The End of The Trail From the Rees-Jones Collection at The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas by 3DLirious

Description

James Earle Fraser's End of the Trail is one of the most iconic works featured in The American West in Bronze, 1850–1925. First modeled in 1894, the sculpture is based on Fraser's experiences growing up in Dakota Territory; as he wrote in his memoirs, "as a boy, I remembered an old Dakota trapper saying, 'The Indians will someday be pushed into the Pacific Ocean.'" The artist later said that, "the idea occurred to me of making an Indian which represented his race reaching the end of the trail, at the edge of the Pacific." In 1915, Fraser displayed amonumental plaster version of the work at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, earning popular acclaim and a gold medal. Within a few months, thousands of prints and photographs of the statue were sold, and in 1918 Fraser began producing bronze reductions of the sculpture in two sizes. Today, an online image search for "End of the Trail" returns tens of thousands of results, as the work has been endlessly reproduced in paintings and in prints, on posters, T-shirts, pins, bags, belt buckles, and bookends. It was even featured on the cover of The Beach Boys 1971 album Surf's Up. Despite its appeal as a popular American icon, Fraser intended the work as a pointed commentary on the damaging effects of Euro-American settlement on American Indian nations confined on government reservations. Seated upon a windblown horse, Fraser's figure slumps over despondently, embodying the physical exhaustion and suffering of…