{"id":13639,"date":"2019-10-14T07:47:48","date_gmt":"2019-10-14T11:47:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=13639"},"modified":"2020-08-25T09:54:40","modified_gmt":"2020-08-25T13:54:40","slug":"philadelphias-cow-boy-monument","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2019\/10\/philadelphias-cow-boy-monument\/","title":{"rendered":"Philadelphia\u2019s \u201cCow-Boy\u201d Monument"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Cow-boys and Indians at the Unveiling of Remington’s ‘Cow-boy’ Statue on June 20, 1908.” (From the Fairmount Park Art Association, 1909. via Hathitrust)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The banks of the Schuylkill were packed with onlookers. On a craggy outcropping overlooking a clearing by the river stood Frederic Remington\u2019s new, larger-than-life bronze statue wrapped in American flags. Soon enough, the cord would be ceremoniously pulled to reveal the city\u2019s latest equestrian monument: \u201cThe Cow-Boy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Five thousand spectators turned out for the dedication. A band of cowboys (the musical variety) warmed up the crowd. Wyoming Jack, \u201ca noted scout\u201d and Chief He-Dog, in full regalia, did the honors. The popular cowgirls Mida and Lida Kemp were there. Mounted Sioux: Yellow Cloud, Cheering Horse and Driving Bear looked on as their families stood with VIP Philadelphia: leadership of the Fairmount Park Commission, the Fairmount Park Art Association (which had commissioned the piece) and others. A stand-in for Mayor John E. Reyburn apologized for His Honor\u2019s absence. June 20, 1908 was a big day for dedications. The mayor had gone out to Valley Forge for the unveiling of another equestrian in bronze: Anthony Wayne<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The fictional \u201cCow-Boy\u201d attracted a larger crowd than the real Revolutionary War hero.<\/p>\n

One would have expected to see there that day the Philadelphian most responsible for the cowboy legend. More than anything else, Owen Wister\u2019s best-selling novel, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains<\/em>,<\/a> published six years earlier, had forged the cowboy in the popular imagination. Lauded as \u201cone of the great triumphs of American literature,\u201d\u00a0The New York Times<\/em> claimed Wister had “come pretty near to writing the American novel.” The Virginian<\/em> was reprinted sixteen times; two million hardbound copies found their way into readers\u2019 hands. There would be five film versions and, in the 1960s, a long-playing television series.<\/p>\n

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Statue – Remington’s “Cowboy” – Fairmount Park. April 12, 1910. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt is safe to say,\u201d writes historian John Jennings, \u201cthat Wister launched the foremost popular mythology in American history.\u201d And he did so by animating the cowboy with words as much as Remington did with images and figures. From the stormy evening in Yellowstone National Park where they first met in 1893, Wister and Remington together crafted and popularized this American character, the appeal of which, Jennings points out, \u201cstood in stark contrast to the vulgar excesses of the Gilded Age.\u201d But in 1899, Wister and Remington had a falling out. And so, that Saturday on the banks of the Schuylkill, Remington alone stood as the cowboy\u2019s creator.<\/p>\n

In fact, credit was due to the trio of Remington, Wister and Wister\u2019s Harvard classmate and lifelong friend, Theodore Roosevelt. In 1888 Roosevelt admired the Dakota cowboy\u2019s \u201cquiet, uncomplaining fortitude.\u201d He found the cowboy brave, \u201chospitable, hardy, adventurous\u201d and \u201cthe grim pioneer of our race, [possessing] to a very high degree, the stern, manly qualities that are necessary to a nation.\u201d This ready-made romantic figure was capable of reassuring some Americans \u201cthat the simple, honest virtues of Jeffersonian America were not lost.\u201d With the cowboy, Remington, Wister and Roosevelt (now as the U.S. President who brought Remington\u2019s Bronco Buster <\/em>in the Oval Office<\/a>) \u201cmanufactured a myth\u201d of this, the \u201cmost popular American folk hero.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cowboy hadn\u2019t always been the object of such unbridled admiration. Before Wister\u2019s Virginian<\/em>, this frontier type was more of \u201ca rough, violent, one-dimensional drifter\u201d familiar at Buffalo Bill\u2019s Wild West show. Remington identified something more, something special, in an article titled \u201cThe Texas Cowboy\u201d published in 1892:<\/p>\n

The cowboy is strongly unimaginative, absolutely unconventional, and his character is as tough as his life, made hard and narrow by combat with appalling dangers, great vicissitudes, and an absence of ideas at variance with his own. He shows in his method of verbal expression that he has succumbed to his environment, for he thinks horse, talks horse, and dreams horse, and awakens to find himself, with some meat and bread and a quart of coffee under his belt, sitting on a horse.\u00a0 \u2026 The cowboy\u2019s life is passed alone, with only his pony and the great stretch of solemn plains and the flat, blue sky. He has little use for his voice, though his thoughts may wander as far afield as any poet\u2019s. . . . \u00a0You will find in his gaze a positive quality . . . for no English high-caste man ever regarded the rest of the world from so high a pinnacle as this tanned and dusty person who sleeps in a blanket and eats bacon three times a day.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Statue \u2013 Remington\u2019s \u201cCowboy\u201d \u2013 Fairmount Park. April 12, 1910. Detail. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Remington and Wister met the next year and soon elevated the cowboy a few notches higher, while revealing distinct biases along the way, in an article published in Harper\u2019s New Monthly Magazine. <\/em>\u00a0In the American West, wrote Wister, one could avoid the \u201chordes of encroaching alien vermin, that turn our cities to Babels and our citizenship to a hybrid farce.\u201d He went on: \u201cit won\u2019t be a century before the West is simply the true America with thought, type, and life of its own kind. We Atlantic Coast people, all varnished with Europe, and some of us having a good lot of Europe in our marrow besides, will vanish from the face of the earth.\u201d Accompanying this essay, titled the \u201cThe Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,\u201d were five illustrations by Remington, including, most notably, \u201cThe Last Cavalier<\/a>,\u201d depicting a cowboy on horseback \u201cwith a host of Anglo-Saxon knights, crusaders, cavaliers, frontiersmen, explorers, and soldiers of the Raj receding into the misty past.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why not introduce this larger-than-life American hero to the public in the form of a larger-than-life monument? \u201cThe fast disappearing Indians and western cowboy should be put in enduring bronze,\u201d encouraged New York art editor Alexander W. Drake in a letter to Remington in 1899, \u201c. . . this should be done by the only man in America who can do it,\u201d he flattered. \u201cWhat could be more appropriate for an American city?\u201d<\/p>\n

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Statue \u2013 Remington\u2019s \u201cCowboy\u201d \u2013 Fairmount Park, October 13, 2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Fairmount Park Art Association agreed. And so would The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, which described Remington as \u201cthe most truly American,\u201d artist who \u201cowed nothing of his craftsmanship to foreign study or to copying foreign ideas. He was a product of our own soil, educated in an American atmosphere.\u201d Remington produced sculptures \u201cwith such fidelity to life that they will remain long after the last cow-puncher has gone to his grave.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many other cities wanted larger-than-life cowboys by Remington. Only Philadelphia would get one. A year and a half after the 1908 dedication, Remington died of complications from appendicitis. The Corcoran Gallery in Washington would be the first of many museums to purchase one of his bronzes (Off the Range, also known as Coming Through the Rye<\/a>) but table-top sculptures, however spirited, just didn\u2019t have the presence or the unexpected gravitas of this 12-foot \u201cCow-Boy\u201d monument overlooking the Schuylkill.<\/p>\n

[Sources: Frederic Remington, \u201cThe Texas Cowboy,\u201d The Denver Republican<\/em>, Sept 1892 (Published in Current Literature<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> Vol 11, September-December, 1892); Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains <\/em>(New York: The Macmillan Company,1902); \u201cCowboy Statue to be Unveiled,\u201d The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, June 19, 1908; \u201cPicturesque Scenes Attend Unveiling of the Cowboy Monument in the Park,\u201d The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, June 20, 1908; Fairmount Park Art Association, Annual Report<\/em><\/a> (Philadelphia: Fairmount Park Art Association, 1909);, \u201cA Genuine American Artist, The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, December 28, 1909; David Sellin, \u201cCowboy,\u201d in Fairmount Park Art Association, Sculpture of a City: Philadelphia’s Treasures in Bronze and Stone,<\/em>\u201d (Walker Pub. Co, 1974); David A. Smith, \u201cOwen Wister\u2019s Paladin of the Plains: The Virginian as Cultural Hero,\u201d South Dakota History<\/em>, 2008, vol. 38, no. 1, pp 47-77; John Jennings, The Cowboy Legend Owen Wister’s Virginian and the Canadian-American Frontier<\/em> (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2012).] <\/span><\/p>\n

Disclosure: The writer is a member of The Association for Public Art<\/a> (formerly The Fairmount Park Art Association) board of directors.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The banks of the Schuylkill were packed with onlookers. On a craggy outcropping overlooking a clearing by the river stood Frederic Remington\u2019s new, larger-than-life bronze statue wrapped in American flags. Soon enough, the cord would be ceremoniously pulled to reveal the city\u2019s latest equestrian monument: \u201cThe Cow-Boy.\u201d Five thousand spectators turned out for the dedication. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13639\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}