by Marc J. Carpenter, Doctoral Candidate, Department of History
When listening to Native students and community members talk about the “Pioneer” statues at the University of Oregon, I have heard the phrase “two sides of the same story” often enough that I do not know whom to credit. Until June 13, 2020, the Pioneer and Pioneer Mother monuments looked down from their pedestals on anyone passing either side of the President’s office at Johnson Hall. Both crafted by the same sculptor, each statue celebrated a different element of the colonial conquest of Oregon. The Pioneer, unveiled in 1919, was intended to celebrate pioneer violence generally and “Indian killers” specifically. The Pioneer Mother, unveiled in 1932, was meant to celebrate the “conquering peace” of women in the “course of empire.” Taken together, these monuments did indeed evoke two sides of an overarching story of colonial invasion. The violence used to seize the land of indigenous peoples was exalted by the Pioneer, and the erasure of that violence was furthered by the Pioneer Mother.1
The violence celebrated by the Pioneer is unusually visible compared to most other pioneer monuments. The nine-foot-tall bronze was a passion project for sculptor Alexander Phimister Proctor, who had for years before getting the contract wanted to craft a statue of an “ideal frontiersman.” As he explained in the unexpurgated drafts of his autobiography, for Proctor the “ideal frontiersman” was a man named Big Frank, an itinerant murderer and adventurer whom Proctor had met as a teen while wilding in Colorado. For Big Frank, Proctor approvingly explained, “killing an occasional Indian was all in a day’s work.” Big Frank bragged of killing multiple indigenous people with only the barest of pretexts as he wandered the West. Proctor imbued the Pioneer with this readiness for white supremacist violence—from the gun, to the whip, to the pose, to what Proctor admired as the “cold eyes of a killer.”2
Speakers at the monument’s unveiling in 1919 saw and praised the readiness for violence in pursuit of white supremacy that Proctor had tried to convey. People of color on campus one hundred years later saw this violence, too. Some took the long way across campus to avoid passing too near to the statue. Many Native community members, walking past this monument that celebrated the murder of their ancestors, felt anew how much the campus was still an exclusive White space. A public protest by the Native American Student Union (and allied groups) in May of 2019 demanded the removal of the Pioneer and brought new attention to the issue. But this action was a crystallization of years of simmering outrage against an overt symbol of violent white supremacy. The research I did on the Pioneer uncovered the sordid specifics of the support for white supremacist violence shared by the sculpture’s patron, creator, and inspiration. But for most Native people at the University of Oregon, I was only confirming what they already knew, just from looking at the monument. White audiences are often shocked and surprised when I detail the horrific origins of the Pioneer. People of color seldom are.3
The Pioneer Mother is a sort of mirror to the Pioneer, meant to celebrate the triumphant end of colonial conquest when “the pioneer woman in the sunset of her life” could rest and “look upon the fruits of her labor.” But those labors, as Shawnee/Lenape scholar Steven Newcomb has demonstrated, were a companion to the violence the Pioneer promises. The inscription on the pedestal that once held the statue speaks of a “spirit of conquering peace,” taken from a longer letter that celebrated the Mother’s “blazing the westward trail that the course of empire might make its way.” The “Pax” [peace] stamped below the statue was possible only after, as the monument’s patron Burt Brown Barker wrote, “the Indian and his arrows” were “but fireside tales,” and “the flintlock hangs rusty on the wall.” In other words, while the prominence of the gun on the Pioneer demonstrably alluded to the killing of Native people, the purported peace of the Pioneer Mother was predicated on such guns having already been used to slay or subjugate the indigenous peoples of Oregon. As with the Pioneer, this part of the story was perceived by those at the 1932 unveiling, where “savage Indians” were listed as the greatest of the dangers faced by “pioneer mothers.” But the visual language of the monument displays little of this turbulent background. The sympathetic calm of the Pioneer Mother stimulates uncritical celebration of a generation that, in reality, seized Native land by iniquitous force.4
Pioneer mothers have long been perceived as moral bastions, and that has been used politically for a variety of purposes.5 Around the turn of the twentieth century, Northwesterners who wanted to celebrate rather than erase pioneer violence against Native people would invoke the defense of white women as their trump card. Women’s suffrage activists in Oregon used pioneer women’s role in colonial conquest, whether by means of domesticity or a double-barreled shotgun, to win allies among heritage groups and “Indian war” veterans.6 In the twentieth century, as Cynthia Prescott and others have shown, pioneer mother statues were used to celebrate a traditional construction of womanhood as a critique of expanding gender norms. The Pioneer Mother has served all of these functions. It was placed as an exemplar of a “true American” who braved “savage Indians” to “extend the precious heritage of freedom to the great Pacific Northwest frontier.” In campus folklore it has been jokingly framed since as a judgmental virginity detector. And besides its own role in softening colonialism, it has sweetened perceptions of the Pioneer. In the eyes of many Euro-Americans, the Pioneer transformed from a symbol of martial manliness searching the horizon for Native people with the “cold eyes of a killer,” to a “Pioneer Father” looking for his wife.7
The Pioneer and Pioneer Mother were inherently celebratory, larger-than-life avatars put on pedestals as paragons. In their original setting, it is unlikely that any plaque or similar could have overcome that message. Most arguments for leaving the Pioneer in place have rested on the dubious potential of the monument as a teaching tool. In August of 2019, an anonymous op-ed in the Register-Guard suggested that leaving up and contextualizing this representation of a “sordid, despicable past” could “help students and visitors learn that their predecessors did horrible things.” The wording was telling, prioritizing a supposed opportunity for White members of the campus community to learn about the sins of their predecessors, while ignoring the harm the monuments continued to inflict on community members of color.8
And this is a false choice; there are many effective ways to educate about colonial violence that do not involve a nine-foot-tall celebration of white supremacy atop a pedestal at the heart of campus. Plaques and public art speaking to the violence of the past and the hopes of the future can and should go up in place of the pioneer monuments. Classrooms and museums can tell a more complex story than the monuments, as they were, could ever have mustered. There are ways to celebrate anew the positive things that were associated with the colonialist horror of the monuments. Changing the name of the annual “Pioneer Awards” will let us offer the same opportunities to students and honors to community leaders without tarnishing them by association with the murderous history the image and name of the Pioneer evoke. Finding different ways to celebrate the decades of support Burt Brown Barker and his family have given to what he called “the sacred trust of educating the young . . . of the Commonwealth” will let us honor their contributions without reifying the colonial erasure and White imperialism embodied by the Pioneer Mother in its old location.9
Those who have protested against these monuments have been right about the two sides of the same story of colonialism that Proctor was trying to tell. Many alumni and community members may have positive associations with the Pioneer and Pioneer Mother, just as many in communities across the South have positive associations with monuments to the Confederacy. But an individual lack of knowledge about the taint of white supremacist violence doesn’t erase it from these monuments. Historical records prove that violence and colonial conquest inspired the creation of the monuments, their design reflects that truth, and those in the know today confirm it. It is a historical fact that violent colonialism is a core part of the story of the Pioneer and the Pioneer Mother. Whatever happens next regarding these statues must reflect that reality.
—Marc J. Carpenter is a doctorial candidate in history. He received a 2019 CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant for his project “‘Worthy of All Honors Accorded to the Brave’: Women’s Rights and the Sanctification of Race War in Oregon, 1890–1919.”
References
1 In the 2018/2019 school year, a short series of interviews were conducted with Native students and community members about the Pioneer and Pioneer Mother statues. Out of respect for the wishes of these participants, these recordings cannot be made public until 2024. On the overturning of the monuments by parties unknown, see K. Rambo, “Pioneer statues toppled amid protests at University of Oregon,” The Oregonian June 14, 2020.
2 Proctor’s family carefully edited out the sculptor’s embrace of violent white supremacy before publishing his posthumous autobiography. This has misled biographers ever since. For the quotations, see Alexander Phimister Proctor, Folder “Indians,” pp. IX-2 and IX-3, Box 1, Alexander Phimister Proctor Papers, Mss 5352, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon. There were more drafts of the Big Frank story in Proctor’s papers than of just about any other—and in every version Proctor admired the man’s casual murder of Indians. For the bowdlerized autobiography and the incomplete biographies it shaped, see Alexander Phimister Proctor, Sculptor in Buckskin: The Autobiography of Alexander Phimister Proctor, 2nd Ed., Katharine C. Ebner, Ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009; orig. 1971); Peter H. Hassrick with Katharine C. Ebner and Phimister Proctor Church, Wildlife and Western Heroes: Alexander Phimister Proctor, Sculptor (Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum, 2003).
3 For a more in-depth history of the Pioneer, see Marc James Carpenter, “Reconsidering the Pioneer, One Hundred Years Later,” report submitted to the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, June 27, 2019, https://www.oregon.gov/oprd/OH/Documents/Fellow2019MarcCarpenterReconsideringThe%20Pioneer.pdf. On the protests, see Hannah Kanik, “NASU protests for the removal of Pioneer Statue,” Daily Emerald May 22, 2019; Jordyn Brown and Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick, “Remedying racist symbols on campus,” Eugene Register-Guard July 28, 2019.
4 While inspired by his mother and perhaps his grandmother, Burt Brown Barker was adamant that the Pioneer Mother was “a pure idealization and as such represent[ed] all pioneer mothers.” Proctor followed the wishes of his patron Burt Brown Barker much more closely with the Pioneer Mother than he had with Joseph N. Teal designing the Pioneer, and had less to say about it generally. Steven Newcomb, “The Pioneer Mother Statue and the ‘Conquering Peace,’” Indian Country Today June 6, 2015; Burt Brown Barker, Pioneer Mother inscription, May 7, 1932; Burt Brown Barker, “The Letter” [Burt Brown Barker to Alexander Phimister Proctor, Nov. 3 1927], in The Pioneer Mother (Salem: University of Oregon, 1956); C[harles] L[eonard] Starr, “Acceptance of Gift,” Program for the Dedication of the Pioneer Mother, ibid.
5 For the Pioneer Mother as an inspiration for a whitewashed fiction of colonial domesticity, see Lauren Kessler, “A Hard-worked Woman,” Oregon Quarterly 82:2 (2002). Ignoring many “pioneer women’s” support for and sometimes pursuit of genocide is common. Abigail Malick, who traveled to the Oregon Territory in 1848, thought that if a given group of Native people was “saucy,” American men should “kill them all,” “Indians and sq—ws” alike. [omission of letters mine]. Abigail Malick to Mary and Michael Albright, June 10 1855, Folder 24, Box 1, Malick Family Papers WA MSS S-1298, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT; Abigail Malick to Mary and Michael Albright, Dec 17, 1860, Folder 38, ibid. Compare to Lillian Schlissel, “‘They have no father, and they will not mind me’: Families and the River,” Great River of the West: Essays on the Columbia River, Robert Carriker and William L. Lang, eds. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999): 112–125.
6 William M. Colvig, “The Covered Wagon,” Address Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Oregon Pioneers, June 1, 1898, Newberry Library Special Collections, Chicago, IL; Abigail Scott Duniway to Dr. Annice F. Jeffereys, “A Pioneer Incident,” Dec 21, 190[2?], Folder 8, Box 1, Abigail Scott Duniway Papers, Coll 232B, University of Oregon Special Collections; Tiffany Lewis, “Winning Women’s Suffrage in the Masculine West: Abigail Scott Duniway’s Frontier Myth,” Western Journal of Communications 75:2 (March-April 2011): 127–147.
7 Cynthia Culver Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019); Sheri Triphagen, “Campus Folklore, 1971,” University of Oregon Archives of Northwest Folklore, 1971_271, Eugene, OR; Chloe Huckins, “The Best . . . Statue on Campus,” Oregon Quarterly 94:2 (2014).
8 “UO should use Pioneer Father to educate about a terrible history,” Eugene Register-Guard Aug 4, 2019. The sentiments in this editorial closely mirror the instructions given to the Committee on Recognizing Our Diverse History in 2019, which was forbidden from recommending that any art or statuary on campus be moved or removed. See University of Oregon Senate Committee on Recognizing Our Diverse History, “Case Study,” Nov. 13 2019, https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/9/13250/files/2019/11/Senate-Case-Study-Nov-2019.v2-Committee-Recognizing-our-Diverse-History.pdf.
9 As I have argued elsewhere, the Euro-Americans who dubbed themselves “pioneers” in the 19th century did so with the martial sense of the word in mind: They were “Soldiers dedicated to the Americanization of the wilderness,” who took pride in their part in the violent conquest of the Northwest. Thus the retention of the Pioneer name remains evocative of violence even without the imagery of the statue. See Marc James Carpenter, “Pioneer Problems: ‘Wanton Murder,’ Indian War Veterans, and Oregon’s Violent History,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 121:2 (Summer 2020): 156 – 185; Burt Brown Barker, “To the State Board of Higher Education,” in The Pioneer Mother (Salem: University of Oregon, 1956).