Apparently the dress code for curators was a little more lax in 1980. This is me at the MIA then, clearly wishing I were someplace else. It was July 31—my older brother’s birthday and, I might add, a beautiful summer day—and my parents decided we should take the four Japanese exchange students staying with us that summer to the museum.
Edward K. Thomas’s “View of Fort Snelling,” from 1850, on view in Gallery G303.
The backdrop is Edward K. Thomas’s View of Fort Snelling, painted in 1850. It shows the surroundings of the river fort, built at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, as a kind of Eden. This idealized image of the Minnesota territory eight years before statehood, with Dakota tipis and a military fort co-existing in harmony, was the first stop in my family’s blatant promotion of the state. We were showing our Japanese friends that Minnesota was not only an artistic and cultural mecca, but also a land with an idyllic past. (That past is even sunnier now, given the painting’s recent restoration.)
Thomas, it appears, was similarly selling the place. A soldier in the U.S. Army and a self-taught artist, he arrived in the Minnesota territory in 1846 and served in several administrative territory posts. Four versions of his View of Fort Snelling are known, suggesting that he made it as a souvenir, a record of one of the major sights in the territory to show outsiders how beautiful and nice Minnesota was.
Revisiting the painting, more cheerfully, 33 years later on November 25, 2013.
For me, one of the measures of any great work of art—painting, print, music, or literature—is whether it rewards repeated (and lengthy) examination, and becomes richer or more meaningful with each visit. Subtle details emerge, marvelous techniques are revealed, some fresh significance is discovered in light of new experience or knowledge.
This painting looked very different at age 7. History was a cheerful subject for me then, with bad things—war, prejudice, outbreaks of disease—happening someplace else. I recognized Fort Snelling as a gleaming ring of stone fortifications reigning majestically over the river valley, the United States flag waving from the round tower near the horizon. A group of Dakota people has gathered in the foreground, with a dozen more dancing in a circle around a totem. Tipis and tidy stone buildings—the homes and storehouses of fur-trade merchants—share the landscape. It appears to be a warm, sunny day not unlike the afternoon I saw the painting, blue sky stretching as far as the eye can see.
Remarkably, it would be another 30 years before I learned what had truly transpired in my own backyard. The Dakota Conflict erupted just a dozen years after this painting was made, followed by the mass hanging of 38 Dakota prisoners in Mankato (the largest execution in U.S. history) on December 26, 1862, and the expulsion of the Dakota people from Minnesota in 1863.
B.F. Upton’s photograph, from the Minnesota Historical Society collection, showing the Dakota internment camp on Pike Island at Fort Snelling in the winter of 1862-63.
What I see and feel about Thomas’s painting has changed drastically. My 7-year-old eyes did not read anything into the fences enclosing the Dakota camp. For Thomas, making this painting before the 1851 institution of Indian reservations throughout the American West, these fences did not hold the insidious meaning they have today. Pike Island, dominating the center of the composition, hosts a bucolic Dakota encampment, smoke rising from each tipi in warm domesticity. In the winter of 1862-63, 1,600 innocent Dakota people (including women and children) were interned on this island in conditions so inhumane that hundreds would die.
While the chain of events leading to these horrific tragedies were in motion in 1850, they were hardly a foregone conclusion. Thomas’s seemingly simple landscape has become a haunting image of what could have been.