Beckley: I think that is about all the time we have, but I was hoping you could tell the folks at home how they can learn more about your work, and about the Shawnee Nation and about Shawnee history – is there any online resources for them that you would suggest?

Barnes: Online resources are always dodgy when it comes to indigenous peoples because you always have to question the source – who wrote it, what was the context of it? The three Shawnee Tribes are the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, and the Shawnee Tribe. Each of us have our own corresponding website. Those are the three Shawnee tribes. There has been a body of work that has been written by scholars. The best is a guy named Stephen Warren. Stephen Warren’s written a couple of books on Shawnee people. There’s others that have written on treaties like Collin Calloway, he’s written on Shawnee people. So, I would start with a couple of those books and look at the references at the back of the book – who did they cite, who did they read, who did they research? Because those are two top notch scholars.

Beckley: We’ll put a link to those things in our show notes which are found at blog.history.in.gov. Ben, I want to thank you so much for coming on today. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you.

Barnes: Thank you for the invite. We appreciate it.

Beckley: Once again, I want to thank Chief Barnes for taking the time to talk with me for this episode. As mentioned at the end of that discussion, check out the show notes for useful links for resources to learn about the Shawnee Tribe. We’ll be back on June 10 with a new episode! In the meantime, follow the Indiana Historical Bureau on Facebook and Twitter for daily doses of Indiana history tidbits. Subscribe, rate and review Talking Hoosier History wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for listening!

Integrity on the Gridiron: Notre Dame’s 1924 Football Team Battles Klan Propaganda

“Football: Notre Dame (South Bend) by South Shore Line,” 1926, broadside, Indiana State Library Broadside Collection, accessed ISL Digital Collections.

This is Part Two of a three-part series, but also stands alone as a story of the incredible strength of the 1924 Notre Dame football team and the university’s struggle to combat prejudice in the age of the Klan. See Part One for the 1923 Notre Dame football season, context on the political strength of the Klan in Indiana, the May 1924 clashes between Klan members and an alliance of Notre Dame students and South Bend’s Catholic residents of immigrant origin, as well as the ensuing damage to the university’s reputation.

Notre Dame students returned to campus in the fall of 1924 under the looming threat that the Klan would return before the November elections. Just months earlier, in May, the Klan had been able to bait Notre Dame students into a violent confrontation. While initially embarrassing to the Klan, as they were all but driven out of town by students, the Klan’s propaganda machine was able to revise history. Using widely circulated brochures and newspaper articles, the hate group painted the students as an unruly mob of Catholic immigrant hooligans who attacked good Protestant American businessmen assembled peacefully. By fall, local Klansmen still wanted revenge for the previous spring’s humiliation, while state Klan leaders sought to show voters that they needed protection from the “Catholic menace.” Notre Dame University staff and leadership prepared for further violence and worked to rehabilitate the school’s image in the wake of the spring clash between students and Klansmen. The school needed a public relations miracle to combat the Klan’s far reaching propaganda.

University President Father John O’Hara devised a strategy for countering the negative press coverage inflicted on Notre Dame by highlighting one university program that was beyond reproach, not to mention already popular and exciting enough to draw press coverage. Father O’Hara’s inspired strategy was to put the full weight of the university behind championing its successful football team and the respectable, upright, and modest team members. The Fighting Irish football team had finished the 1923 season with only the one loss to Nebraska and a decent amount of newspaper coverage.* Much more was riding on the 1924 football team’s success. The school administration, the student body, alumni, as well as Catholics and immigrants in Indiana and beyond, looked to the Notre Dame players to show the world that they, and people who shared their religion and heritage, were proud, hardworking, dignified, and patriotic. The model team could prove the Klan’s stereotypes about Catholics and immigrants had no resemblance to reality. [1]

Father O’Hara recognized that linking the players’ Catholicism with their success on the gridiron created a strong positive identity for the university. Since at least 1921, he had arranged for press to cover the players, Catholic and non-Catholic together, attending mass before away games. He provided medals of saints for the team to wear during games and distributed his Religious Bulletin, in which he wrote about “the religious component in Notre Dame’s football success,” to alumni, colleagues, and the press. [2] According to Notre Dame football historian Murray Sperber, Father O’Hara conceived of an ambitious outreach plan for the 1924 season as a direct response to the Klan’s propaganda. In fact, O’Hara may have gotten the idea from a 1923 New York Times editorial that sarcastically reported on the reason for the Klan’s rise and extreme anti-Catholicism in Indiana:

There is in Indiana a militant Catholic organization, composed of men specially chosen for strength, courage and resourcefulness. These devoted warriors lead a life of almost monastic asceticism, under stern military discipline. They are constantly engaged in secret drills. They make long cross-country raiding expeditions. They have shown their prowess on many battlefields. Worst of all, they lately fought, and decisively defeated, a detachment of the United States Army. Yet we have not heard of the Indiana Klansmen rising up to exterminate the Notre Dame football team. [3]

This editorial and other similar articles implied that making the football team the symbol of Catholicism at Notre Dame could serve to combat the Klan in the press. In 1924, Father O’Hara created a series of press events to align with the game schedule, hoping to link the school’s proud Catholicism with the excitement of the winning team. [4] Of course, for this strategy to work, the team had to keep winning games.

Hammond Times, October 6, 1922, 16, Hoosier State Chronicles.

Coach Knute Rockne, who had led the Fighting Irish since 1918, had built an almost unstoppable football team by the close of the 1923 season. In six seasons, the team only lost four games. Two of these were tough losses to Nebraska where the players faced anti-Catholic hostilities. [5]  In 1924, with the eyes of the nation on them, the Notre Dame team needed a perfect season. Luckily “the 1924 Notre Dame Machine was bigger and better than ever,” according to the editors of the Official 1924 Football Review. [6]

Harry McGuire and Jack Scallan, eds., Official 1924 Football Review, University of Notre Dame, 24, accessed Notre Dame Archives.

The season opened October 4, 1924 with a home game against Lombard College in Galesburg, Illinois. Coach Rockne employed a brilliant opening strategy. He started his secondary unit, called the “shock troops” who would “take the brunt of the fight” during the opening game and “wear down the opposition.” [7] Rockne then put in his main players, who most coaches would have started. This strategy meant that their opponents, in this case Lombard, would think they were holding their own against the Fighting Irish. Then the eleven regulars would show them the full force of the team. While the Chicago Sunday Tribune reported that Lombard “outplayed the second team Rockne started,” aka the “shock troops,” Notre Dame decisively beat the Illinois team 40-0. [8]

South Bend Tribune, October 12, 1924, 12, accessed Newspapers.com

On October 11, the Irish defeated Wabash College just as handily, winning 34-0. The South Bend Tribune reported, “Notre Dame took the game easily and without much apparent effort . . . The Irish were never forced for a touchdown by that old spirit known as a fight.” [9] While Notre Dame was clearly the better team, the Tribune criticized them for being “crude and lumbering” and the play “slow and listless.” In fact, the local paper was fairly pessimistic about the upcoming games, noting that the Irish “may crumple” in the following week’s game against Army or “give way” to Northwestern. The game against Army would decide if Rockne’s 1924 team was as good as the previous season’s hype foretold. [10]

While the Fighting Irish prepared for the battle against Army, Notre Dame officials readied for another kind of clash. The Klan had declared their intention to return to South Bend 200,000 strong on October 18 – the same date as the upcoming game. They also claimed to have the support of local officials. The Fiery Cross reported:

Chief of Police Lane and Mayor Siebert have promised their support to the demonstration and the procession will be escorted by a squadron of police on motorcycles, lest their be a repetition of last May’s attack on Klansmen by Roman Catholic Notre Dame students. [11]

Fiery Cross, October 10, 1924, 1, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

Notre Dame officials had no way to know if the Klan gathering was to be believed or if it was just Klan propaganda. What President Walsh did know was that he couldn’t trust city officials to protect his students. If the Klan descended on South Bend, Notre Dame would stand alone. As October 18 neared, Walsh noticed that the city was not making preparations to host a large gathering. Walsh also heard from Republican insiders that the state party was trying to quiet these kind of Klan demonstrations and distance itself (in public but not behind closed doors) from the Klan in order to not lose voters before the November election.

Drawing on this information, Walsh predicted that the rally would not happen. In fact, Indiana Republican Party Chairman Clyde Walb had forced the Klan to cancel the meeting by threatening to close the party headquarters. This would have left Republican state candidates, including those supported by the Klan, to fend for themselves for promotion and organization right before the election. [12] But the Fiery Cross continued to promote the rally, using the event to repeat their version of the clash earlier that spring. The Fiery Cross reminded its sympathetic readers:

Last May, when the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan attempted to hold a peaceful demonstration in this city, they were set upon — along with other Protestants — by Roman Catholic students from Notre Dame. They were beaten, kicked, and cursed, the women were called vile names and the American flag was trampled under foot. [13]

This was of course not what had happened (see Part One), but through continued repetition, the Klan convinced many people of their biased version of the story. Despite the Fiery Cross‘s claim that 200,000 Klansmen would take over South Bend “from morning to midnight,” they ceded to the political pressure and called off the rally. [14] Notre Dame officials and supporters must have breathed a sigh of relief. They could now return their focus to the upcoming game and all the hopes that rested on this win.

“The Squad” in Official 1924 Football Review, University of Notre Dame, 8, accessed Notre Dame Archives.

The sports media’s hype was intense leading up to the October 18th Notre Dame – Army game that would take place in New York. This press coverage was owed in part to the East Coast alumni. Several graduates were in the city drumming up support for their alma mater by feeding Notre Dame-produced press statements to New York newspapers and proselytizing at Catholic social organizations like the Marquette Club. Another factor, likely more influential, was Rockne’s decision to hire a New York Times writer for an exorbitant sum. This all but guaranteed a round of good press for the Irish. [15] All they had to do was win.

“Running the Army Ends,” in Official 1924 Football Review, University of Notre Dame, 28, accessed Notre Dame Archives.

The New York Times reported that the 60,000 person crowd that gathered at the New York City Polo Grounds was the largest ever in that city. The reporter raved about “Knute Rockne’s Notre Dame football machine, 1924 model” and their “speed, power, and precision.” [16] He gave special notice to the backfield, referring to their “poetry of motion.” Writing for the New York Herald Tribune, reporter Grantland Rice went further in praising the backfield of Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Jim Crowley, and Elmer Layden.  In a passage described by Sperber as perhaps the most famous in sports history, Grantland wrote:

Outlined against a blue, gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore, they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley, and Layden. [17]

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. “Each kiss flamed with danger!” New York Public Library Digital Collections.

In fact, this famous line came from Notre Dame’s own publicity machine. George Strickler, a press assistant employed by the university had just seen Rex Ingram’s new movie, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Strickler mused that the Notre Dame backfield recalled “those ethereal figures charging through the clouds.” [18] Rice took the idea and made it his lead. The article quickly found a life of its own. The catchy lead was picked up by other newspapers and the nickname stuck. Strickler was delighted with the press coverage and determined to make the most of it. He called the university and arranged to have a photographer shoot a picture of the “horsemen” upon their return — on horseback, of course.

“Four Horsemen Are Ready for Gallop to Coast,” Minneapolis Daily Star, December 11, 1924, 10, Newspapers.com
Princeton-Notre Dame football program, October 25, 1924, Princeton University Archives, accessed https://princetonarchives.tumblr.com.

With more attention on them than ever before, the Fighting Irish still had most of their season ahead of them. When they faced the Princeton Tigers on October 25, 1924, it seemed like they might not survive the increased scrutiny. Despite the previous year’s upset, Princeton was favored to win as the Tigers defensive line was much improved. When the game kicked off before 45,000 spectators, Coach Rockne again started his substitutes. At one point in the first quarter, Princeton nearly scored, with the second-string Irish stopping the Tigers at the three-yard line. The game quickly shifted in Notre Dame’s favor when the starters entered the fray. The Four Horseman again stole the show. The New York Times reported that “the darting thrusts of Notre Dame’s lightning backfield were more than Princeton could handle today.” Left half-back James Crowley scored two touchdowns for a 12-0 Notre Dame win. [19] But all was not smooth sailing for the Irish, as quarterback Harry Stuhldreher, who was responsible for the most yards gained that game, was injured. Notre Dame was down one horseman as they returned to South Bend.

Official 1924 Football Review, University of Notre Dame, 34, accessed Notre Dame Archives.

On November 1 Notre Dame faced Georgia Tech for their homecoming game at Cartier Field. By now, Coach Rockne’s method of tiring out the opposing team while holding back his best players had been published in newspapers across the country. Perhaps recognizing that their best chance at scoring was against the second string starters in the first quarter, the Georgia Tech Golden Tornado team came out strong. The Chicago Tribune reported:

Georgia Tech took advantage of the Notre Dame seconds early in the first period, and [full back Douglas] Wycoff promptly ran through the bewildered Rockmen for 40 yards, placing the ball on Notre Dame’s 35 yard line. [20]

Georgia Tech “place-kicked” for three points and the second-string Irish struggled through the first quarter. While Rockne’s strategy was no longer a surprise, it was still effective. When the varsity Irish started the second quarter they were unstoppable, even without the injured Stuhldreher. The other three horsemen led the team to a 34-3 victory with several substitutes also making important contributions. [21] Next, the Irish were ready to take on their first Big Ten team.

Notre Dame faced the Wisconsin University Badgers on November 8th before a crowd of 40,000. While it was an away game for the Irish, it didn’t feel like it to the players. The game was the main attraction for an annual student trip, and so the blue and gold section in the stands was full. The Notre Dame marching band came as well and marched out onto the field playing fight songs. The first quarter saw Rockne’s second-string starters equally matched with the starting Badgers and the quarter ended 3-3, but the tide quickly turned in favor of Notre Dame. The Notre Dame Official 1924 Football Review reported on the start of the second quarter:

Then came the call, and the entire first team burst onto the field while the Notre Dame stands went into an uproar. Then the fun began. [22]

1924 Football Review, accessed Notre Dame Archives.

With all four horsemen in the game, the Badgers didn’t stand a chance. “They simply galloped over the foe,” the Chicago Tribune reported. [23] The score was 17-3 at the half and 31-3 within the first ten minutes of the third quarter. Rockne called in his varsity players and gave some third stringers and rookies the chance to play. The Tribune joked that “no one in the press stand could call them by name” and that Coach Rockne probably could not either. [24] In the final quarter, Rockne put back in his starting “shock troops” who brought the final score to 38-3 for a sweeping Notre Dame win. The students in the stands threw their hats and rushed onto the field to follow their marching band, snaking across the gridiron while singing and dancing. The Chicago Tribune spotted some “well-known Chicago men of Celtic origin out there romping with the students.” [25] Notre Dame was becoming the beloved team of people with Irish heritage across the country. Thus, it was even more important that they beat Nebraska.

The Klan had not forgotten about South Bend. On November 8, while the Fighting Irish celebrated their win over Wisconsin, 1,800 Klansmen and women “from Chicago and from a number of Indiana cities,” gathered just outside the city limits. [26] Between six and seven o’clock they paraded through the streets of South Bend, a quick clip compared to other Klan parades and events. There was little reaction to their presence and the South Bend Tribune reported that “few people were on the streets.” [27] It’s not clear why there was no response from students. Perhaps they simply didn’t have advance notice of the parade, and when the event happened quickly, they didn’t have time to form a response. Maybe they simply refused to be baited into further confrontations. Either way, the Klan had surely succeeded in reminding the Irish Catholic students that the threat of violence still loomed.

The Fiery Cross claimed that the Klan held yet another South Bend parade on November 11, just days after the quiet, uneventful rally of a few days earlier. The newspaper claimed that thirty-five thousand members from across the Midwest gathered and paraded through the city, purportedly “one of the biggest Ku Klux Klan demonstrations ever held in this section of the country.” [28] The Fiery Cross again claimed that the Klan had the cooperation of the mayor and the police chief. No other newspaper reported on the event. The Klan newspaper’s claims are dubious. A crowd this large would surely have drawn at least passing comment from the South Bend Tribune. It seems more likely that this was hype generated by their propaganda machine after the turnout for the rally on the 8th was reported by the South Bend Tribune to have been small. Whether the Klan gathered that day or whether this was just more propaganda, Notre Dame students and officials certainly felt the continued threat. For now, however, the Notre Dame players and their supporters had their eye on a different kind of opponent, albeit one with anti-Catholic prejudices of their own.

The last time they faced the Cornhuskers, the 1923 Fighting Irish team encountered prejudice and xenophobic epithets from Nebraska fans. The university was also still facing public backlash and disapproval from the violent confrontation with the Klan the previous May, as well as the Klan’s ongoing propaganda campaign. In an attempt to remedy their school’s reputation, the 1924 Notre Dame football players had handled themselves with dignity throughout the season, serving as examples of upstanding Catholic American citizens and scholars. But they still needed to beat Nebraska for two reasons. One, the symbolic victory of the hardworking and stoic Irish Catholic school over a team with anti-Catholic fans would be significant to their Irish Catholic supporters in an era dominated by the Klan. Two, to revenge their only loss of the previous season and make 1924 an undefeated perfect season would give them the public platform they needed to further improve the reputation of Notre Dame.

“Football: Notre Dame (South Bend) by South Shore Line,” 1926, broadside, Indiana State Library Broadside Collection, accessed ISL Digital Collections.

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish faced the Nebraska Cornhuskers November 15, 1924 at home in South Bend. Notre Dame supporters packed the stands at the recently enlarged Cartier Field while overflow fans stood on the sidelines or even sat on the fences. The local newspaper estimated the crowd at 26,000 people, the largest to date. [29] Recognizing the increasing popularity of the Notre Dame team to those in the wider area, the WGN radio station in Chicago delivered a live broadcast of the game. [30] Likewise, the South Shore interurban line, which ran between South Bend and Chicago, created large color posters of Notre Dame football players in action to advertise their service. [31]

Photograph from Notre Dame Archives, accessed “This Day in History: Irish Topple A Nemesis,” Department of Athletics, University of Notre Dame, https://125.nd.edu/moments/this-day-in-history-irish-topple-a-nemesis/.

Football fans had a beautiful day for the game, which was “easily the headliner” of Midwestern match ups that week, according to the Lincoln Star. [32] The newspaper reported: “A glorious November sun was shining through golden haze and the tang of frost was in the air.” [33] Photographs from game day show supporters well-bundled in hats and coats.

This game had been the focus of the entire season for Notre Dame. The players’ had written slogans on their dressing room lockers such as: “Get the Cornhuskers” and “Remember the last two defeats” (losses in 1922 and 1923). [34] A Lincoln newspaper complained that “Rockne has pointed his team for Nebraska and doesn’t mind telling the world about it.” One reporter stated simply: “They hope to taste revenge.” [35]

The players took the field at 2:00 and it was clear almost immediately that Rockne’s shock troops would not be able to handle the Cornhuskers. The second stringers fumbled early, got penalized for being offsides, and Nebraska pushed through to the four-yard line. Not taking any chances, Coach Rockne swapped the troops for his first-stringers. But it was Nebraska’s ball and they were able to drive through the remaining yards for a touchdown. [36] That touchdown would be Nebraska’s last of the game.

Official 1924 Football Review, University of Notre Dame, accessed Note Dame Archives.

The Irish thoroughly outplayed the Cornhuskers with much of the credit going to the Four Horsemen. The South Bend Tribune reported:

First it was Miller circling around the ends for notable gains, then it was Crowley, and then there was Layden splitting the line with the speed and momentum of a cannon ball. Then to top it off there was Stuhldreher to carry the ball or to toss the pigskin with deadly accuracy into the hands of his waiting backs. They were all there, they were all stars and together they make Notre Dame the greatest eleven in football history. [37]

Harry McGuire and Jack Scallon, eds., Official 1924 Football Review,

In the end, Notre Dame beat Nebraska 34-6, but even that score did not reflect how well the Irish played. The Tribune reported, “Twenty-three first downs for Notre Dame gave the fans some idea of the complete swamping the western players received.” [38] The most significant aspect of the win for the Fighting Irish though was symbolic. They had finally overcome a rival who had not only ruined their otherwise perfect 1923 season, but had insulted them with anti-Catholic, anti-Irish slurs as well. The Tribune summarized the feeling that day for the victors:

There may be games with more sensational playing, with more artistic foot-ball handling, but none, past or future, will ever appeal to the heart of Notre Dame men as this game which witnessed Rockne erasing the memory of two years defeat, but trouncing the huge Cornhusker squad soundly, without apology. [39]

Rockne reveled in both the football win and the symbolic victory of besting a team whose fans had personally humiliated his players. Rockne said, “Nebraska, as usual, was the dirtiest team we played, and after the game, a few of their players even called me a few choice epithets.” [40] The next game would have symbolic undertones as well. Catholic Notre Dame would face Methodist Northwestern.

Chicago Tribune, November 23, 1924, 25, Newspapers.com

For the November 22 Notre Dame – Northwestern match up, Rockne manged to move the game from Northwestern’s hometown of Evanston, Illinois, to Chicago. As the Irish middle class grew in Chicago, so did support for Notre Dame football in the city. Over 45,000 people bought tickets, the majority of them Notre Dame fans. [41] The game played that day at Grant Park (soon to be called Soldier Field) was the most difficult of the season. Northwestern held the lines against the Horsemen for much of the game and their halfback, All-American Ralph “Moon” Baker “threatened for a time to act as presiding host at an Irish wake,” according to one Chicago reporter. [42] After Northwestern almost immediately scored three points, fans began chanting for the Horsemen, and Rockne put in his first stringers. But Northwestern scored another three, giving them six points and leaving Notre Dame scoreless. The Irish rallied soon after and began to arduously shift the game in their favor. Stuhldreher ran for a touchdown in the second with Crowley’s field goal giving the Irish a one point advantage by the half. After a scoreless third quarter, Layden ran 45 yards for a touchdown in the fourth. Notre Dame won 13-6 against a tough Northwestern team. [43]

“Camera’s Eye Catches Thrilling Plays in Carnegie-Notre Dame Game,” Pittsburgh Sunday Post, November 30, 1924, 26, 26, Newspapers.com.

Notre Dame played their last game of the regular season against Carnegie Tech on November 29, 1924. Tech played well, scoring three touchdowns – two against the shock troops but one against the regulars, minus one Horseman (Bernard Livergood and William Cerney filled in for Elmer Layden who was injured). Even so, Notre Dame dominated the contest with their passing game drawing note in the press. The Fighting Irish beat Carnegie Tech 40-19, and closed the season undefeated in nine games. [44] This perfect record was everything the university administration had hoped for in order to engage their publicity machine and improve the school’s marred reputation. A trip to the Rose Bowl gave them the opportunity to set their plan into action. On New Year’s Day 1925, Notre Dame would play the Stanford University Indians, a game that’s long remembered in the history of this classic Fighting Irish Team. More significantly, the several week tour by rail of the Midwest and West masterminded by Father O’Hara forever repaired the university’s reputation. According to Notre Dame historian Robert E. Burns:

O’Hara saw the Rose Bowl invitation as an almost providential opportunity to counter the extremely negative Klan-inspired image of Notre Dame . . . [and] might well turn out to be the most successful advertising campaign for the spiritual ideals and practices of American Catholicism yet undertaken in this century. [45]

The Klan continued their propaganda campaign into December, through the weeks leading up to the Rose Bowl. As they prepared for the big game, the Fighting Irish faced anti-Catholic vitriol and hatred that the Klan had helped to make socially acceptable. Nonetheless, the Notre Dame football team would establish themselves not only as the greatest players in the country, but also as patriotic Americans, many the sons of Irish immigrants, and as proud Catholics.

Check back for Integrity on the Gridiron Part Three.

Notes

*The University of Notre Dame did not officially accept the name “Fighting Irish” for their athletic teams until 1925, but newspapers had been using it for quite a while beforehand.

[1] Robert E. Burns, Being Catholic, Being American: The Notre Dame Story, 1842-1934 (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999) 347-48.
[2] Murray Sperber, Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993, reprint, 2003), 157-158.
[3] “Where the Klan Fails,” New York Times, November 1, 1923, accessed timesmachine.nytimes.com.
[4] Sperber, 157-58.
[5] Burns, 348.
[6] Harry McGuire and Jack Scallan, eds., Official 1924 Football Review, University of Notre Dame, 24, accessed Notre Dame Archives.
[7] Ibid., 17.
[8] “Notre Dame Too Husky; Lombard Loses by 40 to 0,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, October 4, 1924, reprinted in Official 1924 Football Review, accessed Notre Dame Archives.
[9] Notre Dame Defeats Wabash, 34-0,” South Bend Tribune, October 12, 1924, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[10] Ibid.
[11] “Expect 200,000 at Gathering: South Bend To Be Host to Klansmen,” Fiery Cross, October 10, 1924, 1, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.
[12] Burns, 342-44.
[13] “Prepare for Large Gathering: South Bend Ready for Many Visitors from Four States,” Fiery Cross, October 17, 1924, 1, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Sperber, 164.
[16] “Notre Dame Eleven Defeats Army, 13-7; 60,000 Attend Game,” New York Times, October 19, 1924, 118, accessed TimesMachine.
[17] Sperber, 178-79.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Notre Dame Sweeps Princeton to Defeat,” New York Times, October 26, 1924, 116, accessed TimesMachine.
[20] “Notre Dame Is 34-3 Victor Over Golden Tornado,” Chicago Tribune, November 1, 1924 reprinted in Official 1924 Football Review, accessed Notre Dame Archives.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Official 1924 Football Review, 36, accessed Notre Dame Archives.
[23] James Crusinberry, Chicago Tribune, November 8, 1924, reprinted in Official 1924 Football Review, accessed Notre Dame Archives.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] “Klansmen in Parade,” South Bend Tribune, November 9, 1924, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.
[27] Ibid.
[28] “No Violence of Any Sort Mars Parade,” Fiery Cross, November 14, 1924, 1, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.
[29] Kenneth S. Conn, “Notre Dame Soars Over Corn-Fed Nebraska,” South Bend Tribune, reprinted in Official 1924 Football Review, 39, accessed Notre Dame Archives.
[30] “N. Dame Stakes National Title on Tilt Today,” Chicago Tribune, November 15, 1924, 17, Newspapers.com.
[31] “Football: Notre Dame (South Bend) by South Shore Line,” 1926, broadside, Indiana State Library Broadside Collection, accessed ISL Digital Collections.
[32] Edward C. Derr, “Nebraska – Notre Dame Classic Dominates Interest,” Lincoln Journal Star, November 14, 1924, 16, Newspapers.com.
[33] Cy Sherman, “Nebraska Battles Notre Dame: Cornhuskers Clash with Irish Eleven,” Lincoln Star, November 15, 1924, 1, Newspapers.com.
[34] Jim Lefebvre, Loyal Sons: The Story of The Four Horsemen and Notre Dame Football’s 1924 Champions, excerpt reprinted in “This Day in History: Irish Topple A Nemesis,” Department of Athletics, University of Notre Dame, https://125.nd.edu/moments/this-day-in-history-irish-topple-a-nemesis/.
[35] Edward C. Derr, “Nebraska – Notre Dame Classic Dominates Interest,” Lincoln Journal Star, November 14, 1924, 16, Newspapers.com.
[36] Cy Sherman, “Nebraska Battles Notre Dame: Cornhuskers Clash with Irish Eleven,” Lincoln Star, November 15, 1924, 1, Newspapers.com.
[37] Kenneth S. Conn, “Notre Dame Soars Over Corn-Fed Nebraska,” South Bend Tribune, reprinted in Official 1924 Football Review, 39, accessed Notre Dame Archives.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Sperber, 167.
[41] Ibid., 167-68.
[42] Jimmy Corcoran, “Notre Dame is Forced to the Limit,” newspaper not cited, November 22, 1924, reprinted in Official 1924 Football Review, 41, accessed Notre Dame Archives.
[43] Ibid.; “Game By Quarters,” South Bend Tribune, November 23, 1924, 14, Newspapers.com.
[44] Warren W. Brown, “Notre Dame Gallops Over Carnegie Tech,” Chicago Herald Examiner, reprinted in Official 1924 Football Review, 43, accessed Notre Dame Archives.
[45] Burns, 369.

THH Episode 31: Tenskwatawa: The Rise and Fall of a Nation

Transcript of Tenskwatawa: The Rise and Fall of a Nation

Beckley: I just wanted to drop in here at the top of the episode to give a little bit of a disclaimer. We are currently working from home due to COVID-19, so the sound quality of this episode might be a little bit different from what you’re used to hearing from Talking Hoosier History, since I’m using different equipment than usual. And now, on to the show.

Jump to Show Notes

Written by Lindsey Beckley, produced by Jill Weiss Simins, sound engineering by Justin Clark.

[Flute Music]

Beckley: This is the second of a two-part series covering the life of Indigenous leader Tenskwatawa. If you haven’t listened to the first part, I highly recommend you go do so now and come back after listening. Otherwise, you might be a bit lost coming in at this point in the story.

In “Tenskwatawa: The Making of a Prophet,” we explored the years leading up to and immediately following the birth of Tenskwatawa into the Shawnee tribe. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there was a cycle which played out all across North America. Colonial, and later American, settlers invaded Native Land, Native People fought to keep their land, but were forced to settle elsewhere only for white settlers to once again violently invade, restarting the cycle.

We also followed Tenskwatawa’s transformation from a relatively obscure figure into a political and spiritual leader for thousands of Native Peoples. We left off just after Tenskwatawa received his directives in a vision from the Great Spirit – he was to eschew all European customs, not only to return to the old ways, but also to start a new chapter in the Native story, one in which all Native People are united under the teachings of The Prophet.

Tenskwatawa’s village near modern-day Greenville, Ohio, was structured to reflect this idea of a pan-Indian identity, at least ideally. When people came to Greenville, they were to leave behind their tribal affiliations and become part of the greater whole.

And we left off with Tenskwatawa summoning Native People to gather at Greenville to witness a demonstration of his power. He was going to “put out the sun.” When the appointed day came and the sun did indeed disappear from the sky in a total eclipse, the Prophet sat in his tent while his followers observed the fulfillment of his prophesy. When he finally emerged from his tent, he spoke:

Voice actor: “Behold! Did I not prophesy correctly? See, darkness is coming.”

Beckley: With those words, the sun returned, illuminating his wisdom and power.

I’m Lindsey Beckley and this is Talking Hoosier History.

From our vantage point, it may be easy to think about the Prophet’s attempt to create an autonomous pan-Indian nation as being doomed to fail.  But putting yourself in the shoes of those living through these events might change how you see them. To Tenskwatawa and his followers, and to the white settlers of the area, the Prophet’s movement looked formidable, because it was. And it was this threat, as well as the unpredictability of settler-Native interactions that intimidated U.S. leaders.

In the early 1800s, Tenskwatawa led the largest population center in the region, and his following was only growing larger. And Native People had governed themselves and the land they lived on for millennia before European contact – why would it seem implausible to think a version of that could be restored?

Today, we look at a moment many historians view as the tipping point of Tenskwatawa’s power –the Battle of Tippecanoe. Before the battle, anything was possible. After it, all was lost. This narrative has been repeated in books and classrooms for decades. But is that really the case? Could it really be that cut and dry? No, of course not. And let’s explore why.

After Tenskwatawa’s prophesy was fulfilled, cementing his followers’ faith in him and lending further credence to his movement, many indigenous people traveled to Greenville. In the months after the eclipse, white settlers from as far away as present-day Wisconsin reported that:

Voice actor: “The Indians are crowding down upon us from the Green Bay on their way as they say to see the Shawonese at Greenville.”

Beckley: With so many Native People on the move, the white authorities of the Northwest began to grow uneasy. They questioned whether the mass of people gathering around Greenville were there just to hear the teachings of the Prophet and, indeed, if those teachings were purely religious in nature.

Playing on rising tensions between England and the United States, conspiracies of an impending British-backed Native assault on nearby American settlers swirled among the white communities, but it never came to fruition. In fact, Tenskwatawa had already received another message from the Great Spirit commanding him to move his followers away from Greenville. So, in the spring of 1808, Tenskwatawa and his people arrived just north of present-day Lafayette, Indiana. This new settlement would be called Prophetstown.

This move, ordained by the Great Spirit, was also quite advantageous to the prophet and to his followers. Prophetstown was situated at the confluence of the Wabash and Tippecanoe Rivers – meaning that it could only be approached from two sides. It was also a very fertile area, an important feature, as the Prophet’s followers had nearly starved at Greenville in 1807.

Prophetstown featured European-style houses, wigwams, a large storehouse, a central structure where any visiting Native person could stay called the House of the Stranger, and possibly even a blacksmith shop. All trees around the town were cleared, a strategic move, which stripped the land of any concealment for an oncoming army.

The Prophet had plenty of reason to prepare for that eventuality. Prophetstown was a mere 150 miles from Vincennes, the seat of government in the Northwest Territory. William Henry Harrison, the territorial governor and future U.S. president, was wary of his new neighbors, who numbered somewhere between three and six thousand people. By comparison, Vincennes, the capitol of the territory, had an approximate population of 1,500 around the same time. Harrison was convinced that Prophetstown was more than a holy city – he thought it was a rising political and military threat. And he wasn’t completely mistaken.

While Tenskwatawa was a religious leader, many of his teachings, such as his assertion that all land occupied by Native Peoples was owned collectively and without tribal distinction, as well as his advocacy of a pan-Indian nation, were inherently political. Success in these endeavors would have undercut European power in the area, making it impossible for government officials to exploit tribal differences when conducting negotiations or going to war. Eventually, this could stop the encroachment of white settlers on Indigenous peoples’ lands. Tenskwatawa and his warriors would defend their border, but it’s important to note, he was not intending to launch an offensive attack. In fact, he was offering peace. In a message delivered to Harrison in June 1808, Tenskwatawa said:

Voice actor: “It never was my intention to lift up my hand against the Americans . . . We had determined to follow the advice of the Great Spirit, who has told us that our former conduct is not right: that we ought to live in peace upon the land he has given us.

. . . I am now very much engaged in making my new settlement but as soon as it is completed, I will pay you a visit and hope to remove every bad impression you have received against me.”

Beckley: Harrison accepted the Prophet’s offer of a summit and in August of 1808, Tenskwatawa and William Henry Harrison came face to face for the first time in Vincennes. Against seemingly insurmountable odds, the two kind of hit it off. The Prophet stayed in Vincennes for several weeks and the men spoke of religion and politics. By the end of the visit, Harrison’s fears of an attack from Prophetstown seemed to have been quelled. He wrote to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn:

Voice actor: “I am inclined to think that the influence which the Prophet has acquired will prove rather advantageous than otherwise to the United States.”

Beckley: Harrison also agreed to send funds for provisions to Prophetstown – a much needed break for the settlement as drought had destroyed the majority of their crops. Resulting food shortages caused many followers to lose faith and return to their home villages.

The goodwill that resulted from this meeting didn’t last long, however. And it wasn’t enough to dissuade Harrison from his mission of expanding the United States’ land holdings in the Northwest. Just over a year later, Harrison gathered representatives of the Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi, Wea, and Kickapoo at Fort Wayne. Conspicuously absent was the leader of the largest population center of the Old Northwest – the Prophet hadn’t even been informed of the proceedings.

Harrison had strategically chosen who to invite to the negotiations – all leaders he thought he could coerce to sign a treaty. And he was right. After days of cajoling, bribing, threatening, and supplying a few hundred gallons of rum, coupled with the ever-present threat of military and economic pressure, the leaders at the summit were compelled to sign the Treaty of Fort Wayne in September of 1809, ceding 300,000 acres of land to the U.S. government.

Tenskwatawa was furious at this perceived betrayal. Although the land didn’t include Prophetstown, he believed that all Nations were one and so no land belonging to any Indigenous group could be sold without the consent of the leader of the pan-Indian nation – him. The Prophet wasn’t the only one upset, either. People flocked to Prophetstown after the news of the treaty spread. They came from many nations – Miami, Wyandot, Sac, Iowa, Winnebego, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Shawnee, Ojibwe, and Ottawa. But once they arrived in Prophetstown, Tenskwatawa declared them one people.

In the aftermath of the Treaty of Fort Wayne, Tenskwatawa’s older brother emerged as the military leader of Prophetstown, while The Prophet continued his role as political and religious leader. Tecumseh, who up to this point had widely been known simply as “The Prophet’s brother,” began to travel to tribes affected by recent white expansion and recruit them to his brother’s cause, with considerable success. In 1810, his diplomatic role expanded when he attended what was supposedly a peace summit with William Henry Harrison. Harrison, however, had already made up his mind – he wanted to eliminate Prophetstown for its resistance to the Treaty of Fort Wayne. Unsurprisingly, the peace summit, which began with threats of a shoot-out, didn’t go well. Relations were, if anything, more strained by the end of the “peace talks.”

Harrison wanted to attack Prophetstown but leaders in Washington declined to give their permission, saying he could only act defensively. So, Harrison did the one thing he knew would provoke Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh into action. He sent surveyors into land which had been ceded to the U.S. government in opposition to Tenskwatawa’s wishes. One day into the mission, the surveyors were kidnapped by members of the Wea tribe, allies of the Prophet. Although the men were released the next day, the damage had been done. Harrison, with this “proof” of aggression from Prophetstown, wrote to the Secretary of War asking for approval of his war plans multiple times in the following months. Finally, he got the answer he wanted – he could attack Prophetstown.

And there was no better time than the present. Tecumseh, the war leader of the settlement, was away on a diplomatic mission, a vulnerability known to Harrison. So, on September 26, 1811, American troops set out from Vincennes in the direction of Prophetstown. In early November, Harrison and his troops arrived just outside of Prophetstown and set up camp.

Tenskwatawa, hoping to avoid battle, asked for peace negotiations. Harrison, although resolute in his decision to attack, accepted. The meeting was set for the following day, November 7, 1811. The meeting would never happen though, and while we know the broad strokes of the events that followed, it’s impossible to know the exact sequence of events leading up to the battle.

Traditionally, historians have relied on a mixture of Harrison’s account of the events and that of Shabonee, a man from the Ottawa tribe who was a follower of Tenskwatawa’s teachings but later allied himself with the Americans.

In this version of events, the request for negotiation was nothing but a ruse by the Prophet, who ordered a sneak attack on Harrison’s camp to be carried out  two hours before sunrise, when Harrison’s men would be blinded by their camp fires. In this account, the Prophet’s forces snuck soundlessly out of the dark to fire upon Harrison’s men.

This narrative is often recited as fact, but historian Adam Jortner raises questions about the veracity of the sources. Harrison had political motivations for casting Tenskwatawa as carrying out a sneak attack after requesting peace under false pretenses. And Shabonee, while he was a follower of Tenskwatawa during the battle, didn’t give his account until decades later, after adopting an accommodationist ideology and while employed by the United States government.

Jortner, along with historian Alfred Cave, propose a different sequence of events, this one based on reports given to American Indian agent Matthew Elliott by an unnamed Kickapoo chief just weeks after the battle. So, not a perfect source as it’s still secondhand and relayed by a white agent, but its proximity in time to the events makes it a little more trustworthy.

In this second version, American sentinels panicked and accidentally shot two Native warriors patrolling in the night. The news spread through Prophetstown and their forces attacked the next morning, either with the reluctant consent of Tenskwatawa or against his wishes entirely.

It’s quite possible that neither version is wholly accurate. And considering that neither of these accounts came directly from Tenskwatawa, and neither are free of a white lens, it’s almost guaranteed they are not completely accurate.  Even if we did have access to an account of events directly from the Prophet, the events probably would have looked different depending on which side you were on, and the search for an “objective truth” is often futile.

What we do know is that fighting broke out and what followed was what we know today as the Battle of Tippecanoe. Harrison labeled the battle a great victory and used it very successfully to bolster his political reputation, eventually becoming a top U.S. military leader and then president.

As is so often the case, the victor, even if he was but a self-proclaimed one, wrote the story. Shabonee’s and Harrison’s version of the story would be recounted by historians for much of the next 200 years. But were the outcomes of this battle as clear as Harrison led the country to believe? Absolutely not.

Looking at casualty counts alone would suggest Tenskwatawa was the victor. He lost approximately fifty soldiers to Harrison’s 180. However, Tenskwatawa retreated, abandoned Prophetstown to Harrison, and watched as Harrison burned it along with all the crops surrounding it.

This was certainly a blow, but even so, Prophetstown was reconstructed in less than a month. Additionally, an unprovoked American attack earned the Prophetstown movement more followers in the immediate aftermath of the clash, further discounting the assertion that the Battle of Tippecanoe itself was a devastating and ultimately fatal blow to Tenskwatawa’s movement.

Perhaps the most impactful outcome of the battle was actually  Harrison’s portrayal of the battle and its effect in Washington. Members of Congress concluded that the Native Peoples wouldn’t have fought against the Americans, risking annuities provided by the government, simply to preserve their land. No, there had to be more to it. They decided that the only plausible explanation was that Tenskwatawa and his warriors were in league with the British, who were surely promising annuities of their own. There was no evidence to support this besides Governor Harrison’s long-standing accusations that Prophetstown was working for the British.

Nevertheless, the U.S. government held it as a fact. This belief – that the British were conspiring with Native forces to launch attacks on American forts and other holdings – was one in a string of complaints against Britain. The American belief that the British were inciting Native attacks, along with ongoing naval issues regarding freedom of the seas, economic sanctions, and American sovereignty led Congress to declare war on June 18, 1812 against Great Britain. Today, we call this the War of 1812.

During the War of 1812, Tenskwatawa took a back seat to his brother, who was a better warrior with more experience. Just as the war was starting, Tecumseh established an alliance with British forces – an unsurprising move given the prolonged tensions between Prophetstown and the American government. After battling to preserve the land the Prophet had claimed for his people in present-day northern Indiana during the early war, a devastating blow for the movement came when Tecumseh died in battle in October 1813. After that battle, Tenskwatawa fled the pursuing American forces to Upper Canada, where he and a small group of followers stayed for over a decade, well past the 1815 end of the war.

Following these years of exile in Canada, the Prophet returned to the U.S. in 1825 to lead a contingent of Shawnee to Kansas, where he set up the last, much smaller iteration of Prophetstown. He lived there until his death in 1836.

[Music]

Beckley: While his movement ultimately failed, Tenskwatawa and his followers at Prophetstown represent a piece of history often overlooked – organized resistance to white settlement. Many look back at history and see the eventual removal of Native Peoples to the west as an inevitability. However, in the aspirations of Tenskwatawa, we see another possible outcome – one in which an autonomous pan-Indian nation could succeed and coexist adjacent to the United States, something which the Prophet advocated for, saying:

Voice actor: “I hope what I now say will be engraven on your heart. It is my determination to obey the Great Spirit and live in peace with you and your people. . . . This is what the Great Spirit has told us repeatedly. We are all made by him, although we differ a little in colour. We are all his children and should live in peace and friendship with each other.”

Beckley: I want to reiterate the importance of remembering that this outcome – the dwindling of the Prophet’s power – was by no means inevitable. The failure to establish an autonomous pan-Indian nation was also not inevitable. In fact, part of the terms of the wartime alliance between Prophetstown and the British forces was the establishment of a “buffer state” between Canada and the United States. This agreement put the Prophet and his followers in the best position for success and autonomy after the war, as the “buffer state” was to be an independent Indigenous nation, a possibility that remained as feasible, if not likely, right up to the end of the war.

Considering the outcomes of historical events to be pre-ordained – especially when discussing something as complicated as this – erases the agency of the people involved. It erases the fact that these were real people fighting for a real cause with real reason to hope for success. And who are we to take that away?

The story of Prophetstown is not by any means the entire story of Native resistance to white encroachment, and removal and resistance is not the entire story of Native People in the Hoosier state. There are Indigenous people living in and making history in Indiana today. And we at IHB have committed ourselves to preserving this history. If you are an Indigenous person living in Indiana, we want to hear from you. We are looking for the stories that have been left out of the textbooks and have not been commemorated by historical markers. What stories did you grow up hearing? Who did you look up to? We’d love to listen to your recollections and do what we can to help you preserve your history. Email me at lbeckley@library.in.gov with any questions, suggestions, or stories you’d like to share.

Once again, I’m Lindsey Beckley and this has been Talking Hoosier History. Talking Hoosier History is a product of the Indiana Historical Bureau, a division of the Indiana State Library. The music in this episode was written and performed by multi Native American Music Award winner and Indian Summer Music Award winner Golaná from the Echota Cherokee tribe. All tracks used were from the albums “Meditations for Two” and “Path to the Heart.” You can learn more about Golaná’s music and purchase his albums at oginali.com. You can find a link in the show notes. I used the book The Gods of Prophetstown by Adam Jortner as my main secondary source for this episode. If you would like to see all of my sources, visit blog.history.in.gov and click “Talking Hoosier History” at the top to see a full transcript and show notes. Talking Hoosier History is written by me, Lindsey Beckley. Sound engineering on this episode was by Justin Clark with help from Jill Weiss Simins. Join us in two weeks for the next installment of Giving Voice, where we’ll be talking to Shawnee Chief Ben Barnes. Until then, catch us on social media as Indiana Historical Bureau and remember to subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for listening!

Show Notes for Tenskwatawa: The Rise and Fall of a Nation

Music:

All music in this episode was produced by award-winning Native artist Golaná from the Echota Cherokee tribe. Listen to and purchase Golaná’s music here: oginali.com.

The tracks heard in this episode are from the albums “Meditations for Two” and “Path to the Heart.”

Books:

Calloway, Colin, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History, (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016).

Calloway, Collin, The Shawnees and the War for America, (New York: Penguin Books, 2007).

Cayton, Andrew, Frontier Indiana, (Bloomington: IU Press, 1998).

Dubar-Ortiz, Roxanne, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).

Edmunds, David, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership, (New York: Pearson Longman, 2008).

Edmunds, David, The Shawnee Prophet, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).

Gugin, Linda and St. Clair. James, Indiana’s 200: The People Who Shaped the Hoosier State, (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society), 346-348.

Harrison, William Henry, Messages and Letter of William Henry Harrison, 1773-1841, (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Commission, 1922).

Jortner, Adam, The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Kinietz, Vernon, and Voegelin, Ermine, Shawnese Traditions C.C. Trowbridge’s Account, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1939).

Madison, James, and Sandweiss, Lee Ann, Hoosiers and the American Story, (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014).

McNemar, Richard, The Kentucky Revival, or, A Short History of the Late Extraordinary Outpouring of the Spirit of God in the Western States of America: Agreeably to Scripture Promises and Prophecies Concerning the Latter Day: with a Brief Account of the Entrance and Progress of What the World Call Shakerism among the Subjects of the Late Revival in Ohio and Kentucky : Presented to the True Zion-traveler as a Memorial of the Wilderness Journey, (New York: Reprinted by Edward O. Jenkins, 1846).

Michigan Historical Commission, Michigan Historical Collections, vol. 40, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2006), 127-133.

Sugden, John, Tecumseh: A Life, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997).

Warren, Stephen, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870, (Illinois: University of Illinois, 2005).

Websites:

Candey, Robert, and Young, Alex, “Total Solar Eclipse of 1806 June 16,” accessed https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEsearch/SEsearchmap.php?Ecl=18060616.

Academic Journals:

Cave, Alfred, “The Shawnee Prophet, Tecumseh, and Tippecanoe: A Case Study of Historical Myth-Making,” Journal of the Early Republic, 22, no. 4 (Winter, 2002), accessed https://www.jstor.org/stable/3124761?read-now=1&loggedin=true&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

How Indiana’s Religious Institutions Kept the Faith During the 1918 Flu Pandemic

Indianapolis woman wearing a mask during the Spanish Flu epidemic, November 27, 1918, courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society.

For many Hoosiers across the state, this week marks the sixth week that they’ve been asked to stay at home to help flatten the curve and slow the spread of COVID-19. In addition to the many schools, businesses, libraries, and other enterprises that have been impacted, so too have Indiana’s religious institutions. During this stretch, Christians could not come together as parishioners to celebrate Holy Week as they have for centuries past. Jews had to find alternative ways to observe Passover. And last week, with the start of Ramadan, Muslims could not gather in mosques or with family to mark the month of spiritual rejuvenation as they traditionally would.

Beyond adjusting to holiday commemorations is the general desire among worshipers to practice their religion and attend daily or weekly services together as normal. Most religious leaders across the state have made the difficult, but necessary decision to help comply with social distancing orders in an effort to do their part and protect their followers and other Hoosiers.

Muncie Evening Press, October 7, 1918, p. 8, accessed Newspapers.com.

Historical records show us that this is not the first time Indiana’s religious institutions have faced such circumstances. When the Spanish Influenza pandemic hit Indiana in the fall of 1918, U.S. public health service officials mandated a statewide quarantine here and in most other states. The order, put in place by October 6th, called for the immediate closure of “all schools, churches, theaters, amusements of all kinds, and to put a ban on all public meetings and gatherings.”[1] In a previous Indiana History Blog post, IHB historian Nicole Poletika examined how Hoosiers coped with the quarantine in a number of ways. Here, we take a more in-depth look at how the order directly impacted Indiana’s religious institutions and believers in late 1918.

As we’ve seen today, Hoosiers have not let the stay-at-home order prevent them from finding creative ways to come together, celebrate, and in some cases mourn. While technological advancements might afford us more opportunities to “see” one another and connect virtually now, religious leaders in 1918 also found many ways to help keep the faith among their followers as the number of influenza cases grew.

South Bend Tribune, October 12, 1918, accessed Newspapers.com.

Many used the local press to stay connected with members, give each other hope, and encourage the continued practice of their religion. Through the newspapers, they shared scripture readings, offered Bible school lessons, and encouraged their followers and anyone else interested to worship as individuals or together as a family. In mid-October 1918, A.F. Mitchell, chairman of the press committee of the Ministerial Association, issued the following statement to city church members in Richmond, which was published by the Palladium Item on October 12, 1918: [2]

On account of the ban laid upon congregational assemblies there will be no public services of the churches until after October 20. During this period of time there should be no cessation in Bible study or worship. The home is still fundamental and the basis of all good government. . . Let the home then be true to its highest privilege and around the family altar keep the home fires burning adding even a brighter glow while the churches are closed.

Rev. G.P. Fisher published a similar statement in the Culver Citizen a few days later, urging all families to continue to pray at the stated hours of services.[3] When the statewide ban was extended to the end of October, First Presbyterian Church in Rushville implored members to “make [Sunday] a day of prayer and meditation in their homes” and the pastor offered an outline of readings to unite the congregation despite their physical isolation.[4]

Muncie Evening Press, October 19, 1918, accessed Newspapers.com.

Some newspapers went a step farther and dedicated larger portions of their publications to celebrating Sunday morning services. In a series the Indianapolis Star named “Worship with the Star,” the paper featured a full page that included opening and closing hymns, a scripture lesson, and sermons.[5] The Muncie Press responded similarly in their October 19, 1918 issue, presenting sermons from the pastors of First Baptist Church, First Presbyterian Church, and High Street M.E. Church.[6]

Indianapolis Star, October 13, 1918, p. 30, accessed Newspapers.com.

Religious leaders sought other ways to maintain contact with their members and keep services going during the influenza pandemic. Today, during the present COVID-19 crisis, we’ve seen a trend among a number of churches across the country to offer “drive-in” services. Some worshipers have also celebrated services on their front lawns in an effort to comply with social distancing regulations. In 1918, some church leaders actively proposed and, in some cases held, open air services, believing that “brief religious services in well ventilated churches” could be held “without in any serious sense compromising the health of the community.”[7]

Local health boards across the state discouraged this practice. On October 13, 1918, a policeman had to be dispatched to the Adelbert Polish Catholic Church in South Bend when the pastor of the church offered one such service.[8] Similarly, in Evansville, the local health officer denied granting permission to the Assumption Church to hold open air services at Bosse Field in mid-October, stating that “even a gathering in the open air might prove dangerous.”[9] As conditions seemed to improve in early November and the ban was lifted, many churches held open air services with the approval of their local boards of health.[10]

Fort Wayne Journal, November 13, 1918, p. 6, accessed Newspapers.com.

Rev. F.E. Smith of Jackson Street Christian Church in Muncie came up with one of the more creative ways of safely “getting around the flu order.” Working with the Central Union Telephone Company, Rev. Smith arranged to hold services by having members of the church call in and listen by phone, our modern equivalent to following services online or watching them broadcast on television.[11]

Muncie Evening Press, October 12, 1918, p. 8, accessed Newspapers.com.

As the flu pandemic went on, worshipers and religious leaders alike wondered what the lasting impact might be once buildings began to reopen and gatherings were again permitted. A cartoon in the Fort Wayne Sentinel offered one view, with different families seated apart from one another in church and everyone required to wear masks upon entry to help contain the spread of germs.[12]

Fort Wayne Sentinel, October 16, 1918, accessed Newspapers.com.

As new outbreaks of the flu occurred in late November and December, health authorities across the state strongly urged all people attending churches or theaters, or visiting stores to wear regulation masks.[13] Some churches curtailed services, while others closed again for a few weeks under new bans. In December, board of health officials in some areas ordered churches to keep their services to one hour in length and “instructed [pastors] to devote fifteen minutes of that hour to the subject of ventilation in the homes and business houses as a preventative of influenza.”[14]

Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, December 6, 1918, p. 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

Like businesses across the state, religious institutions also had to deal with the financial strains imposed by the pandemic. Several weeks of missed weekly offerings left heavy burdens on some churches. Many religious leaders looked for ways to continue collections as their buildings remained closed, with some publicizing specific hours whereby members could safely drop off their offerings.[15]

Temple Beth-El, South Bend, Indiana. Photo courtesy of Temple Beth-El.

Pastors and rabbis also sought ways to help those more directly afflicted by influenza. In mid-October 1918, Rabbi Julius A. Leibert of Temple Beth-El in South Bend offered the city the “use of the temple as an improvised concentration hospital where cases of influenza could be taken.”[16] Local board of health members discussed the plan with other leading health experts and declined the offer, fearing that concentrating larger numbers of people at the temple at that time would increase the mortality rate. Other actions were taken elsewhere in the state as the pandemic continued. For example, as the number of influenza cases grew in Tipton County in December, leaders at Elwood’s First Christian Church converted the building into a temporary hospital to help offer aid to those afflicted.[17]

First Christian Church, Elwood, Indiana, ca. 1908. Photo courtesy of Indiana Memory.

Though pressure to end the state’s COVID-19 quarantine has increased in the last few weeks, it remains unclear when businesses, cultural institutions, and religious buildings will reopen and what guidelines will be enacted when they do. The 1918 influenza pandemic offers us examples of how religious leaders and worshipers handled closures and bans on gatherings in the past and how they continued to safely practice their faith and serve the community in the midst of a crisis.

Notes:

*All newspaper articles were accessed via Newspapers.com unless otherwise noted.

[1] “Closing of All Public Places is State Order,” Muncie Evening Press, October 7, 1918, 1, 8.; “No Public Assemblages,” Princeton Daily Clarion, October 7, 1918, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[2] “Keep Church Work Going, City Urged,” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN), October 12, 1918, 5.

[3] “Preacher to People,” Culver Citizen, October 16, 1918, 4.

[4] “With the Churches,” Daily Republican, October 26, 1918, 3.

[5] “Worship with the Star,” Indianapolis Star, October 12, 1918, 1.; “The Star’s Sunday Morning Services,” Indianapolis Star, October 13, 1918, 30.

[6] “Go to Church Sunday with the Muncie Press,” Muncie Evening Press, October 19, 1918, 2.

[7] “Urges Open Air Church Service,” South Bend News-Times, October 13, 1918, 3.

[8] “Polish Priest Holds Open Air Service in Defiance of Health Order,” South Bend News-Times, October 14, 1918, 3.

[9] “The Influenza is Decreasing Reports Show,” Evansville Press, October 17, 1918, 6.

[10] “Hold Services in Open Air,” Fort Wayne Sentinel, November 9, 1918, 1.; [Untitled], Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, November 10, 1918, 2.; “Celebrated Masses in Open-Air Sunday,” Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, November 13, 1918, 6.

[11] “Church Services by Phone to Get Around ‘Flu’ Order,” Muncie Star Press, October 12, 1918.; “And Don’t Forget to Put Baby to Sleep,” Muncie Evening Press, October 12, 1918, 8.

[12] “Church Services Might be Resumed Under Conditions Represented Below,” Fort Wayne Sentinel, October 16, 1918.

[13] “The Need of Precaution,” Fort Wayne Sentinel, November 20, 1918, 7.; “Flu Mask Order Stands; Option is Permissible,” Indianapolis Star, November 24, 1918, 1.; “Must Wear Flu Masks,” Fort Wayne Sentinel, December 3, 1918, 1.; “Epidemic Fought by Wearing Masks,” Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, December 6, 1918, 1.

[14] “Ban is Lifted as to Churches,” Columbus Republic, December 17, 1918, 4.; “Health Board Rapped for Closing Churches During the Epidemic of Flu,” Columbus Republic, December 25, 1918, 3.

[15] “Pastors Need Support While Flu Ban is On,” Indianapolis Star, October 25, 1918, 9.; “Church Needs,” Indianapolis News, October 26, 1918, 6.

[16] “Board of Health Rejects Temple Beth-El Offer,” South Bend News-Times, October 20, 1918, 2.

[17] “Condition Serious at Elwood,” Tipton Daily Tribune, December 13, 1918, 1.; First Christian Church, Elwood, Indiana, photograph, ca. 1908, accessed Indiana Memory.

Being a “Bicyclienne:” Balancing Freedom and Femininity

Miss Schiffling and her wheel on the roof of the National Surgical Institute, 1890s, Herman List Collection, courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society.

Akin to the freedom afforded by the bicycle during this period of quarantine, women in the 1890s discovered a sense of liberation when pedaling on their cycles. No longer did women depend entirely upon men for transportation, and no longer were they encumbered by layers of petticoats. With this newfound autonomy, the bicycle became a symbol of the fight for women’s equality. As noted by the National Women’s History Museum, “Having the ability to be fully self-reliant, often for the first time in their lives, would encourage women to be more courageous in other areas, such as demanding voting rights.”

But while the bicycle led to shifts in gender norms, much to the angst of some, female riders were expected to maintain a sense of grace and femininity atop the apparatus—from the way they outfitted themselves, to the way they dismounted, and even to the method of breathing while pedaling. Essentially, women were expected to adorn the cities and countrysides in which they traversed. Here, we will go over some of the biking decorum suggested by The Indiana Woman, and see how you would fair as a “bicyclienne” in the 1890s. We’re guessing you’ll have a new sense of appreciation for headbands and Fabletics leggings.

Ad, The Indiana Woman 3, no. 25 (May 8, 1897): 16, courtesy of Digital Indy, Indianapolis Public Library.

Before you take your bicycle—perhaps the Ben-Hur model—to Cyclorama riding school, it is imperative to assemble an outfit that strikes a winsome yet serious note. The Indiana Woman, in its May 15, 1897 issue, warned riders to avoid sweaters, as the “sight is not pleasing. If you ask your brother about it, his answer will be emphatic almost to the point of rudeness.” Then what should you wear? A “pretty bicycle suit” will do, so long as it is not made of corduroy, unattractive fabric that it is. Brown or gray suits are best, but whatever you do, avoid red, as a “woman awheel attracts enough attention anyway, without even a tiny bit of color in her costume.” The suit’s skirt should almost reach the tops of one’s shoes, and it goes without saying that an underskirt has no place in one’s wardrobe. Bloomers are acceptable undergarments, so long as the waistband has a deep yoke. You do want your waist to remain trim, don’t you?

When it comes to headwear, one writer lamented “Why, O why, will you wear that monstrous hat, tipped with feathers and garlanded with flowers when you are on your wheel?” No! Mademoiselles should “Either buy yourself a bicycle hat, or stay home.” When it comes to footwear, golf stockings paired with “low shoes” are most appropriate (p.9). Whatever you choose, always keep in mind that “There has been such a revulsion of feeling against all things mannish, that ‘advanced’ modes have received their unmistakable death-blow, and cyclists now dress to appear strictly feminine.”

Ad, The Indiana Woman 2, no. 2 (May 16, 1896): 15, courtesy of Digital Indy, Indianapolis Public Library.

Now that you are sure to please to the eye, it is time to learn to ride, daintily of course. You can head over to H.T. Hearsey’s Cycle Co.’s riding school in Indianapolis, or like one “M. C. C.,” enlist the help of your brother’s friend, an expert cycler. For two hours, the pair “ran up and down that street, the poor instructor almost ready to drop from fatigue” (p.7). The next day, when M. C. C. was at a “good clip,” the instructor released her and she headed  towards a wall of bricks, leaving her bruised and disheartened. “Wisdom, however, came with the fall,”and after a few other incidents of careening into Indianapolitans, she “can now ride with one pedal, one handle bar or no handlebar at all.” This would come as no surprise to a contributor for the May 1, 1897 issue, who stated “It has been noted as a curious fact that women cyclists keep their heads better, are more alert, vigilant and resourceful among the dangers of the streets than most men are” (p.14). The writer mused further that “Strange as it may seem, the women seem better able to keep their wheels bright and clean than most men.”

Clara J. Anderson with her bicycle at the Indianapolis YWCA, ca. 1899, courtesy of the Nicholas Horn Collection, The Indiana Album.

Now, to work on our form. One writer advised in the April 18, 1896 issue, that to be a good rider one must see that “every detail of her costume is correct” prior to mounting. Once atop your bicycle, do not “fall into the ungainly humped-up postures of many masculine riders” (p. 13). Sit upright as if on horseback, making sure to avoid “automatic stiffness” and “limp ungainliness.” Be careful to study the anatomy of the wheels, so as to be able to repair them in case of “small injury,” or at the very least familiarize yourself with repair prices. Do not be among the many women who struggle to “keep their mouths shut,” being that one doctor warned granite particles and microbes kicked up by a spinning wheel are injurious to one’s health (p.7).

Once you have gotten the hang of it, take great care not to ride like a “scorcher,” blazing down the beaten path at godforsaken speeds. Unless you hope to be a professional cyclist, this practice should only be undertaken by men. One is neither interesting nor attractive with her  “hat awry, her hair disheveled, and her face scarlet with exertion.” Scorching also causes poor complexion and, perhaps worse, results in “muscles developed at the expense of her feminine grace.” The “inveterate scorcher” misses out on the beauty of land and sky in an attempt to ride as many miles as possible. Plus, you never know when you might cross paths with prominent bike enthusiasts like Clemens Vonnegut or Carl Fisher—you know what they say about first impressions.

Miss Estep posing in a tree, ca. 1899, courtesy of the Joan Hostetler Collection, The Indiana Album.

Whether you and your party are riding to the Indianapolis Country Club or countryside, the issue of greeting passersby remains. Should men and women forsake manners in the name of safety? Shall, one author in the July 11, 1896 issue asks, “a lady make a sweeping courtesy, or just one of those careless, saucy little good morning nods that sends a man’s heart up under his necktie and results in his speech becoming temporarily embarrassed?” (13). Do your best to maintain gentility, especially on “evening spins” as they have “led to a number of young people falling victim to Cupid’s wiles last year, and that the wedding bells rang out” for couples who met atop their wheels (May 15, 1897 issue, p. 10). If you are lucky enough to be struck by the mischievous cherub’s arrow, be sure to purchase a tandem bicycle to ensure the flames of romance remain stoked.

You’ve now used your wheels to explore the countryside, run errands at the market, and improve your health via “daily constitutionals.” While physicians agree that bicycling is permissible for women, even beneficial in moderate doses, you should heed one author’s advice before jumping into the “latest fad:” the bicycle dinner. The writer noted that pedaling from house to house over the course of eight meals, could “induce violent dyspepsia.” These indulgent dinner parties are an “American idea,” being that “No such a provocation to nervousness and indigestion would emanate from a foreign mind.”

Bicyclists in Madison, Ind., ca. 1895, courtesy of the Indiana History Room Archives, The Albany Floyd County Public Library.

Mastering the art of the wheel as you have you, dear bicyclienne, you deserve to indulge in a little accessorizing. Perhaps you would like to document your escapades with a camera that hooks neatly onto your handlebars. A wicker basket for picnics is not only charming, but practical. Equip your cycle with all the handlebar bells and bangle whistles to alert passersby of your presence. A silver or gold scarf-pin in the shape of a cyclist or riding saddle lends a certain elegance to your fetching figure.

As you journey across Indiana’s many trails, bike paths, and parks— after faithfully oiling your wheels, of course—appreciate that the two wheels beneath you once helped transport Hoosier women to a more autonomous world. Godspeed, and for goodness sake, do not be a scorcher!

ILOHI: The Oral History of the Indiana General Assembly and Its Relevance to You

What if I told you there is a way to get an inside look at the politicians who govern your state?  What if there was a place where you could find out not only who these politicians really are, but why they made the decisions they made? Most importantly though, what if I told you, what they do is ultimately up to you? The Indiana Legislative Oral History Initiative (ILOHI) serves as your gateway into the lives of Indiana’s former General Assembly members.

How the Project Began:

ILOHI was created by House Bill 1100 by the Indiana General Assembly (IGA) in 2017. It is an ongoing oral history project established to record the history of the IGA—from the latter part of the twentieth century to the present day—from those who experienced it first-hand.

What the Project Does:

Essentially, interviews are conducted, transcribed, preserved, and then eventually made publicly accessible. Thus, as ILOHI’s oral historian, I travel around the State of Indiana interviewing former legislators who served as early as the 1960s. I record their stories to provide a new history of the IGA and its members and shed light on the modern political and legislative processes that help shape our state. In turn, this project will highlight the ways in which Indiana has changed over the course of the last four decades and show lawmakers’ contributions and responses to this evolution. As a result, by sharing the history of the IGA and its influence on the people, processes, and institutions of the state, we can begin to more fully understand the role Indiana plays in a national and global context.

Portrait of Indiana State Senators inside the Senate Chambers in the Indiana Statehouse in 1967, courtesy of Indiana State Library Photograph Collections.

Why You Should Care:

State government, let alone government in general, can often seem like a remote and overly-complex process in which we have no control. Consequently, this feeling of powerlessness can sometimes cause us to remove ourselves from legislative issues. However, our role as citizens is far more influential than meets the eye. These are elected officials, meaning they work for us. They are voted into positions of power, because we the people chose them in hopes they will make our state better. Although we should be involved in what they do and how they do it, it is easy to feel intimidated by political officials and the political process. That’s where ILOHI oral history interviews come in. They can help demystify elected officials and inform you about the legislative process, so that you can better understand your state and the people who serve it.

As Ned Lamkin, former member of the Indiana House of Representatives from 1967 to 1982, states in an ILOHI interview:

It’s theirs [the people], and it will be whatever they want it to be, if they in fact want to have an influence. . . . The General Assembly is there to listen and respond to the needs of its citizens and if the citizens recognize that and think about how things could be better and organize to try to make them better, the General Assembly will ultimately respond.

Charlie Brown, former member of the Indiana House of Representatives from 1982 to 2018, informed the ILOHI that citizens:

have as much power as they want to have. . . . I often tell folks you don’t know how powerful you are. While I’m sitting there in the General Assembly and my staff comes to me with a stack of phone messages and all of them are centered around, most of them centered around one subject matter, something that I had not been giving much attention, I said, ‘Boy, I better find out more about this.’

Indiana House of Representatives, 1989, at their desks in the House Chambers inside the Indiana Statehouse, accessed Indiana State Library Photograph Collections.

Ergo, legislators may be members of the IGA, but the IGA answers to you. On the other hand, perhaps you already feel confident in your understanding of the legislative process and your role in it. But maybe you question the motives of some politicians and worry that political games or self-serving interests affect the actual will of the people.  After all, nearly everyone can recall a story about a corrupt politician at the state or national level. But a blanket dismissal of state government and the men and women who are elected into these positions of power removes their human aspects and motivations. This is why when government officials are examined closely via ILOHI interviews, a different side of politics emerge—one that may just restore your faith in your elected officials or at the very least helps you see a different side of the story. As a matter of fact, you may even come to think that they chose to get involved in politics because they honestly wanted to dedicate part of their lives to helping Hoosiers and the state that they too call home.

Bill Frazier, former member of the 1969 Indiana State Senate, provided insight into the responsibilities of legislators in his ILOHI interview. He says a legislator should “Be honest, and know politics is not an excuse to be dishonest.” And Pat Miller, former member of the Indiana House of Representatives in 1982 and the State Senate from 1983 to 2016, asserted:

I had pride in what the General Assembly was doing, I had pride in my colleagues because they took it serious. . . . I had pride in the ethics. . . . I mean you never had to question them. You never had to question their word, and I think for legislators the only thing we had was our word. And if we weren’t good to what we said, then we essentially lost all ability to be effective in the General Assembly.

“Bulen Warns GOP Trails in Voter Registration,” The Indianapolis Star, August 4, 1966, 11, accessed Newspapers.com.

Overall, these oral histories are meant to pull back the curtain and reveal the intentions and perspectives of legislators as they debated the policies, wrote the laws, and crafted the budgets in an attempt to shape and better the lives of Hoosiers today. Furthermore, the insights and lessons that emerge from their experiences are indispensable in understanding how we got to where we are today. If you care about your state, want to make a difference, and change how things work, let these interviews be a source of empowerment and reveal the nature of the relationship between the IGA and the citizens of Indiana. Because Indiana ultimately belongs to you, it requires interaction between elected officials and citizens, and the more citizens work with legislators to help make our state better, the more we all benefit.

“Preparing for the Spring Outing”: Historical Home Exercises to Get Fit or Make You Laugh

Harriet Coates, “Preparing for the Spring Outing,” Daily Tribune, April 11, 1915, Hoosier State Chronicles

It’s easy to feel cooped up as we dutifully abide by our “stay-at-home” instructions to help flatten the Coronavirus curve. It can be particularly challenging as we deal with the tempestuous spring in Indiana, wherein we can face anything from snow showers to beautiful sunshine to severe thunderstorms. Some days it’s just not possible to get the exercise we crave and need. Thankfully we do not usually have to deal with a quarantine, but Hoosiers—especially in a pre-treadmill world—have always grappled with the weather and getting fit for “the pleasure of outings, long walks, or rambles through the fields, wood or parks.” Check out some interesting home exercise tidbits from April 1915 to see how Hoosier women creatively prepared for “the spring outing” by using home furnishings to get in that daily workout.

Don’t Fritter Away Your Downtime: A Guide to Historical Hoosier Cooking

You’ve been (hopefully) sticking close to home and avoiding crowded stores for over three weeks now. If, like us, you’re peering into your pantry to find naught but potatoes, rice, and stale bread, we have just the thing for you: historical recipes!

Greentown, Indiana toddler holding a loaf of bread, ca. 1905, courtesy of Indiana Album.

Our ancestors were exceptionally skilled at making food last. They weren’t able to flit to the corner store to pick up a few staples or summon UberEats deliveries. Largely, they had what they had until they could grow more. Have stale bread? Make bread pudding or breadcrumbs. Have chicken bones or vegetable scraps? Make broth. Have a 10 lb. bag of rice but your significant other suddenly doesn’t like rice even though you’ve been making rice for years and he never complained before?

Anyway, when I look into my barren refrigerator and think, “what would my ancestors have made?” my next stop is Hoosier State Chronicles, which has nearly 1 million pages of freely-accessible digitized historical Indiana newspapers. Some of these include thousands of time tested recipes! Plugging in any given pantry staple brings up dozens of recipes. Granted, some are more useful than others (sadly, I think few of my loved ones would be tempted by a recipe for Tongue Toast), but by and large, these recipes are simple, economical, and delicious! Let’s take a tour through 19th century papers, using search terms for a few items I still have left in my house.

As the sage hobbit Samwise Gamgee once said, “Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew!” One of the best things about potatoes is their versatility. That, and the fact that they can last for months if stored properly, make them the perfect pantry staple. Let’s take a look at several potato recipes from the April 15, 1876 issue of the Terre Haute Saturday Evening Mail. 

(Terre Haute) Saturday Evening Star, April 15, 1876, page 3

This fairly basic recipe for mashed potatoes takes a wild turn towards the end when the author casually suggests making a mashed potato custard! Similar to the filling of a sweet potato pie, this recipe calls for boiled potatoes, milk, butter, eggs, sugar, and nutmeg. After consulting some modern recipes, I’ve made an educated guess as to the amount of each since, as with so many historical recipes, this one leaves much to be desired in the way of specificity.

These potato fritters are – as advertised – absolutely delicious! I haven’t made every recipe in this post, but I have made these and I highly recommend them. They get even better if you add in a little bit of bacon, cheese, jalapeño, or anything else you have around the kitchen.

This “potato cake” recipe is basically just a recipe for delicious, always soft, and surprisingly healthy potato bread.

Remember the 10 lb. bag of rice I mentioned earlier? Despite what my husband has to say about it, I’m going to be making a lot of rice in the coming days. Luckily, I was able to track down some alternative uses from the 19th century that may help in this endeavor.

Indiana State Sentinel, January 14, 1891.

This simple rice pie can be enhanced with any number of additions. Add in raisins, prunes, and brown sugar, for a sweeter dish, or bacon bits, chives, and cheese for a more savory breakfast item. This recipe from Martha Stewart even adds in a bit of brandy into the mix.

Indiana State Sentinel, January 14, 1891.

Rice . . . but make it waffles! This interesting take on waffles will mix things up at your breakfast table. I think since this recipe is on the simple side, it would be a great base to build upon. Top it with gravy. Or go the sweet route and top with fruit and syrup. Or go for the all-out savory dish and make these loaded rice waffles with sausage, spinach, tomatoes, and cheddar cheese. Since this recipe uses some outdated measuring terms (1 gill is roughly 1 cup), I’ve modernized it a bit below to make it easier to follow.

 

Indiana State Sentinel, January 14, 1891.

Now for something I had never heard of before – Rice Croquettes. These endlessly tweakable fried rice balls can be made to fit anyone’s palette. A quick online search reveals cheesy bacon croquettes,  mozzarella croquettes, and ham and cheese croquettes.

Do you eat the heel of your bread loaves? If not, what do you do with them? Consider this – a typical loaf of bread contains twenty to twenty-four pieces including the heels. If you are in the habit of throwing away the heels, that means you’re throwing away 10% of every loaf of bread you buy. If your family eats a loaf of bread per week, you’re throwing away over five loaves of bread a year! Never waste a piece of bread again with these historical hacks for using even the hardest bits of stale (or unwanted) bread.

(Terre Haute) Saturday Evening Mail, February 9, 1884. page 7.

Breadcrumbs are an ever-useful thing to have around the kitchen. From coating your rice croquettes or chicken tenders for frying to filling out your meatballs, you’ll always find a use for these crumbs.

Indianapolis Recorder, April 22, 1899, page 3.

These coffee fritters use up your stale bread at double time – the fritters themselves are made of strips of stale bread and they’re coated in stale bread crumbs before being fried. Delicious with your morning coffee or afternoon tea, I’ve made this recipe and it’s mouthwatering just as it’s written.

Left: Jasper Weekly Courier, November 30, 1877. Right: (Terre Haute) Saturday Evening Mail, January 27, 1894.

My favorite thing to make with stale bread is bread pudding. Traditionally, like many English puddings, bread pudding is boiled in a pudding basin or a tightly woven cloth. See an example of this done with 18th century plum pudding here. More popular in America, though, is the baked version of this delectable dessert, so I’m including an example of each. Below is each recipe broken down and translated for the modern kitchen.

Serve warm with brandy sauce. 

Want more recipes? From dried beans to pigs feet, there are recipes for just about any food item waiting to be found in the pages of historical Indiana newspapers. Show us what you make on twitter by tagging us @in_bureau!

Gardening Wisdom from the Historical Indianapolis News: April Edition

Many people are looking for ways to channel the anxiety of our current crisis into something healthy and productive. For those of us with green thumbs, this has meant more time in the garden. And there is no better place for us to get some sage advice than from those Hoosier gardeners who came before us. Luckily, some of them shared their wisdom in an early-twentieth century column in the Indianapolis News titled “Of Interest to Farmer and Gardner.”

Here are some April highlights.

The Pepper King

In 1912, the Indianapolis News columnist raved about the new Ruby King pepper (Capsicum annuum). The writer enthused:

There are a great many varieties on the market today; but there is only one kind of sweet pepper to grow for a large yield, fine appearance and good selling qualities — the Ruby King . . . when a farmer comes in [to market] with a load of Ruby Kings, what a difference there is and how quickly the buyers pick them up!

Ruby King, Seed Savers Exchange, accessed seedsavers.org.

An exciting new find for the writer, we now consider the Ruby King an heirloom variety. According to several companies selling the pepper, it was first introduced in 1902. However, the American Garden: Illustrated Journal of Horticulture described the Ruby King in 1885. The American Garden writer explained that with the introduction of milder yellow peppers, people seemed to have “developed a taste for less pungency in this fiery vegetable.” This critic was not a fan of the yellow pepper, stating emphatically that “it cannot be denied that the correct color in a pepper seems to be red.” The only vegetable that fit the bill as both mild in taste and red in color was “Burpee’s Ruby King, now introduced by W. Atlee Burpee.” The writer called it a “a respectable Pepper . . . mild and pleasant to taste — unequaled, in this respect, by any other variety.”

American Garden: Illustrated Journal of Horticulture 6:2 (February 1885), 23, accessed GoogleBooks.

Burpee does not seem to offer the variety any longer, but you can add the Ruby King to your garden by ordering from heirloom sellers like the non-profit Seed Savers Exchange.

An Overlooked Bramble Berry

L. H. Bailey, “The Lucretia Dewberry,” Cornell University Bulletin, reprinted in American Gardening 8:5 (May 1892), 274-75, accessed GoogleBooks.

In the April 29, 1911 edition of the Indianapolis News, our gardening columnist gave some advice on introducing a low-maintenance bramble called a dewberry into the garden. While blackberries and raspberries were (and are) better known brambles, the writer gave several reasons to add dewberry, which is also native to Indiana. The dewberry does just fine in poor soil, doesn’t need fertilizer, and can produce in partial sun or full shade. While raspberries and blackberries need regular pruning, the dewberry doesn’t. It can be trained to a stake or a trellis, but doesn’t require any support. And while it doesn’t produce until its third or fourth year, the writer suggested that the plant benefits from mulch and frequent harvesting once it has berries. The Indianapolis News columnist had one more piece of advice for bramble growers in 1911: plant different varieties together. I was not able to confirm the science behind this, but the writer’s experience shows that dewberries grow better when planted with blackberries or raspberries.

“Dewberry,” Missouri Department of Conservation, accessed nature.mdc.mo.gov.

There are several varieties of dewberry, but one native to Indiana, according to the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center, is the Lucretia Dewberry (Rubus roribaccus). Writing for the Cornell University Bulletin in 1892, L. H. Bailey described the ease of growing the Lucretia Dewberry. Interestingly, this gardener-writer also recommended planting dewberry with blackberry and raspberry brambles. The main value of the dewberry was that of the three, it ripened first. Bailey also pointed out that dewberry is hardier than other berry plants, able to survive harsh winters without taking any special precautions. Birdwatchers might also want to plant this lesser known species. According to the Missouri Department of Conservation, dewberry is a favorite of catbirds, waxwings, and finches. I couldn’t find an Indiana farm selling Lucretia dewberry, but you can find them at DeGroot Nursery in Michigan, a family-owned farm in operation since 1957.

The Wolf Flower

“Of Interest to Farmer and Gardener: Perennial and Annual Lupine,” Indianapolis News, April 3, 1909, 20.

The April 3, 1909 edition of the Indianapolis News column touted the beauty of lupines, recommending them to Indiana gardeners. The News columnist explained that this flowering plant works both in formal and more natural gardens, easily withstands the cold midwestern winters, and come in an array of colors and varieties, both annual and perennial. Lupine seeds should be direct sown in April after frost and will flower in June, “and if cut frequently so that the plants can not go to seed, their flowering period continued almost up to the first frost.” An added bonus: lupine returns nitrogen to the soil. (You can learn how here). Beyond gardens, Hoosiers can also keep a look out for lupine in the wild, or even by the side of the road.

National Park Service, “Impact of Climate Change on the Karner Blue Butterfly,” 2010, accessed nps.gov.

Beautiful white, blue, and purple wild lupine (Lupinus perennis) thrives in the sandy soil of the Indiana Dunes and the larger Calumet Region. Here they support the life cycles of three different butterflies that only eat lupine. One of these is the endangered Karner Blue butterfly. At the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, the National Park Service uses controlled burns that encourage lupine growth, in order to improve the Karner Blue’s habitat. While much has been done to improve the chances of this endangered species, climate change is also proving to be a threat, according to the NPS. In response, scientists are working to create lupine-filled microclimates.

Nathaniel Lord Britton, Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions, Vol II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 269, accessed GoogleBooks.

Butterflies aren’t the only species that eat lupine. While the flowers are not edible (in fact they are poisonous), the nut-like seeds are edible for humans once soaked to remove the toxic chemicals and historically have been ground into a flour for cooking. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, lupine seeds were “a favorite food for traveling troops in ancient Europe.” The historical lore around this flower’s name is also rich. “Lupine” is latin for “wolf.” While we now know that lupines add nitrogen, the opposite was once thought true, that they “wolfed” nitrogen from the soil to get their color. Others have claimed the that the flower got its wolfish name, from the barren habitat in which it thrives. After a prairie, the lupine could be seen thriving among the burnt landscape, like a lone wolf. But it is lupine’s intense color, especially the blue, that has captured the imaginations of poets, artists, and writers through the ages. Let’s close then with an 1851 journal entry by Henry David Thoreau:

June 5. The lupine is now in its glory. It is the more important because it occurs in such extensive patches, even an acre or more together, and of such a pleasing variety of colors, — purple, pink, or lilac, and white, — especially with the sun on it, when the transparency of the flower makes its color changeable. It paints a whole hillside with its blue . . . No other flowers exhibit so much blue. That is the value of the lupine. The earth is blued with them. Yet a third of a mile distant I do not detect their color on the hillside. Perchance because it is the color of the air.

National Park Service, “Riverbank Lupine,” accessed nps.gov.

Sources:
* All newspapers accessed Newspapers.com.

The Pepper King

American Garden: Illustrated Journal of Horticulture 6:2 (February 1885), 23, accessed GoogleBooks.

“Of Interest to Farmer and Gardener: Suggestions for Growing Peppers,” Indianapolis News, April 13, 1912, 17.

An Overlooked Bramble

L. H. Bailey, “The Lucretia Dewberry,” Cornell University Bulletin, reprinted in American Gardening 8:5 (May 1892), 274-75, accessed GoogleBooks.

Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, “Rubis Roribaccus,” University of Texas at Austin, https://www.wildflower.org/plants/www.utexas.edu.

Missouri Department of Conservation, “Dewberry,” Field Guides, https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/dewberry.

“Of Interest to Farmer and Gardener: How to Grow Successfully the Bramble Berries in the Small Garden,” Indianapolis News, April 29, 1911, 22.

The Wolf Flower

“Growing Lupines,” Old Farmer’s Almanac, accessed https://www.almanac.com/plant/lupines.

Sarah Fuller, “Wild Lupine,” Indiana Dunes, accessed http://www.indianadunes.com/beaches-and-beyond/blog/wild-lupine/.

Nathaniel Lord Britton, Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions, vol. II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 269, accessed GoogleBooks.

Kim Mitchell and Cathy Carnes, “Wild Lupine and Karner Blue Butterflies,” Midwest Region Endangered Species, U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service, accessed https://www.fws.gov/midwest/endangered/insects/kbb/lupine.html.

National Park Service, “Impact of Climate Change on the Karner Blue Butterfly,” 2010, accessed nps.gov.

“Of Interest to Farmer and Gardener: Perennial and Annual Lupine,” Indianapolis News, April 3, 1909, 20.

Henry David Thoreau, The Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 36 (Hastings, East Sussex, United Kingdom: Delphi Classics, 2017), accessed GoogleBooks.

“Wild Lupine,” Save the Dunes, accessed https://www.indunesguide.com/lupinusperennis.

Better with Age: The Late-Blooming of Artist Will Vawter

Will Vawter, Autumn in Brown County, n.d., Flanner Buchanan Indiana the Beautiful Art Collection, https://flannerbuchanan.com/our-art-collection/.

Since at least the late-19th century, art galleries and critics have focused most of their attention on young, emerging artists. This strategy has paid off for savvy dealers and galleries, as these rising stars of the art world have brought in large amounts of money and produced blockbuster shows. The downside of this trend for the artists themselves, is that it can be difficult to find places to exhibit and sell their work as they get older. This is especially disappointing, as many artists peak later in life and produce their best work in their golden years. In this way, an artist’s best work might go largely unappreciated. [1]

Georgia O’Keeffe, From a Day with Juan II, 1977, Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org.

There are signs that this reign of young artists may be coming to an end. For example, the Tate announced that artists over the age of 50 would now be eligible for the coveted Turner Prize, awarded to a British artist each year for innovation in the arts. This shift recognizes that older artists can also be innovators. [2]

Meanwhile, the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] recently featured an exhibition titled The Long Run, which featured artists who were at least 45 years old when they made the exhibited piece of artwork. Most were much older, like Georgia O’Keeffe, who painted From a Day with Juan II at 90. The MOMA explained:

Innovation in art is often characterized as a singular event—a bolt of lightning that strikes once and forever changes what follows. The Long Run provides another view: by chronicling the continued experimentation of artists long after their breakthrough moments, it suggests that invention results from sustained critical thinking, persistent observation, and countless hours in the studio. [3]

The Carter Burden Gallery, accessed NPR.

The Carter Burden Gallery, which like other New York City spaces sells its artists’ works for thousands of dollars, is different in one significant way. All of its exhibited artists are 60 or older. The gallery’s director Marlena Vaccaro told NPR:

Older adults do not stop being who they are because they hit a particular age. Professional artists never stop doing what we do, and in many cases we get better at it as we go along. [4]

Frank M. Hohenberger, “Will Vawter at Work in His Studio,” photograph, n.d., Frank M. Hohenberger Photograph Collection, Lilly Library, Indiana University.

Simply put, some artists get better with age. This was true for Indiana artist Will Vawter. He began his artistic career in the 1890s as a talented but unremarkable illustrator for his local newspaper. He gained popularity mid-career for his drawings that brought the children’s books of James Whitcomb Riley to life. Vawter peaked, later in his life, as one of the finest landscape artists ever to work in Indiana. As the current art world shifts to include older artists, it’s worth examining one Hoosier painter who produced his best work in his late 60s. Will Vawter’s late-blooming reminds us to give exhibit space to older artists, not for the sake of inclusion only, but because we don’t want to miss out on the best work of their careers.

The Early Years of Will Vawter

John William “Will” Vawter was born in West Virginia in 1871 and moved with his family to Greenfield, Hancock County, Indiana, by 1880. [5] He worked as an illustrator for the (Greenfield) Hancock Democrat before becoming an illustrator at the Indianapolis Sentinel and the Indianapolis News in 1891. [6] In 1893, Vawter got his big break. The Indianapolis Journal dedicated a full page to an exclusive new poem by James Whitcomb Riley. [7] The Journal described the special edition, produced to coincide with a large national Grand Army of the Republic meeting, as “by far the most expensive and delightful feature ever offered its readers by an Indianapolis newspaper.”[8] The newspaper prominently featured Vawter’s illustrations of the poem.

James Whitcomb Riley, “Armazindy: A Borned Soldier and Hero,” Indianapolis Journal, September 5, 1893, 13, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

By the time Vawter started his illustrations for Riley, the “Hoosier Poet” had achieved national renown, and several of his volumes of poetry were best-sellers. [9] Riley was known for using “Hoosier dialect” to create poems “infused with the very spirit of the Hoosier soil from which they sprung.” [10] Likewise, Vawter honed his artistic skills observing life around him for local newspapers. Both men were Greenfield natives and keen observers of the local culture that colored Hoosier life. In this way, Vawter was uniquely positioned to interpret Riley’s work. Thus, the Riley-Vawter pairing, initiated by the Indianapolis Journal, was the beginning of a long creative partnership.

James Whitcomb Riley, Child-Rhymes, Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1898 edition accessed Indiana State Library, 1908 edition accessed Hathi Trust.

The Riley Years

In 1898, Indianapolis publisher Bowen-Merrill Company reissued a collection of Riley poems as Riley Child-Rhymes. Vawter’s illustrations were heavily featured in the book. In an extensive interview with the Indianapolis News, Riley  described Vawter’s innate ability to capture the spirit of the folks depicted in the poems. Riley stated:

It is a very gratifying thing to find an artist who is unconsciously aware of the exact situation and who understands his own intimate surroundings. Will Vawter is such an artist. There is no vagueness in his interpretation of the poems of this book. He is a Greenfield boy, and natively an artist . . . He depicted people and things in no patronizing way. They are taken in a realistic spirit; he is of them. [11]

Riley went on to describe the importance of understanding the subtlety of local dialect when dealing with characters like the “town gossip,” for instance. He continued on Vawter’s ability to capture these individuals:

All these characteristics have been unconsciously observed by young Vawter. Now that he comes to sit down and illustrate these scenes and people, he knows his material and surroundings perfectly . . . While he may be criticized for lack of technical finish, it would be dangerous to equip him with an exacting technical art knowledge . . . This would be to the absolute loss of native feeling, of the tone and direct blood relationship that is needed in his work. [12]

Riley’s comments are a mixed bag. He praised Vawter for his talent, but noted his unpolished rendering skills. He admired the way Vawter captured in ink the very people Riley depicted in words, but implied that the artist did so out of naiveté. Vawter captured their essence only because they were just the kind of folks that the simple young man knew and understood. At this early point in his career, Riley did not see Vawter as an artist with a vision of his own. Vawter would prove this assumption wrong much later in his career.

The fact that Riley’s appreciation for Vawter grew over the following years is evidenced by the sheer number of times the author paired with the artist on lushly-illustrated volumes of poetry. Vawter illustrated:

James Whitcomb Riley, Book of Joyous Children (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902, accessed IUPUI Digital Collections.

Riley Farm-Rhymes (1901, 1905 editions),
The Book of Joyous Children (1902),
His Pa’s Romance (1903),
A Defective Santa Claus (1904),
Riley Songs O’ Cheer (1905 edition),
The Boys of the Old Glee Club (1907),
Riley Songs of Summer (1908),
Riley Songs of Home (1910),
Riley Songs of Friendship (1921 edition).

Vawter also created front pieces for Riley’s A Child-World (1897) and Home Folks (1900), and illustrations for short Riley volumes Down Around the River and Other Poems (1911) and Knee Deep in June and Other Poems (1912). [13]

A Golden Age for Greenfield

Vawter illustrated a children’s book for another Greenfield author: his sister, Clara Vawter. “Miss Clara” as the local newspapers called her, was a rising star of the Indiana literary scene. She was writing for “several publications of prominence,” her work was read aloud and praised by the Western Writers’ Association, and publishers had written her “offering to pay her handsomely for her literary work.” The illustrated book by the Vawter siblings, Of Such Is the Kingdom of Heaven (1899, later published as The Rabbit’s Ransom) was widely praised not only for stimulating the imaginations of children, but also for appealing to the nostalgia of older people. Unfortunately, every article that mentioned Miss Clara’s promise as a writer, also noted her “delicate health” and she died in 1900. Of Such Is the Kingdom was her only published work. [14]

Will Vawter, illustration from The Rabbit’s Ransom by Clara Vawter (Brooklyn: Braunworth, Munn & Barber, 1899), accessed GoogleBooks.

Vawter contributed art to other Greenfield authors. He illustrated historian and poet John Clark Ridpath’s Epic of Life (1893) and contributed engravings to William H. English’s two-volume history Conquest of the Country Northwest of the River Ohio, 1778-1783 (1897). And he illustrated a children’s book by Greenfield author Adelia Pope Branham called Grandma Tales and Others (1899) and poet Barton Rees Pogue’s work Fortunes in Friendship (1926). [15] He made art for numerous other Indiana authors outside of Hancock County. [16] And by the turn of the twentieth century, his original book illustrations were exhibited around the country. [17]

The Rise of American Impressionism

By this time, Vawter was an accomplished illustrator, working in a popular style, and highly demanded by publishers. With the drastic increase in number and circulation of illustrated journals across the country, an illustrator like Vawter could stay gainfully employed in that medium. At the same time, American artists were hungry for an artistic style they could call their own. American painters educated in Europe were returning with the influence of French impressionism – broad, quick strokes, a bright palette, an eye for capturing the effects of light, and a desire to paint en plein air, or outside the walls of the studio. For example, Indiana-born painter William Merritt Chase shifted from the darker tones of the Munich school where he was trained as a young man, to the bright, impressionist style of the era’s avante garde painters during his mid and late career. Working out of his studio in New York, Chase and his colleagues helped to define this style of American Impressionism. These artists remained at home, painting scenes of life and landscape in the United States, as opposed to expatriating to European art capitals like their predecessors. While they drew on artistic elements from European styles as they saw fit, their goal was to create a uniquely American style of art. [18]

William Merritt Chase, Ready for the Ride, oil on canvas, 1877, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, accessed collections.mfa.org.
William Merritt Chase, At the Seaside, oil on canvas, ca. 1892, Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org.

The Aesthetic Pull of Brown County

Another Hoosier painter took this localism further, pushing his cohorts to not just remain in the U.S., but to paint the beauty of their home state. T. C. Steele followed in Chase’s footsteps, studying in Munich before returning to live and work in Indianapolis. Steele found his calling in the Indiana landscape and his muse in the hills of Brown County. Steele’s plein air paintings captured the light and natural beauty of the region and helped establish the reputation of the Hoosier Group, painters of the Indiana landscape that achieved international recognition by 1900. [19]

Indianapolis News, May 4, 1918, 32, Hoosier State Chronicles.

Someone of Vawter’s artistic sensibilities could not help but be influenced by this aesthetic shift, as well as the renown of the Hoosier Group. By 1909, Will and his wife Mary moved to Brown County, Indiana, just south of Nashville on a scenic farm they jokingly called “Rattlesnake Terrace” after some of the local fauna. Vawter set up a studio in an “old clapboard-roofed log cabin” with an expansive view of the property. Reportedly he kept a cow grazing on the property, despite the fact that it gave very little milk, because it added “picturesque interest to the landscape.” [20] While Vawter continued to derive his income from newspaper and magazine illustration, he too was enraptured by the Brown County landscape and began to work in an impressionist style influenced by the Hoosier Group. [21]

Will Vawter, Sunshine and Hollyhocks, 1925, n.d., accessed Fine Art America.
Frank M. Hohenberger, “Willa Vawter Painting in Studio,” photograph, n.d., Frank Hohenberger Collection, Lilly Library, Indiana University Image Collections Online.

Vawter was known to be kind and became popular with the locals. A 1917 Indianapolis News article reported on a little girl who came to visit him in his studio, carrying a well-loved doll. Noticing that the doll’s painted face had faded, Vawter “painted a new face with the rosiest cheeks and a beautiful pair of unwinking blue eyes.” The little girl left “bubbling over with gratitude.” Vawter went back to his work, but only for a few minutes. He was interrupted by another little girl holding her doll, and a half hour later, he had a dozen little fans gathered outside the studio. He quit trying to work and “gave up the day to making faces for all kids of dolls, from the old-fashioned rag baby to the most pretentious efforts in wax.” After fixing everyone’s toy over the course of a day, he joked that “this beauty parlor has closed.” [22]

Frank M. Hohenberger, “Vawter in Potato Patch,” photograph, n.d., Frank Hohenberger Collection, Lilly Library, Indiana University Image Collections Online.

Vawter was just as generous with his fellow artists. After becoming interested in etching in 1919, he opened up the small studio he had moved to in downtown Nashville, Indiana, to his peers. The modest room stood over a grocery store and still displayed the sign of the previous occupant, a realtor. It housed a copper plate printing press, cans of ink, cheesecloth for wiping the plates, a table, and a stove.

The Brown County Democrat reported:

Indianapolis News, June 7, 1919, 18, Hoosier State Chronicles.

It is understood between the few members of a little community etching and printing club that any member is free to use the press, stove, table, etc, but no member must be guilty of using any other member’s printing rags. [23]

In September 1919, Vawter exhibited some of these etchings at the H. Lieber Company art store in downtown Indianapolis, along with oil paintings by Steele and others. [24] While his work gained popularity across the state, Vawter worked to enhance the art scene in Brown County.

Will Vawter, Brown County Landscape, 1920, accessed MutualArt.

By August of 1920, Vawter and fellow artist Adolph R. Shulz, were working to establish an art museum. They found support in unlikely places, both with artists and locals hoping that such an art center would preserve the “nature wonders of a country that is fast losing its old-fashioned atmosphere,” and local businessmen who saw it as a means to increase tourism. [25] Their dream became a reality in 1926 with the opening of a gallery on the public square.  The artists and locals supporting the gallery formed the Brown County Art Gallery Association in order to open quality exhibitions to the public. [26]

In 1925, the work of Vawter and his fellow Brown County artists was exhibited at the art galleries of Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago. This exhibit, known as the “Hoosier Salon,” was popular and well-covered by the press, thus establishing Vawter permanently in the canon of great Indiana artists. For his oil painting Our Alley, which depicted a winter scene in Brown County, he won the Frank Cunningham prize and one hundred dollars. He continued to exhibit regularly at the H. Lieber gallery in Indianapolis and the Hoosier Salon in Chicago into the 1930s. [27]

The Late-Blooming of Vawter

Indianapolis Star, February 19, 1961, 27, accessed Newspapers.com.

But it was in the last years of his life that Vawter created his finest work. No one was better poised to observe this development than Lucille E. Morehouse, an insightful art critic whose popular column “In The World of Art” ran for decades in the Indianapolis Star. [28] In 1936, she covered the Annual Brown County Exhibit at the H. Lieber Company galleries, as she did every year. Morehouse clearly had a fondness for the Brown County artists but also a certain weariness of their subject matter, the landscapes of the county in various seasons, which had become standard fare by the 1930s. Nonetheless, she covered the show in her usual energetic and descriptive manner, because it was still in demand by the public. She explained that the show’s popularity was owed to Indianapolis residents, who vacationed in Brown County and looked to the paintings as reminders of their scenic vacations.

She explained that the public appreciated that Brown County Artists hadn’t changed their style, that they resisted modernism, and made pictures that could “smooth away the cares of the day.” [29] On the other hand, Morehouse wrote: “Sometimes we wish they would paint new subjects or would interpret the old ones in a different angle.”[30] Vawter did just that. Unlike his colleagues, Vawter began to travel in his later years and it refreshed his work. Morehouse especially praised Vawter’s recent painting Blue Pool, which was “one of the fine things from the group of New England coast scenes and Marines.” [31]

Will Vawter, Along the Coast, n.d., accessed Fine Art Dealers Association.

 

Besides exhibiting his reinvigorated work alongside the Brown County artists, Vawter showed his marine paintings in a one-man show at the H. Lieber Company gallery. Morehouse praised his bold paintings in a lengthy article. [32] Comparing his marinescapes with an earlier, popular Brown County fall landscape, she wrote:

When a Hoosier from the Brown county woods goes East to paint New England coast scener[y], one might expect him to go about it timidly. Not so Will Vawter. He makes his brush slash into the ocean just as if it were putting “the glory of autumn” on canvas. [33]

For Morehouse, who had long been familiar with Vawter’s work, these paintings of coastal scenes were like seeing his work fresh for the first time. She wrote:

But I never have been able to throw off my early feeling of wonder when I back away from a broadly-painted canvas and see form emerging from massively-painted surfaces over which the brush had evidently moved with more or less of inspiration. [34]

Detail of Vawter’s Along the Coast showing the abstraction of the work up close as opposed to the impressionist style of the larger work as noted by Morehouse.

She continued to praise the spontaneity of the work and the “striking evidence of genius” in his mastery of form and “expression of light and atmosphere.” [35] The works were vigorous, alive, and fresh, proving the innovative spirit of the older artist.

In 1938, Vawter again held a solo show. This time he combined his seascapes with other scenes from his travels, including hilly landscapes painted on the East Coast. In a show of maturity as an artist, he also included new, but traditional views of Brown County. He could both try new things and showcase his mastery of the light and scenery of his home county. Morehouse took note:

Indianapolis Star, December 26, 1939, 10, accessed Newspapers.com.

What a heritage Will Vawter will leave to Hoosierdom! The longer he paints, the more beauty he captures from nature and transfers to canvas. Because the present exhibit is so all-inclusive, representing every phase of his work. [36]

Morehouse described his Brown County landscapes as “lusciously painted,” his flower still lifes as “vigorously alive,” and again praised his adventuring beyond his home state for new subject matter. [37] She concluded that Vawter’s 1938 exhibit “surpasses all previous showings by this gifted Hoosier painter of landscape.” [38] At 67 years old, Vawter was reaching his artistic peak.

Indianapolis Star, December 8, 1940, 76, Newspapers.com.

In 1940, just two months before his death, Vawter held what would be his last one-man exhibition. It surpassed all previous exhibitions, even the acclaimed 1938 show. Vawter showed nineteen paintings, including tranquil seascapes, the Great Smoky Mountains in early fall, the New England coast in spring, and Brown County landscapes from all seasons. For Morehouse, even his paintings of traditional flower still lifes felt fresh and vibrant. She explained that Vawter didn’t just reproduce the appearance of the plants, but that “he interprets the souls of flowers, makes us feel their personality.” In fact, Morehouse regretted that she couldn’t do Vawter justice by describing his paintings; you just had to see them. She wrote that he depicted something “spiritual that can be expressed only in terms of paint, and not in words.”

Vawter passed away in 1941 after a forty-eight year long art career. But before he died, he mastered not just the technical aspect of art, but found in the heart of his life’s work a spiritual connection to nature so powerful it could be sensed secondhand by the viewer. Will Vawter remains an example to artists everywhere to keep working, despite obstacles the art world places before older artists. By considering the long career of a late-blooming artist, we see that artists can do their best work in their autumn years. Hopefully, art museums and galleries will continue to make more space for this mature, yet still innovative and evolving work.

Will Vawter, A Sunny Day in Springville, n.d., accessed Fine Art Dealers Association.

 

 

 

 

Notes:
All newspapers accessed Newspapers.com unless otherwise noted.

[1] Susan Stamberg, “This New York Gallery Has an Unusual Age Limit: No Artists Younger Than 60,” Morning Edition, January 11, 2018, NPR.

[2] Thomas Marks, “Is This A Golden Age for Older Artists?” Apollo: The International Art Magazine, May 29, 2017.

[3] The Long Run, MoMA, November 11, 2017-May 5, 2019.

[4] Stamberg, “This New York Gallery . . .,” NPR.

[5]“The Eclectics,” Indianapolis News, May 14, 1879, 4, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; “Seriously Hurt,” (Greenfield) Hancock Democrat, July 24, 1879, 3; 1880 United States Census (Schedule 1), Enumeration District 194, Greenfield, Hancock County, Indiana, Page 15, Line 27, June 5, 1880, accessed AncestryLibrary.com; “Eclectic Physicians in Council,” Indianapolis News, November 17, 1880, 3. Newspapers and the 1880 census show Will Vawter’s father Lewis working as a physician in Greenfield by 1879. The 1880 census confirms the family’s move.

[6] (Greenfield) Hancock Democrat, March 5, 1891, 1; (Greenfield) Hancock Democrat, April 9, 1891, 1; “Notes of Newspaper Men,” Indianapolis News, December 5, 1891, 7.

[7] James Whitcomb Riley,“Armazindy: A Borned Soldier and Hero,” Indianapolis Journal, September 5, 1893, 13, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

[8] “That Girl Wuz, and Is, I know, A Borned Soldier and Hero,” Indianapolis Journal, August 30, 1893, 4, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

[9] Advertisement, Indianapolis News, October 14, 1893, 9, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

[10] “Riley’s New Book,” Indianapolis News, October 6, 1900, 16, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

[11]“A Co-Worker with Riley,” Indianapolis News, reprinted (Greenfield) Hancock Democrat, December 8, 1898, 5.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Most of Riley’s books featuring Vawter’s illustrations are accessible via Livin’ the Life of Riley Digital Collection, IUPUI University Library. Most other Riley books are accessible via Hathi Trust. First editions are accessible through the Indiana State Library. Vawter’s illustrations for Riley Songs of Cheer are accessed through Newfields.

[14] “New Authoress Rapidly Coming to the Front,” Hancock Democrat, September 21, 1899, 5; “Of Such Is the Kingdom,” Indianapolis Journal, December 11, 1899, 4; Book Buyer 19: 2 (September 1899), 83, accessed HathiTrust; “Miss Clara Vawter Dead,” Indianapolis News, October 12, 1900, 14.

[15] John Clark Ridpath, Epic of Life (New York: Hunt & Eaton, 1893), accessed HathiTrust; “Mr. English’s New Book,” Indianapolis News, December 14, 1895, 5; William Hayden English, Conquest of the Country Northwest of the River Ohio, 1778-1783 and, Life of Gen. George Rogers Clark (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill Company, 1897), accessed Archive.org; Advertisement, (Greenfield) Hancock Democrat, June 1, 1899, 1; “Greenfield Genius,” Hancock Democrat, June 8, 1899, 8; Adelia Pope-Branham, Grandma Tales and Others, (Greenfield, Indiana: Harold Pub. Co. Press, 1899), accessed Archive.org; “Greenfield Now at the 5,000 Mark,” Indianapolis News, November 30, 1901, 3; Charles H. Bartlett, Tales of Kankakee Land (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), accessed HathiTrust; “C. H. Bartlett’s New Book,” South Bend Tribune, April 9, 1904, 6; John William Vawter, Sheet of 15 Illustrations to Barton Rees Pogue’s ‘Fortunes and Friendship,’ pen and ink over pencil on paper, n.d., Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Collection, Indianapolis Museum of Art.

[16] Robert J. Burdette, Smiles Yoked with Sighs (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1900), accessed HathiTrust; “Recent Literature,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 30, 1900, 13; Advertisement, Indianapolis News, November 14, 1903, 6, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; Wallace Bruce Amsbary, The Ballad of Bourbonnais (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1904); “The Ballads of Bourbonnais,” Indianapolis News, May 7, 1904, 16; “Among the Books,” Topeka State Journal, June 4, 1904, 13.

[17] Advertisement, (Rochester, New York) Democrat and Chronicle, October 29, 1898, 8; “Exhibit of Paintings by Indiana Artists,” Indianapolis Journal, April 24, 1904, 16, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; “Exhibit of Original Drawings for Novels,” Indianapolis News, March 20, 1905, 8. Vawter’s illustrations from Riley’s Child Rhymes were exhibited in Rochester, New York in 1898. In 1904, his original illustrations were exhibited at the H. Lieber Art Gallery in Indianapolis and the St. Louis Exposition; in 1905, at the Indianapolis “city library.”

[18] “William Merritt Chase,” accessed Indiana Historical Bureau.

[19] “T.C. Steele Home, Studio, Gardens,” accessed Indiana Historical Bureau.

[20] (Greenfield ) Daily Reporter, October 9, 1908, 2; (Greenfield) Daily Reporter, April 7, 1909, 2; (Greenfield) Daily Reporter, May 11, 1909, 1; (Greenfield) Hancock Democrat, May 13, 1909, 1; “Vawter’s Brown County Home,” (Greenfield) Daily Reporter, August 8, 1909, 1; “Rattlesnake Terrace, the Vawter Home,” (Greenfield) Hancock Democrat, August 12, 1909, 6, accessed Newspapers.com; N. L., “A Day in the Artists’ Arcadia in Brown County,” (Muncie) Star Press, September 5, 1909, 14; (Greenfield) Hancock Democrat, October 28, 1909, 8.

[21] William Forsyth, “Art in Indiana,” Indianapolis News, September 27, 1916, 12, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; “Paintings of Local Artists Exhibited,” Indianapolis News reprinted (Greenfield) Hancock Democrat, December 27, 1917, 4; “Brown County Pictures,” Indianapolis News, September 17, 1919, 26, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; William Herschell, “Will Vawter’s Home in Brown County,” (Greenfield) Daily Reporter, August 5, 1920, 1; “Art Notes,” Indianapolis News, December 4, 1920, 5; John William Vawter, Barnes Cabin on Owl Creek, Brown County, circa 1920, Oil on Canvas, Indianapolis Museum of Art; Will Vawter, Sunshine and Hollyhocks, 1925, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection, published in Lyn Letsinger-Miller, Artists of Brown County (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 41.

[22] “Little Stories of Daily Life,” Indianapolis News, May 3, 1917, 24, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

[23] “Produced in Brown County Etching Club Shop,” Indianapolis News, June 7, 1919, 18, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; “Brown County Etchers’ Club,” Brown County Democrat, June 12, 1919, 5.

[24] Ibid.; “Brown County Pictures,” Indianapolis News, September 17, 1919, 26, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

[25] “Will Vawter’s Home in Brown County,” (Greenfield) Daily Reporter, August 5, 1920, 1; “Urge a Museum to Keep Romance of Hoosier Art,” South Bend News-Times, August 12, 1920, 7, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

[26] “Brown County Art Gallery at Nashville,” Brown County Democrat, September 2, 1926, 1; “Brown County Art Gallery Is Assured,” Brown County Democrat, September 9, 1926, 1; “New Art Gallery,” Huntington Herald, September 8, 1926, 8; “Artists in Brown County Organize,” Indianapolis Star, September 8, 1926, 1; “Art Gallery Association Grows Rapidly,” Brown County Democrat, September 16, 1926, 1; “Open Art Gallery in Brown County,” Indianapolis Star, October 9, 1926, 5; “Vawter Heads Local Artists’ Association,” October 23, 1930, 1.

[27] “Brown County Artists at Exhibit in Chicago,” Brown County Democrat, March 5, 1925, 1; “Winter Scene Wins Prize for Artist,” Indianapolis Star, March 14, 1925, 11; “Richmond Man Wins Art Prize,” Richmond Item, March 7, 1926, 1; “46 Paintings by Brown County Artists Put on Display at Lieber’s Galleries,” Indianapolis Star, November 16, 1927, 24; “Vawter’s Landscape Wins Prize in Exhibit at Hoosier Salon in Chicago Galleries,” Indianapolis News, January 31, 1928, 7; “Eighth Hoosier Salon Will Be Held in Field Galleries Jan. 23 to Feb. 6,” Indianapolis Star, December 20, 1931, 50. Other newspaper articles on Vawter’s exhibitions available in the IHB marker file.

[28] “Miss Morehouse Dies; Ex-Art Critic,” Indianapolis Star, February 19, 1961, 27.

[29] Lucille E. Morehouse, “In The World of Art: Local Art Exhibitions Scheduled for December Are Distinctly Inviting and of Unusual Character,” Indianapolis Star, December 6, 1936, 75.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Lucille E. Morehouse,”In The World of Art: Brown County Landscapist Turns Marine Painter; One-Man Show at Lieber Gallery for Another Week,” Indianapolis Star, November 22, 1936, 65.

[33 – 35] Ibid.

[36] Lucille E. Morehouse,”In The World of Art: Will Vawter’s Exhibition Tops Previous Shows,” Indianapolis Star, December 18, 1938, 69.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.