SCRIVER

“More than any other book that I can think of, Bronze Inside
and Out puts a human face on Western art—indeed, all M A RY S T R A C H A N S C R I V E R
art. It invites us to ponder the very nature of the creative
process.”
– From the foreword by Brian W. Dippie, University of Victoria


Bronze Inside and Out is a literary biography of sculptor Bob Scriver,

written by his wife, Mary Strachan Scriver. Bob Scriver is best known

BRONZE Inside and Out

for his work in bronze and for his pivotal role in the rise of “cowboy
art.” Living and working on the Montana Blackfeet Reservation, Scriver
created a bronze foundry, a museum, and a studio – an atelier based on
classical methods, but with local Blackfeet artisans. His importance in
the still-developing genre of “Western Art” cannot be overstated.

Mary Strachan Scriver lived and worked with Bob Scriver for over

bronze
a decade and was instrumental in his rise to international acclaim.
Working alongside her husband, she became intimately familiar with
the man, his work, and his process. Her frank, uncensored, and highly
entertaining biography reveals details that give the reader a unique
picture of Scriver both as man and as artist. Bronze Inside and Out also
provides a fascinating look into the practice of bronze casting, cleverly
structuring the story of Bob Scriver’s life according to the steps in this
complicated and temperamental process.

Mary Strachan Scriver lives in Valier, Montana, near the Blackfeet

reservation, where she has worked as a teacher, a writer, and a Unitarian
minister.
Inside and Out
[Link] A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR
978-1-55238-227-1
OF BOB SCRIVER
BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT
 M A RY S T R A C H A N S C R I V E R

bronze
Inside and Out
A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR
OF BOB SCRIVER
© 2008 Mary Strachan Scriver

University of Calgary Press

2500 University Drive NW
Calgary, Alberta
Canada T2N 1N4
[Link]

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or

transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of
the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access
Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit [Link] or call
toll free 1-800-893-5777.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Strachan Scriver, Mary, 1939-

Bronze inside and out : a biographical memoir of Bob Scriver / by Mary
Strachan Scriver.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-55238-227-1

1. Scriver, Bob, 1914–1999. 2. Sculptors–Montana–Biography. I. Title.

NB237.S39S77 2007 730.92 C2007-905742-X

The University of Calgary Press acknowledges the support of the Alberta Foundation
for the Arts for our publications. We acknowledge the financial support of the
Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development
Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the financial
support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

This book has been published with the aid of a grant from the Alberta Lottery Fund
— Community Initiatives Program.

Printed and bound in Canada by AGMV Marquis

This book is printed on FSC Silva Enviro paper

Cover design, page design and typesetting by Melina Cusano

 This book is dedicated to
the Town of Browning and the Blackfeet Reservation

Below is a paid announcement that appeared in the Glacier Reporter of

January 20, 1970:

To the Town of Browning:

Without your help and inspiration none of my “success” would

have been possible. Every man who shed sweat in my foundry,
every storekeeper who opened at odd hours, every repairman who
kept my freezer or compressor going, every person who posed
for sculptures or gave advice, all the kids who ride by on horses,
all the singers who keep the beat going on Indian Days, all the
people who come to my house or offer encouragement on the
street, even the people who understand when I lock the door and
take the phone off the hook – all the people of Browning, my
people – have helped me accomplish what I have.

Browning is my birthplace and my home. This particular piece

of land is a very special, unique place to me, the very lasty of the
old, frontier America that we all cherish. Let’s keep it that way,

My heartfelt and very humble thanks to you all!

 TA B L E O F CO N T EN T S

Foreword XV
Acknowledgments XVII

PART ONE: Prelude

I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES

1. Why we learned to cast bronze and what it was like 1

Browning, Montana, early Sixties
2. How I got to the Blackfeet Reservation and what it was like 4
Browning, Montana, 1961
3. History of the Blackfeet and how artists joined them 6
High northern prairie, 1600s forward
4. “Indian Days” 8
Browning, Montana, in the Sixties
5. The roots of American equestrian bronzes 11
Washington, D.C., 1780s to the 1800s

II PROVENANCE: FAMILY HISTORY

1. The importance of story: the quick-draw guy 17

Browning, 1968
2. Bob’s genealogical roots and how his parents got to Browning 18
The Palatine to England to Quebec to Montana,
1600s to early 1900s
3. Bob’s childhood 24
Browning, World War I and after
4. The white community and how Bob acquired an Indian “mother” 25
Milk River Ridge, the Twenties
5. Artists on the scene 30
Glacier Park, the Twenties
6. Earl Heikka, “crazy artist feller” 36
Great Falls, Twenties and Thirties
 III INSPIRATION: FROM MUSIC TO SCULPTURE

1. First career: leading prize-winning high school bands 39

1934–1950
2. Second career: successful taxidermist 41
Browning, 1950–1964
3. The Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife 46
Browning, 1953–1999
4. The earliest sculptures and the C.M. Russell Contest 55
Browning, the Fifties
5. Beginning to sell 60
Browning, late Fifties

IV PLASTILENE: THE EARLY YEARS

1. About the material and what it demands 65

Greenwich Village, the Forties
2. Malvina Hoffman’s plastilene 69
Greenwich Village, the Forties
3. Plastilene sculptures shelved 71
Browning, 1962
4. The miniature wildlife dioramas: a team effort 72
Browning, Spring 1962
5. Bob nearly goes blind 76
Browning, Summer 1962
6. Evelyn Cole 83
Chinook, Montana, 1967
7. My first hunting trips 84
The Rocky Mountain front, Fall 1962

V ARMATURE: FORMING STRUCTURE

1. About armatures 87
2. The armature of Bob’s inner world 89
Browning, the Sixties
3. The Buffalo Roundup. We both ride 94
Moiese, 1963
4. Organic armatures: skeletons 100
Bynum, Sun River, Moiese, Starr School, mid-Sixties
5. Broken ribcage 105
Browning, 1965

VIII
VI WASTE MOLD: SHARDS ON THE TABLE

1. Waste molds, made for destruction 107

2. Dick Flood 111
The northern prairie, Fifties and Sixties
3. Ace Powell 113
Hungry Horse and Browning, 1928 to 1976
4. John Clarke 116
East Glacier, 1881–1970
5. The last full-mount: a moose 117
Browning, 1968
6. Eegie 119
Browning, 1962–1975
7. Electric cowboys 124
Cut Bank Creek, 1965
8. Life in Browning 125
The Sixties
9. Drifters 127
Browning, mid-Sixties
10. Downhill 128
Hudson’s Bay Divide, late Sixties

VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS

1. About plaster originals: the key 131

2. George Gray 132
Browning, 1968
3. American Artist and Paul Juley 135
Browning, 1964
4. True magazine 137
Browning, 1965
5. New York Shows 138
Manhattan, 1963
6. Glenbow Foundation 139
Calgary, 1967
7. Christmas 143
Browning, 1964
8. Hunting in the snow 144
East front of the Rockies, 1968

IX
 VIII BLACK TUFFY: TROUBLES BEGIN

1. About flexible molds 147

Browning, Fifties and forward
2. The Big Flood 150
Blackfeet Reservation, 1964
3. Animals drive a wedge 152
4. Bob the conservative, Mary the activist 157
Browning, 1969
5. Keith Seele, James Willard Schultz, Lone Wolf and Paul Dyck 158
The Reservation, 1966
6. Overwork and blow-ups Browning, 1969 160
7. Into the Wind, Bucky, and breaking points 162
The reservation, late Sixties
8. Hunting again, Sweetgrass Hills 168

IX MOTHER MOLD: WIVES AND OTHERS

1. About mother molds 171

2. Ellison Westgarth Macfie Scriver 172
3. Alice the high school kid 175
Browning and Malta 1937–1943
4. Jeanette the firebrand 177
Edmonton and Browning, 1946–1959
5. Arlene the ideal 184
Browning, 1959–1962
6. Mary the English teacher 185
Browning, 1966–1970
7. Lorraine the widow 189
Browning and Vancouver Island, 1972–2002

X LOST WAX: CRUCIFIX, PIETA, AND MARGARET

1. Making a wax duplicate 193

2. Portrait of a polo player 196
Santa Rosa, Anacortes, 1967
3. Bob’s daughter dies 200
Anacortes, 1967 and 1968
4. Maurice poses for Jesus 205
Browning, 1967 and 1968
5. Lost in grizzly country 212
St. Mary’s, 1969
X
PART TWO: Crescendo

XI INVESTMENT: NEW YORK CITY

1. Old-fashioned plaster investment 217

2. To Tell the Truth! and Malvina Hoffman 220
New York City, 1965
3. A Moose hunt 225
Swan Hills, Alberta 1969

XII CASTING BRONZE:

THE BUFFALO BILL HISTORICAL CENTER

1. Casting bronze: a review 227

Browning, Montana, 1962–1999
2. One hundred bronzes 230
Browning and Cody, 1969
3. Harry Jackson 240
Cody and Browning, 1969
4. A jubilant hunting trip 242
East Front of the Rockies, 1969

XIII MOLTEN BRONZE: COWBOY HALL OF FAME

1. Moment of truth 243

2. The Western art boom 245
3. C.M. Russell Museum Benefit Auction 246
Great Falls, Montana, 1970 to the present
4. Dean Krakel, cowboys and Indians 247
Oklahoma City, 1965 to the end
5. Bill Linderman 250
Denver and Browning, 1967–1970
6. The National Rodeo Finals 258
Oklahoma City, 1970
7. Asger Mikkelson 261
Browning, 1970–1975
8. Meltdown of a marriage 262

XI
 PART THREE: Diminuendo

XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE

1. How to “chase” a bronze 271

2. Blackfeet religious ceremonies 273
Browning, 1963 to 1999
3. Blackfeet ceremonial objects 275
4. Bob cuts the rawhide 278
Browning, 1963
5. Cree healing ceremony, Blackfeet bundle opening 278
Browning, 1967 to 1999
6. The Thunder Pipe Bundle transfer 284
Browning, 1969
7. Counting coup 286
Browning and Edmonton, 1976–1990
8. The million-dollar artifact collection 287
Browning and Edmonton, 1990 to present
9. The Badger Lodge 291
Browning and Two Medicine, 1971

XV TORCH: THE PRINCE OF PEACE

1. Welding bronze 297

Browning, 1963 forward
2. Losing family members 298
1976 forward
3. The Prince of Peace 300
1982 forward
4. Trying to rekindle the flame 305
Browning, 1985 forward

XII
XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK

1. The journey slows 309

Fort Benton and Great Falls, 1974 forward
2. Lewis and Clark begin 310
Fort Benton, 1974 forward
3. Distinguished Achievement 315
Great Falls, 1990
4. Long quiet days in the shop 317
Browning, 1988 forward
5. Facing death 319
Browning, late Nineties
6. Death on Bob’s terms 321
Browning, 1999
7. “The Man in Buckskin” 324
Valier, 2002

XVII PATINA: OVERVIEW

1. How patinas are formed 327

2. What is a “great artist?” 329
3. The artist as customer 331
4. The Flatiron Ranch 332
Browning, 1980
5. The last visit and goodbye 334
Browning, 1998
6. Four sculptors, four destinies 337
Browning, 1929

Notes 341
Timeline 347
Bibliography 361

XIII
 FOREWORD

Western art, as a sub-field of American art, has been shunned, ignored, disdained
– and passionately loved. Those who love it continue to look hopefully for signs
on the horizon that others have come to see the light. The subject matter of
historical Western art – overwhelmingly nineteenth-century frontier “types,” or
“men with the bark on,” as Frederic Remington put it – defines the tradition to
this day. Bob Scriver established a substantial reputation as a Western sculptor.
He respected the tradition and worked creatively within it to establish his own
vision of the West. He did, of course, do other subjects, but he stayed true to
the legacy of masters like Remington and Charles M. Russell who endowed the
twentieth century with a particular way of seeing, and understanding, the Old
West. Scriver, with deep roots in the community where he was born in 1914,
Browning, Montana, on the Blackfeet Reservation just east of Glacier National
Park, concentrated on wildlife, rodeo, and traditional Blackfeet culture in creat-
ing an impressive body of work over a sculptural career spanning more than
forty years before his death in 1999.

Bronze Inside and Out is a study of Bob Scriver and a meditation on the place of
his bronzes within the Western art tradition. But it is much more than that. It
is the best book we have on a working Western artist—at once intimate (Mary
Scriver was married to the artist), objective, tough-minded, and affectionate.
It is ingeniously structured around a brilliant conceit, the stages of creating a
bronze sculpture, which are here made to correspond to the human life span.
Each chapter begins by walking the reader through a stage in the sculptural
process, then groups ideas, stories, reminiscences, and biographical data appro-
priate to that stage. Taken together, the chapters familiarize the reader with the
process of creating a bronze from first inspiration to final patina, and offer as
clear an explanation of lost wax casting as one will find anywhere, enlivened by
the learn-as-you-go particulars of Scriver’s experiences. Here, Bob Scriver and
his art become works in progress. We follow his struggles to express his personal
vision, the hard effort necessary to make art and a career of art in an isolated
Western town, the frustrations and realities of the commerce of art, the ups and
downs of achieving the celebrity status that sells art, and throughout, we see the

XV
 linkages between character, values, and a specific artistic achievement. More
than any other book that I can think of, Bronze Inside and Out puts a human
face on Western art—indeed, all art. It invites us to ponder the very nature of
the creative process.

Brian W. Dippie
June 2007

XVI A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Karl Thuneman, friend and professional editor, gave me the first feedback.

I am grateful to Jeanette Germaine Caouette Scriver Chase, who opened both

her wounded heart and her photograph album to me. Jeanette’s sister, Helene
Caouette DeVicq, shared what she knew as well as love of Bob Scriver. Jeanette’s
brother, Maurice Chaillot, understood better than anyone else.

Bob’s beloved cousin, Margaret Macfie Meeks, set things straight, and his
cousin’s son, Doug MacFie, head of the Macfie Clan for Canada, was invaluable
in his knowledge of the family tree.

Clyde McConnell did amazing magic to old photos, and his wife, Suzanne, was
an excellent cheerleader.

Brian Dippie was the one who really understood this book. Don Reynolds and
Francis Morrone provided encouragement from Manhattan.

Peter Enman and Melina Cusano were stalwart guardians of quality on behalf
of the University of Calgary Press.

Boyd and Lila Evans and the Cree Medicine family took tender care of Bob
Scriver in his last years.

XVII
 Part One:

Prelude
 I

Genre:
American Bronzes

1. Why we learned to cast bronze and what it was like

Browning, Montana, early Sixties

In 1961, there were no bronze foundries on the prairies of Montana. A sculptor

without a foundry is like Beethoven without a piano, John Philip Sousa without
a brass band. So Bob Scriver decided to learn how to cast bronze. I learned
alongside him. In the Sixties we thought about almost nothing but bronze cast-
ing, rising from both table and bed to cross the yard and check on the homemade
foundry that consumed so much natural gas that the power company had to
install a bigger feed pipe. After days of tension while the mold baked, we would
finally be ready to melt and pour bronze.
Carl Cree Medicine held one end of the homemade crucible cradle; Bob
himself held the other. By gripping the old farm machinery wheel that con-
trolled the chain hoist, I sustained the balance point. If either of the pourers
had dropped their cradle handles, the crucible would have overturned, spilling
molten metal hot enough to vaporize our feet. Cranking my chain hoist up
and down, I could take the weight off the cradle, to give the sculptor and his
helper the control they needed to make a smooth pour. Every pause, wobble,
or backspill affected the quality of the bronze sculpture formed by the seeking
liquid metal filling spaces in the plaster mold, emptiness left by baked-out wax,
“lost” wax.
It took a month of preparation to make the mold by pouring investment
around a wax version of the sculpture. This is called the “Italian block” invest-
ment method, meaning that the mold was a big block of refractory plaster as
invented in ancient Rome, NOT the space-age thin layer of industrial ceramic
shell casting. Then came a week of baking day and night to melt the wax back
out – not just the visible wax, but every molecule. The white plaster of the mold

1
 glowed cherry red. Finally – sipping air from inside the mold through a long
hollow car aerial as a fireproof straw – we could taste no chemicals.
Big as a tree stump, the hot mold was packed – steaming – into wet sand,
so that if it cracked, the liquid bronze would chill when it met the wet sand and
plug the crack. If any wax molecules lingered undetected, spaces could fill with
gas that would force gaps in the final sculpture or cause cracks big enough to
leak the molten bronze out through thin fissures. Once, the mold broke so badly
that it let the bronze rush through so all we had to show for a week of work was
white plaster rubble and a sand-embedded blob of metal.
We opened part of the shed roof and started the kind of fan the fire depart-
ment uses to clear smoke. Then Bob fired up the bronze furnace recessed into
the floor. Roaring, a seething orange chrysanthemum, a voracious sea anemone
of flame, danced over the hole in the middle of the round lid.
If poured into an unfinished mold, the two-thousand-degree bronze might
even explode, sending molten metal out into our faces, so we wore plastic visors
and heavy knit watchcaps, but we had none of the enshrouding protective gear
of today’s workers. Once in a while, escaping metal set the foundry on fire from
under the floor. As soon as the metal was poured we had to grab extinguishers
and pull up boards. Once, the crucible cracked while it was still at the bottom of
the furnace, casting in place a disc the shape of the bottom, so the whole thing
had to be dug up and dismantled. Our disasters were never quite as bad as those
of Cellini, the tempestuous Renaissance sculptor, who allegedly lost his thumb
because the mold was set down on it and he refused to scream for fear of ruining
the pour.
If all went well, the twisting satin ribbon of molten bronze slipped from
the crucible into the round hole on top of the chalky refractory mold like cream
onto pie. The first time we ever tried to cast a bronze, the results were perfect.
The next eighteen attempts were laughable, impossible, unrecognizable. We
never made the same mistake twice – we just didn’t know there were so many
kinds of mistakes. Then we achieved a bit of competence, and finally we became
so proud of our bronze casting that it almost took our attention away from Bob’s
sculpture itself, which was the whole point of learning the process. The means
were in danger of overtaking the end.
Every successful pour left us in a state of euphoria. Afterwards we stepped
out into the snow – sun pouring diamonds onto it though the temperature was
way below zero – our heads thrown back with laughter, squinting in the flood of
winter light. Now that the roaring furnace and fans were off, it was silent.
Earlier I had propped bottles of cola in the snow. If it hadn’t taken too long
to position the mold and get the metal up to temperature, they would still be
liquid. Otherwise, in the subzero temperatures of a Montana winter, even the
ones with sugar would be ice mush bulging out the neck of the bottle. On top
of the mold the pour hole would now be a “button” of newly hardened bronze.
Bob always poured a bit of cola on it so he could watch the liquid explode black

2 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 The first Bighorn Foundry, originally the coal shed for the Browning Mercantile.
Note the actual bighorn skulls on top. Bob in doorway, 1963.
Photo: Mary Scriver.

oxidation away from the shining golden surface of silicon bronze. The smell
of caramelized sugar mingled with acrid metal fumes and wet sand. If the pet
bobcats had snuck in to use the sand for their own purposes, we could smell
their urine. “To the gods! To Fate!” No one said, “To cat pee.”
Pounding each other on the back, we walked in circles to shed tension, and
unzipped coveralls so arctic air could lick sweaty necks and wrists. I handed out
salt tablets. From tender places where flesh pressed against our clothes enough
that heat went through – my bra and Bob’s fly, worse because of the zipper – we
fished out insulating wads of tissue. For a while Bob wore a long, heavy apron,
but the corners would touch slag and catch on fire. To keep his legs from burn-
ing, everyone around him would begin to yell and gesture, which made him
angry and impatient, unappreciative.

I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES 3

 After the pour Bob set Carl at some small task in the workshop while he
and I went out to the small bedroom of the studio and lay down together, our
embrace shaped by adrenaline, relief, and sleep deprivation. We lay half-asleep
while the day slipped down behind the mountains. The newly poured bronzes
ticked in their molds, unseen as they cooled. No one could tell yet whether
they would be whole and beautiful or so flawed as to be unsaleable – only raw
material for some other casting.
In the shop Carl would sing along with the cowboy laments on the radio
and if we didn’t come back in time, he’d lock up after himself in the blue twi-
light, put the key up over the door, and walk home in the snow. Or maybe his
wife, Carma, and kids would be waiting for him in their pickup. In those years
there was a lot of snow, up to our hips all winter. The mountains shone white
on the horizon.
In old age Bob would say, “Those were the few really good years.” I agreed.
Just for those few balanced, centered moments of peace, Bob and I were an axis
mundi, an oomphalos, the center of the world. And then we spun apart, Bob
to become a sort of monstre sacré on the Blackfeet Reservation and myself to
wander, always trying to return. That was more than forty years ago. I like to
remember it as mythic and romantic, poetic and tragic. Maybe it was. Time
burns us out, then fills our loss with memories so that we ring like bells. Now
I’m back on the east front of the Rockies, near the Blackfeet Reservation. Only
the wind is the same.

2. How I got to the Blackfeet Reservation and what it was like

Browning, Montana, 1961

In front of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Montana, is a circle

of footprints cast in bronze in 1930. They are the footprints of the last sign
talkers, imprints taken when the group met to make a movie gesture-speaking
in a circle. In fact, the Museum of the Plains Indian – dedicated in 1941 – began
with the intention of creating some kind of building or enclosure to house these
footprints and then evolved into the brick building it is today.
When my parents drove me through Browning, Montana, on return from
my graduation at Northwestern University just north of Chicago and headed
back to Portland, Oregon, we stopped at that Museum of the Plains Indian. It
was June, the prairie was embroidered with flowers, and the Rocky Mountains
reared up white on the horizon. I stood in the sun-warmed bronze footprints of
the old sign talkers, stepping from one pair to another, and said, “Just throw my
luggage out. This is where I want to be.” I applied for a teaching job and got it.

4 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 When I came back on the train in August, the land was dry, bleached to
the yellow ochre of cougar fur. When I walked over the swelling shortgrass
prairie, the ground thrummed under my feet like a bronze gong. At first I kept
my eyes on the wide horizon where moraines left by ancient glaciers met the
endless sky. Then I began to watch by my feet, where small verdigris plants and
bronze grasses grew at the base of red argyllite boulders encrusted with orange
elegantissima lichens. Now and then, on a ridge, I would find the splintered
silvery remains of a coffin with a few bone fragments and perhaps a sprinkle of
beads. The ancient practice of Blackfeet was to leave their dead as high as they
could get them.
I also kept to the ridges. Being up high, looking far away, feeling the wind,
somehow added up to flying. “Euphoria at spaciousness” they call it, some-
thing like the “oceanic feeling” that Freud felt was the source of religious awe.
Sometimes I walked late, and saw the stars come out. Sometimes I walked very
early and watched the sky pale, then flush to rose, then flood the mountains
with that same rose. “Alpenglow,” they call it.
A person needs words to describe the world. This is why the Blackfeet want
to save their language, their own words for their own place. Chief Mountain is
Ninah-istuki, which is the same as Mountain Chief. Heart Butte is Moskizipahp-
istuki. Between those two blades of rock, fifty miles apart, stands the great arc
of mountains that form Glacier National Park. There is no Blackfeet name for
Glacier National Park. Their nation never needed a park.
Browning, the capital of the Montana Blackfeet Reservation, is in an eco-
tone, a transition between the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains, not quite
in foothills but high enough (4,500 feet above sea level) that before baking a cake
one must stop and think whether to use the high altitude instructions. Boiling-
hot coffee is not quite so scalding here as it would be at sea level. Through the fall
and spring the snow-line is often just a little beyond the town. In a good winter
the snow is everywhere – there is no line. At least until the wind blows.
Water comes from mountain snowpack runoff. The town is built in a
marshy flood plain, which was gradually drained by channeling the network of
little creeks through storm sewers that still criss-cross underneath Browning. No
one kept a map of them. Because there is so much water in spring, the town is
surrounded by sheets of wild iris, camas, shooting stars, buttercups. In fall wild
geranium (cranesbill) and wild rose foliage blaze up red.
To the west are always the mountains, except that in forest fire season they
nearly disappear into purple smoke. Ironically, Willow Creek, which feeds this
flood plain, is one of the shortest and smallest of the many streams coming out
of the mountains – there is never quite enough water for the human infrastruc-
ture of the town. There is plenty enough for sweetgrass.
The Blackfeet Reservation is point of origin for three huge watersheds, one
draining west to the Pacific Ocean, one north to Hudson’s Bay and one south to
the huge Missouri/Mississippi river complex we call “the Louisiana Purchase.”

I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES 5

 It is this last drainage, the tributaries of the Missouri, that gave Europeans easy
access to the heart of Blackfeet country and changed tribal history forever. Even
so, the Blackfeet managed to defend their lands later than most other tribes.
The long-horizoned land never seems to change, but in fact small relation-
ships are always shifting through a rhythm, responding to extremes that press
at different times every species and life form to its limits. Only the intertwined
insects, plants, animals, and people capable of strategies and awareness unneces-
sary elsewhere can survive here. Their hardiness comes from adaptation. They
are tough, but at the same time more sensitive to nuances that make the differ-
ence between survival and extinction.
Over all stretches the sky. When there is little moisture or dust in the air,
it is a strong clear blue. When there is high ice and mare’s tails blow across the
blue, it pales. When a new weather system is on its way over the mountains,
driving a high-altitude wind ahead of it, the clouds will curve up from the ho-
rizon in a Chinook arch. In summer when heat rises from the prairie, marble
thunderheads of extraordinary height and elaborate shape build up and up until
they fall apart in hail, lightning, thunder. If clouds move in front of the sun,
they are rimmed with silver, or if they are thin clouds, they become amethyst
geodes, with glowing hearts.
At night stars cram the skies, so many that familiar patterns may be lost.
If there are active sunstorms, great gauzy films of color dance in the night sky,
aurora borealis. It’s not unusual to see space debris tumbling and flaring through
the atmosphere. Comets and meteors, of course. The sky is a whole world, oc-
cupied and slowly gyring. The Nitzi-tahpi, the old Blackfeet, have many stories
about a star who is a person, perhaps a friendly protector, perhaps a husband
who takes his wife up into the sky to live.

3. History of the Blackfeet and how artists joined them

High northern prairie, 1600s forward

When I came in August 1961, I wasn’t coming from the east, I was coming
from the west coast, traveling in the same direction as Lewis and Clark’s party
were returning when they killed a couple of Blackfeet just a few miles from
Browning. I don’t think I killed any Blackfeet. I may have wounded a few.
I myself was pierced through the heart. At first the love was for the land,
then for that sculptor twice my age, and finally it came to include not only the
Piegan branch of the Blackfeet nation, but also the complex of Métis, Cree,
Hutterites, Scandinavians, Belgians, and British who over the last century have
inhabited this place, some by accident and some on purpose.

6 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 The U.S./Canadian border is the northern edge of this reservation. When
Thomas Jefferson bought the drainage of the Missouri River from the King of
France and sent Lewis and Clark to see what that meant, Lewis saw from Camp
Disappointment (near Browning) that Jefferson had bought the land just up to
Milk River Ridge and Hudson’s Bay Divide. Those moraines were raised by a
sequence of glaciers, which stopped about ten thousand years ago, more or less
along a ragged line of volcanic hills (Sweet Grass Hills, Old Man Lying on his
Back, Bears Paw, Cypress Hills). Often weather systems divide just there.
On the west side of the reservation is the Rocky Mountain overthrust.
Grasses rather than trees grow here. It is grazing and small grain country. For
thousands of years people have traveled along these mountain shoulders unim-
peded by trees, creating the braided Old North Trail from Alaska down through
Mexico. Travois tracks can still be seen. The great path was kept grassy in part
by lightning strikes and Indian fires.
When the jet stream bends far to the south, cold from the Arctic rushes in.
Horses and cattle must be fed to live. Sometimes winter catabatic winds scour
the hilltops, taking the midwinter temperature up as high as sixty degrees, so
the grass is exposed for grazing. There is a larger cycle, running a hundred or
five hundred years, that swings the pattern from drought to flood, from easy
open-winter to iron death, from forest fire to deep grass.
Every tribe is shaped by the place where it came into being. It is the land
that creates tribes. Blackfeet knew many tucked-in secret valleys and flat-topped
buttes. In this sky-place full of rainbows, clouds trailing virga, sudden lightning,
and icy sun-dogs, they were a People of Dreams. But they were always grounded
in the reality of grass, which fed the bison. Women with sturdy digging sticks
found tubers and roots that grew underfoot – in fact, still grow where the prairie
is not plowed. The digging stick, worn by earth and women’s hands, was once
the most sacred object of the Blackfeet.
In 1869 a definitive incident had broken the back of resistance to the invad-
ing whites. Young men had quarreled, a bad-tempered white trader (Malcolm
Clarke) was killed, and in revenge Major Baker was sent on a frozen winter
morning to punish the band (Mountain Chief) from which the young men
came – his orders read “strike them and strike them hard.” Clarke’s wife was a
sister of Mountain Chief and Clarke’s sons rode with the avenging soldiers. One
of the scouts, Cobell, was married to another of Mountain Chief’s sisters.1 When
the soldiers got to the camp, Mountain Chief had moved on. Heavyrunner, a
peace chief, and his people, suffering from smallpox, were there. Few men were
in camp. Baker’s cavalry killed most of the people and left the rest with no food
or clothes in below-zero weather. (The scouts and some of the soldiers snuck
back to rescue a few of the children.)
The children of Malcolm Clarke, half-Blackfeet, especially the daughters,
were educated by his white family back East and enjoyed Western art. They
invited many artists, for instance, Joseph Henry Sharp (1859–1953) and Charles

I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES 7

 Schreyvogel (1861–1912), to their Dawes Act2 allotment ranch near East Glacier,
where the “Big Hotel” was built on their land. One daughter, Helen, was the first
superintendent of schools for the state of Montana and owned the first piano. In
her youth she was an actress who toured Europe with Sarah Bernhardt. Later she
helped to work out the Dawes Act allotments across the United States, taking
the reservations out of communal ownership and into family tracts.
By the twentieth century the European artists were coming by railroad,
sometimes with railroad subsidies to record the scenery and people: Joseph
Henry Sharp (1859–1953), Charles Schreyvogel (1861–1912), Winold Reiss
(1888–1953) and Charlie Russell (1864–1926). The Blackfeet themselves had
always been artists, but now they were pressed into service as models.

4. “Indian Days”
Browning, Montana, in the Sixties

The campgrounds to the west of Browning are far older than the reservation
drawn up in the nineteenth century. A few days after the Fourth of July, 1962, the
grassy field behind the Museum of the Plains Indians suddenly had a tent in it,
a white canvas Army-style tent shaped like a little peaked house. We could see it
from Bob’s studio. In front appeared an old Indian woman with a treadle sewing
machine who worked furiously away at something very large, also white canvas.
Finally someone brought poles and she put up the tipi she’d been sewing.
The second week in July a whole circle of tipis appeared, like the round
fungi that pop up on the prairie in a circle this time of year. It was Indian Days,
a great gathering of all the people, what is called a pow-wow these days, but
which in the ancient days was a ceremonial celebration when everyone came
together for business, pleasure, and dancing, as well as the important socially
structuring rituals. So many came that it had to be held in June when there
was plenty of grass for the horses and enough food stored to last for a week or
so without extra hunting. Then the Indian agent talked them into delaying the
ceremonies until the second week of July, so the hay would be cut first.
The lodgeskin the old woman sewed was not painted that year, but other
older lodges had unique versions of a particular design vocabulary. Around the
bottom edge of the cone was always a broad band of color decorated with the
circles the Blackfeet called “dusty stars” (the round fungi found in prairie grass)
and thought of as meteors dropped from the sky, as children come into our lives.
The top of that color-band might be in scallops or peaks and the people would
say they symbolized hills or mountains. The point of the cone with two smoke
flaps attached was always black and sometimes had stripes of black beneath
the solid black. Four stripes meant the four directions. Each smoke flap had a

8 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

pattern of circles, seven on one side to represent the Big Dipper and a cluster on
the other side to stand for the Pleiades.
Most strikingly, the animal-spirit-guardian of the tipi was represented on
each side, usually facing the door, and the gullet and kidneys of the beast were
marked in the design. On one famous yellow tipi a huge black buffalo leapt
over the door. (That was Jim Whitecalf’s – OLD Jim Whitecalf, who lived to
be more than a hundred. Young Jim was a decade older than me.) And on the
top of the back of the lodge, if the design had been properly brought in a dream,
was a Maltese cross, a stylized version of the “dream moth.” Usually the design
was inherited by family, though sometimes the right to use the design was sold.
There was an additional sign for those who had had the dream of their own
tipi: a buffalo tail or horse tail hanging from the center of that dream moth. By
the time I came, only Chewing Black Bone had a lodge with that special mark.
When the lodges were in place, the drums began, the sound of all the
people’s hearts at once – deep and thrilling and world-making. Blue smoke
layered the slow evenings and we slept hearing the steady throb. When I went
out to the fairgrounds to take care of my horse early in the morning, old Fish
Wolf Robe came out of his tipi, which faced east as all Blackfeet lodges do, and
addressed the Sun, praying for the People. His old voice rose up strongly over the
sleeping camp and he exhorted the People to do the right thing, to stay healthy,
to be generous, to keep order, and so on and on. Not many people were stirring.
Once I saw an old woman with her gray hair loose around her shoulders so she
could comb it, but there was a kitten on her lap and she had stopped in order to
tease the kitten with the comb. The earliest hours of the day belonged to the old
people. The young ones had the nights.
For several days more lodges appeared and, though they seemed to pop
up almost magically, they were in fact hard work. Especially if the wind were
blowing or the tipi poles weren’t quite the right length, it might take repeated
tries to get everything braced and tied and taut enough to satisfy the boss, who
was always the old grandma of the family. The women were the only ones who
could say whether the job of putting it up was properly done. In the Sixties the
directions, the complaining, the objecting, the urging and scolding, was often
in Blackfeet. The oldest ladies still wore layers and layers of calico skirts.
In the center of the grounds the men put up an arbor, in those days made
new from branches every year instead of today’s plywood arena floored with
Astroturf, which is less dusty. The PA system began to snap and boom and
electrical crews came out to repair the lines, though there were only a few. Most
people still used kerosene. Some brought their tipi poles in with horses and
wagon running gears (the box and seat removed). The kids from Moccasin Flats
were already used to having to go to an old-fashioned pump with their buckets
and jugs. (Country people still took water from creeks.) People brought their
own food and cooked at their lodges and tents, so that around mealtimes the
whole west side of town smelled of cottonwood smoke and frying bread dough.

I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES 9

 Finally, the stick game began, the sleight-of-hand gambling game ac-
companied by a steady whacking beat of sticks on logs, roughly in time with
the drums. Two teams sat in long lines while spectators stood behind them,
second-guessing where the handheld “bones” might be. The money being bet
was thrown out on the grass between the teams, each sitting behind their log
while they kept time by beating the log. It was said that ranches changed hands,
horses went back and forth, and I myself saw money in paper sacks and legal
documents among the loose bills. It was hypnotic, narcotic, deeply addictive.
At one time it had had religious meaning, something about the great game of
chance we call Life.
When it was time – regardless of what the schedules said – the dancers
began. Sometimes it took a lot of urging from the PA system. Once in a long
time it rained. Often it was unbearably hot, but that never slowed things down
much. Once it snowed. When the impalpable moment came, dancers straggled
over to the dance arbor, where the drums had been pounding, pounding, and
the falsetto wavering melody had been calling, calling.... The arena filled with
color in motion, bells jingling, braids flying, dust rising up around the danc-
ers. For hours the old patterns and motions flew around in circles while people
drifted back and forth to their folding chairs or the uncomfortable benches. A
few concessions booths dispensed coffee, hamburgers and fry bread, but in those
years there were few carnies. It was past midnight when the dancers finally wore
out and went to their beds in lodges, tents and truck beds. They would ignore
Fish Wolf Robe calling when the sun came up.
On Sunday afternoon, tipis began to come down – first one or two and
then whole sections. By Monday, all that was left was the original canvas tent
and the old woman out in front of it with her treadle machine, hard at work on
another tipi cover. Now on all sides of her the grass was trampled and crews of
repentant drunks from the jail picked up litter. One tragic year the body of a
small boy was found left behind, floating face-down in a little pothole lagoon a
half-mile away. Everyone had thought he went home with someone else.
In a key Blackfeet legend, a woman falls in love with the Morning Star and
goes to the sky to live with him. They have a child, Blood Clot Boy. When she
returns home, she is told her son must never touch the ground with his feet. She
is very careful, but in spite of that, the boy touches the ground and the child is
lost. The story is meant as consolation, explanation, in a world of tragedy.
This was a world Bob knew well. Sometimes he forgot he wasn’t a member
of the tribe and said, “We Blackfeet never surrendered. We were never beaten in a
battle. We just wore out from starvation and sickness and had to stop fighting.”

10 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

5. The roots of American equestrian bronzes
Washington, D.C., 1780s to the 1800s

When the United States first started up their nation, about the time the
Blackfeet were first acquiring horses, they had no bronze foundries.3 They felt
this lack sharply, because the European tradition was to create heroic-size bronze
sculptures of leaders, particularly military heroes. In some ways these big statues
were celebrations of war victories, maybe even like scalp dances.
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson asked the French sculptor, Jean-
Antoine Houdon, (1741–1828), to cross the ocean in order to record the appear-
ance of George Washington, but Houdon worked in marble, which meant that
the statue could not show Washington on a horse, for its brittle legs would have
snapped at the ankles. However, Houdon did an excellent full-length figure of
Washington and continued on to make marble busts of other founding fathers.
In 1847, about the time the Blackfeet were being asked to sign treaties,
Ball Hughes, an Englishman, modeled the “first bronze cast in America,” a por-
trait of Dr. Bowditch, an astronomer, which was placed on his grave in Mount
Auburn Cemetery. The family did not think the casting adequate and had the
statue recast in France. Evidently the true first cast was destroyed. Decades later
people still hungered to see the Father of the Country on a horse, until eventu-
ally there were several.
The successful pioneer was Clark Mills (1815–1883), a self-taught modeler
in clay. Before making a statue of Washington, he had managed to secure a
commission for a heroic-size equestrian statue of General Jackson. At that time
he had never seen either Jackson or an equestrian statue, but – Yankee-style – he
set out to build a foundry to cast the monument in bronze that came from an old
cannon captured by Jackson himself. In order to work near Washington, D.C.,
Mills bought a farm. He was about to begin the real work on his statue when
a high wind blew down his studio. Just as that was rebuilt, his foundry burned
down. The body of the horse had to be cast six times before it was adequate. The
horse was rearing, exactly balanced on the hunkered-down rear legs.
Mills finished his statue of Jackson in 1853, then later his equestrian statue
of Washington, and finally a symbolic statue of Freedom that was put on top of
the United States Capitol in 1863 at the end of the Civil War. (It’s still there.)
He devised all his methods and equipment himself. (Almost exactly a hundred
years later, we did the same.)
One month after the unveiling of Mills’ statue of Jackson, Henry
Kirke Brown (1814–1886), native born, started work on his own equestrian
Washington, unveiled on the Fourth of July, 1856, in Union Square, New
York. Brown was interested in the Eastern Indians, visiting them in order to
portray them. Indian sculpture, therefore, precedes “cowboy” sculpture, for the
American West was only just being invented.

I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES 11

 The Civil War energized a wave of monumental sculpture, financed by
fortunes made on the war and the rising tide of industrialism, and driven by
the need of both sides to commemorate heroism. Also, there were a great many
cannons to recycle.
By now the creative center of the art world was Paris, particularly the
Beaux Arts school. Forsaking Italian marble, many sculptors turned to French
foundries which were just converting from sand-casting to the more delicate ciré
perdue (lost wax) Italian block casting. Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) relied on
French foundries who could cast his extravagant gestural work.
After the War Between the States the President everyone wanted to see in
bronze was Abraham Lincoln. Masters among the sculptors of Lincoln were
Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), Daniel Chester French (1850–1931),
Gutzon Borglum (1867–1941), and James Earle Fraser (1876–1953). Perhaps
the culmination of great marble memorial art was Daniel Chester French’s mag-
nificent portrait of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington,
D.C. French’s first monument had been a bronze Minute Man in Concord, very
much informed by Michelangelo’s marble Apollo Belvedere. Thus marble and
bronze were in conversation with each other.
When military enterprises after the Civil War shifted to the Western fron-
tier to force the tribes off their land, Indians became the subjects of monuments,
not as individuals so much as symbols of the uniquely American continent. Even
as they were being celebrated in bronze, they were being destroyed as humans.
The monumental sculptors of Indians were Solon (1868–1922) and Gutzon
(1867–1941) Borglum, Cyrus Edwin Dallin (1861-1944), Alexander Phimister
Proctor (1862–1950) and James Earle Fraser (1876–1953), who summed up the
situation with “The End of the Trail.” These sculptors were all Western people
who grew up among prairie tribes.
Most of us recognize these statues when we see them – but we have lost the
history and names of the sculptors. The sculptures seem always to have been
there. Frederic Remington (1861–1909) and Charles M. Russell (1864–1926)
– known primarily as painters – were contemporary with the former men, but
neither of them did monumental sculpture. Their parlor-table-size bronzes were
similar in style and subject matter to monumental sculptures, but their popular
reputations have come to obscure the heroic-size bronzes of other sculptors.
Often the history of art is told in terms of exhibitions. In 1876 at
the Centennial Exposition, French sculptors dominated.4 By the Chicago
Columbian Exposition in 1893, American sculpture had taken a major leap.5
Not only were tours de force produced for the show, but also many Paris-trained
American sculptors worked together in a loose coalition of masters and ap-
prentices. Creators of equestrian statues felt free to hire younger men who were
expert at horses so they could concentrate on the rider and overall design. It’s a
short step from horsemen to cowboys.

12 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 The immediate result was an array of “white sculptures” in a White City,
all created by casting “staff,” which was a hard plaster reinforced with straw.
To the innocent, they appeared to be marble. A few figures were reproduced in
bronze so that they still stand in Chicago. Among those bronzes were portraits
of Indians. In addition, Proctor produced sixty excellent individual figures of
Western game animals, all of which he had hunted since his boyhood in Denver.
He was an American animalier as well as a key artist of the American West.
Edward Kemeys (1843–1907) was equally celebrated as an animal sculptor at
the Exposition, but has since become nearly unknown.
The towering figures of the Columbian Exposition were Augustus Saint-
Gaudens and Daniel Chester French, New England men educated in Paris who
would teach and lead dozens of American figurative sculptors. Saint-Gaudens
was the senior, a long-faced redhead with a French father and Irish mother.
He had a gift for getting along with the wealthy and lived on an estate with a
great flourish. Though he had a mistress, also his model, she seems to have been
dependable and discreet in the French manner. Responding to the continued
shadow of the War Between the States, Saint-Gaudens made strong, winged
women in cowls of draped flags, who consoled or inspired as the situation de-
manded. Possibly Saint-Gaudens’ masterpiece is a monumental bronze eques-
trian portrait of General Sherman, his horse being led by one of these idealized
women as she carries a waving flag.
When realist Daniel Chester French began to sculpt winged angels, he
wrote home to Concord to ask an ornithologist friend to send him “about sev-
enteen” different kinds of bird wings for study. He was much helped when the
Italian brothers Piccirilli, fine marble craftsmen, came to New York City to
open a stone-cutting workshop supporting American sculptors. (Several of the
brothers became sculptors themselves.) He only needed to complete a small clay,
and the Piccirillis would notify him when the enlarged statue was ready for final
touches. French showed no inclination to any other romantic relationships than
his wife, who was his cousin, named Mary and called Mamie – the same as
Charlie Russell’s wife.
In the period surrounding WWI, many American artists continued to
travel to Paris for classes at the Beaux Arts, learning how to work with the
nearby foundries. Like the marble cutters before them, bronze craftsmen fol-
lowed the sculptors back across the Atlantic, meeting new opportunities by
creating the major New York foundries that still persist: Modern Art, Bonnard,
Roman Bronze, Gorham. Now there were true American bronzes. Important
schools and societies such as the National Academy of Design formed in New
York City.
Then came the infamous Armory Show of 1910, the entering wedge of
the new abstract and intellectual art that didn’t look like anything “real.” They
were of no matter to Bob Scriver, who was inspired by Malvina Hoffman
(1887–1966) who studied with Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) who studied with

I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES 13

 Antoine Barye (1796–1875), the first to be called “animalier.” Scriver’s artistic
forebears were sculptors of realistic figurative bronze monuments, first French
and then American, finally Western.
Cubism, impressionism, and other startling innovations were a shock to
the systems of conservative art patrons. But in Montana few paid much atten-
tion. Many of the early mining and banking leaders were from Boston, and
thus were aware of the legacy of the Paris-trained monumental sculptors who
had contributed work to the Boston Commons. In front of the Montana State
Capital building the politicians erected a huge statue of Irish Governor Meagher
pointing his saber to the sky. A statue of Paris Gibson,6 city founder, stands in
the park in Great Falls, and a statue of General Stevens, who located Marias
Pass, which made the east/west Great Northern Railroad possible, stands at
the Continental Divide along the tracks. It was not until much later, closer to
World War II, that “modern” art of any kind got to Montana, and even then it
remained pretty much sequestered in the university towns.
Western American art nostalgically portraying the pre-industrial world
has now been collected in major Western historical institutions, founded by
fortunate industrialists, engineers, and miners and developed by obsessed and
resourceful curators. Soon the clientele of the “cowboy and Indian” painters
discovered and claimed realistic bronzes that had Western subjects.
By the turn of the second millennium we were used to seeing Remington
bronzes in the Oval Office of the White House. A political dimension lingers,
perhaps because of the origin of equestrian bronzes in national military monu-
ments. Western sculpture fans value the open frontier (unregulated by govern-
ment) and the importance of individual enterprise. “Cowboy” art has become
part of the patriotic “grand narrative” version of the settling of the West that still
prevails in the face of post-modern criticism. It has become a genre, a popular
category of the “gens” or people, in response to both historical nostalgia and
present economics which make bronzes affordable to ordinary folks. Scriver’s
sculpture career happened to begin just as art of the American West became a
kind of craze and whole empires of commerce grew up around the genre.
When Bob began doing sculpture, the Great Falls C.M. Russell Museum
was a small neighborhood archive created by the bequest of Josephine Trigg,
Charlie’s librarian friend. The objects were modest: letters, place marks, small
figures meant to entertain and not necessarily Western: turkeys, monkeys, Arabs
on camels, figures from literature. By the time I write this, the C.M. Russell
Museum is a whole block anchored by a huge imposing edifice, with Charlie’s
little log studio and the family home over to one side of the lawn. The interior
shelters major paintings and bronze, attracts an international crowd of fans, and
is managed by a well-educated, competent, – even inspired – art curator, Anne
Durand.

14 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 In the Sixties a small experimental art auction was pioneered by the Great
Falls Ad Club. By the time of this writing, a dozen major “art of the West”
auctions are staged annually. In 2001 one painting alone, a Russell watercolor
called “Meat for Wild Men” which was formally estimated as worth $475,000,
sold for over a million dollars at the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction in Reno. Later
a numinous panorama of Yellowstone painted by Moran, one of those early
artists, sold for a little over eight million dollars.
Scriver entered the fray early in this chuckwagon race and was still part of
the action at his death fifty years later. It all happened so fast he never did really
understand what was happening. But he left more than a thousand sculptures,
a dozen of them heroic-size. They include Western subjects, animals, portrait
busts, nudes, rodeo subjects, a whole series on Blackfeet, and Lewis and Clark
monuments.

I GENRE: AMERICAN BRONZES 15

 II

Provenance:
Family History

1. The importance of story: the quick-draw guy

Browning, 1968

Guns and art are more valuable if you know where they come from, who owned
them, what their marks mean. Bob and I were discussing this one day when the
light-bulb man showed up. He was a traveling salesman, a small unassuming
man so eager for sales that if we’d buy the new bulbs, he would take a tall
wobbly ladder into the freezing winter museum and replace all the burned-out
bulbs. Bob had said every a person has a provenance, a story, and bet me that the
light-bulb man was more exciting than he looked. We invited him to supper in
order to find out. Bob won the bet because he turned out to be the quick-draw
champion of Montana.
After supper the salesman demonstrated quick-draw. Bob had always shot
for accuracy, matching his .22 rifle against Joe Foley’s pistol (and sometimes Joe
Foley could outshoot Ed McGivern, world’s greatest revolver shot), but speed
was new to him. The quick-draw guy showed us cartridges that shot wax instead
of lead and we brought in some cartons to draw targets on. When we missed, we
made dents in the glossy pale green back door, but we didn’t really care.
The quick-draw guy left us some wax ammunition. For days afterward Bob
and Carl Cree Medicine went out in the snowmobile in hopes that dogs would
chase them. Of course they did – Bob was always at war with mean dogs. Carl
steered the Arctic Cat in circles while Bob shot dogs and whooped. Then they
traded off.
Because it is possible to make molds and castings that are duplicates – more
or less – of a sculptor’s work, the provenance of the individual casting (where it
came from and where it has been) becomes crucial to its value. A Remington
bronze that was cast under the artist’s supervision is worth hundreds of thou-

17
 sands of dollars. A cheap reproduction of the same sculpture, carelessly cast, can
be found on the market for a hundred dollars. For this reason, every bronze that
Bob sold was recorded in a book and a certificate of authenticity was given to the
new owner. It was a little like a birth certificate.

2. Bob’s genealogical roots and how his parents got to Browning

The Palatine to England to Quebec to Montana, 1600s to early 1900s

This is Bob’s family provenance. During the 1600s in the European Palatine
– which eventually evolved into Germany and other countries – a war broke out
that was so long, complex and destructive that it was called the Thirty Years’
War. Such destruction caused waves of emigration. A family called “Scriver”1
emigrated to England, where the Crown gave them refuge. Some went on across
the Atlantic to the colonial area along Lake Champlain where today Vermont
meets Quebec, and there they settled on farms.
It was contested land, changing hands repeatedly, from French to English
and then – during the Revolutionary War between the United States and the
British Empire – wavering back and forth. On at least one occasion, the families
had to take what belongings they could carry on their backs and flee across the
frozen lake. Another time, the household silver was buried in the woods while
the women and children retreated to safety and the men took arms.
The Scrivers were Loyalists, meaning they wished to remain part of the
British Empire. Beginning in Vermont, they ended up in Quebec, their second
homestead slightly smaller than the first because of starting over.
Ellison Westgarth Macfie was Anglophone (an English-speaking person in
the Canadian bilingual province of Quebec), the daughter on the Macfie farm
next to the Scrivers in Clarenceville.2 Her mother was Josephine Creller, daugh-
ter of a preacher and first cousin to Lady Kemp, who was not English landed
gentry (as Wessie often hinted) but rather the wife of a Canadian industrialist
knighted for his contributions to the country. The Kemps had an imposing
home and lived very well. The British Loyalist Crellers, like the Scrivers, had
come out of the Palatine through England to Quebec. All of Josephine’s broth-
ers (her sister died at age five) went on to the American West and made fortunes
on the frontier in the mid-nineteenth century.
Lady Kemp, Josephine’s cousin, had a daughter about the same age as
“Wessie,” and often brought that girl to visit. At night Lady Kemp’s daughter
was put to sleep alongside Wessie, with Wessie on the outer side so that the
visiting cousin wouldn’t fall out of the unaccustomed bed. Lady Kemp came,
dressed for supper in her pearls and silk, to kiss her daughter good night. As
an old woman Wessie would still tell, with a mixture of hurt and amusement

18 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

at herself for caring at all, how Lady Kemp would lean over to kiss her own
daughter, but never once kissed Wessie as well.
When she was a little older, she kept a scrapbook of the Kemp social events
at Castle Frank, and even now they sound impressive. In the days before jet
airplanes, the monied people went by steamship. The Kemps lost family on the
Lusitania and a woman who later married a Macfie escaped from the Titanic
and spent the night rowing a lifeboat alongside her maid.
Wessie’s father, George Hawley Macfie, descended from another Robert
Macfie who was born at sea when his parents, Alexander Macfie and Ann Tough
Macfie, emigrated from Scotland to Canada in April 1824. (At this time the
Blackfeet were considered the most powerful tribe on the plains and the fur
trade was at its height.) Prosperous landed people in Scotland, they did not
travel steerage, though it must have taken courage to sail while so pregnant. The
generous family money came from sugar trade in the Indies, but Alexander was
the youngest brother.
In 1837–38 the Canadian population of Quebec – particularly the French-
speaking people – began to feel that England was taking advantage of them.
To head off another revolution like that in the American colonies, the English
government organized local militia charged with remaining loyal to the Crown,
as opposed in particular to the separatist tendencies of the French speakers. The
Crellers, Scrivers, and Macfies participated in these Loyalist militias.
In 1851 Alexander’s son, Robert Macfie (1824–1896), married Sarah Eliza
Hawley (1833–1914). Their oldest son (second oldest child) was the George
Hawley Macfie (1855–1923) who became Wessie’s beloved father. By all ac-
counts he was a mild man, though he was a major in the militia. Because of
that, the farm was also an armory. His sisters, Miss Annie and Miss Lillie, never
married. His two brothers, like his mother-in-law’s brothers, went to the far
West to seek their fortunes.
George and Josephine Macfie had two children, “Robin” (short for Robert
Eugene) and “Wessie” (short for Ellison Westgarth, which was the name of an
aunt). Wessie was not a girl who played with dolls, but rather made pets of all
the barnyard animals, much to the despair of her father, who could not do the
chores without the spoiled creatures following him around.
Among the young cadets who served Major Macfie in the 6th Hussars was
that clever young bugler called “Thad,” from the dairy farm adjacent to the
Macfies, the youngest son of James and Mary Scriver.
The oldest Scriver son, Edward Julius, had been born in 1863, just as
the American Civil War ended, opening up the American West to turmoil,
fortune-seeking, and Indian wars. Franklin John was born in 1864, but only
lived a month. Other still-births followed. Robert Elgin was born in 1876, and
Thaddeus Emery in 1879. Prematurely born, Thad was so small that his mother’s
wedding ring fit him as a bracelet. His first days were in an incubator improvised
from the warming oven of the wood stove. He grew up small but tough.

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y 19
 When the time came for the Scriver boys to seek their fortunes, all headed
West. The oldest boys ended up in Minneapolis where, for a dollar-and-a-half
an acre, Ed bought much of the land that became the city, making a handsome
enough profit to start a luxury furniture store and hire Elgin as his financial
officer. Ed became very rich and Elgin was “comfortable.”
Thad also went to Minneapolis and at first worked for a newspaper. But
soon he became friends with J.H. Sherburne, an Indian agent. Sherburne had
been in Oklahoma, where he had befriended famous chiefs and warriors, in-
cluding Chief Joseph. Now he was established with Blackfeet in Montana, just
east of the Rockies, where new opportunities were opening due to the Great
Northern railroad building its “High Line” track just south of and parallel
to the Canadian border. Also there was talk of oil, which had just turned the
Oklahoma Poncas into millionaires.
Thad came to Browning in 1903 to work in the Sherburne mercantile store
on the town square in the little reservation place once memorably described as
a “dusty little partridge of a town.”3 Just to the north, across Willow Creek,
the government had a much larger square – big enough to drill cavalry, since at
that time the Bureau of Indian Affairs was part of the Department of War. The
government square was edged with barrack-style housing and crowned, at the
top of the hill, with a hospital built of field stones.
The town itself was only a few dozen one-story buildings on the low side of
Willow Creek. In the town square a Maypole was sometimes erected and wound
with ribbons by Indian girls in white Edwardian dresses. Two livery stables on
the main street – which now runs at right angles to the highway – watered their
horses in the town square pond, and sometimes a cowboy would ride a rank
horse into the water to give himself an edge if the horse bucked.
Thad told us about the day the liveryman brought a stud horse to water
him, alone because he was inclined to fight rivals. Everything was fine until they
returned from the pond past the hotel, which had just installed a big plate glass
window, very expensive. The stallion spotted his reflection, reared unexpectedly
enough to jerk free, and plunged – front striking feet first – through the window.
The clerk had barely enough time to duck down under his counter.
Thaddeus Scriver was so short that he had to stand on a box to transact
business across the tall counters that ringed the mercantile store. But he went
nimbly up and down the ladders that slid back and forth across the well-stocked
floor-to-ceiling shelves, he was quick to make folks laugh, and he was the soul
of dependability. At one point he won a race against a horse – the horse was so
big it took precious time building momentum while Thad was already propelled
yards ahead. Some say he had a reputation as a dancer.
In a few years he and a partner opened their own mercantile store, Willets
and Scriver, across the town square from the Sherburne Mercantile. Willets, an
American, had to be involved until Thad became a U.S. citizen.

20 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Bob was always very proud of his father’s Blackfeet name, Stumik-sah-toh-
see or “Medicine Bull,” which he thought was given to his dad because of his
ability to tell the weather. He felt it was a special name, implying strength and
honor. One day I found a photo of the original “Medicine Bull,”4 and saw that
he was an unusually small man. I suspect that’s really why Thad got the name,
but I never passed this information on to Bob.
In time, Thad was ready to start a family. He thought of Ellison Westgarth
Macfie back in Clarenceville and bought a small four-room house from
Ammons, an earlier trader. Methodically, he took the train to Toronto, where
he had connections with a diamond merchant, and bought a ring wholesale.
Then he proceeded on to Clarenceville and proposed marriage to Wessie. It was
the summer of 1911, eight years since he had gone to Browning, but he had often
come home for visits. Everyone thought it was a good match.
Wessie (1887–1977) was eight years younger than Thad (1879–1970). She
had always wanted to be a nurse, though her mother could not approve of her
daughter having such a vocation.5 She had even begun to take classes, but in
the course of her duties she caught measles, a case bad enough to cause her to
be secluded in a dark room for weeks. In spite of this precaution, her vision was
affected and she had to wear glasses.
Wessie had far too much energy to be happy with the life of a young woman
in a genteel family of the time. The most exciting thing to do was to rise early in
order to iron a dampened white muslin dress with many ruffles and tucks, then
wear it into town in order to call on friends – returning home with the hem of
the long dress so dirtied from the streets that the garment had to go back into
the laundry. She attended Durham Ladies College, a finishing school where she
learned to do fine needlework and to play the piano. Her mother took her on
a tour of Great Britain, where they visited Dreghorn Castle, which had been
bought in the 1700s by the Macfies.
Though “accomplished,” she was getting older. She did not envy the spin-
ster lives of Aunt Annie and Aunt Lillie, comfortable as they might be. The
arrangements for the marriage went forward quickly, and she was married in
a bower at home on August 9, 1911. She regretted only that she had allowed
an older relative to arrange her veil, which was pulled into a kind of turban
effect across her forehead. After seeing photos of the event, she thought this was
unflattering. She didn’t wear her glasses for the ceremony, not that they could
have helped her see into her future.
Thad had bought an automobile, which was loaded onto a flatbed car, and
the young couple went off together on the railroad, headed west to wide-open
territory. The rail trip across the continent took days of noise, heat, and soot.
When Wessie saw where she was expected to live, she sat down and wept.
She would have gone home to the elegant, cool farmhouse in Quebec, except
that the thought of repeating that long, arduous trip so soon was also unbear-
able. Outside this little house there was no yard at all – just dust and a string of

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y 21
 barbed wire to keep the cows that wandered the town from thrusting a curious
head through a window. The concern was more to protect the cow from getting
cut on the glass than to preserve the privacy of the interior, as there were no
curtains or drapes. The rooms inside were lined with gray insulating felt with no
paint or paper. Each room held a big coal stove in the center.
In a while, Wessie got up and began to make improvements. The first one
was to disassemble the stove in the parlor, which cooperated by falling apart in a
cascade of soot. She was disappointed that Thad had no intention of letting his
wife work in the store.
Wessie found her best friends among the Indian Health Service nurses. She
even went on house calls with them to carry supplies and lend moral support.
Years later she told about arriving one brisk day at a little cabin which evidently
had no plumbing, for a “thunder mug” had just been set out on the step with its
coiled contents still steaming. The nurse leaned over in a professional manner
and said, “Well, it looks perfectly healthy to me, Wessie. What do you think?”
Someone in town once told me about going into the Browning Merc on a
quiet day and spotting Thad over by the ammunition, doing exercises with bags
of shot for weights. He was solidly muscled late into his eighties. In the early
days fifty- and hundred-pound bags of feed were stored in a cellar accessed by a
trapdoor and ladder. Thad could lift out those sacks over his head onto the floor.
A photo of him shows a dapper fellow leaning in the doorway.
The Browning Merc was built on the straightforward plan of most mercan-
tile stores of the period – simply a warehouse with rows of shelves, an aisle for the
clerk, a long counter, and another aisle for the customers. These ran down both
sides. In the middle was an island of glass cases with space for the clerk inside.
In the earliest days, there was a big stove. A hotel-style counter desk stood at
the back for doing business with the accountant, who perched on a stool like a
Dickens character, working at a ledged shelf for the journals and other records,
with steps up to an open balcony or mezzanine. Up there Thad worked at a
rolltop desk, which was locked when he was away. When I came in 1961, the
store had changed very little since its founding fifty years earlier.
In the early years the eggs were kept in a barrel at the end of the counter.
One clever fellow in bib overalls had developed the habit of sidling up to the
barrel and slipping the raw eggs into various pockets. One day when the fel-
low came in, Thad waited a while and then came down from his desk. “Why,
there you are!” he said, cheerfully slapping the fellow on the chest in greeting.
“How are you doing, anyway?” and he gave him playful but vigorous pats on the
lower pockets. The egg thief turned red and left, slime slowly oozing through his
clothes. He didn’t come back.
Small goods like simple drugs or toiletries were over to the left. Then yard
goods and baby clothes. Way in the back was a hardware counter, shelves for
dishes and kerosene lamps, and bins for horseshoes. The floors were wooden,
broad thick planks dark from age and oiling. At the end of the day someone

22 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

threw sweeping compound all around and then swept everything up. A bit
of poking around would turn up oddball stuff like a carpet beater, which our
Egyptologist friend’s wife was delighted to buy for fifty-nine cents, the original
price. It seems that Oriental rugs should not be vacuumed, and her old carpet
beater had disintegrated.
This was a family store but incorporated, and often included partners who
came and went. Harold, the eldest son, grew up working in it. Wessie, confined
to being “Mom,” simply called over her order every morning and a clerk delivered
it to her kitchen door. When her Quebec sister-in-law asked her casually what
groceries cost out West, Wessie had no idea. If the bananas in the store got too
ripe, she took them home to make banana bread. At Christmas she got one of
the row of poinsettias, at Easter she got one of the row of lilies, at Thanksgiving
she was asked what size turkey she wanted, and on her birthday or at Christmas,
she was brought a catalog and told to order a new dress.
Inside the store at the front was a straight chair, often occupied by Mrs. Old
Man Chief, bent under the weight of many years. She wore layers of calico skirts,
a thick shawl, and a bandana over her head. I never heard her speak English. Or
anything else. Late in the afternoon, when Leo Spotted Eagle went to deliver the
groceries, he would load her into the Jimmy and take her home.
Thad never properly turned the store over to Harold, though Laurel,
Harold’s daughter, claims she can’t remember a time when Harold didn’t do
the bulk of the work. When Thad was nearly ninety, about the time he quit
tying his shoes, he also stopped showing up very much. Harold carried on as
usual, opening the store, taking the daily delivery over to his mom’s house – just
out the back, down the alley, and across the street. His mom would slip him a
forbidden donut and gather the news he had picked up so far. Then he came
back to the store for the day. When Thad died, Harold asked Bob to come up to
the mezzanine and help him force the rolltop desk open. He’d never been given
the key and had no idea what might be inside.
When Harold died and the store went to his daughter Laurel, she was
shocked at how much money so many people owed – some of them since the
Depression. She made one last attempt at collection – which horrified everyone
(“How can she want money to pay my grandpa’s bills – he’s DEAD!”) and then
closed out the accounts. After reducing the inventory, she finally sold the build-
ing, which stood empty until it eventually burned down. It was not entirely paid
for, so the insurance was in her name. It had never been modernized. After it
burned, the United States Government bought the property to build a big new
brick post office.

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y 23
 3. Bob’s childhood
Browning, World War I and after

In Browning the nineteenth-century pre-industrial world lasted far longer than

in the rest of the country, resisting the modern because of remoteness and pov-
erty. One of Robert’s earliest memories was his dad starting the kitchen fire first
thing in the morning. The small boy, still unsteady on chubby legs, stamped on
escaping sparks while he and his father chanted: “Kaiser Bill went up the hill to
take a look at France. Kaiser Bill came down the hill with bullets in his pants!”
Thad’s oldest brother, “Uncle Ed,” who had become so wealthy in Minneapolis,
lost his only son, Edward Stanleigh Scriver, in World War I. There were no other
male Scrivers in that generation except Robert and Harold.
No one in the Scriver family ever talked about the terrible period after
World War I when Spanish Influenza reduced the population of the prairies
by 10 per cent (only a fraction of the mortality rate among the Blackfeet in the
Smallpox Pandemic of 1837, which killed two-thirds of the population). Neither
did the Scriver family ever talk about the five-year drought right after World
War I, the abruptly falling farm prices that starved out thousands of homestead-
ers along the High Line, or the many related bank failures. Robert’s memory
of this time was that “business was good. The family was healthy and enjoying
life and had many a pleasant weekend at the Charlie Buck ranch on Cut Bank
Creek, not far from the site of Lewis and Clark’s Camp Disappointment.”6
Thad’s father, James H. Scriver, died on June 8, 1921, at his farm in
Clarenceville. In September 1922 the Glacier County Chief records that notifica-
tion had come that Wessie’s father was mortally ill. He had undergone abdomi-
nal exploratory surgery, revealing cancer all through him. He was sewn up and
sent home. The entire Thad Scriver family packed up and drove to Clarenceville,
where they remained until November. Robert was eight years old. Perhaps this
was about the time he tried to make a blackbird “come back to life” by putting
wires in it and giving it hatpin eyes. The maggots got it anyway.
He had a dog called Dart, an English bulldog of the type we might call a
pit bull now, but then considered a good child’s dog, like the dog with the ring
around its eye in Our Gang comedies. With his dog for company, Robert often
ranged out over the hills with his .22, shooting gophers and warily approaching
hilltop burials.
One day on the way home the boy and his dog met a particularly mean
drunk who was famous for his brace of big nasty mutts. The drunk’s dogs began
to stalk Robert’s dog. Pit bull or not, Dart was outnumbered and he might have
been killed. Robert, who was pre-adolescent, raised his .22 to his shoulder and
declared, “If you don’t call off those dogs, I’ll shoot ‘em!”
“You will, will you?” sneered the drunk and forthwith he seized the gun,
wrenched it out of the boy’s hands, and slammed the stock up against his left

24 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

temple. Robert dropped unconscious. That part of the skull is thin, poor protec-
tion for the brain underneath. Then the drunk and his snarling dogs went off as
Dart stood over the fallen boy, ready to fight to the death.
The next person to happen along was J.L. Sherburne, son of Thad’s mentor,
who carried Robert home and called the doctor. The boy was all right, but it
was a narrow escape and he always bore a mark on his temple. Mr. Sherburne
helped in the prosecution of the bully. All his life, Robert was protective of that
side of his face. In adulthood he acquired a grizzly skull and studied the thin
place at the side. Finally, he shot a grizzly with a .22 by piercing that thin temple.
Perhaps it was a kind of exorcism.

4. The white community and how Bob acquired an Indian “mother”

Milk River Ridge, the Twenties

Thad Scriver was prospering. Just to the east of Browning was a little railroad
town called Blackfoot, the end of the rail line where the cars had to be turned
around. The Blackfoot station agent, J.P. Carberry, was a good friend of the
Scrivers. Margaret Carberry, the daughter, often babysat Robert. Blackfoot was
a humming village because it housed and fed the train crews.
Thad and Mr. Carberry started a second mercantile store there. Thad bought
the “Bell Ranch” (320 acres on the South Fork of the Milk River), the “Percival
place” (640 acres), and a wheat ranch (800 acres) near Valier, Montana. Then he
went in with Sam Bird, Charlie Devereaux and Charlie Buck (mixed-blood but
enrolled Blackfeet) to start the Stockman’s State Bank.7 All was well until one
morning the bank stood with the door open and the safe empty.
No one bothered to pursue the thief, presumed to be the clerk since he
never showed up again. It would have cost even more money, though Wessie
urged Thad to chase the rascal. Bitterly, she demanded why he would just accept
the loss, but Thad mused, “He seemed like such a nice fellow.” In order to pay
off the depositors in those days before federal insurance, Thad sold his ranches.
When the railroad was extended over Marias Pass, Blackfoot collapsed.
The Browning Review of June 23, 1922, reported that the Stockman’s Bank
claims were being received by D.J. Hilger, a prosperous and influential rancher.
In the same issue was a notice about the estate of Margaret Carberry (the mother
rather than the daughter), and the estate of Horace Malcolm Clarke, son of the
Malcolm Clarke whose death provoked the Baker Massacre. (In fact, Horace
rode with Baker that tragic winter morning. He was the father of John Clarke,
the deaf-mute woodcarver.) I suspect these dark events made more of an impres-
sion on the young Robert than he realized. Thad never tried to build back up

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y 25
 again. The Thirties Depression intervened, World War II struck, and then he
was older, in his fifties.
At one time a cluster of white mercantile families used to go goose hunt-
ing every fall at Dandy Jim Lake, which was a series of potholes south of the
Browning Depot. Everyone took lunches and thermoses with hot chocolate – or
maybe something more adult. It was almost like a British shooting party. One
day Thad raised his shotgun to the crook of his elbow and it accidentally fired,
hitting one of his friends. The man was wearing a heavy canvas coat and the gun
was loaded with birdshot, so there was no serious damage. But Thad never went
hunting again. He subsided into being a quiet man, puffing his pipe, chatting up
the customers at the Browning Merc. People of every sort thought of him with
considerable affection.
After Blackfoot closed down, Mr. Carberry became the station agent
in East Glacier. The Twenties certainly did “roar” along the edge of Glacier
National Park as Prohibition made resorts with access to alcohol hugely popular.
Moonshiners thrived on the reservation and “rum runners” like writer Wallace
Stegner’s father became prosperous crossing the Canadian border with quality
labeled whiskey. In East Glacier “Mike’s Place” was a dance hall and then a roller
rink, where young people went to meet and party. After repeal the building
found a new use when the Carberrys bought it.
Robert reports in his autobiographical notes:

Mrs. Carberry and her daughter Margaret moved to East Glacier to cater
to the expanding tourist trade. They had purchased a forty-foot-by-sixty-foot
log building with high walls that were dimly lit by skylights. Eventually an
attic and living area were added onto the back. The walls were hung with all
kinds of great Indian artifacts: weapons, religious items, gaming sets, dance
costumes, war bonnets and beautifully beaded Indian-tanned leggings and
warshirts, Navajo rugs, baskets and pots – everything imaginable. There were
rows of tables conveniently placed, equally packed with artifacts, all of the
things wonderfully displayed. 8

It’s a bit of a mystery where all these materials came from, but those who have
delved into the history of the Lake MacDonald Lodge, originally built and oper-
ated privately, suggest that when the railroad bought the lodge, the artifacts that
adorned it were sold separately. The Carberry connection with Great Northern
might have been useful. Indian artifacts were still curiosities more than treasures
so they were not treated as scientifically as now nor were they so costly.
Through the Twenties and Thirties the Browning newspaper was an eight-
page publication, four pages or more of the copy evidently coming from the
Anaconda newspaper and then local news inserted. One page was always an
exciting story about the frontier, usually illustrated by Charlie Russell or maybe
Remington, Deming, or Schreyvogel. Robert’s understanding of Montana his-

26 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

tory came from these stories about old Indian battles, new fossil finds, and the
building of industrial empires on the wealth of mining. Many features were
about the founding of great museums, like the Field Museum in Chicago or
the Heye in New York City, and about monumental bronzes being created and
placed all across the United States. The names of the sculptors were Augustus
Saint-Gaudens, A. Phimister Proctor, James E. Fraser, Gutzon and Solon
Borglum – Beaux Arts sculptors of American bronzes.
At first Robert was expected to work in the store, but he drew on the can
labels and carved faces in the potatoes.9 Dreaming, the boy miscounted change
or wasted time telling tales. Soon it was made clear to him that he was the
younger brother – the oldest was the inheritor. As he put it, he was “promoted
backwards” right out of the store, which hurt him all his life though he never
admitted it. The real truth might be that Thad saw the store could only support
two families, his and Harold’s, aside from the several employees and partners
who came and went: Shannon, Starr, and Willets.
The families lived on both sides of the same street and socialized together
after work, almost as one extended family. The Scriver house was next door to the
Sherburnes’, separated in the early days by a little rivulet called “Muskrat Creek,”
which now runs underground in a storm sewer. J.H. Sherburne, thinking of the
interests of the town, often acted as a de facto mayor. His son, J.L. Sherburne,
through his banking interests, became a strong financial force throughout the
Reservation and eventually foreclosed on the Holy Family Mission in the 1930s.
J.L.’s wife was Eula Churchill, daughter of one of the Indian Agents, and his
sister married Selden Frisbee, a lawyer in Cut Bank. J.H.’s other son, Frank,
took a different path, identifying more with the tribal people than with business
interests.
In his autobiographical notes, Robert says:

[Sherburnes] had a beautiful early-style American home with many rooms.

One room in particular was amazing to me because the walls, furniture and
floor were covered with genuine Plains Indian artifacts. Buffalo horn chairs,
bows and arrows, buffalo robes on the floor, Chief Joseph’s saddle with
blanket, and the prize of them all was White Bird’s war bonnet with two eagle
feather trailers reaching to the floor.

Upstairs in the house was the room where J.H. Sherburne installed his nephew
to create the first school in Browning.10 That was before the Scriver boys were
born. In the early Sixties, when the top floor of the house caught fire, Bob and I
helped carry out maps and desks to heap them on the Scriver lawn.
Robert suffered from terrible hay fever, just like his dad. The doctor’s
prescription for Robert’s “sneezles” – which approached being asthma – was
summers out on Milk River at the Stone ranch. This also saved face for a boy
who was humiliated by not working in the store. Jim Stone was an authentic

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y 27
 old-timer who had been running a jerk-line for Benteen at the time of the Custer
event. (A jerk-line driver of multiple teams doesn’t sit on a wagon seat but rather
on the rear horse with a “jerk-line” to the front team.) Mrs. Octavia Stone, who
was Blackfeet, had been the stage-stop cook in Sun River when Mr. Stone met
her. She had needed a serious operation but couldn’t afford it. Mr. Stone had
paid, gaining a devoted wife and partner. The couple was enormously popular, a
social focus for the whole community.
When Robert was at the Stone ranch, which provided stage-stop services
and raised heavy horses for hauling, he never had hay fever – even in the long
stable where stalls for the horses stood lined up into the shadowy depths while
chinks in the boards let in shafts of sun full of dancing dust.
Mr. Stone let the boy pick out a horse of his own from the wild herds that
roamed the ranch, a blood bay he called Banjo. The horse was seven years old
– Mr. Stone felt no horse was mature enough to train until then – but he had
been gelded as a colt. The sire was Captain Jack, a state champion quarter horse,
and the dam was a gray mare who never was broken. It took a day to get Banjo
in off the range the first time. The Blackfeet ranch wranglers – Deefy Gostick,
Isaac Smith, Johnny DeRoche, and Charley Ell – cut him out of the herd and
ran him down the main wagon road, which was bordered by fences. Just after
the opening to the corrals, they had strung another wire to make him turn
through the gate. But Banjo, coming fast, soared right over the wire! After a rest
and lunch, the cowboys tried it again and this time they tied fluttering rags to
the wire. Just in case, Mrs. Stone stood behind the wire and flapped her apron.
Banjo turned in to the corrals.
Robert claimed he trained Banjo the “horse-whisperer” way. I suspect the
horse was green-broke by the ranch cowboys, probably Emory Livermore, but
no doubt Robert did hang around with the horse until they were “partnered
up.” Boy and horse invented hide-and-seek games in the long stable when it
was empty and ranged out over Milk River Ridge to look both ways into two
nations. Of course, it was Blackfeet country in both directions, but this was the
high ground, the glacial moraine, that determined where the boundary of the
U.S. would be.
At the ranch Robert lived in the bunkhouse with the other hands but was
really Mrs. Stone’s choreboy, with the duty of filling the woodbox and carrying
water. Often enough they finished the kitchen work in time to take a fishing
pole or Mrs. Stone’s .22 out along the creeks to look for a little table meat. This
is how Robert ended up with two mothers, one very “English” and one quite
Blackfeet, a phenomenon that guided many of his life choices. Side-by-side in
his heart stood two civilizations, one indigenous and the other displaced from
“home back East.” Sometimes their co-existence was not peaceful. Once Mrs.
Stone gave a birthday party for Wessie, but was mortified when someone gave
Wessie a set of huge long red underwear as a joke. She felt her party was being
mocked.

28 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 The Stone Ranch on Duck Lake in the Milk River Valley, where Bob spent his
teenaged summers. The house is log under the stucco and was originally built
as a stage stop. Photo: Mary Scriver (1990).

In the Twenties the Scrivers often visited the Glacier Park Hotel in East
Glacier. Dignified Blackfeet put up their lodges on the long sloping lawn and
met the daily trains of Easterners coming to visit the “Switzerland of America.”
Cowboys rode out to meet the train and staged gun battles with blanks. At least
they were supposed to be blanks – Charlie Beil, one of the actors and later a
well-known artist, said he came back from one such ride with a bullet hole in his
tapadero, the cover over his stirrup. He also recalled riding his equally daredevil
horse over the railroad bridge just outside town – a terrifying span over a deep
gorge.
Mr. Carberry was notorious for his piles of papers and for constantly smok-
ing a pipe. Eventually, the two habits came together in a conflagration. By then
a widower, he had returned to the house at Blackfoot. His son-in-law found his
remains in the wreckage early in the morning after the fire. Most of the artifacts
had gone earlier to the Field Museum in Chicago, but Charles Shreyvogel, a
rival to Remington, had lived with the Carberrys for a while and all of his work
stored there was destroyed.

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y 29
 5. Artists on the scene
Glacier Park, the Twenties

All through school one of Robert’s best buddies was Ace Powell, a little older and
more worldly since his family was associated with race horses as well as running
the Park dude strings out of Apgar at Glacier National Park in the summer. The
tie that kept them close was art. Ace drew and Robert made little figures out
of the creekside clay that is common around Montana. Both were admirers of
Charlie Russell, and Ace hung around Charlie’s Apgar cabin.
One day the artist was sitting on a log outside his cabin, whittling. Some
tourists came along and, knowing who Charlie was, came over to see if great art
were being created before their very eyes. He worked away solemnly, taking a
sliver off, then holding it out at arm’s length to check the effect, only to bring
it back and take off more shavings. Pretty soon he stood up, but the tourists
couldn’t quite make out what charming animal he had carved this time. With
great dignity Charlie carried his work of art over to a little shed with a hasp but
no padlock. Carefully, he tucked the peg he had whittled into the hasp, which
it fit just exactly. “Been meanin’ to do that for quite a while!” he exclaimed and
pretended to notice the tourists for the first time. “Mornin’! Havin’ a fine time,
are you?”
Robert’s stories about Charlie Russell were about the Mint Saloon, where
the boy was allowed to come in and gawk at the paintings so long as he behaved.
However, in the back of the room was a nickel crank machine that would show
animated drawings by Charlie. They were of the cowboy-visits-a-lady-friend
genre Charlie liked so well. Robert thought he would like that kind of picture,
too, but he never got in more than two or three turns of the handle before he was
grabbed by the collar and ejected. Lost his nickel, too.
Russell was around the reservation, especially at the annual Indian Days
whose beginnings went far back into the history of the tribe. Robert admired
his Métis sash and his entourage, but Charlie didn’t seem so colorful in those
days as he would now. The boys went in and out of the households of full-bloods
and Métis with their friends from school and never thought very much about it.
Only once in a while would things get exciting.
Like the time the drunk passed out and fell over backwards into a pigpen
where those voracious omnivores ate his face off. And the time the whole town
turned out to look for the victim of an ax murder. The murderer had confessed
but wouldn’t tell where he had hidden the body. The boys searched, not knowing
if they wanted to find the evidence or not, both jealous and relieved when their
efforts failed and someone else located the corpse. It was well known that a band
of horse thieves kept their herds up around Chief Mountain where they could
be moved back and forth across the border.

30 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Telleferos, who were close friends and eventual next-door neighbors of the
Scrivers, ran the post office and store in Babb. (Their daughter, Helen, married
Jack Dodd who was the Glacier National Park Supervisor in the Sixties.) Mrs.
Tellefero kept a shotgun leaned against the head of her bed. Her father had been
a doctor in the Midwest, skilful enough that outlaws who had suffered bad
injuries sometimes blindfolded and kidnapped him to treat their bullet wounds.
He was careful never to identify any of them, though he was pretty sure that one
was Jesse James. Mrs. Tellefero knew she should take outlaws seriously.
Once “Tick” Tellefero, who had to transport a payroll from the Browning
train station up to Babb, asked Thad to go with him. They had an open car, but
had heard that a band of horseback outlaws planned to rob them on the Duck
Lake Road, little more than parallel wheel tracks in those days. Thad took his
pistol, which frightened Wessie. But when he got back he only said, “Well, they
had rolled a haytruck out to block the road where it goes through the aspens,
but I showed my gun and we never saw them. Just heard their bridles and gear
jingling back in the brush. Saw their horses’ eyes shining.”
The most memorable event was the shooting of an outlaw who had been
working for the Stones. The men were in the bunkhouse – Robert was not there
– and they were playing cards, which they almost always did in the evening.
One of the cowboys was cheating. The outlaw said, “If you do that again, I
will have to shoot you.” The cheater persisted and the threat was fulfilled. Then
the outlaw, knowing the law would be after him, shot himself in the head. The
bodies were brought back to Browning where they were laid out on the floor in
an empty building. Robert managed to squeeze between the grownups to take a
good look and he never forgot the sight. “He was very pale and still, with only a
dark hole above his eyes,” he said.
Moving farther now, because he traveled on Banjo, Robert carried 3 x
5 cards in his shirt pocket and drew little sketches on them of what he saw:
bucking horses and curious deer, foxes and cranes, sunsets and twisted trees.
Sometimes he found artifacts, like a buffalo bone with a hole drilled in it and
an old stiff thong still attached. Once he approached a burial house out by Starr
School, but veered off quickly when the family whose people were laid out there
sent a bullet zinging by him.
He never took anything – just looked. Except sometimes he would steal
a nestling magpie or crow to make a pet of it. Once he was down along Two
Medicine River and climbed a cliff to see if he could peer into a nest. He levered
himself up onto a ledge and found himself staring straight into the empty eye
sockets of a skull. The rest of the body was there as well, wrapped tightly. He
almost fell rather than climbed back down.
Robert and Harold slept upstairs in the old house. There never was any heat
up there except what rose from downstairs. The bathroom was installed on the
first floor, off the kitchen, to keep the plumbing close together for the sake of
economy and to prevent freeze-ups. Sometimes their grandmother slept in the

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y 31
 little “parlor” room at the bottom of the stairs, blocking the way out, but the
boys learned how to evade that difficulty by slipping out over the roof at night.
The brothers slept in the same bed, partly for warmth, until Harold ob-
jected to Robert’s idea of room decorations. He had boiled out a rabbit and
reassembled its skeleton, which he kept on the bureau. Harold always hated
rodents. (If a biologist were to point out that technically a rabbit is not a rodent,
he would have said, “Close enough.”)
Another of Robert’s good friends, Jimmie Welch, often stayed overnight.
Once poor Jimmie woke in a hurry because Robert was pounding on him, “Get
‘im, Jimmie!” cried Robert in his sleep, dreaming that he and Jimmie were beat-
ing up on some other boys. Jimmie Welch grew up to have a son by the same
name who became a famous writer. 11
In 2004 Jimmie Senior told me that when someone threatened the pair,
Bob would urge Jimmie to beat that threatener up. (Bob was small for his age.)
Once the bully was Harold! So Jimmie lashed out and by dumb luck (he says)
knocked Harold flat. “Oh, oh! We’d better run for it! He’ll get us for that!”
The two liked to fool around the railroad and once they tried staying in
the snowshed, a kind of wooden tunnel, while the train went through. It was
far more intense than they had expected – they nearly got sucked under the
wheels – and they never repeated the experiment. Another time they scraped
together all their money – a grand total of thirty-seven cents – and buried it on
the playground, taking care to disguise the location. The trouble was, they could
never find it again, even when they really needed that thirty-seven cents. Some
pirates had the same problem.
When Robert went out to the Stone Ranch, Jimmie went to a nearby ranch
where he was the horse wrangler. Before dawn the bull cook woke him when the
big man got up to pump water and start fires. If Jimmie didn’t turn out quickly,
the bull cook simply picked up the end of the bed and dumped him out on the
floor. By the time the cowboys had finished breakfast, the boy was expected to
have found the horses and herded them back to the ranch house to saddle up. Then
he got his own special sit-down breakfast in the kitchen where the cook mothered
him, fixing a good lunch to take along while he checked fences all day.
In alternate summers Robert, Harold, and their mother would go back to
the farm in Clarenceville to stay acquainted with their extended family. What
impressed Robert the most was the Macfie well-house, with its mossy interior
and strangely seductive green smell. Their mother’s brother, Robin (short for
Robert) lived in Montreal nearby. He and “Aunt Nina” Macfie and their three
children often came to Browning for long summers.
Margaret was the only girl of the three cousins on the Macfie side. Red-
headed and freckled, she gave as good as she got. The kids spent plenty of time at
the lake near Aunt Annie’s and Aunt Lillie’s. Robert caught turtles to keep in the
rain barrels under the eaves, adding wooden rafts so they could sun themselves.

32 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Browning High School Sophomores in 1930 (Class of 1932). Bob is second from left
in front row. Jimmie Welch, father of the writer James Welch Jr., is third from the
right in the center row. Photo: Etumoe (yearbook).

Harold demonstrated how to ride a bucking bull by climbing aboard Hector, the
Scriver dairy bull. The Quebec cousins were impressed.
The boys, especially Robert, loved to visit the armory on the farm under
their grandfather’s protection. Periodically it was necessary to do an inventory,
so Robert would help to count the McClellan saddles on their sawhorses with
the bridles and the saddle blankets. Somehow saddle blankets would disappear,
even though the cavalry never rode anymore. When that happened, the Major
would wink at Robert and tear one blanket in half to make two. They were
meant to be doubled over for softer padding on the horse, but no one used them
anyway and it was important to make the inventory come out even. Decades
later Robert was still pondering the ethics of this.
When Robert was a teenager, his mother caught him kissing the Blackfeet
girl she had hired to help her and gave him a proper dressing down. Then in

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y 33
 Clarenceville he and his cousin Margaret became confidantes. On a 3 x 5 card
he drew a picture of their two heads close together as they rode in a buggy with
a big moon ahead of them. The next time Margaret was in Browning, Robert
made a little statue of a horse with a cowgirl sitting alongside, rather like Lone
Cowboy. Modeled of ordinary river clay, it was very fragile, but Robert built a
little carrying case, and Margaret managed to get it back to Quebec intact.
They wrote to each other and, distrusting maternal reactions, they wrote
two sets of letters, one for the mother and one for the other. The mothers fi-
nally figured it out and treated the relationship as something shameful. Ellison
Westgarth’s namesake had married her own first cousin and nothing bad had
come of it. Daniel Chester French, the most sensible of sculptors, had happily
married his first cousin. But eugenics was all the rage and Margaret’s father left
a book on the subject out for her to read, remarking that he was confident that
she was a “sensible girl.” Gradually, the little clay cowgirl and horse crumbled
back to dust. Bob’s love for Margaret never did.
On the way to Quebec, the family stopped to visit Thad’s brother Ed, who
had prospered with his fine furniture store in Minneapolis and lived on an el-
egant estate. Uncle Ed’s son, the one killed in World War I, had been the only
male cousin on the Scriver side. Uncle Ed’s granddaughter, Barbara, owned four
jumping horses and rode in proper English costume with four reins, a pancake
saddle, and a hard hat. Robert and Harold were not allowed to ride the tall
horses, so they scoffed and talked up their “Indian ponies.”
Indoors Robert was almost beside himself, especially coming down the
grand paneled front staircase with its carved handrail – not so much from the
glory of the two-story stained-glass window that lit it, but from the statue of a
nude woman at the bottom. He loved it with all his aching being, but was careful
to keep that to himself. Already physical love and secrecy were entwined in his
psyche. His mother would slip around and cover the nude bronzes with scarves,
which only made them more attractive. I never asked the provenance of these
figurative sculptures, but I suspect they were Beaux Arts reproductions. Before
fancy art galleries, one bought sculpture at a furniture store, where they were
classed as ornaments. His Aunt Mattie also had a fine collection of elephants,
because she was a strong Republican. Later in like Bob also collected elephants.
Harold, according to Robert, sneaked past rules without any effort at all.
He would slide in the back door at all hours of the night, call sweetly to his
mother in the parental bedroom just off the kitchen, “Good night, Mother,”
and arrive upstairs with booze on his breath and lipstick on his collar – maybe a
black eye. Robert never figured out how he got away with that. In youth, Harold
was considered the more handsome and dynamic brother. Harold claimed he
had to learn to fight early because his mother dressed him like a sissy in short
pants and a big floppy bow. When Harold bought a car with his salary from
clerking at the store, he grandly allowed Robert to chauffeur Harold and his
girl – with a blanket hung between front and back seats so the driver wouldn’t

34 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

be distracted, although the sound effects gave him a pretty good idea what was
going on.
About that time Winold Reiss (1888–1953) established a summer colony at
St. Mary Lake, not far from the Scriver’s cabin. (He was the artist who did many
fine Indian portraits used to promote the Great Northern railroad on calendars.)
Reiss’s son Tjark was the same age as Robert and the latter was invited to join
the group. Customarily Reiss included several local Indian boys from both sides
of the border. Gerald Tailfeathers (1925–1975) and Victor Pepion (1907–1956)
became quite well known. Reiss offered Robert a scholarship to take classes with
the others, but Wessie would not agree. The group had a reputation of being too
bohemian to suit her. (The reputation was not entirely unjustified. One pair of
students, madly in love, was missing for a couple of days before Reiss noticed.)
She also tried to keep her boy away from James Willard Schultz, the popular
writer, who was – to say the least – “colorful.” He rented space a few doors from
the Browning Mercantile.
When it came time to graduate from high school, Robert was salutatorian
of his class, though later he claimed to be valedictorian. The real valedictorian
was Alice Sewald. Two years later the Browning paper reported that “Robert
Scriver and Hiram Upham returned home Monday from a few days visit to the
Sewald ranch. They brought back a couple of rattlesnakes which they captured
out at the ranch.” It appears that the good students were continuing their natu-
ral history projects.
On the back of his patriotic graduation speech about George Washington
he wrote: “This is the original work of Robert M. Scriver and no other,” and then
he drew a bison skull just like Charlie Russell’s. Off he went to Dickinson State
Teacher’s College in North Dakota for a two-year teaching degree (1932–1934).
Harold, after a few terms in Bozeman, had taken some business classes at
Kinman in Spokane, so that he would be ready to go on with the store, but the
ignored truth was that he would rather have been a rancher. It was Harold whose
“Senior Class Will” bequest was his “cherished sex appeal.”

6. Earl Heikka, “crazy artist feller”

Great Falls, Twenties and Thirties

Another artist’s life haunts the background of Robert’s life in this formative pe-
riod. Earl Heikka,12 four years older than Robert, was a quiet, stuttering, slender
man who made sculptures out of Marblex™ (a difficult-to-manage water-based
product) and colored them with oil paints. It was easy for him to haunt Russell’s
studio because he lived in Great Falls. In the Twenties he worked on the KBL
Ranch, founded by the Klick Brothers, who – as outfitters – brought trophies

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y 35
 to Robert in his taxidermy years. In 1927, when Robert was thirteen, Heikka’s
work was praised in the Great Falls Tribune and exhibited in the window of
the Como Co. where Robert undoubtedly saw it. From then on, Heikka’s pack
trains and bucking horses were often in store windows. In 1931 he exhibited six
pieces at the Stendahl Galleries in Los Angeles.
In the Thirties Heikka worked as a guide in Glacier National Park, and
made small plaster castings to sell to tourists. Occasionally he worked for S.C.
Rumford, the taxidermist at the Great Falls Sporting Goods company, who also
(much later) employed Joe Halko, another talented sculptor. During the years
Robert was attending Dickinson, Heikka was exhibiting work at the Chicago
Century of Progress Exposition, visiting the Field Museum and Gutzon
Borglum. In 1934 Robert arrived in Chicago to study at Vandercook School
of Music on the south side. He doesn’t seem ever to have met Heikka there – at
least he never spoke of it or of seeing Heikka’s work in Chicago.
Heikka’s decline began in 1935 with the death of his brother and the be-
ginning of serious alcoholism. Nevertheless, in 1939 when Robert had married
and was teaching music in Browning, Heikka exhibited at the Golden Gate
International Exposition on Treasure Island in San Franciso Bay and was mak-
ing dioramas of pack strings on commission. On May 18, 1941, just as Robert
was finishing his first year of teaching in Malta and struggling with his mar-
riage, Heikka shot himself to death in his car outside the family home because
of a quarrel with his wife. The incident made a deep impression on Robert,
seeming to confirm Wessie’s opinion that being an artist was something danger-
ous, disreputable, and unrewarding.
When I first met Bob in 1961, he owned a Heikka riderless bucking horse,
supported by a fence. The Heikka figure called The Bronco Buster suggests
Scriver’s Pullin’ Leather because both use the fence this way, with one difference
being that Heikka’s horse is up on one hind leg and Scriver’s is up on one front
leg. Scriver’s horse has a rider. Among Bob’s early pieces is a pack train – very
similar to Heikka’s trademark subject – that was commissioned by Red Harper
to display behind the bar in the Businessmen’s Club, a saloon in Browning. In
the late Sixties someone brought Heikka’s The Vigilante to Bob for repair. It
hung around the studio for months and Bob, thoroughly offended by the lack
of proportion in the piece (tiny feet under a long, large body), made a deliberate
revision with proper measurements, which he then called U.S. Marshall.
When Bob talked about someone who aroused strong feelings in him, he
took a certain tone – a kind of knowingness with a bit of anxiety and sarcasm
around the edges. He always spoke of Heikka in that voice and I thought it
was because of competitiveness, though Heikka’s work never rose to the level
of Bob’s best sculpture. Now I wonder if Bob’s voice wasn’t charged because of
worry about drinking and suicide – which some believe are the inevitable lot of
the creative artist. But also, Bob was often accused of copying and the superficial
similarity of some pieces to those of Heikka made him vulnerable.

36 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Robert Macfie Scriver, Browning High School Salutatorian, Class of 1932.
Photographer unknown.

I I P R O V E N A N C E : F A M I LY H I S T O R Y 37
 Later in life Harold slipped quietly into genteel alcoholism, quietly sipping
brandy after supper while enjoying a good cigar and then, after Hazel died of
Alzheimer’s, something more troubled. But Bob Scriver never drank in all the
time I was with him, except for the very occasional formal event. Maybe he was
remembering Heikka.

38 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 III

Inspiration:
From Music to Sculpture

1. First career: leading prize-winning high school bands

1934–1950

Bob liked to say, “‘Great art transcends the artist.’ I truly believe that the finest
pieces of art an artist does come about by some great inspiration experiences and
he is driven by a force greater than he ... I have done three or four pieces in my life
that were inspired.”1 Cagey as usual, Bob would never tell which sculptures he
thought were inspired. He knew very well that it would keep people considering
and debating over the issue. Sometimes, if he asked me, I’d tell him which ones
I would choose. But he always suggested another one that I hadn’t mentioned.
After Bob had become a famous artist, worth millions, with a complex
of ranch/museum/foundry/gallery, three published books, and close to a thou-
sand sculptures, people were forever asking how he got his ideas. They figured
a mysterious force called “creativity” was the key. Some thought that made him
a genius and others felt it was somehow cheating – a way to get out of work by
sitting around a studio. They must have been thinking of painters rather than
sculptors.
He said he had a screen in his head and on it he saw pictures. Then all he
had to do was to copy those pictures. “I think me a think and draw a line around
it.” Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, had a tale (possibly
apocryphal) about his black cleaning woman who saw Borglum carving a huge
bust of Lincoln out of a block of marble and went to Mrs. Borglum to ask, “How
did he know Mr. Lincoln was in there?”
When Bob was in grade school he used to walk home with a kid named
Ace Powell who drew pictures on all his school papers. Ace said, “You know
what I’m gonna be someday? An artist! Like Charlie Russell!” Robert, as he was
known then, thought this was terrific and he burst into his mother’s kitchen full

39
 of the idea. His mother said, “No son of mine will ever be an artist.” She thought
they were dubious characters. Russell hung out in bars and whorehouses.
In the Browning high school yearbook there’s a photo of “Robert” with his
class when he was fourteen. His pants are long but his bowtie tilts one way and
his grin slants the other. His hightop shoes are scuffed. He’s a little smaller than
the other boys, still more child than man, but already he’s playing first chair
cornet in the high school band.
A brass instrument was manly. His dad and his Montreal cousins played
horns. In fact, his dad had been a bugler in the Canadian cavalry. Robert’s
high school graduation photo, only a few years later, shows him as slim, with
huge blue eyes, a sensual mouth, and a noble brow, more fit to be a poet than
a cavalryman. Now he wanted to be a musician, but his parents said there was
no money in it. His band teacher helped him negotiate a compromise: to be a
band teacher.
Anyone on the Blackfeet Reservation will tell you that when Robert Scriver
taught band in Browning, the students won first prize in the state competitions
all the time – they were the BEST. Those students, some of them only a few years
younger than Robert – which means they are retired grandparents now – still get
excited about music and still play their instruments. He was clearly one of those
conductors whose baton could weave spells. And who could be a tyrant.
He taught two batches of Blackfeet kids, once for a few years before World
War II and once for a couple of years after, both times with spectacular results
achieved through controversial discipline. Musicians were supposed to show up
for concerts in black shoes – he kept black shoe dye on hand and anyone who
came wearing brown had his or her shoes dyed, no matter how new they were.
The rehearsal times were absolute – the doors were locked during practice and
anyone who was a few seconds late could not come in even if they had struggled
there on foot through three feet of snow. One musician rode in from Starr
School on horseback, a distance of six miles. Discipline was supposedly handled
by a board made up of the first chairs of each section, but Robert was not above
manipulating their decisions.
Sometimes he entertained them with a trick when they paid their instru-
ment fees. He blindfolded himself and when the coins were put in his hand, he
guessed whether the payer was male or female. The secret was that coins from
boys’ trouser pockets were body temperature and coins from girls’ purses were
cool. (No girls wore jeans to school then.) The kids were so dedicated that they
would cut school but attend practice.
In every way he stayed in control: rules, bluffing, skill, and vision all con-
tributed to the fine achievements of the band and orchestra. The goal justified the
means. The parents were thrilled, the town turned out en masse for events, and
the students marched through town triumphantly playing their instruments by
heart because Bob thought those music holders on their instruments were ugly.
When there was no money for uniforms, mothers made red capes for everyone

40 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

to wear over white shirts and black pants. When it was time to go somewhere,
there were no buses, but a fleet of private cars showed up. To outsiders, it was
surprising that most of the players were Native American, but Indians have
always loved bands and they were a staple of government boarding schools.
Robert started the primary kids on plastic “Tonettes,” not unlike classic
Native American flutes. He figured out how to transcribe traditional Blackfeet
songs and wrote orchestral music using their themes. (Walter McClintock 2 had
gotten Ethelbert Nevin, the fine American composer, to do this.) At Christmas
he composed an operetta about a little star, because stars as people feature in
Blackfeet mythology. Jeanette, his second wife, and Margaret, his daughter, said
that his conducting of the high school symphony orchestra was so masterful and
the results so beautiful that they wept. He said the only real secret to music was
playing exactly in tune and would spend an entire rehearsal session getting the
players to play one note EXACTLY in tune. It is not exaggerating to say that
for Robert Scriver, music was religion. In fact, most of the year’s concerts were
attached to Christian festivals like Christmas or Easter. Why would anyone
abandon such a vocation?

2. Second career: successful taxidermist

Browning, 1950–1964

In the Fifties the Blackfeet reservation had just been released from a ban on
alcohol. Many men had served in the military and were recovering from trauma
both physical and emotional. Indian veterans had been world citizens overseas,
accepted and honored, but now they returned to be stigmatized and shut out as
second-class citizens. Their families were struggling to reintegrate them plus a
wave of new babies. President Eisenhower had resolved to disperse the reserva-
tions and was sending many people on relocation to cities, intending to improve
their lot but often dumping them in ghettoes with no resources. Burglary rates
and violence, especially within families, were so high, and the willingness of
the federal government to pay for enough police was so low, that the Browning
businesses chipped in together to fund a town police force. By then Bob Scriver
was the city police magistrate and also Justice of the Peace. To some degree he
felt the same restlessness as the men who came before him to be tried – most
often for common drunkenness. He had come to hate authority figures, even
though he was one.
Some Blackfeet men, who had done well in the military world and had new
confidence in their ability to cope, found their feet and became tribal leaders as
well as businessmen. There was an influx of young white men looking to make
their fortunes on ranches. Many of them married female tribal members who

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E 41
 had large land allotments in excellent grazing country or out on the wheat flats.
Their “mixed-blood” children were the beginning of a true middle class on the
reservation but also another force for cultural disintegration. Some felt that an
Indian was necessarily poor and a drunk, so in their efforts not to be “Indian” in
that sense, the successful ones became scrupulously “white.” Unsolved was the
puzzle of how to assimilate enough to relate to the larger world while remaining
faithful to a unique way of life.
During World War II Bob had been the first chair cornet in the U.S. Army
Air Corps band in Edmonton and then the band leader and arranger at the
Trocadero, one of the finest dance clubs in the city. He’d been a powerful man
among other highly skilled men, so it’s not surprising that he could not return
to balky children, disgruntled parents, and small-town principals. He would not
have returned to Browning if it had not been his home in the deepest sense, as
truly as it was for Indians, the people he knew best. Teaching was the only job
in town.
In the end he lost his temper and quit teaching mid-year, an act that black-
balled him from any other teaching contracts in the state. He called Fred Stone,
Jim Stone’s son, who was running an ice-cutting operation in Whitefish and
asked him for a job. “I don’t know much about cutting ice,” confessed Bob. Fred
said, “That’s okay. I’ll make you the foreman so you can just walk around with
a clipboard and keep track of things.” He got along fine until spring when the
ice melted.
Now he could tell his mother, who so wanted her son to be a music teacher,
that he HAD to do what he’d wanted to do all along: taxidermy and sculpture.
The two skills wove back and forth between each other. Vern Mundt, a news-
paperman who sometimes played in a combo with Bob, remembered later that
Bob leaned forward between sets and asked him, “What would you think about
a taxidermy business with a little line of curio animals?” He didn’t listen to
Vern’s answer, because he’d already decided.
Actually the path had been blazed by Carl Akeley, Louis Paul Jonas, and
others who combined taxidermy and sculpture into major careers. While Daniel
Chester French was making his first commission, the famous bronze statue of The
Minute Man for Concord, he supported himself with plaster castings called “pari-
anware.” They were genre vignettes like The Chicago Incendiary, a model of Mrs.
O’Leary’s cow kicking over the lantern that supposedly started the Great Chicago
Fire. French’s very first commercial piece was two little owls, comically in love.
Bob knew Montana local people who were making a living with origi-
nal curios and wood-carvings: Blake in Hungry Horse, John Clarke in East
Glacier, Al Racine in St. Mary. A.E. Bessette had opened the Diamond A
Studio in Browning on July 12, 1946, featuring miniature horse models and
other wildlife, plus paintings and sketches. No one knows what happened to
Bessette, but Blake’s comical gaunt horse, Clarke’s mountain goats, and Racine’s
church panels are still admired. More significant Beaux Arts sculptors of Indian

42 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Sergeant “Bob” Scriver, first chair cornet, U.S. Army Air Force Band,
Alaska Division, 1943. Photographer unknown.

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E 43
 Bob with cornet, 1947. Photo: Jeanette Caouette Scriver Chase.

44 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

subjects, Adrien Alexander Voisin (1890–1979) and Edwin Willard Deming
(1860–1942), had passed through the reservation at different times, but evi-
dently without Bob knowing them or the local newspaper noting them.
Bob never did anything in small ways or with a short timeline. In this
post-war period when so many were rebuilding the world, he laid out a plan. He
would begin a taxidermy business. That summer when taxidermy was slow, he
would use the GI Bill to give his music credentials another lick at Vandercook
(just in case), and, while in Chicago, would find someone to teach him to make
plaster curios for tourists.
His buddy, Ace Powell, had been exploring ways to turn out multiple small
toys and novelties. He had even worked for a business that produced injection
plastic objects, but who could afford the thousand-dollar steel dies necessary
to mold plastic? Instead, Bob and Ace both turned to plaster. As soon as Bob
had a line of wildlife animals, he’d start a summer tourist business to sell them.
Also, in the back of his mind was a museum, complementary to the Museum
of the Plains Indian built on the west end of town during the war. The Scriver
Museum would be about Montana wildlife and he would fill it with full-mounts
of the major game animals, collecting the specimens himself.
His timing was excellent. The new Al-Can Highway went right past the
door and on up the continent to major trophy hunting in Alaska. Combat
veterans across America itched for adventure and were comfortable with guns,
so hunting “boomed.” When hunters returned from Alaska with a trailer full
of moose horns and Kodiak bear hides, Scriver Studio was the first taxidermy
place they came to in the States. One look at the full-mounts in the museum
persuaded them to leave their hides and heads for mounting.
Tires and gas were finally available. Families could afford automobiles,
which they took on long trips around America to all the patriotic national parks,
feeling they were making pilgrimages to sacred places. There were kids in every
car and everyone loved souvenirs to brag about to the neighbors. The road to
Glacier National Park was the perfect spot for a museum and souvenir shop.
The first summer Bob experimented with a little tourist shop in an aban-
doned service station across from the Blackfeet Trading Post. The next summer
he built a one-room log cabin shop up at St. Mary, forty miles away. That small
building was moved down to Browning for a year and then over Looking Glass
Pass to East Glacier, another twenty treacherous miles, but the cabin was very
stout. Every log was splined and grooved lengthwise and pounded together with
oakum, as tight as a boat. In St. Mary he had mounted a real horse on a swivel
so it would “buck” for snapshots. It soon wore out.
Bob saw clearly he had to pay a high price for two lots on the highway just
east of the Museum of the Plains Indian. Those lots were the key. He would
build in sections. His theory about the design of the final building was that it
should look “Western,” a long, low building with a barn-like midsection big
enough for the large animal mounts. Maybe he would show wildlife movies in

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E 45
 the evening or give lectures. There were vague ideas about anatomy lessons for
artists and using the Museum mounts as models for sketching classes.
The sewer under these buildings was to haunt Bob. In the first place, it wasn’t
deep enough in the ground for him to sink the basement a full story, so the first
section had to be up higher than he had intended. Second, the main sewer line
was evidently an ancient wood-and-tar conduit that began to collapse in a few
decades. Third, it became a source of gas fumes from a leaking gas tank belong-
ing to a service station at the other end of the block. More about that later.
The official PR story was that Bob had started out with an old red pickup,
$500, and an ancient warehouse which he bought from J.L. Sherburne for one
dollar. Originally the warehouse had been the Ammons Mercantile Store, next
to the Browning Merc. (Ammons had also been the original owner of the T.E.
Scriver house.) Bob used a nail puller to dismantle the boards, hauled them up to
the lot, and rebuilt them into his shop, even straightening out the nails to re-use.
At Bob’s death fifty years later, the attic of the shop was still crammed with
white blanks of little animals. They had a distinctive “feel” to them – they were
“cute.” Partly they had slightly bigger heads than they ought to and they were
smooth, sometimes with lightly incised hairs like the heads of baby dolls.

3. The Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife

Browning, 1953–1999

Scriver’s idea of a wildlife museum was based on that imposing millionaire’s

institution in Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History, but he had trans-
lated it to his own resources. As each animal was collected he recorded it in a
one-fifth life-size sculpture with as much detail as possible, teaching himself
anatomy. He had been hunting since he was a kid, in contrast to Charlie Russell,
who was willing to help pack carcasses and even cook the meat, but never was
a shooter. Among artists it was Carl Rungius who shot one elk or moose after
another, stringing them up between trees as models.
In 1952 a big grizzly was taken on the east slope of Chief Mountain,
barely on the Blackfeet reservation. This was the seed of the museum, a rearing
mounted grizzly in an alcove. Ten cents to get your photo taken with the bear!
People loved posing, some pretending to be eaten, others pantomiming hand-
to-hand combat.
This is from Bob’s autobiographical notes in his best sports magazine
style:

46 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 ... Some Indian men brought in a huge grizzly pelt. Being in rough terrain,
they had not skinned the head or paws but had left the carcass where it fell. I
wanted to do a life-size mount of it, so I asked the hunters the locality of the
carcass. They told me this story.
When hunting elk near Chief Mountain one day in February, they crossed
the tracks of a small elk herd. They had followed them for a while, when they
came upon the tracks of a large grizzly, also following the elk. In February, no
less – he was supposed to be in hibernation but he surely wasn’t. These tracks
alerted the hunters and as they moved cautiously to the top of a small hill
and glassed the timber area for elk, the bear had gotten their scent and came
charging at them from some nearby bushes.
The Indians were terrified. One had a .25-.20 rifle (way too light a weapon
for a large grizzly), another a .30-.30 model ‘94 Winchester (still too light)
and the third a .30-.06 Springfield. The first two men stood their ground and
emptied their rifles into the bear. After thirteen shots were fired they finally
brought the monster down and ended his life with a fatal shot to the head. The
man with the .30-.06, the only rifle in the group that could reasonably have
brought the bear down, was up a tree a hundred yards away....
After they described the location carefully, Hiram Upham (an Indian friend
from boyhood) and I set out to find it from the directions the hunters gave
me.... After a two hour hike we came upon it. We viewed the area of the
scrimmage – the blood-covered ground and brush torn up all around attested
to the great bear’s final struggle. I had brought my calipers, tape measure,
notebook and a fairly good-sized piece of clay. We immediately set to work.
Hiram measured and I wrote and sketched. After this was accomplished, I
made a one-eighth life-size model of the carcass.
I opted to bring one of the forelegs home to make a plaster cast of it. Hiram
helped load my backpack and boosted me to my feet. I’d go a short distance,
then have to sit down on a log to rest. Hiram would hoist me up again but each
time my legs got weaker and I’d have to rest more often. After three miles of
hiking, we finally reached the pickup truck. I was exhausted, so Hiram drove
us out of the wilderness. When we got home, we weighed the forearm of the
bear – it was nearly a hundred pounds. It was quite a load for me up and down
hills, over dead-falls and across a rushing mountain stream.

That was the bear who posed with the tourists. Occasionally some nut would
steal its tongue, which was rubber. We had a whole drawer of tongues, num-
bered by size, but it was a nuisance to have to glue in a new one. (Bob used clear
bathtub sealant.) No one seemed to realize that the claws were worth ten dollars
and more, each.
In 1957, when enough dimes had accumulated, Bob began the main hall of
the Museum of Montana Wildlife The businesses boot-strapped each other: the
taxidermy business paid for the figurine factory, and then the Museum brought

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E 47
 The big Chief Mountain griz that started the Museum of Montana Wildlife
at a dime a pop (1950s). Photo: Bob Scriver.

48 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Bob in the early Fifties, still in thrall to grizzlies. He used a self-timer to
take his own photo. The gun is an Enright. Photo: Bob Scriver.

in a steady stream of admission money which paid for the foundry until the
sculptures began to sell. In the early years Bob still played his horn at small clubs
and dances along the High Line with a combo – often himself and Jimmy and
Johnny Girard. Jeanette worked around town as a clerk and bookkeeper while
starting a business in original leather jackets.
Meanwhile Bob became president of the Chamber of Commerce. He was
a Mason, along with his father and brother, and proud to serve as chaplain one
year. He was an associate member of the Guides and Outfitters and both secre-
tary and president of the Glacier Wildlife Association. The taxidermy business
was a great success right from the beginning and the curios began to sell as well.
He was still City Magistrate and Justice of the Peace. The seal of approval was
given to his teaching career when he was listed in “Who’s Who in Music,” the
Mid-Century Edition, 1950. He was so proud that he kept the canceled check
he had sent to pay for his copy of the book.
None of the achievements was enough. Eventually, everything (includ-
ing Jeanette, his wife) fell away but the Museum and the sculptures. Bob had
stopped casting plaster tourist figurines just before I came in 1961. The last of
the taxidermy was a couple of years later. He wanted to be “renowned,” and it
appeared that bronze sculpture was the means.

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E 49
 Bob the small-town businessman, later in the 1950s.
Photo: Jeannette Caouette Scriver Chase.

50 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 By that time, the operation was ten years old. The shop was an amazing
jumble. Bouquets of glass bird eyes – each pair fused on the opposite ends of short
wires so they wouldn’t get separated – bloomed in zinnia colors from open draw-
ers. Yawning jaws and rude pink rubber tongues lolled in others. Mysteriously
encrusted cans and jars perched everywhere on the counter that surrounded an
ordinary bathroom sink and tub, set waist-high. The walls were knotty pine. On
nails alongside goggles or tools, hung string-wound blobs of excelsior with wire
legs for mounting birds. In one window was a stack of half-destroyed radios. A
visitor could not guess which one was wailing cowboy music on any given day.
Often it was the most ancient, which had no dials and had to be tuned with pli-
ers. Over the top of this taxidermy detritus was the encaustic and rubble of art:
paint, wax, plaster shards, and big chunks of plate glass used to seal off a mold
when it had been filled with plaster. Tools wandered at random.
The only bathroom was in the basement and was not the sort of place
that encouraged people to linger. We were cautioned NEVER to let tourists
use that bathroom. Vern Mundt, local newspaperman and musician who liked
his drinks, went down there only once – he claimed it gave him nightmares
for a week. Skulls and horns were piled here and there. Strange smells of acid,
hides, and bear fat hung in layers of still air, stirred only when someone walked
through.
The actual museum was entirely different, a shining checkerboard of ever-
green and gray tile, walls the soft dove gray of rain clouds, and a vaulted ceiling.
Spotlights were focused by wiring stovepipes over them. There was only enough
money for one big glass case to display the small animals and birds, so the larger
animals stood free. Visitors could walk around them, even gently touch them. It
was wonderful to watch a blind person stand on a stepladder, feeling the horns
of the moose.
By the end of October, dead game animals were often chilling in the un-
heated front room on tarps thrown down to protect the floor. By late November
the pet dogs underfoot would have gotten fat on the neck meat of deer, moose,
elk and mountain sheep. Bob acted as a fur buyer for Pacific Hide and Fur, so
stacks of beaver plews, stretched round on willow hoops, mixed with mink fitted
wrongside out like scabbards over wooden boards.
Winter was a long quiet time while the hides soaked in mild acid to tan
them. Ever the schoolteacher, Bob would explain that there were three sub-
stances to get out of hides before they could be considered tanned: first came the
water content, which was extracted with salt; then came the fat which was partly
scraped off and partly removed with soap; and then came the glue among the
fibers which soaked out in diluted acid. After all that, the fibers of the skin were
so stiff that the capes looked as though made of cardboard – unyielding.
The final step was using a grinding wheel to thin and soften them. (Old
Blackfeet ladies had done the job with scrapers and rubbing.) All day Bob sat
at the wheel, pressing the hides against the abrasive stone wheel, thinning with-

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E 51
 The Museum of Montana Wildlife, now the Blackfeet Heritage Center, in Browning,
Montana (early 1960s). Photo: Bruce Strachan.

out grinding holes in the hides. Hours of this gave him massive shoulders and
wrists. A lifetime of horn-blowing and walking the mountains had deepened
his chest.
Every head “cape” had to be put on its hollow papier maché form, antlers
bolted to the top, clay thumbed into its eyeholes and nose, thin plastic leaves
slipped up into its ears and more clay thrust into the ear-base, and then the
whole mass worked around into a likeness of the original animal. Glass eyes
went into the eye holes, the mouth was tucked down into a slot cut in the form
(herbivores were never shown with their mouths open, except for bugling elk),
and the rest was a matter of poking, twisting, aligning one side against the
other, and then stepping back to squint at the results. When all was in the right
situation, the back of the neck and around the horns was tightly sewn up before
the glue between the hide and the hollow papier maché form could set. Bob
had repeated this operation so many times and knew the animals so well that
he could have the day’s work ready for the crew to sew up before lunch came
around so he could turn back to sculpture.
Sometimes mounting heads was so automatic and repetitious that he got
a little bored with it. “Where is this bear looking?” he would demand as he
focused its eyes on the distance and then changed to a focus about where a

52 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

person might stand and look down at a bear rug. “Which way is best?” Once he
was flummoxed by a man who insisted he wanted his bear rug to be smiling. All
afternoon he experimented with imposing a human expression on a beast that
never smiles. In the end it looked mildly pixilated.
Museums contracted Bob for high quality taxidermy on their exhibits, for
instance, a javelina and a desert mountain sheep for the Death Valley Museum
in California. The most notable custom job was Big Medicine, the albino buffalo
who had happily aged into great-grandfatherhood on the Moiese Bison Range.
His pink skin showing through the thin white fur, the ancient bull looked his age.
But the Montana Historical Society director at the time wanted him mounted as
a young on-the-prod bull with tail in the air. Bob sighed and did it.
The deer heads drying on the walls tended to acquire accessories, like sun-
glasses or hats or a pencil tucked over the ear. We thought of them as distinct
individuals and were a little sorry when they were finished with shiny lacquer
eye “makeup,” the eyeballs scraped to get the lacquer side-stream off, and some
turpentine wiped over the horns.
When Bob first began his taxidermy business, he calculated the cost of
mounting each head – adding up forms, eyes, tanning, his time – and came
up with a figure much below everyone else in the area. Word got around and
he was flooded with heads to mount. By spring they were all done and hung
on a wall for an amazing group portrait – none of them smiling for the camera
except the novice taxidermist in his rubber apron. The taxidermist soon lost his
smile: he had forgotten to figure in his overhead – the lights, the heat (a big item
in Montana), the rent, the taxes. Each head cost him money. His father and
brother laughed.
The cougar, seven feet and four inches long and weighing 185 pounds (game
animals are always described like prizefighters or babies), showed up in Louis
Nightgun’s woodshed about two and a half miles out of Browning towards East
Glacier. Louis shot it and then came in, a little shaken, to tell Bob about it. Bob
figured it was a bobcat until Louis got to the part about the long tail. Bob always
wanted to fix that tail so it would gently twitch at the end. The cougar’s eyes,
on a level with human faces, are focused about twenty feet ahead of the cat, and
he wished he could make them suddenly refocus on the face of whoever was
standing right in front of it.
The story of the museum buffalo is a little longer. Bob and Ace had made
friends with C.J. Henry, the manager of the National Bison Range at Moiese,
Montana. They rode in the fall roundup and went over during the summer
to draw and sculpt from the big animals. One year, to improve the genetics,
a group of new bulls were brought in from the herd in Niobrara, Nebraska.
This meant that the entire “pecking order” of the range had to be renegoti-
ated. All over the dry, dun hills rose clouds of dust and roars like lions as the
bulls threw dirt over their backs with massive hooves and issued challenges in
universal huge vibration of male sound. BBRRRROOOOMMMMRRRRR!

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E 53
 NNOOOOAAARGGGHHH! They crashed into each other. One went
sprawling; the other pretended to lose interest and sauntered off, rolling his eye
to peek behind him.
The emerging alpha bull was dubbed “Old Blue Bull” because of his more-
luxuriant-than-average blue-black mane. Musculature bulged at the rear where
his tail was erect. When he whirled to face a challenger, he showed a flash of white
eye, a shining runckled snout that dripped silver strings of drool, and a purple
tongue in a gaping mouth – the horns and ears were buried in fur. There was less
hooking with horns than direct frontal smashing, like a demolition derby.
The artist buddies were thrilled, and forever after thought the mating sea-
son was a failure if it wasn’t like that. In fact, once the new hierarchy of bulls was
established, there was far less fighting. The year a new manager, experimenting
with grazing management, fenced the herd onto a steep hillside, the season was a
fizzle. Every solid impact sent the lesser opponent not just sprawling, but rolling,
so that by the time he stabilized and got up, he was fifty feet away and not clear
about just whom he was fighting. In the end the buffs got tired of the confusion
and simply walked through the fences back to where they were used to being
that time of year. Some of them were kept in an exhibition pasture enclosed by
cyclone fencing on twelve-by-twelve posts, but one day a bull tired of that, too,
and was found grazing in the manager’s front yard, dragging the cyclone wire
on his head a like bridal veil.
The “boys” at the Range knew that Bob was looking for a bison to mount
and one afternoon they found the carcass of a bull who had died from his fight-
ing wounds. He was a little ripe – mating season is July – and the wound had
gone untreated (even healthy old bulls tended to hide out in the brush) so there
was a bad mess on one side, but if Bob were interested he could come get it.
Otherwise it was a loss – since it was summer the hide wasn’t good for a rug
and the meat couldn’t be used. Bob, his son, and another helper closed the shop,
sharpened a bucket of knives, rounded up some flashlights and got there just
after dark.
By the pickup headlights and the flashlights, they discovered that skinning
a bull buffalo is not an easy task. Often they had to stop to put a new edge on
their knives. Even in the dark it was warm enough that sweat poured off of
them. While the sky began to streak with morning, they unloaded hide and
carcass in Browning. In the early light they saw that maggots were squirming
everywhere and were glad to have skinned in the dark after all. A few hours’
quick nap later they were back up and out to put the plaster mold on the carcass,
already stinking. The hide, salted as soon as they peeled it, was in better shape.
Tom Kehoe, curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian next door, asked
for the skeleton for an exhibit. When the plaster mold came off, great waves of
stinking corruption swelled out of flesh now becoming green goo. Neighbors,
grimacing, called City Hall to report a burst sewer. No one on Bob’s payroll
would even go into the corral where the work was proceeding.

54 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 As City Magistrate and Justice of the Peace, Bob had a certain amount of
influence and discretion, so he went down to the jail and announced that any
man who would come clean the buffalo’s bones would be released from his jail
sentence. He got two volunteers, both of them tough old characters with senses
long since dulled by hardship and alcohol. Neither lasted more than an hour.
“Take us back to jail, Your Honor,” they begged through the bandanas over
their faces. “We’d rather sit it out there.” Eventually the buffalo got cleaned
somehow (probably Bob did it himself) and the bones, so far as anyone knows,
are stored somewhere in the Museum of the Plains Indian.
In the end the mounted buffalo was pushed up against the wall so the
patched side wouldn’t show. Ropes under the skin mimicked swollen veins and
Bob even painted tiny red blood vessels on the bulging eyeballs, though the
tourists rubbed them so much that they wore off. The final touch was picked up
on the next trip to the Bison Range to scatter around the base of the pedestal:
genuine buffalo chips.

4. The earliest sculptures and the C.M. Russell Contest

Browning, the Fifties

Bob worked so hard and so close to the limits of his strength and knowledge
that he could get into a tantrum of frustration. Jeanette said that in the Fifties he
sometimes talked wildly of suicide. Then she would persuade him to take a drive
up to East Glacier for a cup of coffee – a little break. Sometimes he disappeared
for a few days without telling her where he was going. Usually it was hunting
season. She says he was always restless until he shot a grizzly in the fall, legally or
not. (There was a wicker clothes basket of grizzly skulls in the basement of the
shop that he never would discuss.) She could not understand what drove him so
hard – where that desperation was coming from.
The earliest sculpture worth casting in bronze was a warily stepping little
buck whitetail deer, dated 1951. The first bronze version was cast twenty years
after it was created, at the request of a customer who saw a plaster cast. Bronze.
Bronze meant something beyond souvenirs, beyond anything local. Bronze
was real fame and fortune, the media of a true sculptor. No one could say that
bronzes were toys.
When Charlie Russell had died in 1926, a statue of him had been proposed
for the Congressional Hall of Fame. Nancy, Charlie’s wife, chose a man named
Lion to make a maquette for the big statue but it was rejected, partly for the po-
litical reason that Lion was not from Montana. A Montana female artist prepared
a model of a seated Russell, which Nancy disliked intensely. The matter became
so snarled that it was put aside. At that point there was no money anyway.

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 In 1956 the idea revived when Weaver, the staff sculptor at the Montana
Historical Society, created a portrait for the Hall of Statuary in Washington,
D.C. Recurring outcries for a native Montana sculptor resulted in an official
contest. Besides Weaver, three sculptors met the arbitrary requirements and
deadlines of the competition: Evelyn Cole of Chinook, whose career never really
happened; Bill Gephardt of Conrad, whose reputation remained local; and Bob,
who caught fire and created an international career.
Sculptors had to be “sponsored” by someone. At first Bob’s “sponsor” was
L.T. Aubrey, but then that gentleman switched his allegiance to the lady, Evelyn
Cole. Aubrey’s sister, Mae Aubrey Coburn Williamson, became Bob’s sponsor.
Mae, “Many Victories,” was a formidable Blackfeet woman who had become the
first female member of the Blackfeet Tribal Council about the time of Bob’s first
marriage. She never stopped being Bob’s mentor and promoter and he, in turn,
used her as the central figure in his classic bronze called Transition. By the time
the actual contest started, Bob’s official sponsor was the Browning Chamber of
Commerce.
The contest kept getting tangled up in politics and ended in a bit of a
scramble. Bob had cast his statue of Charlie in three pieces, divided at the belt
and at the collar. Mrs. Gephardt said it made her think of a cookie jar, the kind
that is a clown or Aunt Jemima with a top that lifts off. The set-up crew for the
contest was tickled, too, and at first put Charlie’s head on backwards, which
must have provoked Bob.
As expected, Weaver’s bronze was chosen and everyone went home, not
necessarily satisfied.3 One of the judges had been Charlie Beil, a friend of
Russell. He liked what he saw in Bob’s sculpture, because he understood what
was the matter with it – Bob didn’t know anything about proportion. He didn’t
use any measurements – just eyeballed the clay, so the portrait looked like a
cartoon of Russell, with a big head. Beil was intrigued enough to stop by Bob’s
studio, which was on the way back to Banff anyway. This was exactly what Bob
needed: a mentor.
Charlie Beil was an old cowboy artist who had led Russell’s horse in the
funeral cortege in 1926 and who had for years supplied the prized trophy sculp-
tures for the Calgary Stampede. He vaguely remembered Bob as a small boy who
sometimes stayed with Margaret Carberry, daughter of the station agent in East
Glacier, where she belonged to a crowd of Roaring Twenties pals. In those color-
ful young years, Charlie and others met the Great Northern with its load of dude
summer tourists in a supposedly spontaneous display of high cowboy spirits.
Earlier, Beil had survived a lot of hungry years, some of them working as
an extra in Hollywood for Westerns. By taking a job in a California foundry,
he learned how to cast art bronzes, and managed some formal art classes. In the
Thirties he rented a little studio in Great Falls. Close enough to Charlie Russell
and then Nancy to arouse the jealousy of Joe DeYong, that designated protegé
declared Beil to be “cold-blooded.” Actually, he was just tough and practical,

56 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Bob, Jeanette, and the portrait of Charlie Russell that lost the contest, 1956.
Photographer unknown.

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E 57
 and his early years proved it. His father had been a blacksmith in the Black
Forest area of Germany. In 1906, aged 12, Charlie had signed onto a nine-
teenth-century sailing ship but eventually left the sea in Argentina, where he
became a gaucho. Oceans and grasslands seem to share their appeal.
Working his way back north, he drove twenty-mule teams and oxen in
Arizona. In 1917 he joined the cavalry and was sent to Hawaii. Then came East
Glacier, California and Great Falls. Finally settling in Banff with his wife, Olive,
he built his own foundry in the backyard and raised three children, all of whom
turned out very well indeed.
Now Bob learned about proper armatures and how to check proportions
with calipers. He set about disciplined preparations: measuring, making dia-
grams to record the measurements, taking photographs, using models, collect-
ing a “morgue” of images by other artists and photographers. He knew from his
music training the importance of practising scales, the necessity of developing an
embouchure (lip musculature for blowing a horn) and the basic drill of master-
ing an instrument. He also appreciated the importance of the logical structure
of the music. His willingness to do this kind of basic work soon distinguished
him from others who wanted to “create” without practising.
This is less common than one might suppose. In fact, Russell – who was
more likely to be painting anyway – didn’t use calipers or models. He painted
from his imagination, often based on memory, though he wasn’t above checking
out his own anatomy in a mirror. Some people suggested to Bob that he was
“cheating” by using models and recording their measurements, but it gave his
work a solidity and specificity quite different from many Western sculptures.
No More Buffalo was the result of what Bob learned from Charlie Beil.
There was still a lot of oil money around Browning in those days. Blacky Wetzel
and Iliff McKay, tribal leaders and councilmen, began to talk about a series of
heroic-size Indian sculptures to be cast in bronze. The first was this portrait of an
old-time Blackfeet hunter standing at the edge of a piskun, a buffalo jump. It was
not a Charlie Russell kind of sculpture, but a monumental bronze like Malvina’s
portraits in the Hall of Man. The model was Eddie Big Beaver.
In Bob’s notes for an autobiography he says he told Eddie,

“... he would not have any decorative feathers, no fancy war bonnet. He
needed no props to make him look like an Indian – he WAS Indian. His clothing
would consist of a breech cloth and moccasins with the Blackfeet camp circle
design.... Eddy asked me for a staff of some kind, so I gave him a broomstick.
He immediately struck this pose in the sculpture. It was just what I wanted.”

Edward Big Beaver was born in 1886. Because of his fine face and noble de-
meanor, he was a favorite of artists and casting directors in Hollywood movies.
Sometimes he played “Tonto” in local skits.

58 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 A. Phimister Proctor visited Browning the first time in the summer of 1895.
In 1917 Proctor was working on a commission for a monumental sculpture
called On the War Trail, an Indian on a horse. At his New York City studio his
models kept quitting, until finally he put the sculpture in his car and drove clear
out to Browning, where he located Big Beaver. Fall arrived and Proctor loaded
Eddie up to take him along to California. Proctor plays him up as a superstitious
old fellow who likes women, but Eddie was only 31.
When On the War Trail was finished, Proctor “sent Beaver on ahead” to
his studio in New York City. There he finished a second statue, theoretically of
a Mohawk Indian, with Eddie posing again. On the War Trail now stands in
Denver at the Civic Center, paired with Bronco Buster.
From the Glacier Chief, August 7, 1958:

Eddie Big Beaver Services Set for Saturday Morning

Funeral services have been set for Saturday, August 9, at 10 AM in Little

Flower Catholic Church for Eddie James Big Beaver, Sr., 79, whose body was
found in an irrigation ditch between Yakima and Toppenish, WA, early this
week.
Authorities believe his body had been in the ditch about six days before
discovery.
Big Beaver was a full-blood Blackfeet Indian who spoke excellent English
and was regarded as a competent game-keeper, experienced in the handling
of all kinds of animals and an experienced show man, having done this type of
work in different sections of the US.
In 1931, during his employment with South Park, a director for the Bureau
of Parks described him as a “picturesque full-blood Blackfeet.”
During his lifetime his activities were many and varied. In 1935 he and four
other Blackfeet Indians were employed by Ringling Bros. Circus. He was also a
one-time game warden at Pittsburg.
In 1936 Big Beaver was requested to participate in the National Folk
Festival at the Texas Centennial, an educational and cultural organization that
brought together different Indian groups from many regions of the U.S.
In 1939 he was employed by the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
in the motion picture Susannah of the Mounties.
Survivors include sons, Sam Wolverine, Eddie Big Beaver Jr. & Lynus;
Daughters, Joyce Boy and Margaret Boy and 11 grandchildren.

[Death was due to a fractured skull from a blow on the head.]

Eddie never saw the final casting of Scriver’s portrait of him, though his
family sometimes visited to look at it. A doctor said that his body showed signs
of starvation and alcoholism. At one time Eddie had kept a pet badger and that

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E 59
 may be where Bob got the idea. No More Buffalo has endured as one of Scriver’s
best sculptures. The edition sold out most quickly and was one of the first to be
copied illegally. It is as excellent a sculpture as any American bronze.
The copyright year for this piece, 1957, was also the year that Bob met
George Phippen, at that time the only other Western artist doing similar sculp-
tures to be cast in bronze. Phippen would become one of the key members of
the Cowboy Artists of America, but died of cancer quite young and never saw
how big Western art became. Today there are awards and a museum that carry
his name.

5. Beginning to sell
Browning, late Fifties

Every time Bob made a new sculpture, he took it to show his folks. His mother
cooed, “Is that what you were playing with today, dear?” as though it were a
crayon drawing from grade school, and then praised “all the little buttons on the
shirt.” His father would say, “Well, Robert, are you makin’ any money?” For a
long time little or no money came from sculpture.
One day an entrepreneur who specialized in athletic trophies – sculpture of
a kind – stopped by to talk. This was Bill Ukrainetz, who wanted Bob to make
a set of five small equestrian statues which “Uke” would get cast back east. They
were meant for window-dressing in men’s haberdasheries. Each would illustrate
a different period of Western history. They signed a contract.
That night Bob rose from his bed in a panic. He wrote a long letter in
red ink (the only pen he could find) on adding machine tape (the only paper
he could find). It summed up the fears that haunted him for his entire career
– that he would be legally tied up in a way that would cripple and confine him,
destroying all his creative freedom.
Bob and Uke broke up, but in a few years cheap plaster castings of the
horses and riders, by then being sold as fine art bronzes, began to show up in
curio shops. Uke had not paid the manufacturer for the first test molds, so the
manufacturer was recovering his costs by selling castings. In spite of each piece
having been carefully copyrighted, lawyers could only achieve a stand-off: no
damages paid to anyone, but an agreement that the manufacturer would destroy
the molds.
This bad beginning would echo over and over down through the decades as
Bob’s paranoia became confirmed, in part through self-fulfilling prophecy and
in part due to Bob’s inability to resist flattery. He never had a decent crap-detec-
tor. The constant gnawing fear of being destroyed haunted him, though he was

60 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 No More Buffalo,
1957. a portrait of Eddie
Big Beaver. Photo: Paul
Juley. Courtesy of the
Smithsonian Institution.

Transition, 1961.
Portraits of Chewing
Black Bone, Mae
Williamson and a
boy whose name has
been lost. Photo: Paul
Juley. Courtesy of the
Smithsonian Institution.

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E 61
 Fighting Elk, 1963. This is one of the sculptures that resulted from the
design lessons of Warren Baumgartner. Photo: Paul Juley. Courtesy of the
Smithsonian Institution.

able to swagger and bluff his way past it sometimes. The steadily climbing value
of Western art kept the crooks interested.
Nevertheless, Lone Cowboy, the last sculpture he made for Uke’s series, is
one that qualifies as inspired. This classic portrait of a horse with its rider on the
ground in front of it – which is itself an abiding Western figure interpreted by
many artists as well as the title of a famous novel by Will James – was nearing
completion when Warren Baumgartner, an outstanding illustrator, visited. The
older man guided Bob through a lesson in composition, using this piece, so that
every line on it is graceful and fulfilled. Even Bob’s later version of the same idea,
Lone Cowboy 1860, in which an old-time cowboy and horse are turned in the
opposite way, is not so satisfying in some subtle way.
No More Buffalo, Transition, and Lone Cowboy are strong, peaceful bronzes,
quite unlike the usual flashy, action-oriented Western art of the time, and – early
in his career as they were – are among the best by Bob Scriver. Rather than being
in the tradition of Remington and Russell, they are like the straightforward por-
traits by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, Malvina Hoffman,
and A. Phimister Proctor.

62 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Lone Cowboy, 1960. Self-portrait of Bob Scriver and his horse, Playboy.
For many years this was Bob’s logo, on checks and stationery. He acknowledged
that the concept and title came from Will James. Photo: Paul Juley. Courtesy of the
Smithsonian Institution.

I I I I N S P I R AT I O N : F R O M M U S I C TO S C U L P T U R E 63
 The foundation under Bob’s work was all those humble portraits of taxider-
my specimens, carefully observed in their natural habitat, studied again écorché
(skinned), and recreated twice, once as full-mounts and once as sculpture. Since
Bob hunted, skinned, mounted, modeled, and displayed each animal, all that he
loved about them was preserved and expressed.

64 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 IV

Plastilene:
The Early Years

1. About the material and what it demands

Plastilena. Roma plastilena. Sounds like a woman’s name. But it’s merely a special
kind of artist’s clay, a mixture of fine sediment and waxy oils instead of water,
so it never dries out but can be reused again and again. It never turns into the
dry, hard-edged shards of water clay, but it never achieves permanence either, re-
maining a potential, receptive surface ready to accept the smallest detail or tool
stroke. The same plastilene is used over and over, formed into a shape, buried
in a plaster mold, dug out, cleaned and reused. It is mixed back on itself again
and again, so that what was once a woman becomes a horse and what was once
a hairy mountain man becomes a delicate fawn.
Often as I sat near Bob he handed me a wad of cold plastilene to warm. At
first it was hard and cold. Gradually, as the top layer warmed and slipped under
my fingers, it moved over the inner resistance of the deeper, still-cold clay. In the
end the whole mass became soft as pie crust dough and the surface was silken
so that my fingers slid over it, but it was tiring, took energy and muscle. While
he incorporated the first clay into the animal he was making, he handed me the
next cold lump of clay.
His own hands, strong and square-sided, were capable of both force and
exact control because his joints were strong and tight, especially his wrists. He
used his fingers as much as the tools, creating long sliding lines that delineated
muscle and denoted movement, almost caressing some parts into existence. His
thumbs dented the clay, leaving prints. His hands told him what he was making
as much as his eyes did, transferring his own kinesthesia into the small figure.
Technique is the difference between marble sculpture, which is cut into a
hard surface, and bronze, which begins as malleable clay or wax. Working in
these quite different materials requires disparate skills. Chiseled stone is called

65
 Creating Trophy Rams, 1961. Photo: Jeanette Caouette Scriver Chase.

glyptic sculpture. Modeling soft material is called haptic. Two different kinds of
energy shape them and the materials themselves have demands. Stone glyptic
sculptures tend to be massive, compact, and sharply detailed or sometimes
smoothed to a flesh-like quality. Marble busts are often classic, like Roman por-
traits, with clean outlines and no fussy decoration, perhaps showing a bare neck
and shoulders, a squared-off herm as base. Discussion of them is about shadows
and “holes,” where the stone is deeply cut. Bob never did glyptic sculptures.
Clay-based haptic sculptures, especially those to be cast in bronze, are likely
to be more romantic, gestural, with arms outflung and legs leaping. In cast
bronze busts, a broad-brimmed hat may be added (impossible in a large marble,
so there are no marble cowboys in sombreros) or the shoulders draped, collared
or wreathed with flowers. No one can cut a waving flag out of marble or a buck-
ing horse balanced on one leg, but bronze can do it.

66 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Trophy Rams, 1961. Meant to portray a “legal” ram, a 3/4 curl and a really worthy
trophy ram at the top. Hand-painted hydrocal. Photo: Bob Scriver.

In France Auguste Rodin relied on foundries for fine sand casting and then
investment ciré perdue. Most of the time he was a “modeler” – haptic (working
in clay) rather than glyptic (cutting stone). A clay sculptor need not take into
account the limitations of a specific piece of marble or granite, its possible flaws
or inevitable weight, and he does not need a crew of stone cutters. Rodin had
a fondness for leaving some figures half-emerged from the stone, a tender head
rising from rough chaos, but the heads were cut by someone else, working from
a Rodin clay, and then touched up by the sculptor.

I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S 67
 Return of the Blackfeet Raiders, still in plastilene and unfinished, 1961.
Photo: Bob Scriver.

Rodin was fond of pointing out to others that as the eye traveled over the
surface, it was like looking at one pose after another, and even proposed that
the effectiveness of his sculptures were caused by him deliberately sculpting one
end of the figure at the beginning of a gesture and the other end at the conclu-
sion – which accounts for an illusion of sinuous movement. But this is pretty
sophisticated stuff.
Were Scriver and Rodin produced by haptic forces – warming/ smooth-
ing/pressing – that gradually shaped them into sculptors through loving their
work, or by glyptic forces – striking/cutting/gouging – until what was left was
only the sculptor and nothing else?

68 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

2. Malvina Hoffman’s plastilene
Greenwich Village, the Forties

In Malvina Hoffman’s autobiography Yesterday is Tomorrow,1 she tells of going

to buy some plastilene from a sculptor named Rudolph Evans: five hundred
pounds of it at seventy cents a pound, a sizeable investment for her. She took
her plaster caster, Russo, along with her to help make a judgment as to whether
to buy.
As it turned out, Russo – who served many sculptors – recognized the batch
of clay and said he had handled it many times. It had originally been bought (at
thirty-six cents a pound) for Daniel Chester French to use in his studies for the
huge seated marble Lincoln that occupies the Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Then Saint-Gaudens used it for various figures and eventually sold it to Evans.
Forty years had passed since French bought it, and Hoffman – who could hardly
resist a material with so much history – used it for panels on the sides of an
American War Memorial Building erected in the Vosges Mountains of France
after World War II. Eventually she gave the clay to an art school.
I wrote,

Once, Bob Scriver stole a bit of plastilene from the studio of Gutzon
Borglum, the sculptor of Mt. Rushmore, and for a long time he kept it separate
from his other plastilene. But someone saw it on a shelf and – cleaning up,
consolidating, making neat and categorical – failed to realize the distinction
and pitched it into the clay box with all the rest. Now Gutzon Borglum’s
plastilene, the particles of clay and molecules of oil that were warmed and
rubbed by his fingers, are dispersed imperceptibly into the whole mass and
it is impossible to tell whether the lump you hold was once a part of the
mockup for Mt. Rushmore: perhaps a bit of Teddy Roosevelt’s mustache or
Abraham Lincoln’s wart. It is identity-less, unfindable, and yet permeates all
the plastilene, unchanged on a microscopic level.

I showed the above paragraph to Bob Scriver himself. (“So how are you coming
with your famous book?”) He told me I’d completely fabricated the whole story.
In the first place, he wants me to admit that he NEVER steals. The artist – or at
least his helper – GAVE him the clay. The true situation was that his Dickinson,
North Dakota, art teacher, Zoe Bieler, happened to be in Chicago when he
was going to Vandercook School of Music in the Thirties, and, in an effort to
persuade him away from music, she took him to the studio of Lorado Taft – not
Borglum. Taft was not there. (He died in 1936 so he might have been ill.) That’s
why it had to be the helper who gave Bob the clay. It was water clay and Bob said
he still had it, carefully protected. (Who knows where it is now?)

I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S 69
 So even the stories are malleable. Who knows which are true? Only the
people directly involved. Even they may not remember accurately.
Bronze that seems to equal permanence is an illusion. The greatest hazard
to a sculpture, as to many other things, is human beings, who – when times
change – melt up bronze to make something else. Fine statues and church bells
have been sacrificed in order to cast cannons. In recent years we’re seeing statues
of dictators pulled down onto their faces. Simple neglect can destroy a poorly
made bronze. Air pollution and ice are acid and chisel. Just the same, Bob felt
that bronze was a step toward immortality. In his childhood the Browning pa-
per often pictured distinguished statuary as it was placed around the country
after World War I. The accompanying rhetoric lauded each such object as for the
future generations, eternal, to mark The War to End All Wars.
After Charlie Russell’s death in 1926, Nancy Russell tried to make a little
money from his sculptures, since only a limited number of paintings were left
for her to sell. Customers would persuade her to cast Marblex™ figures that the
artist might not have meant for bronze, reasoning that the sculptures would be
more permanent in that form. In theory she could duplicate the sculptures and
still have them. In fact, the mold-making process lost the little tufts of rope for
grass and other details, even pulled paint off the surface. Sometimes the process
destroyed entirely the charming but fragile little clay figures. If the bronze was
badly cast, it couldn’t be repaired by comparing it with the original. Nancy
struggled with bad castings and dark matte patinas, almost like stove blacking.
A haptic sculptor is at the mercy of molds, which are the only way to
transform something soft and malleable into something hard and lasting. That
interval in which the clay is soft is dangerous. Any “mishap,” a careless thumb, a
bump against a doorknob, and hours of work are destroyed. A mold-maker who
can be trusted to take a soft plastilene or wax and safely make a mold of it should
be valued almost as highly as a sculptor. Unfortunately, such artisans are far and
few, mostly concentrated where there is enough work to keep their skills sharp.
Their names are rarely recorded anywhere.
During the Sixties an enthusiastic female journalist often dropped in to the
studio in search of a story. Once we talked to her about plastilene and she went
away to write an article extolling the virtues of the “new material” Bob Scriver
had discovered. It was everything an artist could want: malleable, reproduce-
able, and it could even be hardened in an oven. (We had told her we wished it
could be. Today materials actually exist such as polymer-based clay, but then
we only longed for them every time we damaged a plastilene.) The name of this
“miracle material,” she confided to her readers, was Petrolane (the name of the
local gas company) and Bob Scriver “absolutely refused to reveal his source.” It
was months before we stopped getting phone calls from aspiring sculptors, none
of whom believed us in the slightest when we told them this woman reporter
had pulled the whole thing out of thin air.

70 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Still, for Bob, plastilene was a kind of privileged substance. Intrigued by the
different kinds in the art catalogues, he bought five pounds of each for experi-
ments. I didn’t know until many years later that some artists make their own
plastilene, developing a recipe that suits their purposes. A woman sculptor in
Saskatoon, who sculpted huge “African queens” that looked like chess pieces,
showed me how she made up her black plastilene with wax, oil, and clay. I was
grateful Bob didn’t know about this or we would have been launched on mak-
ing plastilene. (He did make his own taxidermy water-based clay, mixed with
carbolic acid to keep it from getting moldy. When we were working with it, our
hands stung but we weren’t troubled with infections.)
The woman sculptor had said part of the reason she made her own plas-
tilene was to avoid the lead in commercial plastilene, which gradually absorbs
into the skin. There was sulphur in the commercial stuff, too, and the plastilene
would react chemically with some kinds of wire, creating a strange dark jelly.
Now there are lead-free plastilenes on the market. I wonder how much lead Bob
absorbed over the years. It saturated his skin and clothes.

3. Plastilene sculptures shelved

Browning, 1962

When I first met Bob, on top of his kitchen cabinets were some figures made of
plastilene. I asked and he lifted them down to show me. They were fuzzy with
household dust and some had fallen apart a bit. Two were Indian subjects and
one was elk. The two Indian subjects were vignettes that had been suggested
by George Montgomery, who had intended to buy them until his divorce from
Dinah Shore wiped out his discretionary money. Both were in the context of
conflict, typical of early Western art.
Price of a Scalp showed a warrior on horseback pierced by a spear held by a
warrior on the ground who will clearly be brained by the downstroke of the war
club the equestrian is holding. Enemy Tracks (a Charlie Russell title) was two
Indian men on horseback in cactus country following the tracks of a shod horse
and spotting an empty discarded U.S. Cavalry canteen. When George couldn’t
pay for these storytelling sculptures, Bob set them aside, disappointed. (George
did buy other pieces and eventually began making his own sculptures.)
The third plastilene was Fighting Elk, with two bull elk fighting so close to a
recumbent cow elk that they had bashed into her. This violent but graceful piece
later won prizes, at least in part because Warren Baumgartner, the fine watercol-
orist, had spent time with Bob using this piece as another lesson in composition,
showing how he could create design lines – along antlers, out along the backs of
the elk, and even through “rock crevices” in the sculptured base, just as he did

I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S 71
 for Lone Cowboy. The contribution makes both of these sculptures more unified
to the eye, easier to see and understand. But Warren, an older man, became ill
with pneumonia and slipped away. Saddened, Bob had put the sculpture on the
shelf. I couldn’t understand letting them just disintegrate. After a while, he did
return to them.

4. The miniature wildlife dioramas: a team effort

Browning, Spring 1962

In the winter of 1961–62, soon after we met, Bob prepared to add the final
room to his museum: miniature dioramas scaled at inch-to-a-foot. A scene of
mountain goats on the precipices of Glacier Park had already been completed for
years. Now he wanted to make one “window” for every major mammal species
in the state. In the shop he and Carl started to make shadow boxes with plaster
hills and valleys while a crew was set to work opening up a room I hadn’t known
existed. Until that moment it had opened outdoors to the horse corral in the
backyard, and had been used to store saddles and hang deer carcasses. One day
the crew simply cut an arch in the wall and there it was.
At the end of every work day, Bob threw his indispensable modeling tools
(traditional steel instruments from a sculpture supply house, some leatherwork-
ing styluses, a handful of dental picks donated by his dentist, and other handy
things like wire-cutters and a light hammer) into his ten-gallon metal lard
pail so he could carry them all back to the house where he worked at a proper
sculptor’s cast-iron and hardwood revolving table. The sound of those sliding,
jangling tools being pulled out of the pickup in the driveway always signaled a
long, snug evening of work with plastilene. That March he created more than
sixty little portraits of animals, some of them worth casting into bronze later on,
most notably Reclining Bighorn.
Following the plans sketched out on the backs of paper napkins at “tea-
times” (one at 10 AM and the other at 3 PM) and filed by stuffing them into
his breast pockets, Bob went directly to his sculptor’s turntable after supper
every night. Choosing a blob of plastilene, he softened it in his hands while he
“thought him a think.” Roughing out the body with a knife, he twisted its head
and limbs around experimentally. Since the creatures were so small, there was
no need to be confined by an armature.
Every culture, no matter how primitive, has loved miniature objects, if only
as toys. Play is often where we do our deepest changing and make our most
poetic discoveries. With our toys we are as gods, free from consequences. The
psychoanalyst Kohut and the philosopher Langer speak of a “virtual world”
created by art, religion, or play – a world of intense meaning and fulfillment

72 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

that makes change and growth possible, in part because it is a mental construct
as flexible as plastilene.
He became the animal. Sometimes he remembered particular animals he
had watched secretly, for he had spent most of his later childhood and early
youth prowling around the reservation and up into Glacier Park, disdaining – as
did others in those days – any arbitrary boundary lines. If he found a band of
mountain sheep or goats, he would accompany them through the day – hang-
ing back just enough to keep them from running away – until they habituated
enough to tolerate him. As a kid so young he was using a learner’s driving permit
– with his mom alongside him, knitting – he took a car up to the hotel garbage
dumps in the fall after the tourists left, letting the vehicle be snowed in, and sat
quietly watching bears search for last meals before hibernation. Later, of course,
he was an avid hunter.
Now with clay in his hands he looked out of his own head with tiny bear eyes
and curled his upper lip to lift his snout into the breeze. His massive shoulders
rippled as he reached to roll away a boulder and search beneath it. For moments
he would be lost in the drama he was creating, and then he would stop to tell me
about it. I thought of the first “real” book I read as a child, The Biography of a
Grizzly by Ernest Thompson Seton. How I wept at the end when the old lonely
bear died! Sometimes we’d get far enough into the play of “being bears” that no
more work got done. Only now do I realize how much Waab, Seton’s grizzly, was
really Seton, the same as Scriver’s bear was really Scriver.
Each diorama had to meet certain criteria: tell a story, teach something
about the animals, be typical of the species, hold enough detail to be looked at
for a while, and so on. Bob traded one of his sculptures to Les Peters, a fine re-
alistic painter in Great Falls, in return for Les painting two of the backgrounds
in Peters’ signature muted, softly detailed, realistic style so that Bob had them
to learn from as he went on with the rest. Les, rocking back on his heels and
pushing his hat off his forehead, was generous with support and advice. He was
the Gary Cooper of the Montana painters. A private man, he never became a
star of the national exhibit circuit but he was a major force in the development of
Western art in Montana and the curator who prepared Charlie Russell’s studio
for exhibit.
The medium of dioramas rested directly on Bob Scriver’s lifelong dilemma
as an artist, which has also been the dilemma of Western art. Isn’t cowboy “art”
merely decoration, collectible, some kind of folk phenomenon of a self-taught
and self-identified artist? Isn’t real art supposed to be some kind of privileged,
eternal, and high-aesthetic product of education? Is Western art “high-brow” or
“low-brow?” Is illustration really art?
There is a sense in which these “story-telling” sculptures were a throwback
to an early genre of three-dimensional story-telling that was often made in
wax. Bob loved the little story-telling group sculptures of John Rogers, which
are sneered at for being “un-artistic” in the same way that Norman Rockwell’s

I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S 73
 friendly small town folk are considered “low-brow.” Yet the quality of the art
is often very high. If Rogers had been illustrating Greek mythology, as many
of the early American marbles did, he might have been respected as well as
making money. But because he made many copies of sentimental little groups
– for instance, a young couple getting married with the parson peering over his
glasses – which were enormously popular, he is mentioned only briefly in the
scholarly studies of American sculptors. (Part of Bob’s estate was a collection of
John Rogers plasters.)
Bob’s understanding of the world came out of his life as a reservation small-
town shopkeeper’s son, and as such was often “corny.” But – partly because
he had a (tenuous) back-east connection with money and prestige – he knew
enough to long to be a sophisticated sculptor in a nineteenth-century way. No
one would ever think of Malvina Hoffman making a dollhouse or Rodin con-
cocting dioramas, but Charlie Russell did those things without apologizing. It
was the diorama scenes, the accuracy of the knots and riggings on Bob’s mules,
the “true-to-life” details like rivets on jeans – in short, the reproduced familiar-
ity – that his local audience thought was fine and admirable. Even his most
educated mentors – Charlie Beil, Warren Baumgartner, Robert Lougheed, or
John Clymer (who used to alternate with Norman Rockwell on the cover of
The Saturday Evening Post) – were popular artists, not salon artists. Their work
illustrated slick magazines – until Lougheed and Clymer joined Cowboy Artists
of America and acquired fine art easel studios.
When “modernity” swept through the art world – turning attention to
thinking about images as shapes instead of depicting reality, which photography
could do better anyway – the “educated” and “sophisticated” world elevated
abstract art and scorned the representational. The beautiful monuments of the
Beau Arts tradition, the fine tabletop bronzes by Animaliers, were now just old-
fashioned. Except that out West people never gave them up. For them it was still
exciting to see their ordinary world recorded in paint and bronze. Anyway, there
is an anti-snobbery doctrine in the West that meant people were free to scoff at
Picasso and Pollock, even as they were impressed by the Life magazine stories
about what outrageous geniuses they were. Cowboy artists are supposed to be
clean-living, happily married, and well mannered.
Bob had what I often called his corny “Wall Drugstore” side, since that
most famous of roadside attractions featured automaton puppets. Clever as
his dioramas were, Bob wanted to add clockwork. Powers, one of those early
creators of a George Washington equestrian monument, earned his living in his
youth creating wax figures with clockwork in them to make them move. They
were exhibited in dime museums where the gruesome subjects sometimes made
the patrons faint. But there were no scenes of horror in the Scriver dioramas
except the forest fire, which we have learned is not all bad. (On the other hand,
one of his early taxidermy mounts had been a small bobcat ripping up a duck,
with copious fake blood. The weekly Browning Chief felt that it had to remind

74 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

its readers that nature was “red in tooth and claw” and that Scriver was just
being honest.)
In fact, Bob knew his former student Billy McCurdy could devise the little
cams and gears that would have made the deer flick their ears and the cou-
gar lash its tail. He just never got around to it. The success of the mechanized
rattlesnake in the museum was encouraging. It had taken him months to find a
mechanism that would make the tail on his specimen shake in realistic fashion
(a vibrator from the aerator in an aquarium did it). As rationale for the gimmick,
he claimed he only installed the coin-operated snake so that people could learn
to be safe in rattlesnake country. No matter that Glacier National Park and most
of the reservation is too high for rattlers and no matter that the snake in question
was a huge Texas rattler, quite unlike anything local. Could he be blamed for
appreciating the many quarters the machine reaped? He figured out how much
it made and showed the numbers to his skeptical Pop.
That February and March of 1962, Bob did taxidermy all morning, cast
his diorama animals in the afternoon, and in the evening either modeled more
animals or chipped out the ones he had transferred to hydrocal in the afternoon,
putting them up to dry on racks near the ceiling in the shop before sealing and
painting them. By now the big shadow boxes for the windows were crowding us
out of the shop and Carl Cree Medicine, Bob’s best employee, was working full
time on the new diorama room.
The hardest part for Carl was fitting the tile on the floor around and under
a circular seat Bob had invented to get some use out of a necessary support pillar.
Carl must have trimmed and fitted those blasted tiles a half-dozen times before
Bob thought they were good enough. The big Indian, awkwardly kneeling so he
could reach under the seat, squinting in the glare of a worklight that was never
in the right place, fuming with impatience and frustration, never said anything
until eventually he got a good fix.
My turn to fume came when we composed the little explanations that went
under each diorama. I, with my pretensions as a would-be writer, discovered
that I couldn’t get the knack. Bob had tourist women, his old girlfriends and the
wives of buddies all writing better captions than I was. (They were all women,
which didn’t help.) I finally ended up writing the majority, but at great emo-
tional cost and after many revisions. It was a valuable lesson.
Bob’s most frustrating problem was the water in the beaver dam. We had
discovered some pourable clear plastic and how to mix it, but it was meant to be
in sheets rather than solid volume, so when it cured, it cracked. With great effort
we dug it all out. The next time we poured it, the color mysteriously changed to
purple. We never knew why. There were “trout” embedded in the water, so the
water had to be partially poured, let set, the trout put in – like banana slices into
half-set Jell-O – and then the rest of the plastic goo poured onto them without
knocking them on their sides or backs. When the diorama was finished and lit
(“moonlit”), we discovered you could only see the trout by shining a flashlight

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 through the glass in front and even then you sort of had to know where they
were. But we comforted ourselves that they still added something – maybe
people would see them unconsciously, just “sense” them.

5. Bob nearly goes blind

Browning, Summer 1962

Another complication entered the picture in 1962. While it was still winter,
an officious man had appeared in uniform saying he was the “federal warden”
and demanded to see the closed museum. Bob, thinking about prison wardens,
reluctantly let him in – it was cold in there and untanned hides were stored on
the floor in piles. The man came out upset and threatening. There were many
mounted songbirds, mostly victims of a late storm. Local kids had brought them
in for a quarter each. One specimen was a swan, which had been found in a
field dead, a hole eaten in the underside by mice. The state game warden had
given it to Bob who mounted it on the wall next to a snow goose for purposes of
comparison, since swans were protected and snow geese were not.
This warden stormed that Bob was violating federal law, that he could be
fined $2000 and given six months in jail for every single illegal specimen. Bob
protested that he had a taxidermy license. The warden pointed out that it only
gave him permission to mount migratory WATERfowl, not migratory birds in
general. What he needed was a MUSEUM permit. This was the first Bob had
known of the existence of such a thing. Reasonably, he inquired how to acquire
one. “No, no!” objected the man. “You can’t have a museum permit – you’re
PRIVATE!”
Bob could stand it no longer. “If this is private, then you get out and don’t
come back without a warrant!” The man left. We later heard that he gave a
similar dressing-down to a man on the west side of the Rockies whose cat caught
a phalarope (a wading water bird) and brought it into the house. The warden did
in fact have the power to charge Bob with a felony for each bird and to padlock
the museum, thus eliminating the summer’s income. We removed all songbirds
but left the swan.
In those years we had no understanding of what a non-profit organization
was. In fact, it might have made good sense to create one, especially for the
wildlife museum, but I suspect Bob thought that meant any profit would have
to be sent somewhere else. This is the kind of price we paid for being so isolated
and individual. There was no one to teach us the small strategies of survival, so
Bob just did it his own way.
Not like a rancher or farmer but more like someone living in Britain on
an estate, Bob felt the land was his. At that point he only owned two city lots,

76 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

but the mostly unfenced land stretched out around town in a sort of assumed
commons without any particular feeling that it was owned by the Blackfeet nor
even any feeling that there was a real boundary around Glacier Park. From the
big picture window in the studio he built that first summer, we looked across
the Indian museum and camping grounds, past the fairgrounds and the unde-
veloped Methodist “ranch,” to the Rockies. It was still almost like the old open
range days of the West.
In summer Bob would bring our horses up the alley to my open bedroom
window and say my name to wake me. Out I’d fly, and we’d ride off across the
grass in the early rosy light. There were few fences but, just in case, Bob carried
wire cutters in his saddle bags. If we had to cut a fence, we usually wired it up
behind us if there were any wire scraps around. If there was wire on the ground,
especially barbed, Bob would stop and wind it up – hang it off a fence post. He
had a constant fear of wire cuts on the horses.
Nearing fifty, he had more stamina than I had in my early twenties. The age
differential entitled him to teach me the lore and ceremony of what he’d learned
as a boy out on the Stone ranch. Not fancy contemporary rancher stuff, but old
nineteenth-century notions of what worked. Teacher to student was his best
kind of relationship, even in intimacy.
He was my first naked man, a mature, hard-bellied, furry male. I did a lot
of exploring but was puzzled by his toes. Some of them were webbed. He tried
to pass them off as an evolutionary improvement. I wondered why his mother
didn’t have them clipped when he was born – it would have been easy. He said
she wanted them left alone because they would be good identification if he were
killed in battle. Is this what one thinks when looking at a newborn? It added to
his sense of being slightly freakish.
Whenever there was trouble, Bob would build something. That first sum-
mer there seemed to be nothing BUT trouble. As soon as the diorama room
was finished and the coal shed that was to be the foundry was moved aside, he
staked out a studio/home behind the museum and finished it in the fall of 1962.
Moving the boxes from under the eaves in Bob’s rental house was a revelation.
I read everything in them – letters, divorce papers, his “little black book” from
Edmonton – with the urgency of reading a novel.
One day in 1962, my first spring with Bob, when he was still in the rental
house across from his mom, a letter had been propped in the music rack of the
spinet piano, almost as though Bob hoped I would see it. Probably his mom,
who came over every morning to make his bed and vacuum, saw it, too. Written
in graceful script, it was postmarked Great Falls. Naturally I read it. This was
Arlene, the one who would NOT marry Bob. He had told me about her, but
she was only hypothetical until then. Now she was returning to work in the
museum for the summer. I was expecting to work there, too.
One bedroom in the little studio/home was for Arlene. He made a scale
model to show her what a dear little room it would be and to ask her what details

I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S 77
 Bob the cowboy artist, about 1961. Photo: Albert De Smet.

78 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

of construction she would prefer. Arlene was cool. She and I alternated shifts in
the museum, quarreling bitterly over whose till came up short and why. Bob
would ignore us sometimes and other times he reacted violently, throwing the
drawer of money on the floor with a great crash, so that we had to crawl around
finding money in order to count it again.
Stress always affected Bob physically. One day his eye began to itch and
water, then it turned red, and finally it became painful. He had been quarreling
with Arlene. Pitifully he begged her to take him to the doctor, since he couldn’t
see to drive. She decided it was a ploy for sympathy and refused. Luckily, his
old hunting partner, Calvin Augare, happened along and took him up to the
Bureau of Indian Affairs hospital. White people were not supposed to use the
facility, but few people ever argued with Calvin, who was a very large man not
averse to violence, and anyway, if there were a true need, few doctors would turn
anyone away.
The doctor took one look and said Bob had to get to a specialist in Great
Falls. It was herpes simplex keratitis and if it got much deeper into the layers of
the cornea, the only cure would be to remove the eyeball. A worst-case scenario
meant the virus traveled up the optic nerve into the brain. Bob had no health in-
surance. How could a blind sculptor make a living, especially with the museum
padlocked? Calvin took him straight down to Great Falls to get the diagnosis
confirmed and begin treatment.
Calvin brought the patient back late at night and to my shock, since we
hadn’t been speaking, Bob came knocking on my door for refuge. He said he
didn’t want to stay with Arlene – who was living in his house – since she hadn’t
believed he was sick and hadn’t helped him when he really needed it, after all he
had done, etc. I lay awake all night holding him while we listened to Miles Davis
play Sketches of Spain over and over until he slept. He told me he was sure that if
he’d gone on with the cornet, he would have played like that. (Everyone always
says he played like Harry James.)
I couldn’t wake Bob up early enough for him to leave in the dark as he
had promised to do. When he finally went out my only door, I saw that the
occupants of the little cabin on the corner, Mary Mittens and Calvin Boy, were
in their window watching and laughing at him climbing over the wire fence
into the alley. He could not have looked more guilty. I don’t think they ever told
anyone white, though I’m sure all Indians soon knew. I began to realize how
thoroughly the town was divided into levels and classes, each with their own
secrets and principles.
The only treatment for this herpes infection of the cornea was to scrape the
surface of the eyeball, like taking lacquer off the glass eyes of the mounted heads,
and to pour iodine on it, a procedure that had to be done three times a week
in Great Falls. Bob was convinced that his career as a taxidermist and sculptor
was doomed – if the Museum were closed down as well, he would be completely

I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S 79
 impoverished and helpless. His only hope was to go to be tortured, but he would
be sick to his stomach all the way to the treatment.
I didn’t know how to drive and Arlene refused to do it. The folks bravely
assumed the chore and in the next weeks they calculated they drove the equiva-
lent of the distance to Montreal and back. Then appeared Ruth Hill, author
of Hanta Yo, with her mild little husband DOCTOR Hill (her emphasis) and
her large asthmatic son, Reed, whom she intended to somehow turn into John
Wayne. Doctor Hill, or Buzzy as we called him, was not a medical clinician
but a Ph.D. cancer researcher who worked at the City of Hope in Los Angeles.
Musing, he remarked that he remembered something or other about a cancer
drug that worked on herpes infections ... if only he could think where ... oh, yes,
it had been a dinner party ... but who ... perhaps if he contacted the hostess.
Miraculously, he located the experimenter and the drug. Bob could receive
treatment but only if he were in the Cut Bank hospital under the strictest of
protocols, so as not to ruin the experiment’s integrity. He would be the twenty-
eighth guinea pig. Of course, he did appear to need someone to drive him down
to Great Falls for checkups – so why not just keep Reed for the summer?
Reed, cigarette in one hand, cola in the other, rolled his eyes. Buzzy and
Ruth took off without him. He was used to such arrangements, he said resign-
edly. When he had turned five years old, his mother had fixed him a sack lunch,
told him he was on his own, and pointed out the way to the public school. He
had coped somehow. He was very fond of uncooked red wienies (the kind full of
dye) dipped in mayonnaise. Later in the summer, Hal Bieler, author of Food Is
Your Best Medicine, appeared on his annual pilgrimage and assured Reed he was
killing himself with such a diet. Reed looked at Hal’s plate of boiled greens and
remarked at least he would die happy.
So the summer began, with a sneering Reed and an increasingly desperate
Arlene, the new studio/home merely a foundation and frame, Bob in the hospital
in Cut Bank, and a steady stream of eccentric visitors demanding attention, to
say nothing of impending legal problems. In the midst of the confusion a letter
arrived canceling Bob’s taxidermy license. We hardly paid attention.
Somehow I appeared to be the person expected to cope. Whether I was
drafted or simply took over in order to protect my own interests is impossible
to distinguish. But Bob’s sculpture career continued to grow throughout every-
thing else. We took orders for Hydrocals™ every week.
From the hospital Bob issued a steady stream of notes full of details about
how to run the business, along with sketches of himself in jailhouse stripes. I
talked to him on the phone, but Arlene actually went to visit. The Scriver family
“code” required that anyone in the hospital be visited every day or at least every
other day, but they drove the forty miles in daylight while I was working. Bob
suggested on the phone – rather petulantly – that if I really loved him, I would
find a way to come visit.

80 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Alonzo Skunkcap, a very old, nearly blind man who had a log cabin a few
doors away from us, sometimes asked us to drive him out ten miles to his ranch
on Willow Creek. We didn’t mind. Bob always respected him as a hunter. Now
it occurred to me that one of Alonzo’s sons might be willing to drive me to Cut
Bank if I paid him. Sure enough, Leroy – looking rather baffled – agreed to
run me down one evening. I told him the truth and he took me straight to the
hospital. To say Bob was glad to see me would be an understatement.
He walked me back to the door at the time Leroy was supposed to be there
and we were both a little surprised to find that he was there. Bob paid him
another five dollars (which suddenly cast a new light on my visit) and we drove
back, Leroy still baffled about what was going on, but hopeful about what other
good things might happen to him.
The treatment worked, though Bob claimed he couldn’t see very well past
the scars on his cornea. His eyesight was a sensitive point with him.2 In his
youth he had been diagnosed as needing glasses but had evaded them by doing
a series of exercises. They were one of his best examples of mind-over-matter,
or at least over his own body. Now his eyes had gone bad in a way he couldn’t
control. In fact, his whole body seemed to be balking. He complained about his
shoulder aching and about being tired. A place in his back ached constantly.
Sometimes he would crawl up on the pile of bear hides on the bear table and
nap for a while.
Arlene spent her quiet moments at the reception desk writing long letters to
Bob and others, then tearing them up and leaving the pieces lying in the shelf
underneath. I secretly gathered them and taped them back together to read.
Once she slashed her wrists and left handfuls of bloody tissues under the desk,
but by the time I came to work she had put band-aids on her wrists. I said to her,
in a snotty voice, “You can’t do anything right, can you?”
In a little reservation town with no car, no telephone, no doctor for white
people, where does one find counseling help? In those days people in small towns
knew nothing about psychology. My drama training only suggested emotional
scenes. A sick symbiosis grew among the three of us, but Bob didn’t ask us to be
friends. Just get the work done.
I worked the early morning shift, arriving at 6 AM, unlocking, cleaning,
and setting up the till. Arlene came at noon and worked until suppertime. Then
I worked the evening and closed up. Bob insisted this was the only schedule
possible, because of Arlene’s private life. As compensation, most afternoons – if,
because of waiting for supplies or workmen, there was no building to do – Bob
and I would saddle up the horses and roam off across the prairie. Or sometimes
we loaded up art supplies and looked for a place to paint a bit of scenery.
We must have been going back to places Bob knew because he rode there
as a kid. We set up easels to paint, en plein air, as one says now. Bob always took
off his shirt and the bugs would try to bite him, but he was so hairy that they got
tangled and trapped, struggling and buzzing. Then he would absent-mindedly

I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S 81
 smack them with his paintbrush, until after an hour he looked like a human
mixing palette. The smell of the oil paint mixed with the smell of grass and
maybe mint along a creek where we could go skinny-dipping to wash off the
paint and squashed bugs. Fish rose around us.
I had never tried painting before. We talked about colors and shapes, com-
position on the canvas, light direction. Gary Schildt had a particular way of
painting that Nancy McLaughlin Powell also used in her pastel portraits. They
got it from a little art book by a guy named Merlin Enabnit. It was a matter
of “cool” (blue and green) light coming from one direction and “warm” light
(red or yellow) coming from the other. It made no sense to Bob, but the light
bulb flashed for me, because that’s the way stage lighting is done – warm lights
shining from one side and cool lights from the other. In fact, Montana scenes
are just like that – blue sky reflecting where there is shadow and the low pink
winter light painting everything else. The result was an effect of depth, model-
ing. Charlie Russell used it.
Bob claimed it was a silly idea for color to have temperature and that some
greens looked warm to him and some orange looked cool. Certainly, color was
not his strong suit. (He couldn’t understand left-wing politics versus right-wing
politics either, but I suspected he was just being stubborn.) Often I read up
on something until I understood it, and then explained it to Bob, who could
actually do it, while I watched.
When the first blizzard of the year came on September 8, the studio still
had no windows, but soon it was weathertight. The inside took months and
months longer, because Bob was determined to get it right, to make it a jewel
box. “If every baseboard and molding isn’t done now, it never WILL get done.”
I took all the pots and pans he owned, laid them out on the floor, edited them,
and then designed cupboards that would hold just these things – no more, no
less. Between wives abandoning goods and his mother giving him her castoffs,
he had four teakettles (all crusted with alkali and some burned through), three
frying pans (only one with an intact handle), a strange assortment of plates, and
no sharp knives at all.
Finally, Arlene had fallen in love with Gary Schildt, a Blackfeet artist of
enormous talent and tumultuous character. Bob paid Gary to choose the colors
for the studio and paint it, which the young man did beautifully. Then Bob
took Gary and Arlene up to Cardston, Alberta, and acted as witness while they
got married. Wessie and I prepared a little reception feast – Wessie even baked
a cake – and Bob provided a mattress on the carpet in front of the massive new
fireplace for an overnight honeymoon while he slept elsewhere. Gary got drunk.
In a while they moved to the other side of the mountains.

82 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

6. Evelyn Cole
Chinook, Montana, 1967

When Bob was commissioned to make a heroic-size statue of rodeo cowboy

champion Bill Linderman, everyone was in a great hurry, as usual, and Bob
didn’t have enough plastilene on hand. (Later he learned to use giant styrofoam
blocks as a lightweight core in order to make the clay go farther.) Once he
had had enough plastilene to make a heroic-size statue of Charlie Russell, but
now that clay was all tied up in other projects that were not yet ready to cast.
Looking for a source near to hand, he thought of Evelyn Cole, who had entered
her portrait of Charles M. Russell in the 1959 contest. He had lost, and so had
Evelyn, but she had a lot of clay and she only lived a few hundred miles away
in Chinook. Even though they had never been buddies, a little persuasion by
phone got her to agree to loan several hundreds of pounds of plastilene – just
about her whole supply – “for a few months.” I was sent to fetch it, driving our
little old red van.
Evelyn Cole, to be direct about it, was a stocky, mannish woman sculptor.
Where she got the vision of being a sculptor, I’ve always wondered. She never
married, lived with her parents on their little farm until they died and then con-
verted a barn to be her studio. Following some inner drive, she made portraits of
local heroes and murals for local businesses. With her butch haircut and flannel
shirts under bib overalls, she was far from pitiful.
She followed her stubborn vision, making herself into more than just
another unmarriageable country female. Her supporters were local folks who
thought her eccentric and thus probably a genius. She was treated with amused
respect. I always felt that falling in love with Bob Scriver saved me from becom-
ing Evelyn Cole. Then one day it occurred to me that if I’d become Evelyn Cole,
it would have saved me from falling in love with Bob Scriver.
Evelyn never did get her clay back. That plastilene is melded and rolled into
the bins of Scriver clay now, and maybe that’s just as well. Her health failed, she
needed money, she was discouraged after the Russell contest led nowhere. No
mentor or opportunity came forward. Bob wrote her a check and we never saw
her again.

I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S 83
 7. My first hunting trips
The Rocky Mountain front, Fall 1962

Bird-hunting in the fall of 1962 was my introduction to driving – wallowing

the pickup through slimy gumbo clay along irrigation canals dug for the wheat
fields south of the reservation while Bob and his son-in-law, Butch DeSmet,
walked ahead of me with their shotguns over their shoulders. The day was glori-
ous and by afternoon the road was no longer mud – now it was rutted concrete.
Every once in a while a cock pheasant would explode out of the brilliantly hued
fall foliage of rosebushes and willow along the ditch and almost always one of
the two men would blast it in flight. Then they’d wait for me to catch up so they
could pitch the elegant bird into the back of the pickup. I asked for one to be in
the cab so I could look at it, the clever metallic feathers and round glassy eye.
During the 1962 Thanksgiving vacation we took the horses in the
pickup up the Blackleaf Canyon road into the Rockies. This is where Nature
Conservancy has established the Black Butte grizzly refuge, where there is an
old Métis cemetery filled with refugees from the Riel Rebellion, where novelist
A.B. Guthrie Jr.’s ranch was, and near Egg Mountain, where the dinosaur nests
that revolutionized dino theory were found. It’s a quick way to get deep into the
mountains.
Snow was on the foothills and the temperature was subzero. Bob wanted
to start from Browning at 4 AM. Gunsmoke, Bob’s half-Arabian gray, loaded
easily, but Skeeter, my old brown relay racehorse, balked in spite of oats in the
feedbox. “Go back there and slap him with a rope,” said Bob, and I did – with
little or no effect. “Throw pebbles.”
Stooping to feel around my feet in the darkness, I managed to scrabble up
some pebbles which I flung as hard as I could. I must have hit a sensitive spot,
because Skeeter lashed out with both hind feet, flipping my bangs up in the
air. A quarter-inch closer and my brains would have been sent spraying like a
fountain into the freezing dark. Then the horse went into the back of the pickup
as though he’d meant to all the time. Shaking, I swung the gates of the stock-
rack shut while Bob climbed over the front to tie the halters and put out hay. He
made no comment on the near miss.
We drove out of the sleeping town, every building detail and tree skeleton
flashing in the headlights of my adrenalin-charged mind. An hour or so south
of Browning we turned west up the gravel road into the mountains. Because
a “double & doe” season was intended to curb an explosion of deer, we could
shoot four deer of either sex between us. The pickup toiled up narrow roads
along foothill shoulders that were increasingly icy. Two horses are a big load for
a half-ton pickup. I didn’t even think about where we’d put four deer carcasses.
Then we spun out, with a drop-off on one side and a hillside steep up the
other. Morning was just beginning to chalk the sky. Bob let the pickup roll

84 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

backwards slowly, meaning to find a bare place in the road to get traction, but
instead of responding to the steering wheel, the pickup slid closer to the edge.
Now one rear wheel was perilously close to the edge. Our eyes were bugging
with fear. If the horses jumped around a bit, we would go over, but their eyes
showed white, too, and they stood still.
“Chains,” said Bob. I couldn’t believe it. How could he drive forward or
back to get them on? “Jack,” he said. My mouth was dry. “Chock the wheels.” I
searched for big wedge-shaped rocks and stuck them in tight behind the tires.
The horses stood unmoving as Bob reached carefully in back of the seat for the
jack and chains. He did not slam the door shut.
For a seamless time Bob worked smoothly, using his considerable muscle
to wrestle the chains on without wrenching or pushing. The horses snorted,
but hardly shifted their weight. I concentrated with all my might, not so much
praying as WILLING that nothing would happen. At the same time I began
to develop a plan for going back down the mountain road alone to report the
deaths, since I would be the only one left, standing alone in the road.
Then the chains were on, Bob shouted at me to get in, I did, and we made
only one try, creeping, then lunging and thrusting the rest of the way with never
a pause until we were at the top and it was safe to stop. We hooted. The horses
did a little dance.
It was still first light, too early for color, and all around us spread the east
overthrust front range of the Rocky Mountains, stretching away in long valleys
of pine to soaring curtains of stone. I thought of Japanese ink drawings, so
abstract yet full of meticulous clarity. Every needle, every bit of weed showing
above snow, existed with deep inevitability. We breathed exaltation.
The horses unloaded easily. They were carrying their saddles, so we had
only to tighten cinches and put on bridles. Hardly had we ridden out along the
hilltop when Bob was off, aiming, and had fired. It was a muley buck, yards and
yards away, instantly dropped with one bullet to the head. We had only gotten
to that fallen deer when a doe stuck a curious head up from behind an outcrop
of rocks and Bob dropped her, too – one bullet. It would take the rest of the day
to get a third deer. But at least the first two didn’t have to be packed far to the
pickup. There was no fourth.
I held the horses while Bob went to cut the buck’s throat and gut it. The
sky was bright now and our mouths trailed steam. Deftly, he slit the buck’s belly
and reached in to tumble out the guts, a blossoming of intense poppy red, and
fling them onto the paper-white snow. Steam rose up, cell-life escaping, and I
saw how orderly the insides were, how cleverly arranged to just fit. I felt abstract
love, like a theoretical physicist considering the order of the universe.
Bob was solemn, too, as he cut away the heart and liver to stow in my
saddlebags, since mine were the biggest (and since he didn’t want to mess up his
own), and then scrubbed his hands clean in the snow. There was no nonsense
about putting blood on faces.

I V P L A S T I L E N E : T H E E A R LY Y E A R S 85
 The third deer was shot from across a valley and it took sweaty, straining
hours to get to it. The carcasses went on top of the pickup cab. Driving home,
we were in darkness again but had no trouble, until we hit pavement, stopped
to remove the chains and shared the last salted nut roll, which was Bob’s tra-
ditional hunting food. (They don’t melt in saddle bags.) He reached over and
pounded my knee. “You’re a good sport,” he said, and I understood that it was
high praise.
We hung the deer carcasses up in a cold room until they were covered
with green mold, then cut them into two-inch-thick slices with the bandsaw,
ignoring the proper traditional way of making steaks and roasts. I cut all the
fat off and broiled them with butter and garlic, because Bob was allergic to
onions. Every time I ate a bite, I remembered that cold morning and said a kind
of prayer/poem, thanks for my life coming from their life. I was eating sunrise
and jack pine.

86 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 V

Armature:
Forming Structure

1. About armatures

Armature can mean either a protective shell, like a suit of armor, or an internal
skeleton and support. For an artist, it is the latter. A strong sculpture must be
supported by a strong armature. Nearly every beginning sculptor struggles with
the problem of armature. Some make all their early sculptures of animals lying
down, because it is too hard to figure out how to hide wires in slender legs
with uncertain bends in them. The strategy is rather like painting horses always
standing in deep grass because one can’t paint the complexity of fetlocks. Bob’s
childhood work did tend to be of animals lying down but mostly because they
were ordinary mud clay that crumbled in thin places anyway.
Charlie Russell was an improviser when it came to armatures. Most times
he drove nails up through a piece of wood so they pierced the legs of the already-
made figure. He was fond of strengthening sections with hairpins plucked from
his wife’s head. Hard to know whether he worked small to avoid armatures, or
didn’t need them because of working small. I think he enjoyed small sculptures,
like the tiny sand-cast and colored “Austrian” or “Vienna” bronzes then popular
(not necessarily cast of bronze but also of less expensive alloys), often exotic
animals like the ones he loved to make: monkeys in coconut trees, camels, pigs,
and bears.
When Bob made his first portrait of Charlie Russell, he had no knowledge
about armatures except what he had improvised for mounted animals or seen
in books. The day he decided he was finished with his first heroic-size statue,
the one for that first competition, was the day he came to the shop and found
that Charlie’s arms had fallen off onto the floor in the night. The weather had
warmed up, which made the plastilene less cohesive. There was no other internal
support. No wonder Russell appeared to be a little squatty.

87
 Another very early sculpture, On the Lobo Trail, was made with no armature.
It showed an outlaw on a rugged little pony struggling up a mountain trail. After
a warm summer night in the shop, the pony almost buckled down onto its belly,
which Bob decided made the sculpture better! When he inserted some wires, he
left the legs bent, only correcting the impossible anatomy of the joints.
Bob’s idol, Malvina Hoffman, was just a girl when she tried to model a
portrait of her father over “three sticks of kindling wood fastened to the base,
a tin can upside down over the top ends, and a short board tied across to hold
up the shoulders.”1 When it fell apart of its own weight, she was rescued and
corrected by Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, a friend of
the family who happened to live nearby. In fact, at that point Hoffman entered
a whole community of sculptors and was given access to the studios of Gutzon
Borglum and A. Phimister Proctor. Through her family she already knew many
of the fine artists of that period and had been given an opportunity to handle
and study a large collection of Rodin sculptures.
When Hoffman finished the portrait of her father, which Proctor helped
her to translate into marble, she did a clay head of her future husband, Samuel
Grimson, a violinist, working in Borglum’s studio. He gave her the following
critique on her portrait, which would also have been valid for Scriver: “These
lines are a bit sharp ... but here you’ve accented the chin and jaw forms with free
strong strokes of your thumb – leave them – they give freshness to the surface.
Try to work spontaneously. Don’t use little tools; they tend to make it look fussy.
Use only your fingers to get the feel of life into the clay – emphasize the forms
of character but don’t carry it too far. Above all, keep it fresh and active. It takes
courage to know when to stop. Don’t forget that! I’ll come in again tomorrow.”
When Borglum came the next day, he pronounced the bust “ready for your
plaster caster.”
Taxidermy had taught Bob a kind of armature for his work, in that he had
the knowledge of many real animal skeletons, plus their real carcasses, skinned
by himself – not just plaster models like the small écorché (skinless) horse or man
that art stores sell for the study of muscles. Taxidermy animals are not stuffed
at all, but are hollow sculptured forms of papier maché onto which the hide is
glued. Bob learned to cast and to reproduce the flesh of many animals. Each of
his papier maché forms was custom-cast from the carcass of the original animal:
no need to fudge to get a good fit. But they needed support, an armature, inside.
He had put welded steel skeletons inside the large museum animals and, with
Charlie Beil’s prompting, he saw that’s what was needed for sculptures as well.

88 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

2. The armature of Bob’s inner world
Browning, the Sixties

An artist’s work rests on a sort of armature of principles, assumptions, and world-

view. The armature of Bob Scriver’s philosophy was very much turn-of-the-nine-
teenth-century, progress-focused, and anchored in hard work. He believed in
what is called “the Grand Narrative” of the settling of the West. When it came
to art, the 1894 Columbian Exposition in Chicago exemplified his romantic,
entitled, untrammeled idea of what the world was about – or ought to be. This
was the world he learned from adults in his childhood and to him it was the
“Big T” Truth.
My favorite place to visit on weekends or evenings was Hubert Bartlett’s
lumber yard, which was really only a little shack where he lived out by the “Y”
where Highways 89 and 2 divided again on their way south and east of town.
Hubert brought lumber over from the west side of the mountains where it was
cheap. Clouds traveling from the wet coast, going east under the jet stream,
dump their rain in order to rise over the mountains. This creates the amount
of rainfall it takes to grow thick forests, but the east side is in a rain shadow
and has few trees. Hubert traveled at night to evade weigh stations and other
complications.
In the little shack of two-by-fours stacked up like Lincoln logs, Hubert
himself – minus his front teeth – generally rested in an old easy chair with the
legs busted off. A cat wreathed around his shoulders, a dog scrabbled in its sleep
at his feet, and the little tin woodstove hummed with lumber ends and scraps.
It was wood-fragrant, dark, low-ceilinged, and wind-proof, like a cave, with a
constant peppery smell of gunpowder from Hubert’s reloading of ammo in the
next room, and an occasional whiff of the strong coffee on top of the stove. We
would come in from below-zero cold, stamp snow off ourselves, and settle by
the fire. I never said anything, except hello, and no one ever said anything to me
except to nod and give me coffee. It felt safe and easy.
But the conversation was hair-raising. Hubert was a John Bircher, as far to
the political right as it was possible to get, and he was convinced that the world
was soon to be plunged into World War III. He swore he had ammo and guns
“greased, wrapped in plastic, and buried” where the hated “feds” would never
find them, in case it was necessary to fight a revolution. The right to bear arms
was his main religious principle, and he was sure that anything less than a John
Wayne approach to life was an example of moral rot, to say nothing of unpa-
triotic. He talked a lot about the posse comitatus, as people did in those years. I
was grateful to be with Bob, who would no doubt know how to survive in the
mountains after the atomic holocaust began and the people from the cities came
to wreak havoc on us. Somehow the people from the cities and the regulatory
agencies always sounded worse than Russians.

V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E 89
 Of all the endless yarning, the story I always remembered most vividly was
a simple one. About 1960 on a bright, snow-laden moonlit night Hubert had
been bringing a load of lumber over Marias Pass, along Highway 2, which skirts
the south border of Glacier National Park. As always, his rifle with scope lay on
the seat beside him. As he passed along the series of elk meadows, white and flat
as paper, he saw movement and then what he thought was two big dogs playing.
Curious, he pulled over, rolled down his window, and – as many do in this part
of the world – used the scope on his rifle for a closer view. They were wolves,
probably a mated pair, out there in the subzero moonlight. Their fur would have
brought a couple of hundred dollars each. Hubert, who knew this, was always
short of money. Wolves were not protected – no one knew there were any.
He didn’t shoot. After watching until the cold made him shake too hard
to see through the scope, he drove on. When he told the story, both he and Bob
were quiet for a long time. The wood shifted in the stove, settling, and the dog
on the floor made sounds in his throat and twitched his feet. We all understood
that this had been a story about freedom, wilderness, and sanctuary.
Probably both Bob and Hubert, if they were alive today, would oppose
the restocking of wolves in Glacier Park or Yellowstone. They would say it was
just more tinkering and that it endangers the property rights of ranchers strug-
gling to make a living and how could a rancher make it with all these damn
regulations anyway? They would say that no authorities, no college-educated
smart-alecks, should be allowed near Montana and that, anyway, a wolf that
wears a radio collar and gets tracked everywhere, a wolf that is captured and
recaptured by some scientist, that is drugged repeatedly, is not a wolf at all.
And they would have a point, but it was a point relevant to a world that was
ending. The apocalypse that finally came was a shift that the John Birchers felt
but couldn’t resist. Some called it the Age of Aquarius. Machine guns could not
prevent it. A whole lot of young people fell in love with wolves.
In the end, Bob made a sculpture of the cherished Nine-Mile Pack. But
he also made a sculpture of a bull moose being brought down by a wolf pack
that had managed to get the long-legged ungulate onto thin ice. He called it
The Mighty and the Many, which he confided was about government regulators
and tax collectors bringing down the creative entrepreneur. So his sentiments
switched sides, not uncommon with wolves.
To my mind the best wolf was a portrait he called Lunging Lobo. Bob had
long wanted a big male to mount for the museum, but in the Sixties they only
existed (we thought) far to the north. He made arrangements to get the carcass
of a wolf that had been poisoned by a government trapper. Friends went up to
get it in Edmonton and drove it to their home in Calgary, where we could pick it
up. To save a lot of people trouble, we brought it back over the border under a big
pile of garbage in the bed of the pickup, undeclared. Somehow, as the wolf trav-
eled, it acquired the name of “Charlie.” Properly, Lunging Lobo goes alongside a
female wolf crouched into the horns of a moose, Starving She-Wolf.

90 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Resentment of regulation, desire for independence, and love of freedom
put Hubert’s politics where the political gamut bends around to where the right-
wing John Birchers meet the left-wing anarchists. All this had nothing to do
with the family Bob was born into, but Bob managed to make himself think it
did. The Macfie family motto, Pro Rege, “For the King,” became “for” Ronald
Reagan. In his archives a letter to Reagan begins, “My liege lord....” Bob always
portrayed his dad as a Vermonter whose motto was “Don’t tread on me!” But
in fact Thad was born in Clarenceville, Quebec, a loyal Canadian subject of the
British Empire, and he was never a troublemaker. His ancestors had lived in
Vermont before it was Vermont. The tangle didn’t bear up under examination,
so Bob was careful not to examine it.
While still in grade school, Bob had walked out of town with his dog, Dart,
to shoot gophers. He was stopped by the town policeman for carrying his .22
and taken before the crusty old Justice of the Peace. The mouthy kid defended
his case hotly, saying that “the right to bear arms” was in the Constitution of
the United States. The JP denied it. “Ha!” the old man scoffed. “I’d like to
see THAT!” So Robert went up to school, got his civics book and brought it
back so he could point out the Second Amendment. The JP scoffed, “Why, boy,
that’s an OLD copy. It’s out of date now.” Bob was outraged at such ignorance.
From then on, though he never belonged to the NRA, Bob was adamant about
the right to bear arms. In truth, Scrivers and Crellers had been in an actual
militia and had had to fight more than once – he knew that – but AGAINST
Americans in defense of the British Canadian homeland during the American
Revolution. He ignored that.
One day I was walking home along Boundary Street with groceries and
heard a bullet go zinging over my head, close enough to make me hit the ditch.
Two little boys were shooting gophers and had shot towards town, not real-
izing how far a bullet can carry. I arrived at the studio in a tizzy. Bob had been
working with his shirt off, so he was sweaty, sunburned, and hairy besides, a
formidable sight. “Get in the pickup,” he said. In a cloud of dust we swerved out
to the campground and up to the two boys. Bob said almost nothing, though
he was the City Magistrate and Justice of the Peace. He just took the .22 out of
the boy’s hands and bent it over his knee into a U shape. Then he handed it back
and we left. So much for the right to bear arms.
In spite of Robert’s admiring graduation speech about George Washington,
he was proud of the family connections to British landed gentry who saw
Washington as a traitor. He was proud of his Scots heritage – never friendly to
the English king – and evidently unaware that three-fourths of his genes were
from parts of Europe that would today be included in Germany. In short, when
it came to family and nation, he was all emotional sentiment and very little
rational analysis – but that was true of just about everything in his life.
Scots are notoriously proud of their national origin, based on education
and endurance, anchored in the place and history of Scotland. This I know

V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E 91
 because my maiden name is Strachan, which is a little town not far from the
River Dee in Scotland. My great-grandfather Strachan brought his family from
Edinburgh, Scotland, to homestead in South Dakota. My paternal grandmother
was also Scots, but her family arrived earlier through Canada. Beulah had a bit
of German in her family tree, but because of the feelings against Germans in
World War I, she never mentioned it, and took enormous pride in her U.S.
citizenship.
Bob’s family had much the same situation. He represented his father’s name
as “Flemish,” and was very proud of his mother’s name, Macfie, which he carried
as a middle name. His mother had a book of tartans, showing the plaid and a
few sentences about each particular clan, but the page for Macfie said, “Noted
for being....” and then the rest of the sentence was blacked out. Wessie’s bridge
friends had looked at this book and were very intrigued to know what had been
censored. One of them happened to be in Waterton Peace Park, which is the
Canadian national park contiguous with Glacier Park, and spotted in a tourist
shop the very same book. Quickly turning to Macfie, she saw that they were
noted for being sheep thieves! She could hardly wait for the next bridge party.
Wessie was mortified. But then it became a funny story within the family.
National allegiance was a high value, but what was their country truly?
England? Scotland? Canada? Or the United States? Strictly, they were a con-
tinuation of the displaced Palatine families, British colonialists who did not
return home, Canadian nationals who had become U.S. citizens for reasons of
commerce, and whites on an Indian reservation where their allegiance shrank to
each other, only four people: Mom, Pop, Harold, and Robert. Bob memorial-
ized each in a small bust. In time they were buried together, also Harold’s wife
Hazel, but none of Robert’s wives. The “family stone” is on Bob’s grave but was
bought previously by Wessie when Thad died. It’s not impressive.
Their feeling was that they were of a privileged class, and on the reservation
this seemed true. Most older Indians would never tell me what they thought of
the Scrivers, though some expressed admiration and friendship, but it was pretty
clear that they all thought of Scrivers as “OUR white people.” They were not
Indian and yet they belonged to a shared history.
Everyone, white or not, was absorbed in the difficulties of living on a reser-
vation. Was the town an “island of jurisdiction” in the reservation, accountable
to the state? This is what the whites liked to assume. Did the tribe itself have
sovereignty over its lands, or was it only living there at the sufferance of federal
agencies? This was vital to the dignity of the tribal members. The land was listed
as federal land, not tribal land, and therefore compensatory federal monies were
supplied to the school for the value of that federal land. The tribe was sovereign
but paid nothing to the school. Could an Indian on the reservation be sued in
civil court? Could a white man be arrested by tribal police? Must Indians buy
a state driver’s license? The questions remain unresolved, though the courts are
slowly working their way through them. Today the dilemmas are much sharper

92 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

because of tobacco, casinos, and drugs on one-tribe/double-reservations that
adjoin at the national border, making them a kind of overlay on two nations, a
gap in the national borders.
The T.E. Scrivers were raised in the Edwardian years, the Upstairs, Downstairs
years. At home Wessie’s family had had a much-loved “hired girl,” Alice Chew.
She had been sent from England as a youngster because her birth family was
rock-bottom poor. I don’t know whether she was technically “indentured.” In
Canada at some point she stopped being a servant and became a member of the
family, formally adopted. Certainly Wessie loved her and depended upon her.
Occasional hired help in Quebec was French and I suspect that in Wessie’s
mind, French was not unlike Indian. When she hired temporary help – she
never had servants in Browning – they were Indians, often one of the Bremner
girls – vigorous and competent sisters. One said to Wessie innocently, “Oh, I like
cleaning at your house so much better than cleaning at Mrs. Sherburne’s house.
In this house I can tell what I’ve cleaned.” It was Wessie who repeated the story.
If someone were ill or hurt, it was Audra Pambrun, the Blackfeet nurse, who
asked no questions but arrived to stay as long as necessary. She was never seen as
hired help, but always as a skillful friend.
In Browning the Scrivers were entrepreneurs who had to keep the goodwill
of their customers, not Bureau of Indian Affairs officials who could impose their
ideas. The only time Thad got involved in politics was when it affected eco-
nomics, like the constant attempts to move the highway out of Browning. (The
threat remains. Bob fought it all the time I was with him.) I was cautioned not
to say anything offensive about Indians, but it wasn’t always possible to predict
what might be offensive. I remarked about all the glow-in-the-dark Jesus figures
on the car dashboards and was quickly shushed. (I never see them anymore.
Now it’s dream catchers, eagle feathers, and crystals.)
The nineteenth century persisted in Browning. Once wash water was de-
livered to the door in barrels on a wobbly wagon driven by Green Grass Bull, at
one time famous as a warrior and now famous for the pack of dogs that followed
him everywhere. Over the decades after World War I, plumbing, electricity, and
finally (after World War II) piped gas came to the house. Additions were made,
the last of which was a breakfast nook in the kitchen which the Scrivers, by then
aging and alone, enjoyed thoroughly, not least because it gave them a good view
of whatever was going on in the street. The newspaper noted the installation of a
“boulevard” (grass strip) and sidewalk in front of the house. At some point Bob
planted poplars by cutting sticks in spring and burying the lower branches to
become roots, so the breakfast nook was pleasantly shaded in summer. The trees
grew quickly but the people felt no need to grow or change.

V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E 93
 3. The Buffalo Roundup: we both ride
Moiese, 1963

The buffalo roundup came around again and Bob decided I could go along. It
took a lot of people to push the buffalo in from the hills and coulees, but even
so they had to be brought along a different route each time to keep them from
figuring out where they were going. When they were close to the actual chutes
and corrals, only a determined horse and a hell-for-leather pace would get them
to go where they were supposed to go. We both rode in the grand sweep and Bob
would help cut out the smaller groups at the corrals.
Once started in the first of a series of chutes, the buffalo were handled
mostly from above, where the cowboys used catwalks. They had two tools: an
axe-handle to defend themselves down on the ground in the corral, and a long
bamboo pole with a half-dozen jangling tin cans wired to the end which they
used as a distraction and as bait. They tried to separate bulls so they were han-
dling only one at a time. Enraged, bulls could rip up even the two-by-twelve
boards and timber posts of the corral, so everyone moved slowly and calmly.
The goal was to count, brand, doctor, and cull the herd. A few were sold live.
The robes, skulls, and meat of others were sold later on, after the work of the
roundup was over.
It was clear October weather. I wore my new shotgun chaps, a birthday
gift from Bob. The manager had two orphans in his yard: a baby antelope and
a baby buffalo born out of season. I fed them windfall apples, noting how the
antelope chipped off a little bite and the buffalo chomped half the apple. I was
warned never to turn my back on the buffalo, because she loved to sneak up
and butt people in the rear. Only as tall as my waist, she was strong enough to
knock a grown man flat. When we all stood around with loose cinches on our
horses, waiting for instruction, the little buffalo walked back and forth, just
short enough to pass underneath the horses so they shuddered at the tickle under
their bellies. If they hadn’t been both agreeable and conserving energy for the
day they knew was coming, they would have bucked.
My orders were to stay with Bob, to keep back, and not to try to chase any
animals on my own. We went far out to the ridge we had been assigned and
waited for the signal to begin the long drive back to headquarters. I took a pic-
ture of Bob and Gunnysack and he took one of me. When the prints came back
they were over-exposed, but we thought they looked like Remington paintings,
romantically bleached to dust-color. We didn’t have long to wait until the signal
came. A long line straggled out from the edge of the range, and buffalo began to
move ahead of us. A small group of animals doubled back, and Bob rode off to
the side to head them back in. Most of them turned, but a young bull came out
of nowhere and headed toward me.

94 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

These photos of each other were taken while we waited for the signal to begin
moving the bison. I’m with my “learning horse,” Skeeter, and Bob is with his
“buffalo horse,” Gunsmoke. 1963. Photo: Bob and Mary Scriver

V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E 95
 It was all very well to tell me the rules, but Skeeter had been used on cattle
roundups before and he had no intention of letting anything go by. Shifting
directions so quickly and violently that I had to clutch the horn with both hands
to stay on, he confronted the young bull. Its horns were very sharp indeed: I
could see the sun glinting off their polished ebony points. Everything stopped,
except for my heart and Skeeter’s breathing. The bull glared, trying to make up
his inexperienced mind. He kicked up a few gouts of dust.
“Don’t move! For Chrissakes, don’t move!” Bob came as fast as Gunnysack
could travel, and that was enough to turn the young bull back in the direction
he was supposed to go. Skeeter relaxed, but I didn’t. “Yahoo!” I yelled and swung
my hat, which was really one of Bob’s old hats. He laughed.
Nothing much happened for the next couple of hours. We soaked up the
sun and the amazing sight of the buffalo gathering into a herd. Arrowleaf bal-
samroot, a kind of low-to-the-ground sunflower with big heart-shaped ruffled
leaves, had dried where it had bloomed in sheets during spring. The thundering
feet of the running animals rushing through the leaves sounded like the surf of
a mighty ocean.
When we pushed the buffs up to a steep and rocky hillside, we expected
them to go around the shoulder, but for some reason they went right on up the
broken incline to the top, not even slowing. Bob followed them up, but Skeeter
thought it was a waste of energy – meaning he flatly refused to go – so we went
around the shoulder in case of stragglers.
In a few minutes Bob appeared at the edge of the rimrocks above me. His
arms were waving wildly. “Molonimfutedgorup!” he called. I couldn’t get any
sense out of it. Then the ground began to shake. Skeeter stopped. Ahead of
us, coming straight for us at full speed, was the whole brown, heaving wave
of the returning herd. Determined to do my part, I detached my picket rope
and waved the whole coil over my head, shouting as loud as I could – the only
obstacle between several hundred buffalo and their freedom. They simply parted
and went around me, rolling their eyes sideways as they rushed past.
It turned out that one of the other guest riders, a Texan who had come to
buy buffalo, had gotten too eager and pushed the herd a little too fast. Unlike
cows, when buffalo are crowded, they disperse into small clusters and go in
every direction. Bob explained later that the principle is survival: drive up on a
bunch of domestic chickens in the road and they will tend to stick together, even
if it means running under the wheels of the car. Drive up on a bunch of grouse,
and they rush away in all directions, so that some of them are likely to be safe no
matter where the vehicle goes.
When we all regrouped to decide what to do next, Bob and the others
were tickled by me. They said I’d been so excited that my voice was falsetto and
my self-assigned mission was so hopeless it was ridiculous. I laughed, too, but
secretly I thought I was rather brave. And I was glad I wasn’t the Texan, who was
ostracized for the rest of the day.

96 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 The horses were exhausted and most of the riders voted to stop for lunch.
Babe May, the foreman, was a determined and competent man. He was also
disgusted and perhaps that was part of the reason he said, “All right, fine. I’ll go
get those buffs myself.” And he did. Somehow he rounded up the whole herd
and had them back on their way to headquarters by the time we finished our
break. He had lived through several attacks by bull buffalo, once surviving a
charge that carried both him and his horse for yards on the horns of the bull.
Rather sheepishly, the crowd finished their job. A few old bulls were left
in brushy ravines, simply noted rather than endangering everyone. Late in the
afternoon we sat on the ground, decompressing and telling stories, and someone
started a whiskey bottle around the circle. Each man (there were no women
besides me) took a swig, wiped off the mouth of the bottle, and handed it on.
Bob took his jolt, handed it to me, and I wiped it off – and handed it on. Not
because of sanitation or even because I wasn’t one of the boys, but because it was
a chance for a joke and it was a little too much like a communal kiss.
All the next day Bob helped run small bunches of buffalo down into the
chutes. The men risked their lives in every wild descent, mostly because of a gi-
ant boulder that obstructed the hillside. It was several more years before anyone
thought to dynamite the rock out of the way.
Everyone was so competent that it was easy to forget the danger. But when
one bull went on the fight, Grant, one of the regular hands, was just a second too
slow swarming up the corral fence. Hooking at him and leaping to get higher,
the bull barely caught one horn around Grant’s lower leg and flipped all six
feet of him end-for-end high into the dusty air. Grant hit flat, momentarily
immobilized by lack of air, and the bull twisted around to drop his massive head
into Grant’s back, so as to grind the life out of him.
At the very last second, another hand jangled his tin-can pole right beside
Grant and the bull mistook his target, smashing the cans. By that time, Grant
was rolling and three other hands were down on the ground to boost him up the
fence while two more stood guard with their ax-handles. No bones were broken,
but Grant had a little trouble getting his blood to circulate for a few minutes.
The bull stood drawn up into an arch, every muscle bunched into a ridge.
His shining black nose wrinkled up high, and the slobber ran from his purple
mouth in long silver strings. Warily wheeling in circles, he threw sheets of dirt
up behind him. His great swinging belly tassel vented acrid urine into the dust.
Everything stopped while we all gazed at his huge frustrated male power and
wondered if he would demolish the two-by-twelve fences. It had happened
before. We were relieved not to be out on the open prairie with him, as the
Blackfeet must have been.
Long before the Plains Indians were a horse people they were a buffalo
people. The most sacred ceremony of all, the Horn Society, is in two parts.
The men’s part is about virility – bison bulls. The women’s part is about birth
– bison cows producing calves. These natural events shape the dances, songs,

V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E 97
 Annual October Bison Roundup at the Moiese National Bison Range.
Bob is second from left (1963). Photo: Mary Scriver.

Bob Scriver and Ace Powell at the Moiese National Bison range, 1962.
Photo: C.J. Henry.

98 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

and pantomimed actions of what might otherwise seem arbitrary. That’s why it’s
so important to get everything exactly right. The ceremony is meant to touch
by imitation whatever forces create a viable population of healthy bison, because
they are the source of everything. To blunder, to quarrel, to balk, might mean
that no buffalo would return. And eventually none did, until modern times
when tribes pride themselves on their herds.
The Moiese buffs didn’t have to be run over cliffs, nor was there any relevant
ceremony except prayer for one’s personal safety. No need to hurry. Before this
old bull was pushed on through the chutes, he was left to settle for a while. We
walked around a bit and talked quietly. Many took photos. Grant was checked
out and found whole. Then work resumed.
When the animals not diverted for sale or slaughter came out the end of
the chutes, they most often came “stotting,” a strange bouncing-on-all-four-feet
way of going along. They calmed quickly and began to graze their way back out
into the open fields, looking peaceful and approachable. We knew better. Lying
along the fence, I took a series of photos, safe only as long as I held perfectly still.
A telephoto would have been smarter but I didn’t have one.
When it was time to butcher the animals that had been separated, Bob was
invited to go back so he could measure them. I didn’t go because of teaching.
When he created his bronze called Real Meat, each of the animals was based
on one of the animals whose carcass he had crawled all over, sketching and
measuring. In fact, they let him shoot one of the bulls. As directed, when it
had been run into a tight chute, he put the rifle right in the ear of the animal,
and pulled the trigger. In spite of the roar and impact, the bull reared up and
fought for a few minutes before dying. Afterwards, still a bit shocked, Bob told
me, “He fought for his life to the very end. I’m ashamed.” Its huge vitality made
him yearn for the days of unlimited herds on an unlimited prairie where a dead
buffalo had more dignity.
The next year we went back. The day of the drive a cloud came down to
the ground and everything was shrouded in fog. We could only tell where the
buffalo were because of their feet swishing the balsamroot. It was like a ghost
roundup. We hardly dared separate more than a few feet because we lost sight
of each other.
Mr. Henry retired, and the new manager refused to let outside horses
participate for fear of equine sleeping sickness. Bob went once after that and
rode “Cactus,” a tall Appaloosa, but for him the fun was riding Gunnysack
(Gunsmoke). The first time Bob had gone, people had turned up their noses
at the little white horse and assigned Bob to ride with Ernie Kraft, a Refuge
employee, who was supposed to keep him out of trouble. At one point Ernie
went hell-bent-for-leather up a steep hill, paused at the top and looked back to
see how far up Bob had gotten – Bob loved to act out how Ernie was baffled to
see no one coming up the hill and then did a double-take when he realized Bob
was right beside him.

V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E 99
 That first time, Bob had been charged by a bull down in a coulee and
Gunnysack had narrowly saved himself and his rider by going nearly straight up
the coulee wall. The way Bob told it, the whole thing was research to see whether
Blackfeet could actually have killed buffalo with bow and arrow from the back
of a horse. His conclusion was, “Hell, yes!”
The last time we rode, we watched the sold buffalo going away in the backs
of trucks and U-Haul trailers – tarped to make them dark to keep the buffalo
quiet – and felt that nearly constant sense of ending, loss, disintegration that is
part of being a Westerner. We didn’t have quite the overwhelming sense of the
whole planet being dirtied and diminished that eats at us now. Nor did we have
any consciousness that there were ways of fighting back, of turning the tide by
changing ourselves. We felt that to be changed was to join the lost, the ones who
gave up, the weak.
News from the cities was scary. And then one snowy November afternoon
Bob was sitting in a café for lunch when someone came in breathlessly shouting,
“Kennedy has been shot!” Someone asked, “Oh, yeah? Which Kennedy?” The
Kennedy clan on the reservation was a big one and they weren’t exactly mild-
mannered. It took a while for the messenger to make everyone understand that
he meant the President of the United States.
When the principal announced the assassination over the school P.A. sys-
tem, I was talking to a student, Ed Kennedy, just before the afternoon classes
began. I’ve forgotten what we said, but the wood-patterned formica of the desk
in front of me became imprinted on my brain. “This is history,” I thought. “And
maybe the right-wingers are right – maybe the world as we know it is ending.”
In a reservation town with a shocking death rate from disease, violence, and
drunk-driving, far enough to the north that blizzards raked us all winter, and
dry enough that a few inches of rainfall meant the difference between grass and
drought, it was easy to despair.

4. Organic armatures: skeletons

Bynum, Sun River, Moiese, Starr School, mid-Sixties

Since childhood Bob had been interested in skeletons, their graceful shapes and
clever joints. As a boy he had boiled out a rabbit and wired its bones back together,
then set it proudly on the bureau in the room he shared with his brother. Now
he was thinking about getting a human skeleton and I could only hope he didn’t
intend to go collect one locally, particularly one still in use by its “wearer.”
He spotted an ad in the newspaper. A human skeleton was for sale in
Bynum. It was historical, a skeleton that had been found on the prairie with a
metal arrowhead in its hip bone. It had been reassembled by some doctor long

100 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

ago and was being exhibited in a glass-fronted case at the Trexler rock shop.
Trexler’s widow, who eventually became Marion Brandvold, the original finder
of dinosaur eggs, was selling it to meet an unexpected expense.
We stood in her rock shop late at night, while her son David showed us
the two bummer lambs they had brought inside to raise. Probably there were
unrecognized stone baby dinosaur bones in the pails of rocks around our feet.
Marion is a remarkable woman, a person of force and charisma who grew up
there in Bynum. In advanced age she somehow manages to be sexy even when
she has failed to get around to dyeing her hair black long enough that the part
shows an inch of silver on each side. I never forgot her after that night and still
stop to visit. We didn’t buy the skeleton. It went to the tourist village in Choteau
while Marion developed a larger fossil shop in an old Bynum church with purple
and turquoise dinosaurs painted on it by John Brandvold, her second husband.
Her son became a professional paleontologist who conducts tours.
But now Bob was obsessed with the idea that he should get a skeleton of a
man and a skeleton of a horse. He would get a six-foot man to make it easy to
use the inch-to-a-foot scale, but a life-size horse would be too big, so we would
look for a Pony of America skeleton. That would be far more convenient since
they weren’t much bigger than the largest dogs. It turned out to be easy enough
to order a human skeleton from a biological materials catalog we borrowed from
the high school. But we were a little stumped as to how to go about acquiring the
horse skeleton. It would be too expensive to buy a live horse – and we’d have to
wait for it to die, since none of us would be willing to kill it for its skeleton.
Finally we discovered that there were some Pony of America breeders
down by Great Falls. But we never got farther than, “We’re looking for a Pony
of America horse skeleton...” before they’d slam the door on us, yelling, “You
monsters! Don’t come around here! We don’t kill our horses!” Finally we found
one person who recognized Bob as a sculptor and listened to the end. It just hap-
pened that they’d had a stallion that had died from a twisted gut – which meant
that the skeleton would be intact. They’d hauled it out to a field and dumped a
truckload of sand on it, so it would be easy to get at – it wasn’t in a hole in the
ground or in a carrion heap. It had been a very valuable stallion. It took us a
while to convince them that probably the skeleton was NOT so valuable as the
living horse. But we finally reached an agreement.
We looked around for people who wouldn’t mind digging up a dead horse.
Blackie No Runner claimed he was pretty tough and would be able to do such
a job. When we got there, the sand seemed clean and quiet. It wasn’t until we
got down to the former horse that we hit the bad stuff. Blackie began to throw
up and he pretty much spent the next few hours retching in some bushes off to
the side, while Bob and I dug out the horse bones. We got everything except the
very last two bones of the tail. No one had the time or motivation to assemble
the bones, so eventually Bob inquired of a scientific supplies outfit the cost of

V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E 101
 wiring them together on a stand. The estimate on April 17, 1970, was $1,680.
I’ve forgotten what we paid for the bones – a few hundred dollars.
But then the skeleton of the man didn’t come. Month after month with no
skeleton. We called the company and they explained that they got their bodies
from India – poor people who died in the street and had no family. But those
people were small, normally, so they had been waiting for someone six feet tall
to die. We decided to compromise and asked for the biggest skeleton they had. It
came. We sat – all of us, including the skeleton – and pondered. This was all that
remained of someone in India, so poor that his bones were sold, so unknown
that no one cared. When that really got through to us, we sent it back. Very
slowly, our consciousnesses were being raised.
The biological supply people asked if we would like a plastic six-foot skel-
eton, since someone somewhere had once made molds for plastic replicas of
some Norwegian of that height. We agreed. When he arrived, he was beautifully
clean and non-human. This was especially clear when looking at his jawfull
of flawless plastic teeth, which was spring-loaded to stay clamped shut unless
someone pulled it open. The real skeleton had had woefully bad teeth.
The skeleton became a sort of character in our lives. We left him loafing on
the sofa or with his legs crossed in a rocking chair. He leaned over a chess set or a
bowl of soup – well, an empty bowl with a spoon in his hand. When Halloween
came, I put hair chaps on him, stood him in the window holding back the
drapes with his bony hands, rigged blue Christmas tree lights in his eyes, put a
six-shooter in each hip-bone hole and – for a final flourish – clamped a Bowie
knife in his jaws. I was looking forward to seeing what effect all this had on the
trick-or-treat crowd, but no one knocked on the door. We could hear the cars
and pickups slow down, stop, and then suddenly step on the gas – in a hurry to
get out of there. We had to eat leftover candy for days.
When Lane, Bob’s six-year-old grandson, came for the summer, we made
him a bed in what we called “the Indian room” because of the artifacts on the
walls. The skeleton hung in there under his muslin cover. We pumped up an air
mattress and spread out a sleeping bag, and thought the boy would be comfort-
able. He thought so, too. We left the hall light on. But we hadn’t considered the
skeleton’s bony toes hanging out the bottom of his cover. Lane rolled over in the
semi-dark and there, at the level of his face were THOSE TOES. I was sound
asleep when I felt a small finger prodding my shoulder. “Mary, can I sleep in here
with you and Grandpa? That skellington is just TOO MUCH.” He slept in the
middle and made no trouble at all.
One of my favorite Blackfeet ghost stories is in Walter McClintock’s The
Old North Trail. Bob said his dad knew McClintock, who came at the turn of
the century as a scientist making a survey and took excellent notes as well as
photos. In fact, he lived with an Indian family for quite a while and returned
annually with gifts. In this ghost story, a Blackfeet man camps alone for the
night in a grove of trees. He sits for a while by his fire and along comes someone

102 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 The skeleton earns his keep by posing for a cowboy sculpture,
“Saturday Night in Cowtown” (1960s). Photo: Mary Scriver.

else, wrapped up in a blanket. The man asks to share the fire and, of course, the
traveler agrees.
But pretty soon the guest stretches out his toes toward his host and his toes
are long and bony. He won’t keep them to himself. Finally the traveler, losing
his temper, takes a piece of firewood and smashes the man’s feet and legs. Then
he has enough peace to sleep. The next morning he sees that he has camped by a
tree with a burial up in its branches – and the feet of the burial are smashed.
The absolutely real ghost story of the Blackfeet is Ghost Ridge, which is
on the turnoff from Highway 89 to Heart Butte along Little Badger where the
Old Agency used to be. In the Starvation Winter a combination of smallpox
and no buffalo – plus none of the supplies promised by the U.S. government
in payment for the reservation – killed as many as six hundred people. All this

V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E 103
 lethal winter the people, as they died, were taken up to the top of the highest
ridge and stacked. When spring came, the bodies had pretty well freeze-dried,
but they had leaked nutrients into the ground so that vegetation grew up around
them and then dust blew in and piled up.
We never understood what happened after that, until someone told me that
he was driving the ambulance once with Vinie Chattin in it. At that time she
was a sick old lady being taken to Great Falls for treatment, so she was supposed
to lie down in the back, but she wanted to ride up in the front to see everything.
Red-headed Vinie never wanted to miss anything. The driver stopped close to
Old Agency, where no one could see, and let her move up to the front. Her father
had been the Indian agent in the years after the Starvation Winter. She said that
he had sent a crew out to burn off the top of the ridge – the vegetation, the bones
and whatever wrappings were left. At some point thirty-seven skeletons were
removed and sent to the Smithsonian. They were repatriated in 1991.
The sanitation people wanted bodies buried and gradually converted people
to using cemeteries – with some exceptions. A few people felt it was too repellent
to put their loved ones in the dark ground, so they built small houses and piled
the coffins into them. One of these frail weathered mausoleums was on Bird
Earrings’ place near Starr School. When Bob was a boy, he rode up that way on
Banjo and was about to investigate the rough little cabin when a shot rang and
buzzed by his head. He was not wanted and he left.
In the Sixties, when the Egyptologist Keith Seele was visiting, he asked
to see that burial house. We took him there and looked at the people in their
broken-open coffins. All their heads were gone, taken as souvenirs. One woman
had a small child in her arms, but the baby had no head either. Dr. Seele wanted
to look more closely at a bracelet on a woman’s arm, and since it had become
detached, he simply took it out into the sun. We snapped a photo, then put it
back where it belonged. Just then a coat hanging on a nail by the door began
to move. There was a frozen moment until a mouse jumped out of the pocket.
We left.
Dr. Seele was used to handling dead people – he was in charge of the ex-
cavations made when the Aswan Dam was going to flood a whole valley and he
found in the graves several remarkable objects (for instance, a mirror that was a
dancing woman holding up the round polished disk). But still I wonder at us.
We ought to have understood that these people had died recently enough to be
the parents and grandparents of living people we knew. We were infected by that
strange conviction that dead white people are different from dead Indian people,
who are objects of scientific and then idle curiosity. We knew those heads ended
up in bars or in some man’s study, like the heads of stuffed animals. It was like
an evil spell, one that makes contemporary Indian people desperate with rage
and sorrow, because it still clings to and blinds white people.
There is another story about dead people. A small Indian boy came into the
shop and said he had found bodies, that he was afraid of them, and that Judge

104 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Scriver should do something about it. (Bob also acted as coroner sometimes.)
With the small boy riding in the back of the pickup, we went to see. The boy said
he didn’t want to go near the place, so he would jump out when we got close.
When we got near, he pounded on the top of the pickup cab to stop us. It was
Starr School again, a grove of evergreen trees not far from the burial house.
Walking into the gloom, we had to wait for our eyes to adjust from the
afternoon sun. This time we found two very small tree burials that had been
wedged into the forks of evergreen trees until the wind had sprung them out.
Fallen to the ground were the bodies of babies. The small boxes they had been in
were crushed except for a few boards that stayed up somehow – perhaps nailed.
The bodies had freeze-dried, which made them light and porous, and they were
in pieces, either from the tree smashing the boxes or because dogs had been at
them. We left them as they were and went back to town to call the coroner. We
never did find out what their story was, and it’s just as well that we didn’t. When
the coroner went out to take care of those tiny bodies, he also cleared out the
burial house and burned it down.

5. Broken rib cage

Browning, 1965

Early in the summer morning Bob came for me so we could go riding. He

wanted to take the edge off Playboy, who was usually the company horse because
of his easy gait, so we caught the horses with oats in the Trombley field where
they were living and saddled up. A small creek crossed the field with a trail worn
down to the rather deep water and back up the other side. Bob led the way but as
soon as he got into the water, Playboy exploded. Even with water up to his belly
he was rising into the air, twisting, and hitting again in sheets of creek water.
In a few seconds he was across the creek, bounced off alternating sides of the
trail-cut, and finally knocked Bob off so that he lit on the worn trail on his chest,
a shoulder on each raised side, and burst the cartilage of his rib-cage sternum. I
thought he’d been killed. Playboy went galloping off, carefully holding his reins
over to the side so he wouldn’t step on them.
When I knelt beside Bob, he would only repeat over and over, “Get me
the rifle from the pickup. I’m gonna kill that sunnavabitch.” He could hardly
stand up, but managed to get one foot in my stirrup and bend over the saddle
so I could get him back to the pickup. I stripped Zuke and let him go, then got
behind the steering wheel. “We’re going to the Indian hospital,” I said.
“No, no! Not the hospital! I refuse to go to the hospital!”

V A R M AT U R E : F O R M I N G S T R U C T U R E 105
 “Either we’re going to the hospital, or I’m going straight to the nearest
bar and announce that you can’t stay on your horse.” He shut up. I went to
Emergency at the Indian Health Service.
A young doctor came to look and went away to get a hypo. “Don’t give
him morphine,” I said. “He’s allergic to morphine.” The doctor looked at me
and gave Bob the hypo of morphine, which caused him to melt. We ended up
on the floor with his head on my shoulder, his chest curled over, me kneeling.
A nurse came in with a big roll of adhesive tape, took off his shirt, and wrapped
his chest from armpits to waist with layers of the stuff. She didn’t shave him or
put on a layer of gauze first. Never needed to with hairless Indians – but Bob
had a true pelt. Then she helped me get him back into the pickup while he raved
incoherently.
Luckily, the men were already at the shop and Carl had the idea of sup-
porting Bob’s back with a piece of plywood. We eased him into bed and he
was unconscious for the rest of that day. The next day he discovered that even
wrapped in tape, having one’s sternum broken is the most painful of injuries,
partly because every toe wiggle and head turn is connected. It took longer to
heal than if he had broken a bone. Every morning Carl and the others slowly sat
him up with the plywood and every night I struggled to lean him down.
Removing the tape was an ordeal I didn’t witness, thank goodness. One of
the crew drove him to Cut Bank and I could almost hear him screaming forty
miles away when the nurses, their jaws set, cut and ripped off tape with hair
attached. Once it stopped hurting, Bob was interested in how hairless he was for
the first time since childhood. In adolescence he had been so upset by the grow-
ing-in fur that his mother had paid for electrolysis, but after one square inch had
been cleared, he decided it was too painful. I used to look for that square inch.
After that when we rode (including the bison roundup that fall), I re-
wrapped him according to his directions (a layer of gauze first), with a pair of
crossed sticks at his back to keep his sternum from being stretched. Pretty soon
he went to the saddlemaker and got him to create a hybrid between a belt and
a corset that he could buckle up the front. He wore it often over the rest of his
years. I wonder if it was buried with him.
Every morning in Bob’s little studio home we opened the drapes and stood
looking at the mountains for a while. In the Sixties they were full of snow all
winter every winter. The sun painted them peach and indigo, shifting all day
as the sun moved through a clear sky. The Backbone of the World, an armature
of the land, controlled everything. It was our weather maker, our water keeper.
These uprisings of rock, which result in the tumbling and over-sliding of gigan-
tic slabs of continent, are easy to interpret because they are sedimentary layers
created by ancient oceans and winds. “We can understand it,” say the geologists,
“But only afterwards. We can’t predict much and certainly we can’t hope to
control what happens.” They say that the prairie grasses evolved after the Rocky
Mountains created the high plains.

106 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 VI

Waste Mold:
Shards on the Table

1. Waste molds, made for destruction

The plaster waste mold is the one made directly against the plastilene. When the
plastilene is picked out, the space is filled with a harder plaster positive (called
by its trade name, Hydrocal™), and then the soft plaster is sacrificed – chipped
off in bits. Chiseling off the softer plaster from the hard Hydrocal™ casting
takes skill, confidence, and concentration: even the best craftsmen will do a little
damage to the casting unless they have good luck.
The crucial skill is the ability to see both the positive shape of the figure
and the negative shape that figure makes in the mold. The management of that
infinitesimal interface with parting compounds and one’s mental map of where
the surface goes in or out – how figure and mold pull on each other – is the key
to creating molded figures. The principle of the whole sequence of processes in
lost wax casting is transformation without loss. This is an idea worth pondering,
even as one acts on it.
First look at the plastilene figure from all sides. Sit quietly and turn it slowly,
imagining cross-sections, noticing undercuts, planning strategy. What is now a posi-
tive clay form, soft and malleable, must be converted to a negative plaster imprint,
rigid and permanent. How will the plaster pull at the clay when it is removed? Will
the clay give way as it should? Or will it break a piece out of the plaster? Can the divi-
sions between plaster sections be planned to eliminate the trouble? Hasty judgments
are a mistake. Experience is a great help. An eye for three dimensions. An engineer’s
appreciation of stresses and strengths. Animals with long slender legs always present
major problems.
The miniature animals for the dioramas were remarkably different from all
the smooth little trinket animals Bob had previously made. They were supple,
suggestive, alive, full of individual personality and made with a slightly rougher,

107
 Making the first waste mold of “An Honest Try,” 1968. Photo: Mary Scriver.

less finished technique. As soon as one of them was complete in plastilene, they
had to be converted into hard Hydrocal™.
The highest point of the little diorama animal was often something delicate:
a furl of ear, a flare of tail. (The horns were simply removed to be cast in latex and
added back later.) In a cigar box were hundreds of bits of keystone-shaped brass,
thin as paper. These had to be inserted, oh-so-carefully, into the animal, often
right down from the ear and through the side of the face, like a scalpel being
sunk into flesh, a razor slashing but the razor remaining in place. The next shim
went in, barely overlapping or just touching the first, and then the third, until
there was a little fence going down the neck and the breast and the leg to the bit
of plate glass on which it rested. Another row of shims had to meet this fence
at the top and then proceed down its own course, until the two dividing lines
had marked off a section to be covered with plaster mold. Since these diorama
models were so small, the work demanded considerable manual dexterity.

108 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Mix batches of plaster in the old margarine tubs and plastic bowls that wander
about the shop. First break the old hardened plaster out by crushing the bowl in one’s
hands or against the table. Like china, it rings, shatters, and falls in shards into the
garbage can (for careful workers) or onto the floor (for those in a hurry – like Bob).
Put water of a certain temperature in the bowl. Too hot makes the plaster set
too quickly and too cold makes the plaster set up too slowly. Gypsum, or calcium
sulphate, which is what plaster really is, belongs to a family of minerals that are
held together with chemical bonds. They can be particle-ized by grinding and bak-
ing, but the broken chemical bonds are reactivated by the addition of water. Water
temperature affects the speed of the reaction. If the plaster has been stored out in a
cold shed in the winter, warmer water is helpful. If the work is going to be tricky and
demand time, cold water is a good idea. For the rigid mold around a clay model,
add laundry bluing to the water (to distinguish the mold from the model later in the
process) and use ordinary soft plaster.
The key to mixing plaster is putting the plaster into the water and not the other
way around. Carry the powder in a can or jar, if that’s handy, or simply cup a hand
directly into the torn-open sack. Then, as in sifting flour, rain the powdered plaster
into the water gradually until a volcano arises in the middle, slowly absorbing the
white powder and turning a delicious soft blue almost impossible to find in paint or
cloth. When the summit of the volcano develops cracks and faults, like a miniature
geological demonstration, stop pouring plaster and pitch the rest of the handful back
in the sack. This is a key point in the process to be learned only by experience – the
whole thing is experience.
Next come a few moments of respite. Lay out a small cheap paintbrush, the
kind meant for painting trim. In a minute, slide one hand to the bottom of the
plaster/volcano, if the container is big enough. It is vital not to make bubbles, and a
brush tends to make bubbles. The idea is to agitate, not stir, to let the water gradually
touch every particle of powder. Again there is standing around. Bob uses the time
for a bit of housekeeping or making a last-minute inspection of the shim-insertions,
testing to make sure the pressure of plaster won’t knock them out. This is a bad time
for the phone to ring or for someone to drop by.
Soon, what had been a skim milk solution begins to transform in the way that a
sauce or cooked pudding begins to change with heat. The mixture becomes like cream
and coats whatever it touches. Put the little brush to work painting plaster onto
the animal – only in the section partitioned by shims – so that plaster is poked into
every little crevice, swizzled up its nose, urged into every bit of detail, rudely hustled
up between legs, always trying to make sure plaster goes everywhere but without
making bubbles. One how-to book advises, “Enough force must be used to make sure
that [plaster] penetrates the smallest anfractuosities.”1 (Little sinuous twistings and
turnings.) Some people throw the plaster at the clay.
Then the mixture passes into another phase, stiffening like whipped cream.
Gravity can no longer pull all the creamy stuff back off, for it smooths now, like
butter frosting. Put aside the brush and pick up an artist’s spatula – or maybe even a

V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E 109
 cook’s spatula. With dexterous wrists and a light-fingered grip on the tool – and with
consciousness of the underlying shape of the figure so as to keep a consistent thickness
of plaster over it and not let some part poke through a thin place – smooth it, like
frosting a cake. Very little time is left, and then – abruptly – it is all over. The plaster
is set up and beginning the molecular bonding that will make it into stone.
Avoid teasing at the job any more. Do other work. Make a phone call. Even go
for a coffee break. Be sure to wash your hands in a bucket of water rather than the
sink – plaster will plug the drains so completely that it will be necessary to jackham-
mer up the main sewer and replace all the piping. The little paintbrush is clogged
with set-up plaster. It takes a hammer to re-powder the plaster and free the bristles.
If you touch the blue plaster between the shims, it is hot, reacting.
Return after the plaster is cool. Delicately, take out the shims. Scrape the
smudged and stained brass with a sculptor’s knife until it gleams like gold among
the bits of heavenly blue plaster on the table. The shims must come out straight,
perpendicular to the model’s surface, so that the razor-cut in it can be healed with
a bit of light pressing. Cleaned, the shims go back into the cigar box, ready for next
time. They’re tedious to make and shim-stock sheet brass isn’t always easy to get.
Removal of the shims reveals a smooth, thick edge. A bit of trimming with
a steel hook tool with rough teeth on the edge will knock off peaks and flat fins of
plaster. Then make dents with a small hook tool along the surface where the shims
have touched – these will be the keys to ensuring that the other sections fit back where
they belong. Paint it with a parting compound. Much of sculpture work is the art of
choosing a parting compound, for it is parting compounds that keep one substance
from sticking to another so that molds may be made in pieces and castings may be
removed from molds. For plaster, the parting compound is a coating of shellac cut
half-and-half with alcohol, and then another coating of soap. A strange substance
called “waterless hand soap” is sold to auto mechanic shops, and works admirably to
keep almost anything from sticking to anything. When that is dry, do the next section
of the mold.
Another margarine tub of water, another sifting of plaster, the violently cleaned
paintbrush, the tabletop cleared off, and the whole process repeats. Another interval.
Bob goes out back to see if the horses need anything or maybe takes a moment to
smoke a cigarette and check orders.
In a mold for a simple animal, two halves might be all that is needed, especially
if the animal is lying down so that legs didn’t make trouble. The mold is soon ready to
open. Scrape the hook tool along the division line on the outside shell until the soak-
ing-in of the alcohol/shellac mixture (perhaps darkened with a bit of alcohol-based
leather dye) is apparent. It will be a hairline, a tiny fracture in the blue with a faint
stain alongside. The knife tool is held along the line, its thin wedge ready to enter, and
one raps on the back of the knife with a light hammer – oh, so lightly. Then again.
Again. Is the thread of a line widening just a bit? Another rap.
Gradually, the two parts of the mold separate. Pull them apart, like an avocado
with a plastilene pit, or maybe use the knife-tool to apply a bit of leverage. Avoid

110 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

gouges along the edge of the divisions: the fit must be tight enough to hold water later.
When the mold comes in half, the little plastilene animal inside is pulled apart,
removed from its little blue womb the way a stillborn calf is sometimes dismembered
for removal from a cow. Sometimes it is only twisted and deformed a bit, but usually
it is destroyed enough to be cleaned and wadded back into a lump.
Carefully scrutinize the new mold. Did bits break off and remain in the clay?
Did bubbles form? Did detail remain without blurring? Bits of clay remain here and
there and must be removed carefully, sometimes with a tool so small as a dental pick
or even a large needle.

2. Dick Flood
The northern prairie, Fifties and Sixties

A culture, especially in a small town, can be a hard mold, forcing compliance

with local custom. But always there are fault lines, boundaries visible and in-
visible, where the local norms are susceptible to being broken open. If much
of that happens, through a shift in population or economic circumstances or
even weather patterns, “what is done” can be reduced to rubble, but the people
shaped by local custom can remain resistant for a while. When the Sixties finally
got to Browning – so late it was really the Seventies – the effects were subtle at
first and then sweeping.
Things happened that seemed so trivial that no one would put them in a bi-
ography, and yet they often were part of our lives in a deep way, down among the
assumptions and adaptations of everyday life. Their power to explain is strong if
one is careful to look at them.
One of the most shrewd visitors in the Fifties and early Sixties was Dick
Flood, who sold leather goods and supplies. He was one of a pack of art scouts
all through the West, the only one to come so far north. We kidded that he
“started on a shoestring” and indeed he did sell leather laces as well as dye and so
on. Going up and down the Rockies, Flood had realized early that the art scene
in the Southwest would eventually spread up into Montana, and he intended to
be ready. He was one of Ace Powell’s patrons, but mostly he watched for minor
Russell works, which still turned up in attics or some old ranch parlor. It was
still possible to buy a used book, shake it out, and find an original Russell sketch
worth a lot of money. Everyone dreamed about it, and Flood often found bits
and pieces, sometimes things that “could be” Russells or were surely “unsigned”
Russells. There were a few other sculptors – like John Clarke or Les Kauba or
Earl Heikka – for whose work he watched.
Flood, and Ace as well, urged Bob over and over to “loosen up,” so his work
would look more like Russell’s. Bob was still making hair patterns in fine lines

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 and smoothing out the ridges scraped by his tools. He was told his work looked
too much like Remington, who was considered Eastern and not quite one of the
boys like Russell. “Looseness” was one of the few artistic qualities most people
could distinguish, all they knew about the treatment of surfaces.
One day Flood came in with a Russell bear he had bought. “This is the most
fabulous bear ever made,” he said. “Just look at how wonderful it is. NO ONE
else could make a bear as good as this one.” And he looked at Bob significantly.
That was at lunch. Flood took his bear and went off to make his salesman’s
rounds. Bob, aggravated by Flood’s tone (as was probably intended), grabbed
some plastilene and began to model. In a short time he had a bear exactly like
the Russell bear. At supper he flaunted it in front of Dick, “NO ONE, huh?
How do you like this bear?”
Flood liked it. “How much?”
Bob took the bear out of Flood’s hands and began to twist it. “Russell
wasn’t so very damn terrific! The nose is too big, the gait is wrong….” He made
corrections to suit his own notion, while Flood blanched and could hardly keep
from grabbing at it to prevent the changes. “Now, THIS is a good bear!”
“How much?”
“I won’t sell it to you.” Bob enjoyed teasing such operators as much as
Picasso did by drawing in wet sand when the tide was coming in or drawing in
the dust on dealers’ cars when he knew the drive back to town would destroy the
picture. On the Prowl, that little bear, eventually sold many castings but not to
Flood. Once an illegal casting of it turned up at the Montana Historical Society
and when Bob protested, the director had someone with a welding torch burn
holes in it, which made it more valuable than it was originally because now it
was unique and had a story.
In 1962 Flood was visiting when the first real Scriver bronzes came back from
Mendota Foundry, a little backyard artist’s operation in St. Paul, Minnesota. We
didn’t know much about the artist, Richard Randell, except that he was not
representational (so we figured he wasn’t likely to copy or steal) and he was said
to have the technical part of casting down pat. His price was right.
Bob’s biggest worry was somehow being cheated, accepting second-rate
castings. We had read that the word “sincere” comes from the Italian, sine ciré,
which means “without wax.” The phrase refers to patching bits of bad metal,
or even rather large holes, with wax to disguise them instead of repairing them
by welding. Bob pulled his gooseneck lamp down to focus on the bronzes and
the three of us went over each one looking for flaws and wax. We found them:
a pinhole here, a bit of porous metal there, a surface not quite right somewhere
else – in total innocence that a bronze that didn’t have such anomalies would be
like an apple with no flaws: unreal.
The next day we typed out a list of all these “problems” and sent them off
to Randell. It was years before we understood his reaction, half-exasperated and
half-amused. Then we realized that Flood hadn’t known any more than we did;

112 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

in fact, maybe he had never looked at a bronze that closely before. From then
on he did.
When Flood retired from the shoestring business, he built Trailside
Galleries in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which expanded into a branch in Idaho
Falls, Idaho. Eventually, it went out of Flood’s hands, but for a while he was a
key to the entire field of northern plains Western art. His name is on many items
at the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, including a casting of the Russell
bear in question. Many of them were never meant to be bronze: the head off a
walking stick, a tiny diorama, or a novelty. One wonders if Charlie would want
them cast, since the process often damaged their charm. Flood bought them
from Joe DeYong when the latter had aged and fallen on hard times.

3. Ace Powell
Hungry Horse and Browning, 1928–1976

When we sold something, it was usually to someone who had accidentally come
into the museum, gotten interested, maybe went out to help feed the horse or
play with the bobcat, possibly stayed for a picnic on the prairie – then produced
a chequebook or asked about time payments. In those early years they weren’t
buying to invest or to be big shots – they just loved the sculpture and wanted
to be part of a kind of family. Hydrocal™ castings cost one-tenth as much as
bronzes, which put them within reach for local folks. (Shirley Welch, a rancher,
bought the first bronze Bob sold – a casting of Lone Cowboy.)
At that point Bob’s philosophy was that he was a “people’s sculptor.” But it
was rather like his original taxidermy strategy, which cost him so much money
because he wasn’t taking into account an intangible that might be called his
“energy overhead.” After he had worked in the foundry or shop all day, and
sat up late with potential customers, where was the creative energy? A person
with less stamina would have crumpled much sooner. Late in life he finally did
choose a few galleries.
One day Ace Powell himself showed up, an unmistakable character. Ace
knew that stories sell art, and he had a yarn for every painting or sculpture.
Some of Ace’s art looked suspiciously Russell-esque, but once in a while he
turned out something tenderly moving and authentic. Anyway, no one could
resist his big ravaged face under a John Birch crewcut (though he resigned from
the John Birch Society as soon as he discovered they charged women half-price
for membership – “I can’t stand discrimination,” he snorted). A cigarette always
dangled between his ring and little fingers when it wasn’t tucked into his big lips
and making him squint – this man knew how to present an image.

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 But it wasn’t an image – it was really him. Every moment that he was awake,
drunk or sober, his worn-out whispery voice philosophized and theorized and
soliloquized and otherwise provided a cowboy voice-over of ideas. You could pay
attention for a while, wander off to do something else, and come back again, all
without him slowing down or stopping.
His first wife had been Russian, well-educated and dynamic, one of those
exceptional women who sometimes came to Glacier Park for a vacation and
ended up joining a cowboy guide’s remuda. He listened to her even after he lost
her. Artists’ wives seemed to either stay the rest of their lives, becoming part of
the legend, or leave after a few years, exhausted and lonely. This Russian wife
taught Ace a world-view and a set of principles in startling contrast to his rugged
appearance. He shared what he knew with Bob. The two men were so close that
if one of them was expecting a divorce or lawsuit, they would arrange to have the
other one hold their property for them until it was safe to be prosperous again.
Or so they claimed – I never saw it happen.
Ace didn’t believe in money. “Barter, that’s the thing!” His wife when I
first knew him was Nancy McLaughlin, half his age and an artist herself. She
believed in Ace. When she had each of her three babies she spent the recupera-
tion time after the birth lying in her hospital bed drawing Indian portraits in
pastel on velour paper in order to pay the bill. Three or four days of bed rest
were traditional then and Nancy had asthma that always complicated physical
exertion, so she generally created a pretty good pile of drawings. Of course, there
wasn’t any money anyhow, so trade it had to be. (Her son, David Powell, is an
artist like his dad, though he also makes good money as a period advisor for
movies. His wife Sasha is also Russian, and their son looks much like Ace, nose
and all, except small and tender as a new pea.)
Ace used to joke, “Well, I got Nancy a good present this Christmas: a
lantern so she can see to chop wood. I may even go out there and hold it up for
her.” The truth was that Ace was more frail than Nancy. Alcoholism had nearly
destroyed his liver and emphysema was dragging at his heart. Mostly he lived on
cigarettes, black coffee, and ideas. And all too often, booze.
One afternoon Ace came through alone, an unusual occurrence. After
supper I was invited to go along with Ace as passenger to his studio at Hungry
Horse in order to meet his family. Nancy would bring me back in a day or so,
or I could get on the train. I’d been tired and crabby, so Bob urged me to go.
I didn’t understand that Ace had been drinking, was late getting home and
therefore in disgrace, and was afraid he would fall asleep at the wheel unless
he had someone to talk to. Even if I had understood, I would have gone. In the
car on the dark mountain road across the pass, Ace talked theatre to please me,
while managing the twisting road and an endless chain of cigarettes.
The Powells’ gallery at that time was an old storefront on the highway,
beautifully renovated and furnished with a mix of Navajo blankets, Pacific
Northwest Indian chests and masks, graceful Windsor chairs made by George

114 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Montgomery, and the paintings of both Ace and Nancy. Nancy unfolded a bed-
chair for me right in the gallery. I lay for a long time smelling cedar wood and
oil paint, watching the moon cruise among the tops of firs and larches along the
highway. I thought, “Artists live so beautifully!” Based on my theatre experi-
ence, I believed that all artists created around themselves a community where
they could explore ideas and support each other.
Next morning the girls and Nancy came to sit on my feet and do their long
blonde hair for the day. I sipped coffee and answered questions and admired
what the sunlight spilling through the gallery did for the colors of the paintings.
Nancy drove me home. I took all this to be the artist’s life: easy camaraderie,
colorful surroundings, a gypsy schedule. Nancy and Bob went off for a private
conference but I hardly noticed. No doubt Nancy was desperately afraid that
Ace would die. Divorce was inconceivable at that point.
Sometime, maybe six months after I’d met Bob, he said to me, “You haven’t
even noticed.”
“Noticed what?”
“I quit smoking.” He’d decided that “those little white cylinders” were boss-
ing him around and quit as an act of defiance. For quite a while he carried the
pack of Camels in his pocket to show they had no power over him. Until he
told me, I really had not noticed – he never said a word about whatever struggle
it cost him. Nor did he say anything about what motivated it. Now, my guess
is that he had early heart symptoms and quit smoking because he was afraid of
dying. But to me his death was inconceivable. He was just turning the corner
on fifty. Ace was two years older. Nancy and I, young wives, stood as bulwarks
against aging.
It was the middle of winter when someone called to tell us that Ace’s gallery
had burned. We left immediately after work, driving on ice, and arrived in the
dark. All that was left was a metal shower stall, sticking up in the middle of a
charred foundation. This was a new gallery, back from the highway, and they
hadn’t lived there long. Ace and Nancy had just returned from Michigan where
they’d had a very successful show. Ace always tried to barter or to convert money
immediately into precious objects, so their profit had been in carved jade beads,
Victorian solid silver flatware, fine saddles and furniture, and so on.
The jade had turned from green to white and the string had burned from
within the beads. The flatware was a solid silver puddle. Ace had gotten a couple
of saddles out. The Lone Cowboy that Bob had given Ace was twisted beyond
recognition. A bootleg casting of a Russell wolf with a bone, cast solid because
the caster didn’t know how to make a core, was so heavy it had fallen through
the table that burned under it and buried itself in the insulating ashes of the
floor. With a new patina it could be saved.
Everyone assumed that it was Ace’s cigarettes, combined with liquor and
turpentine, that had burned the gallery. Nancy divorced him not long after. We

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 stood with her a long time, just looking. Her face was red and slick from being
scorched by the fire. Ace must have been sleeping it off somewhere.
A few years later we got another call, this time saying that Ace was in the
hospital and if we wanted to see him alive one more time, we’d better get there
fast. As soon as work was over, we got in the pickup to cross the Rockies to
Kalispell. When we got there, we rushed to the room. Ace was sitting with the
bed cranked up, painting quick oil vignettes of the Montana prairie. Sunsets
with Indian lodges or old wagon running gear, nothing elaborate. “You know,”
he informed us, “I’m painting these on little cheap tablets of embossed paper
that look like canvas, and in the right place you can sell each page for $10.
Twelve pages, so that makes $120. Not bad.” He was simply indomitable.
There were a few other artists around, far from Beaux Arts trained, but
a community nevertheless. Gentle, unpretentious, most of them made their
money from the tourists. Blake the Woodcarver carved Indian portraits in
chunks of wood and cast plaster editions of the sway-backed, sad-eyed, knobbly
little horse who became the mascot of Hungry Horse, where he lived. Blake had
been a highway patrolman and was enjoying a happy marriage late in life.
Al Racine, another woodcarver, a Blackfeet, had a sturdy white wife, Inez.
Al’s carvings graced the Methodist church in Browning: the Sermon on the
Mount on the pulpit and the Last Supper on the altar. He was best known for
his “Napi” cartoons – a caricature Indian in a big hat and braids, usually riding
a cougar, whipping it with a rattlesnake, exclaiming, “I’m getting out of here! It’s
too tough for me!” In summer he and Inez sold figurines from a tumbledown
log cabin along the highway in St. Mary. Though Al pretended to be a spontane-
ous self-taught artist, he had in fact been to art school and also could make his
living painting signs if necessary.

4. John Clarke
East Glacier, 1881–1970

The really significant artist was a Blackfeet woodcarver, John C. Clarke, a

gnarled old man with a shock of white hair and bright dark eyes, who had
become famous in spite of being deaf and mute from childhood illness. Past the
peak of his fame and even past the era to which he belonged, John had a little
studio-house in East Glacier with the top burned out of it, simply closed off so
John could live in the bottom.
When we stopped by to see him, he was usually napping on an iron cot,
halfway under a tangle of old quilts and accompanied by a puppy or two, while
an electric heater buzzed along too close for safety, making the room an oven.
On the walls were rows of photos that had struck his fancy. Most of them were

116 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

animals, notably a picture of bears mating out of Life magazine. Bears were
John’s specialty, along with mountain goats. Great Northern Railroad had
helped to promote him by using his portrait of a goat on their trains. A big
cement mountain goat like the one on the GN logo marked the studio out front.
Bob repaired it at least once.
John dressed in the old-fashioned way, with a suit-vest over his shirt and
long underwear under everything. In fact, he walked wrapped in the past much
of the time, not just because of being old, but because he was the grandson
of Malcolm Clarke, whose death had provoked the Baker Massacre. John’s
aunt, Helen Clarke, the first state Superintendent of Schools, and John’s father,
Horace, are buried in East Glacier, in the same small cemetery where John was
eventually laid.
At the tail end of the tourist season, when there weren’t many people
around, we ate supper at Buzz Lutz’s restaurant (once Mike’s Place and later
the Carberry Museum) and John would sit with us on the stools at the counter
“talking” by making quick notes on napkins or using Indian sign-language. Or
rather Bob and John talked, because every time I tried to make a sign they both
claimed I’d just said something obscene and hooted like teenagers. Everyone
around us enjoyed the joke. John always called Bob “billy goat,” because by then
he had grown a mustache and chin tuft. (People thought he was trying to be
Buffalo Bill, but he said it was because everyone mistook him for his brother. I
think the latter is true.)
Eventually, Bob and I attended John Clarke’s funeral mass on a winter day
after a snowfall. The Church of the Little Flower in Browning was full. The sun
came out as we gathered and soon the solemn words were punctuated by chutes
of snow leaving the warming metal roof. Father Paul Kingston spoke about
artists participating in creation, the work of God. When we got to the little
cemetery up among the trees in East Glacier, it had begun to snow again, great
drifting goose-feathers. A backhoe had dug the grave among the roots of one of
the huge evergreens, and John’s coffin was laid down in them as though into the
arms of a waiting ancestor.

5. The last full-mount: a moose

Browning, 1968

There was one animal Bob had yet to shoot and mount for the museum: a
moose. Having acquired a good hide, he decided to go ahead and mount that
rather than waiting for a chance to hunt himself. The mold for the body took up
the whole workshop. The frame had to be welded up out of steel rebar. Finally
everything was all set to glue the hide onto the papier maché form which had had

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 the horns bolted onto it. But Bob could see that the glue would dry before the
hide could be sewed up around the legs unless there was one person per leg.
Luckily, almost every hourly-wage man on the reservation had worked for
him at one time or another and he could round up a crew just by driving along
the street. Pretty soon he came back with three helpers and left them off while
he went to look for a fourth. “Now just wait right there and don’t start until I
come back,” he told them. The three settled themselves to smoke and consider
the task. I could hear them from the other room where I was trying to figure
out some paperwork.
“Mighty long legs.”
“Yup.”
“Take a long time to sew up that bugger.”
“Yeah. Pretty long. Might go past suppertime.”
“Them are sure long legs.”
“TOOO long, if you ask me!”
Then I heard a scramble and a scuffle and before I knew it, all three were
out the door and going down the road. When I hollered after them, they ignored
me. When Bob got back with number four, he was not surprised, though he was
angry with me for letting them get away.
There was nothing to do but go round up another three. This time he kept
all the men with him until he had four, and because it took so long to find
three more workers, the job DID take until a couple of hours after supper. They
couldn’t stop to snack either, with their hands full of glue. Bob pushed them
on through the job and they suffered a little, but didn’t complain. It was a little
money in a town with no jobs.
For years afterward all seven men would drop in now and then to look at
the moose. They’d stand respectfully for a while, then shake their heads. “Them
sure are really loooooong legs. Take a looooootta sewing.” (In the Blackfeet
language, one emphasizes a word by elongating the vowels.)<Photo 26.>
The second summer we had Gimpy, the only one of several bobcat kittens
we raised who stayed tame – and alive – long enough to grow to full size. Gimpy’s
favorite napping spot was up in the basket formed by the moose’s horns, which
just about fit her when she curled up. One ten-foot-high leap got her up there.
Sometimes a nice tourist lady from Iowa would go by, trying to get her bifocals
at the right angle, and before she succeeded Gimpy would reach a gentle paw
down to pat her fluffy tinted hair. The result was usually a shriek, a hubbub as
her family gathered around to defend her, and then amazed laughter and excite-
ment when Gimpy stretched and purred and meowed.

118 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Interior of the Museum of Montana Wildlife, 1960s. Photo: Bruce Strachan.

6. Eegie
Browning, 1962–1975

Early in the summer of 1962 some kids from Heart Butte brought us a box with
a live eaglet squashed into it. Still half-fuzzy instead of feathered, it had fallen
from its nest and was nearly starved to death. We didn’t speculate about what
had happened to the adults. It peered at us with a gaping beak, resigned and
passive.
We stood it on the fence and I poked mouse-sized balls of hamburger down
its throat. Overnight it stayed in a cage to protect it from the other animals
and the next day Bob shot a gopher for it. Shrieking in shockingly loud cries of
recognition, the revived eaglet methodically tore open the gopher’s belly, sucked
out the guts, and gobbled each limb in turn. The rest went down its stretchy
gullet and then the eaglet napped until the roughage was ready to be thrown
up in a pellet. There were no raptor rehabilitation programs in those days. We
thought it was good when she seemed to bond to Bob, treating him first as a
parent and later as a mate.
We built a big cage in a corner of the building, adding a tub of water where
she splashed boisterously. Her feathers came in like finely-grained shingles,
forming a kind of shell around her, and we could put our hands in under her

V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E 119
 Bob hugging Eegie. She was imprinted on him as her “mate” and wouldn’t
let others touch her (1960s). Photo: Mary Scriver.

wings, next to her body, where the down was so fine it was almost imperceptible,
like soapsuds or meringue, except warm and alive with the quick beating of her
heart. She rode around on our arms, trying not to dig her talons in, with better
success if we moved slowly, or we planted her on the bottom half of the Dutch
door between museum and workshop, which was fine until she vented with a
great swash of white. She loved Bob, who brought a gopher every morning, and
when he put his arms lightly around her, she nibbled gently at the same place
under his ear that I liked.
When the traveling school assembly people sent the man who trained
Perri the Owl for Walt Disney, I got him to come look at Eegie. He had come
with raptors of his own which flew out over the heads of the students and then
returned to be hooded after their rewards. He taught us about “di-morphism,”
which means female raptors are usually bigger than the males. He guessed Eegie

120 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Eegie being noble (1960s). Photo: Mary Scriver.

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 was female, and told us that every hawk or owl must have roughage of some
sort in its meat. After that we never substituted hamburger for gopher without
cutting up paper or string to imitate fur. We knew he was right when an egg
arrived, though it was sterile.
At first we had fantasies of raising eaglets, until we read that eagles mate at
thousands of feet in the air, on the glide – quickly. When we went outside to find
Eegie staring up at a seemingly empty sky, we knew that if we got binoculars
we would be able to spot a male wheeling high on a column of air. Yet she had
never in her lifetime flown more than a few feet and when we took the wire off
to make her cage taller, she only flew to the top of the studio and then back into
her cage without urging.
One day we came back from a trip that had lasted overnight. Bob had a new
navy-blue jacket and when he hurried to the cage to greet his “girl-friend,” she
flew at him with talons extended, shrieking, clearly attacking. His feelings were
hurt. Later he went back out in his khaki shirtsleeves and she was once again his
friendly chirping nibbler. We reasoned out that someone must have teased her
while we were gone, someone in a dark jacket. The backyard had to be enclosed
with a high board fence.
Her most dangerous moment came that fall when the first blizzard hit. We
had put a board wind-shield up alongside her perch, but this was a real norther
with driving wind. After supper at Bob’s house, then still the rental across from
his mother’s while the studio got finishing touches, we suddenly thought of her
and returned in a hurry. There she hunched, white as a schmoo, only one eye
barely open and her nose holes freezing over. Each of us took a wing-tip and we
walked her into the shop where she remained until we made a way she could get
under the shop next to the warm pipes. Indoors she didn’t try to fly, but stomped
around like a crabby little bent-over cowboy in heavy spurs, startling visitors.
Bob crawled under the shop to close off part of the space and took his
electrical saw along with him, but Eegie kept unplugging it. Annoyed, Bob got
one of the neighborhood kids who was always hanging around to crawl in with
him and hold off Eegie with a stick. But when the eagle jumped up and rapped
him in the chest with her “fists,” he resigned from the job and we didn’t see him
for a while.
We stocked the freezer with gophers in ziplock bags, but Eegie didn’t eat as
much in winter. Whenever we passed a road-killed rabbit, we stopped to grab it
and throw it into the back of the pickup, arriving at the rare formal occasions
with a tangle of furry, blood-stained remains behind us. I was the one who
played retriever while Bob stayed behind the wheel, calling “Hurry up!” Several
times when I hopped out to get a contorted body, it was frozen to the pavement
and I had to jerk hard –even get the shovel from the truck bed to hack it free.
We joked about what other drivers must think when they caught me in their
headlights – in high heels and dangly earrings, tugging at my road-kill prize.

122 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Eegie liked sticks and we kept her supplied. She carried them back and forth
and wrestled them from end to end. Like most predators, she played a good deal
of the time. Once Bob and I rode horseback over a hilltop and spotted a pair of
wild eagles playing at the edge of a pothole lake, splashing in the water, passing
sticks back and forth, dropping them from overhead and generally frolicking.
We rigged a bleach bottle to hang from a string like a giant parakeet toy.
Her best trick was playing catch with a rubber ball, though she really seemed
to be batting the ball back when it was pitched to her. Many years later Peter
Mattheissen explained to me that most predatory birds don’t grab smaller birds
in the air, but dive to clout them with their fists, and then stoop lower to catch
the stunned and broken prey. This strategy avoids struggles in the air.
Cats who intruded into Eegie’s cage for gopher remnants met a quick de-
mise. Gripped in piercing talons of steel, they squalled and flailed their last
while Eegie held her face away from them as though she were offended. I put a
corrugated fiberglass wall around the bottom of the cage to keep kittens from
climbing the wire and constantly mended the chicken wire, but cats found gaps
and holes.
One morning we awoke to screams and Bob looked out the window to
see what he thought was one of the bobcat kittens in the cage. Charging to the
rescue, he grabbed a shovel and bashed his way in through the wire – only to see
it was an unknown domestic cat and too late for it anyway. It was lucky we’d
put a tall fence around the backyard, because Bob was wearing nothing at all. In
fact, I had to take out his slippers so he could walk back over the gravel on the
driveway. He had such tender feet that even when he was nude at the cabin, he
wore high-topped tennie runners. The effect was rather like a satyr with tennies
instead of hooves.
We never did think seriously about hunting with Eegie according to real
falconry techniques. She seemed like a friend. Anyway, when the federal law pro-
tecting raptors was passed, we had to fight hard just to keep her, since the federal
bird warden came to clout us again. Bob said fiercely that the only way they would
get his bird was in eagle soup. Somehow nothing developed beyond threats, and in
the end, she lived happily until the shop burned. Smoke killed her.
One day before the high fence was built, we found a local Blackfeet man
staring at the eagle. Ruth Hill, author of Hanta Yo, was with us and said, “Look
at that man reveling in his heritage!” The man turned and said, “Boy, that tail
is worth a lotta money.” But Bob didn’t think about it that way. When Eegie
moulted “money,” he picked up the giant feathers and carelessly thrust them
into an empty mayonnaise jar.

V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E 123
 7. Electric cowboys
Cut Bank Creek, 1965

Back in 1962 two movie crews were shooting film (this was before the invention
of videotape) – one from a university and one from some other place – and we
met them one evening at Cut Bank Creek for a picnic. We decided to travel the
few miles on horseback.
I had acquired my first horse, a tall brown stubborn beast of ancient years
from the Bullshoe family’s famous relay racehorse string. Bob called the gelding
my “learning horse,” because he refused to do anything unsafe or against his
policy of non-exertion. His worst habit was sinking slowly down like a camel. I
wished he WOULD do that when it came time to get on board. He was a tall
horse and cleverly waited until I had one foot on a fence before swinging away
on an angle or, if I were standing on a bucket, crowding in to kick it out from
under me. I could ride him for any length of time in any direction and be back
in fifteen minutes because he lagged all the way out and hurried all the way in.
His name was “Skeeter,” and a less mosquito-like creature I’ve never known. But
he could keep up with Bob’s white horse, more or less, and once he got moving
for a while, he began to warm up and cover ground at a steady pace. He could
rock along for an hour or more with never a pause.
With the movie people we sat around the campfire talking too long and too
carelessly until all at once the sky darkened and lightning began to sizzle on the
horizon. If we hadn’t been down in a creek bottom, someone would have seen
it coming. Our friends jumped to pack up their cars. Either Bob and I stayed
under the trees where it was dangerous and we’d get drenched, or we ran for
town. Already Bob had cinched up and was ready to be on his way. His horse
whirled in circles while I leapt desperately to follow suit. Then we pounded out
along the borrowpit, now far too dark to see broken glass or tangled wire.
Lightning was all around us and the stunning WHOMP-GRUMBLE of
thunder seemed right overhead. The barbed wire fences began to sing and the
horses’ manes lifted hair-by-hair just as our own hair would have if we hadn’t
jammed our hats down so hard. We hurtled along in near-total darkness,
Gunnysack leading the way so I could barely tell his apple-shaped white rump
was going up and down ahead of me. Rain drenched us, and I put all my faith
and trust into the horses and Bob. What choice did I have? By the time we were
safely back in the yard, we were laughing with hysteria and relief.

124 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

8. Life in Browning
The Sixties

There was a big gentle man who worked for us named Sullivan Hameline. We
never did keep a coffee pot going in the shop – instead we went for “tea” at 10
AM and 3 PM. (If Bob were angry at us, he’d sneak off alone and we got no tea
or “long johns,” the local name for maple bars. But otherwise, he picked up the
tab.) Most of Sullivan’s “work” time was taken up with lighting cigarettes, fill-
ing his coffee cup with hot water and putting Band-Aids on his fingers. He often
used a whole box of Band-Aids in one day. In tourist season he loved to drape
himself over the Dutch door and gossip with the visitors, who never seemed to
realize that his glossy hair and copper skin came from being an Indian. “Is there
a reservation around here?” they asked. “Are there any Indians around here?”
When Sullivan told them he himself was Blackfeet, they always moved back a
little ways, which tickled him.
Sullivan had a new baby but she caught pneumonia and died. He and the
mother, who was quite a bit younger than he, were heartbroken. We took money
and food up to their little shack on Moccasin Flats just as the Rosary ended, and
then went with the crowd out to the cemetery where the priest blessed the small
soul and sent it on its way. It was the first time I had ever faced the precarious-
ness of life for people on the reservation, how easy it was for part of a family to
slip away.
For the first time I heard the old-time wailing, like Irish women mourning
sons drowned at sea. It was as elemental as wolf-howling, infinitely desolate. The
average life-span for a male American Indian at that time was around 45, and it
has risen since then to maybe 55 – not just because people die at age 55 (though
diabetes will do that), but because for every elder who achieves a long lifetime, a
tiny baby is lost soon after birth. To know this from a page of statistics is quite
different from following a baby coffin to a tiny grave.
The siren wailing, other than for a ten o’clock curfew that was supposed to
mean all the kids went home, announced a fire and everyone turned out to fight
it. One of the first I saw was a two-story house, a neat little place with two trees
on either side of the front yard, symmetrical as a child’s drawing. An old woman,
crippled, was trapped in the upstairs, but all the walls were sheets of flame. Some
claimed they could hear the old woman screaming and, as the walls burned
away but the frame remained, said they could see her, but I saw only the fire
and that the trees were burning, too. When the flames were finally gone, kids
clustered around to see the body carried out. (There were no body bags in those
days.) The Browning Chief of Police couldn’t drive them away. They hooted and
circled back from the shadows. They wanted to know for themselves. “Show us
the worst! We can take it!”

V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E 125
 At school the kids wanted to talk about death. They said they snuck into a
morgue and saw a stillborn baby – it was blue. And they insisted that ghosts came
out of the graves in the old graveyard on the west side of town where weeds grew
tall and cows sometimes browsed. When I tried to rationalize the ghosts as gas
escaping from collapsing coffins, they scoffed. I didn’t know anything at all.
It was not the babies and old people who died most often. It was the young
men, who drank and fought or drove drunk. Sometimes they killed women,
usually half-by-accident. Sometimes they killed themselves. The informants and
artists whom John Ewers had employed at the federal Museum of the Plains
Indian came occasionally to work for us or to sell us something. Almost always
they were drunk. Darrell Blackman had been to college before he learned to
drink. He said he had resisted until the students on his floor held him down and
poured whiskey in his mouth. Victor Pepion died in a fire before I came. Victor
Auld died in a car accident, almost back to town from drinking in East Glacier.
Calvin Boy. These should have been the people who preserved the old ways with
their art and skill. Artistes perdues – lost artists.
Bob and I went to a rodeo, not the kind I was used to with a huge amphi-
theatre and professional contestants, but a local competition where everyone
either sat on the fence or on the hood of a pickup. We sat with old Joe Davis,
on the ground right in the corral. Ed Connelly had a little black mare that he
tied next to us, and she kept putting her soft nose, with its white blaze and a
dent from fighting a tie-down, on my shoulder to be petted. In the course of the
afternoon we got so attached to that friendly little horse that Bob tried to buy
her, but Connelly wasn’t selling. He said she was the easiest horse to load into a
pickup he’d ever had. We watched once and, sure enough, the horse went in like
a cat. We tried to get our own horses to load that way with limited luck.
Gradually coated with dust, slowly roasted by the sun, occasionally scram-
bling to our feet and maybe on up the fence when a bucking horse or bull
came in our direction, we were not mere spectators but right IN the action.
Being an Indian rodeo, it was slow, with lots of time for joshing around between
chutes opening. If someone put on an exceptional performance, all the pickup
truck horns honked. Our old cowboy friend, Joe, looking like a brown and
wizened Leanin’ Tree greeting card, hunkered down alongside, rolling cigarettes.
I thought I might burst from happiness, even as the sweat trickled from under
my hat, into my stinging eyes, and down my back. We all felt that way, proud
and competent and part of the REAL WEST, like Marlboro Men.
Once we went to a local rodeo on a wet day. The ground was caliche,
gumbo, slippery sucking mud. Horses couldn’t keep their feet. The cowboys
were soon plastered with mud. A bucking horse, a light-boned palomino mare,
fell and broke her leg. One of the cops was called over to kill her. He was afraid
to get close for fear she would kick him in her thrashing, so he stood too far away
and shot with his pistol. But he was a lousy shot and we watched, hypnotized,

126 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

while he shredded the horse’s head until she went down, spouting blood. We
never went to a rodeo on a rainy day again unless it was indoors.
Another time we were looking for someone who was out at a corral with
others and horses. I ran ahead and jumped up on the fence to look. They were
gelding the horses, breaking the “strings” to the testicles with their teeth. As
soon as they saw me they stopped, but I had heard the horses scream and now
I heard them moaning. Kids were forcing them to move in circles around the
corral so they would drain and heal. It has been done this way ever since horses
got to the prairie.

9. Drifters
Browning, mid-Sixties

When it had come time to build the fireplace in the studio, a young man walked
in the door. I’d never seen him before, but felt I recognized him somehow. He
was skinny, wore glasses, and spoke softly. In need of money, he stayed a few
days to help lift rock. His story was that he’d been running a chicken farm – or
was it a turkey ranch? – that he had inherited from his uncle, so he could read
philosophy in the evenings. He was an intellectual. Now he had sold the ranch
and was headed to Stanford for a Ph.D. in philosophy. Or was it Cornell?
It had been a while since I’d talked about ideas the way this young man
did. He was living in a little camp he made out at our picnic place on Cut Bank
Creek and on his last evening he invited me – alone – out there for supper. Of
course, I asked Bob, who said angrily he didn’t care what I did. We ate beans and
wienies and talked until it was late. I explained my theories of life and he said I
sounded like Spinoza, a person I didn’t know. He thought I was wasting myself
and that I should go to graduate school. I argued that nothing was so valuable
for a writer as real life, and that I was having adventures in a way that wouldn’t
be possible when I was old.
When it got chilly, the young man fetched blankets for our shoulders. He
began to rub my back, which I accepted innocently, too inexperienced to realize
it was meant to be seductive, and he asked me to go with him. “Grad school is
an adventure, too,” he argued. “If you stay here with that old man, you’ll just
rot. Keep your mind alive.” Flattered as I was, I turned him down and asked to
be taken home. But he had the right bait.
Next morning, the young man reported, Bob rode up on his lathered and
panting white horse and circled the camp, trying to peer into the station wagon
– to see if I was in there. I had never even considered staying overnight and was
solemnly impressed by this development. It had never occurred to me that Bob
might be jealous. I rather liked it.

V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E 127
 “Are you sure you won’t go along?” the young man asked before he left. I
shook my head. He gave me a scrap of paper. “Here’s my address. Call or write
if you change your mind.” I kept it a few days and then stood on the front porch
of the museum and let the wind take it away. But it was always a comfort to me
and I wondered what happened to him. It was my Bridges of Madison County
moment.
A tall, pushy writer from Texas appeared. When he came to the house, he
expected to be fed. Bob developed an intense dislike for him. He was staying,
more or less, with old Jim Whitecalf, and was writing a journal of his visit,
claiming to be old Jim’s adopted son. His tone was always mocking and superior.
One evening he showed up at suppertime when I’d planned that Bob and I
would pick the last meat off the carcass of a Canada goose. Bob got up, went into
the shop, locked the door, and refused to come out. I did NOT want to feed our
goose to this guy, so I scrambled some eggs. Quickly he shoveled them in, told
me he’d certainly had better, and went on his way. I wished I’d clobbered him
with the frying pan.
Somehow he charmed Ace’s wife into illustrating his book and then leaving
with him. He was so abusive that decades later the now middle-aged children
still shudder and check the shadows. I’m told that for a while he was committed
to an institution for the mentally ill. But his book won prizes and was widely
read as true.
So it went for decades as the drifters came through, often making gifts
of the spirit and other times deeply destructive. Rarely did their self-accounts
match what we saw in reality. One of the exceptions was Bill Ballantine and his
wife, who were circus people and wonderful fun.2 Another was Barnaby Conrad
III, who wrote of Bob at age 75 as having “strong worn arms” and “slightly
crazed blue eyes.”3

10. Downhill
Hudson’s Bay Divide, late Sixties

Bob wanted to ride the horses down trails he had once used when traveling from
the Stones’ ranch to the folks’ cabin. Pop drove us to the end of a trail that went
off north along Hudson’s Bay Divide, then took the empty truck down to the
cabin where Mom joined him with their car, so we could truck the horses back
home on the highway.
It was pleasant at first, going down an old fire trail wide enough to ride
side-by-side, hearing grouse in the brush and thrushes in the trees. Once off the
ridge, the trail was overgrown, long and treacherous, through beaver dam brush,

128 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 The cabin Bob built between St. Mary and Babb (1970s).
Photo: Mary Scriver.

and we struggled to make our way. We got to the cabin so late that the folks had
left us a note on the pickup windshield and gone home.
Gunsmoke loaded into the back with no problem, but this time it was
Zuke, my second horse, who wouldn’t load. He turned sideways, he sat down,
he reared up. Anything but get in. Bob finally lost patience entirely. Looking
around for a club, he saw a fence post that was not entirely firm and yanked it
out of the ground, tearing the wire away from the staples. Wham! on the top
of Zuke’s head knocked him flat. I thought for a minute he was dead. Then the
chastened horse got up and nearly crawled into the pickup. No more trouble.
And I got in quickly.
Neither of us said anything until we got back to Browning.

V I W A S T E M O L D : S H A R D S O N T H E TA B L E 129
 These stories are fragments, some jagged as plaster fallen off a casting, oth-
ers with clear imprints of a moment that stayed with us. Unconnected to each
other, puzzling to those who weren’t there, in theory they had recorded the
whole story, a time in history. But the times and the people ended, lost. No
longer needed.

130 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 VII

Plaster Original:
First Success

1. About plaster originals: the key

When every particle and crumb of plastilene has been teased out of the plaster waste
mold, seal the inside with shellac and alcohol, grease with waterless soap, fasten it
back together – empty, of course – and tie it. Another of Bob’s “secret advantages”
was bungee cord, then only available from army surplus, where it was known as
parachute cord. Billy McCurdy had discovered it, like so many other things. The
stretch in it was invaluable for holding molds together.
This time the gypsum comes from a different bag: the hard kind of plaster called
Hydrocal™ for artists. Leave the water white. When this Hydrocal™ begins to turn
to cream, pour it into the waste mold, back out of the mold, into the mold, shake it
while holding it in every position so that the stuff goes into every small place, every
“anfractuosity.” This takes muscle and control, which Bob had. Pour it out, pour it
in, shake it side to side – at last close it off with a bit of plate glass on the bottom.
Turn the mold end over end without losing the plaster, pour out, pour in, until your
arms ache.
Then, at a moment only experience can teach, pour one last time and jiggle vig-
orously to make all the bubbles rise one last time. A bit of tipping to release air from
undercuts, more jiggling, and – that’s it. Either it’s cast or it isn’t – no second chance.
The plate-glass fragment squashes down onto the top of the “whipped cream” to make
a flat bottom, and the whole thing is propped somewhere to let the bonding set up. If
you touch it, the bottom of the cast will be hot from the chemical reactions.
The hardest task is still to come, chipping away all the blue plaster from the
white Hydrocal™. It takes the nerves of a diamond cutter and a fine ability to visual-
ize what is inside. The first blows of the light hammer on the back of the carefully
placed knife tool might cleave away large pieces. If there are long flat surfaces inside,
it’s even possible that the blue will separate simply from jarring and fall off to reveal

131
 the smooth white surface of animal muscles underneath. More often the blue has to
be nearly carved away. The faint stain of the shellac/alcohol might be the only warn-
ing that the Hydrocal™ is a mere whisper away under the surface. That’s the only real
clue to the thin boundary in space, negative in blue and positive in white.
Carefully, gingerly, rap a bit here and a bit there, until finally a shard falls
away to show an elbow or half a face. One is tense in the balance between hurrying
to see if the cast is good and going slowly so as not to knock off a nose or an ear.
Sometimes a piece does get knocked off, and then the trick is to recognize it and pick
it out of the shattered mess of blue plaster lying around the base of the work like scree
around a mountain cliff, so as to lay it aside and glue it back later. Never throw that
rubble away until the positive is checked carefully.
Anywhere between a half-hour and a whole evening later, the figure stands
clear, once again created, twice-born. But now the sculpture is no longer clay, warm
and pliable. It is a sort of Platonic ideal of form, ghost-white, marble-cold, stone-
hard. Not until it is dirtied with a coat of the shellac mixture does it show detail and
come back to life. This figure is the artist’s reference model, the key against which
all other castings will be compared. If a new flexible mold must be made, this is the
original that the mold will be made around in order to preserve the integrity of the
sculpture.

2. George Gray
Browning, 1968

I thought life with Bob would go on as it was in those first years. It never occurred
to me – or to him – that casting bronze would be different from casting plaster,
that the new customers would be different than the earlier ones. We didn’t know
that becoming famous would change everything. But Bob was aware that he
was aging, which I tried not to think about. Sculpture is an arduous art form
– Bob longed for the ease of painting.
Most of his attempts didn’t satisfy him. Ace’s theory was that Bob should
never paint with a brush. He urged use of the palette knife, on the principle that
it would be more like sculpture. Actually it was good advice, because Bob’s big-
gest faults were fuzzing up his boundaries and muddying his colors. If he used a
palette knife, he HAD to mix his color on the palette and then put it on in one
smooth facet. But he didn’t feel as though he were really painting if he used a
knife. To him, painting meant a fistful of brushes.
Then salvation came in the form of George and Sandi Gray. George was a
photo-retoucher – a highly skilled one who made a good living in Manhattan
– but who yearned to make his living as a full-time painter. He was studying
with Frank Reilly, longtime painting instructor at the Art Students League in

132 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Trimming the plaster. Johnny Bench, catcher for the Cincinnatti Reds, 1982.
Photo: Buster Ruetten.

VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS 133

 New York. Reilly had a system worked out to teach values (dark versus light)
by confining his students to graded shades of gray. Most people can’t see values
– they are distracted by shade, hue, and saturation – and anyway don’t have
the concepts to discuss what they see. Getting values accurate and in proper
relationship was the single most effective way to improve amateur painting. We
were impressed.
George taught us to look through our fists. The darkness of the inside of
one’s hand is a good reference point for values. We realized that we had been
making everything too dark and with too little subtlety between values – like
most beginners, we were distracted by contrast and what we “knew,” even
though Ace had given us the speech about twisting up a shiny tin can and
painting it, so that we’d realize it wasn’t gray but rather the composite of colored
reflections from everything around it. Now that we knew about values, we went
around squinting through our fists at everything. To keep people around town
from thinking we were using some kind of threatening hex, we had to explain
to other folks, who also tried it. I don’t know what tourists thought of all these
people looking through their fists. Maybe some ethnographer recorded it as a
Blackfeet sign. George also encouraged us to make a square with our hands in
order to think about composition, but that seemed to be recognized as an artist’s
gesture, like holding out a thumb at arm’s length to judge proportions.
We set up easels, and George painted an orange resting on blue paper,
teaching us about color transfer (a little blue reflected in the orange and a little
orange reflected in the blue) and controlling the crispness of boundaries (sharp
edges where people should notice, blurry ones at unimportant places). Then
we went out around the reservation to paint landscapes. When we visited the
pale sandstone escarpments along Two Medicine River, George criticized our
dark skies, but then he saw that we were right: somehow that sky WAS heavy
and dark, especially in the long clefts where erosion had made good habitat for
swallows and owls. Each bird burrow had a white patch under it.
Painting is the creation of an illusion, especially if one is doing representa-
tional pictures, which is what Bob wanted to do. It requires thinking on several
levels at once, seeing many qualities in relationship, almost like working a puzzle
– if one does this here, then one must do that there. Adding a spot of the comple-
mentary color can intensify the first color – but though Bob could see that it
did, and knew his color wheel, he couldn’t see why. It was all too intellectual
and removed for him. George came closer to explaining it than anyone else had,
because he could demonstrate and then Bob could feel it.
Sandi Gray, as well as being beautiful, was part of the upper-class world
that I envisioned from magazines. Her liveliness and confidence, her willingness
to scramble around on rocks in gullies, and her curiosity about what I thought
and felt, came as fresh water to one in a desert. We chattered, goofed around,
said outrageous things, and, to let me paint, she did the support-system stuff:
the lists and sandwiches. When the Grays left, we both actually wept a little. All

134 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

next winter we painted pictures and tried to figure out what George would say
about them.

3. American Artist and Paul Juley

Browning, 1964

American Artist magazine assured us they would accept the article I had written
about Bob IF we could come up with decent photographs. A fussy, demanding
man appeared who assured us he knew exactly what was needed. His theory was
the more lights, the better. For weeks he lived on the sofa, told us all about his
dear mother, and blew out overloaded fuses in an effort to get the bronzes ever
brighter. It would have been easy to bake cookies at the point of focus. American
Artist was not impressed, but we used the photos for a first attempt at a catalog.
Desperate, we demanded to know from the magazine just what photogra-
phers they approved of anyway. They gave us the name of Peter A. Juley & Son.
As it turned out, Peter was deceased and the son, Paul, was the whole business
now. We didn’t realize until later that between the two they had photographed
the works of all the great Beaux Arts sculptors and their negatives would end up
in the Smithsonian. When we called to ask how much money it would take to
get him to Browning, Montana, his fee seemed exorbitant, but we sent him a
plane ticket (tourist class) and drove to Great Falls to get him.
We had sent Paul photos of ourselves in the course of our correspondence,
but neglected to get any clues about his appearance. Craning our necks for the
sort of person we expected, we were mildly annoyed when an old man toting a
big box came up and stopped in front of us. He pretended to be indignant – I
think his feelings WERE a bit hurt. Gradually we focused. His polka dot bowtie
was flamboyant as a South American butterfly. His fingers were purple from
impatience with tongs in putting his prints in and out of developing chemicals.
He had no other baggage than his big box and a little satchel. “Well,” he an-
nounced, “I only came because I was curious to see who had the nerve to send
me a plane ticket that wasn’t first class!”
It was winter and the landscape was overcast, strictly black and white. The
drive, crammed into the pickup, was awkward. “What’s next?” he asked, “A
dogsled?” We had wrapped his luggage up in plastic to keep the snow out of it
but he was worried about what the subzero temperatures might be doing to his
camera in its box. It was an ancient 8" x 10" view camera held together with bits
of tape and wire, its lens made with a skill no longer in existence, its massive
wooden tripod looking more like a stepladder.
In the museum we had prepared a setting for the bronzes and put on an
extra hired man to carry things around. Bob was prepared to enter into a long

VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS 135

 discussion of angles and lighting on each piece, but Paul waved him off. “Just
bring ‘em and bring ‘em fast,” he said. “I hate having to wait for the set-up.” He
only used one portable spot and a dim fill light, the exact opposite of our last
genius photographer.
Carl Cree Medicine brought Lone Cowboy and set it on the backdrop. Bob,
torn between respect and trepidation, began to ask again about angles, but Paul
wouldn’t listen. He had lit a huge stinking cigar and blew smoke in all direc-
tions. We had visions of the sculptures looking as though they had ascended to
the clouds of heaven. For a moment he considered, tinkered with the back of his
ungainly contraption, and looked at the bronze upside down on the view-glass,
then he chucked the massive film holder into the back of the camera, reached
around to take off the lens cap, and began to tell a joke.
“Aren’t you timing this?” squawked Bob, not hearing the joke at all.
“Naw. I know about how long it takes.” At the end of the joke he put the
lens cap back and demanded the next bronze. His joke was about sex, a subject
he liked very much. He was fascinated with my relationship to Bob and not
quite rude in hinting about it.
“You aren’t bringing these pieces fast enough!” he complained.
“Don’t you want to try out a few negatives? I have a darkroom,” suggested
Bob desperately. He was beginning to realize that we were not going to see any
of the photos or even know whether they turned out until Paul was back in New
York City, a plane ticket away. But Paul had his own way of doing things and he
intended to accommodate no one else’s notions and anxieties. In a few hours he
had photographed all sixty pieces in existence at the time, as well as taking some
candid snaps of Bob and I, and going on a quick jaunt down to the folks’, where
Bob’s mother was charmed. Pop just puffed on his pipe.
But Paul was hinting strongly that he needed a cocktail, so we came back
to the studio, where our meager alcohol supply dismayed our guest. I set about
fixing supper. Paul, seeing that the open galley kitchen had only one entrance,
came to “help” me while he worked on his cocktail. His help consisted of French-
kissing the cook, who was not French. I had no idea how to fend him off, though
I was repelled and alarmed, and was getting more and more angry that Bob was
pretending not to notice. I knew he thought the photos were so important that
almost any price was justified – especially if I paid it. But where was this going
to lead? Would I have to suddenly vault over the counter?
At last the phone rang: it was Paul’s wife. She asked to talk to me and sighed
humorously as she asked if he were “behaving.” I said something ambiguous, so
she understood at once. “I’ll scold him for you, dear,” she promised. “He doesn’t
mean any harm. He just likes to flirt and get away with mischief. He’s really
just a little boy at heart. It’s so good for him to have this adventure.” Everything
was fine after that, Paul minding his manners a little better and me leashing my
indignation.

136 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Paul was using time exposures to get a deep field of focus. That – and a
negative so large it could be used for 8" x 10" contact prints – meant that every
detail on the sculpture showed clearly. We had thought the angle of the shot
was the key and then raised the light level to compensate for modern 35-mm
fast-film technology. Simply, we had passed over the classic considerations of
photography, even as we clung to classic realistic sculpture. We should have
known better; it turned out that Peter Juley had been Malvina Hoffman’s pho-
tographer. Paul represented two generations of experience in exactly the context
Bob so longed for.
In the September 1964 American Artist, the article about Bob finally ap-
peared between an article about Norman Rockwell and one about Maurice
Sendak. We waited breathlessly for fan mail to roll in, but nothing much hap-
pened. Still, it was nice to show the magazine around, and we bought a box of
them.

4. True magazine
Browning, 1965

Years earlier, Bill Browning, whose job was promoting tourism for the state,
had come to Bob and asked him to mount a five-inch fish for a joke gift. It was
a nasty little job – especially for Bob, who was allergic to fish – and there was
no money in it. (The charge for mounting fish is usually by the inch – people
mount trophy fish and the bigger they are the better.) But he did it anyway, and
Bill went away grateful. Now, this fall, he called Bob to say he had Erwin “Joe”
Bauer with him and Joe wanted to take photos of the museum animals. But
could they take the animals outside to habitats? That would be exciting and real,
and Joe could do some super-close-ups. It was agreed.
Carl Cree Medicine and some Heavyrunner brothers spent all day – luckily
one filled with much sunshine and little wind – hauling the mounted deer and
mountain sheep around the reservation. It was a struggle, but no one complained
because it was so interesting to see what they looked like, which was real enough
that there was a little concern about someone shooting at them.
The next day Joe had hoped to photograph the bobcat kittens, but they
– unconfined and perverse as usual – had disappeared. Since I was the one who
fed them, it was my call they responded to, so I went up and down Willow
Creek, their normal travel corridor, calling, “Kitty, kitty, kitty!” We checked a
huge square boulder several miles west where Gimpy liked to sun herself while
digesting gophers and the nearby rancher’s chickens. (We bought a lot of chick-
ens after the fact – our own private predator compensation program.) Normally
she came in great hopping leaps, sometimes getting so excited to see us that she

VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS 137

 flopped into the creek instead of going to a narrow place she could leap across.
But this time there was no sign.
Reluctant to waste time, Joe and Bill hit upon the idea of taking the sculp-
tures out to photograph them in landscapes, just as they had done with the
full mounts. We wondered why we hadn’t thought of this before: the Return of
the Blackfeet Raiders on a cliff against the sky. Boss of the Trail Herd – painted
naturalistically with oils – in a reflecting mud puddle. The big grizzly rearing up
among rosebushes with rosehips bright as blood drops. This was great stuff! Joe
felt sure the photos would sell to True magazine.
And they did! Maybe no one read American Artist but surely, we thought,
everyone read True, and now fame and fortune would be upon us. While we
waited to find out, Bob was asked to join the Salmagundi Club, old and hon-
orific bastion of artistic respectability. This put him in the company of Malvina
Hoffman – well, not Malvina exactly, because women weren’t accepted into the
men’s club – but Warren Baumgartner and Bob Lougheed and many of the big-
gest and most respected names of traditional American art. Bob was so proud he
strutted, though he was unclear about what it meant to belong to a gentleman’s
club in New York City.

5. New York Shows

Manhattan, 1963

To keep in touch with the theatre world, I bought the Sunday New York Times
at Val’s Cigar Store every time we got to Great Falls. The art pages were folded
with the theatre news, so I read both. To me, Broadway and Manhattan were
where art happened, where reputations were made or broken. I didn’t know
that Western art was in a sort of bubble by itself. I noted invitations for juried
shows with Audubon Artists or National Academy of Design and thought Bob
was perfectly well qualified to exhibit with them. With a little persuasion, he
sent some bronzes to various shows, where they were invariably accepted. This
was clear proof of quality, and we gleefully went down to the folks to tell them
about it. “Did you sell anything?” asked Pop. One piece sold. But the shows
made Bob’s reputation. He was a New-York-City-approved artist, no question
about it, and very few of the other Montana artists around at that time had even
exhibited out of state.
A friend of Malvina Hoffman, a woman sculptor named Joy Buba, trav-
eled through. She asked Bob to find her a model, so Bob took her out to meet
Cecile Last Star, an experienced model, an older woman with a fine face. Her
grandson, Victor Auld, was on his way to being a painter. He and his new wife,
Ginger, were sleeping out in a tipi in the yard. Bob said, “Let me introduce you,

138 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Joy,” and scratched on the canvas, which is proper etiquette. There was a lot of
scrambling inside, because they hadn’t bothered with pajamas. Ginger rolled
under the canvas on the backside and made for the house with a sheet around
her. Victor called, “Come on in!” He couldn’t get up because there was a big
orange cat sleeping on his stomach, but other than that, he greeted Joy with a
handshake and welcoming words, as though being flat on one’s back was just as
good as being upright.
Cecile had long been up and dressed. She used to meet the trains in Glacier
Park, and was able to negotiate with Joy smoothly. Joy made her portrait that
afternoon and then asked Bob to cast it in plaster for her so it would travel. We
were interested because Joy worked mostly by putting pellets of the plastilene
to build up the face, while Bob had a tendency to push and pare it away from a
block. He took special care in making the plaster original, and Joy, meaning to
pay him a compliment, said offhand, “Well, if your sculpture doesn’t sell, you
can always make a living as a really fine plaster caster.” Then she saw Bob’s face
and realized her mistake.
Joy Buba and Malvina Hoffman recommended Bob for membership in the
National Sculpture Society, the absolute criterion for a fine figurative sculptor.
Now Bob was certified and included beyond all doubt. This was the organization
that had included the fine Beaux-Arts-educated turn-of-the-century American
sculptors.
The modest scrapbook that Bob had kept until now was suddenly an
excellent marketing tool and we set it up on a lectern in the little gallery so
that people could read for themselves. The cap was when the International Art
Guild, sponsored by Princess Grace of Monaco, exhibited Return of the Blackfeet
Raiders. Everything was in French so we had to go up to the high school to get
translations from the language teacher. I had suspicions that it was some kind of
con game, but Bob exhibited with them for the rest of the century. It’s just that
there were never any sales.

6. Glenbow Foundation
Calgary, 1967

It must have been John Hellson (more about him later) who first brought us
rumors of a man in Calgary “so rich that he doesn’t buy things from a collec-
tion – he just buys whole collections.” This man was “Colonel” Eric Harvie, a
lawyer who, during the Depression, had taken mineral rights as payment for the
legal work he did. Since there was quite a bit of litigation over the oil-rich land
between Calgary and Banff, he ended up owning huge oil and coal deposits. By
the time we heard of him, he was old, frail, and – as John put it – so rich he could

VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS 139

 afford to be anonymous. He was known as the “Glenbow Foundation.” Harvie
and his family gave this institution to the people of Alberta in 1966, and it exists
now as the Glenbow Museum plus related legal bodies, such as the Devonian
Group or the Riveredge Foundation.
The pitch John made to Bob was about an entire collection of mounted
birds that Harvie had bought in England. A talented taxidermist was needed to
clean them all. One item alone, he said, was a glass case made into a fire screen
for a fireplace and filled with more than a hundred mounted hummingbirds. But
Bob was just leaving taxidermy at this time. He was dubious. In fact, after being
attacked by the federal game warden, he had qualms about birds altogether. John
could not be resisted. He suggested we take along some of our newly cast bronzes
and see if Harvie would look at them. The man was buying everything, raved
John. Then he found the entry point, “Bob, they have hundreds of paintings by
Rungius! Maybe they would sell or trade.” John arranged the whole thing.
When we arrived in Calgary, a hotel room was provided. A crew came to
the pickup and disappeared with the bronzes. We were assigned a guide – a high
level executive in the foundation – who would take us around to see the Harvie
collection as it stood so far. There were warehouses full of the strangest medley
of objects anyone could imagine, much of it junk, all set up on temporary tables
of plywood on sawhorses. Buyers had been roving the West, not taking time
to sift through what they bought, but merely hauling it all back to Calgary for
evaluation. There were life-size rubber Indians (intended to prop up in front of
roadside attractions so that tourists would think they were old-timers snoozing
on the porch) made by a guy Bob always suspected had stolen one of his bison
skulls and reproduced it to sell at tourist traps. (They’re still being sold, made
from molds that have twisted and lost detail over the decades.)
There were tables and tables of New Guinea penis sheaths. I had read about
these long feathered embellishments and wanted to look at them closely, but
the anthropologist who was working on them shooed me away. He had been a
friend of Thor Heyerdahl, who built and sailed the Kon-Tiki, which fascinated
Bob. (The sheaths made him blush.) The anthro hinted that I should go powder
my nose somewhere else so he could help Bob try on one of the decorations. The
anthro was a very handsome man: tanned, blonde, muscular. Bob encouraged
me to stay.
At some point we were getting a little punchy after looking at so much
stuff – like paste replicas of the British crown jewels displayed in an actual safe.
(At that time exhibits were housed in the former Calgary City Hall.) We went
down a narrow stairway that opened into a hallway with doors on one side.
Bob was ahead of me and as he stepped into the doorway he doubled back so
quickly that he bumped into me. Confused, I stood there until he got behind
and grabbed my arms. “Tell me what you see!” he exclaimed, thrusting me for-
ward and quickly pulling me back. I could hardly believe my eyes: a whole room
of Malvina Hoffman sculptures! Harvie had bought an entire set of her work.

140 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

We refused to go on. For the next hour we went from sculpture to sculpture,
exclaiming to each other. We knew them all from photos and many of them
as enlarged versions in the Field Museum in Chicago. Our guide got a little
exasperated with us. We were behind schedule.
The crew that took our bronzes had polished them, put them under spot-
lights on velvet draped bases, and made little name tags for them – as though
they were being presented in a classy gallery. We’d never seen them that way
ourselves and were impressed at how good they looked.
There were indeed nearly a hundred Rungius paintings. His studio had
been in Banff, not far from Calgary. Charlie Beil, Bob’s mentor, had lived close
by, sometimes acting as a caretaker. The paintings were spectacular portraits
of bighorns and elk against the huge characteristic stone slabs of the northern
Rockies. The paintings were hung on pull-out screens and we went through
them until we were exhausted. Many other paintings were there as well. The
best are included in Lorne Render’s book, The Mountains and the Sky,1 and they
are very good indeed. But then there would be some fussy little scene evidently
painted by someone’s aunt. There was little of the cowboy art so popular in the
States. And it was clear that nothing was considered to be trading stock.
We looked at the stuffed birds. They were all European and up to a century
old. Bob estimated that for one man there would be a decade of work. Birds
really are “stuffed” with tiny bodies of excelsior and string. Rather than be-
ing tanned, they are treated with poisons, usually arsenic, which will fade and
discolor organic materials. (Bob used borax.) These had been in glass cases, but
dust had infiltrated. Each would have to be gently blow-cleaned with compressed
air and then every feather put back into place with a big needle, preening in the
same way a bird preens its feathers. A bird spends hours a day keeping its feathers
fluffed, smoothed, and properly overlapping to be waterproof and aerodynamic.
There WERE more than a hundred stuffed hummingbirds looking like jewels
in a glass case with brass feet, meant for use as a fire screen in a parlor. One could
imagine them with firelight glancing off the iridescent feathers. But one could
not imagine sitting day after day, dusting and preening them.
Finally we were to meet the Colonel himself in a huge taxidermy room with
hundreds of mounted heads around the walls. Bob was very concerned because
no one had thought to put steadying nails at the base of the necks of the bighorn
sheep heads. Because of the horns, they were so top-heavy that unless they were
prevented from swiveling on their point of attachment to the wall, they would
eventually dump themselves onto the floor. These were high on the twenty-foot
walls so their horns and the papier maché shells inside the hides were bound to
be damaged. Someone had said to Bob that he should speak very frankly to the
Colonel, because he was a blunt man who wanted the bottom line always.
Someone whispered, “Here he comes!” There was a flurry of hair-smoothing
and clothes-straightening and then Colonel Harvie came along slowly with his
retinue. The first thing Bob blurted was, “You’ve got to get someone to stabilize

VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS 141

 those bighorn heads!” The Colonel did not smile. He wanted to know if Bob
would rejuvenate the birds. Bob refused. He began to talk about the bronzes,
but the Colonel cut him short and left. We were crestfallen. The “someone”
explained that the Colonel’s health was so bad that he could only be out of bed
for an hour and was probably already tiring when he met us.
Overwhelmed, we packed up and went home. Pretty soon we got word
that the Glenbow Foundation wanted to buy several bronzes. It wasn’t until
after Bob had divorced me and his reputation had greatly increased that the
Riveredge Foundation bought the entire set of rodeo bronzes. Today they are
on display in the Calgary Airport, where they are seen by millions, especially
around the time of the Calgary Stampede. The money from the sale made such a
bulge in Bob’s annual income that the IRS could never believe it wasn’t typical.
He was permanently earmarked for review to keep him from hiding any repeat
sales of that size.
In many ways the just-developing Glenbow Foundation gave Bob the con-
fidence and direction to go on with his sculpture and museum. We spend many
long hours trying to digest what we had seen, all the hypotheses about art we
had heard, and what a small operation like ours could learn from such a mam-
moth outfit. The lesson we got out of it was focus. The smaller, the more focused,
the better the quality and the more important the quality.
At the time we didn’t know that Claude Schaeffer’s papers had gone to the
Glenbow library, but maybe they weren’t there yet. Claude had followed John
Ewers as the curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, and his
widow had taken his estate to her retirement home in Seaside, Oregon, to sort
through the many papers. (She was a trained architect, though it is unclear
how much she developed her profession.) As well, the Glenbow had the papers
of D.C. Duvall, vital informant to Clarke Wissler, who was one of the earliest
anthropologists of Blackfeet.
From then on, Bob was always aware of the Calgary institutions as our orig-
inal big-time institution. Lorne Render was at the Glenbow before he became
the director of the C.M. Russell Gallery in Great Falls, and Render became one
of the few people Bob really trusted and should have.

142 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

7. Christmas
Browning, 1964

When the June 1964 flood changed life on the reservation, Browning was
completely isolated. All bridges were out and the phone went down. No tourist
business was operating. We didn’t know that Margaret, Bob’s daughter, and
the four grandkids, had gone from Valier to Margaret’s mother in Anacortes,
Washington. The DeSmet marriage appeared to have ended. Surely she would
be back soon. We had known things were rocky, but we’d had no notion that
it would come to this. Weren’t they devout Catholics? Didn’t that mean no
divorce? No one was telling us anything.
At Christmas, when Margaret and the kids finally came for a week, we
“taught” them what we had learned about painting. At first it is the seeing that is
important – looking at what it is easy to take for granted and really understand-
ing the relationships of shapes and colors, values, and saturations. Is that pine
as dark as it seems? Does that long shadow seem more blue or more red? The
kids pretended to listen and then painted their own stuff the way they wanted
to. Margaret was more impressed. When she had been close to high school
graduation, Ralph Crosby Smith had offered to take her into his family home in
Westport, Connecticut, while she went to art school. She had been afraid to go
so far alone, afraid she didn’t have enough talent.
The sensuousness of the eye must be the most subtle and complex of all hu-
man pleasures. What bliss to sit quietly in a panorama of air and light, merged
and yet observing, and with small movements of the hand to create a virtual
world of tiny contrasts and blends of color and shape! Touch does come into it:
soft mink brushes, stiff bristles, springy thin metal of palette knives, kinesthesia
of hand muscles transferred to the slender enameled wand of brush handle and
then to taut canvas. And smell: the tang of the oil medium and – on the prairie
– painting plein aire with the incense of grass, one’s own body, and nearby herbs
such as bee balm, horse mint, sage, wild onion. But it was also good in the snug
little studio, the Christmas tree, cottonwood smoke from the fireplace, good
food smells. We were very proud of ourselves. This was art.
I thought an artist should live beautifully. I envisioned a community of
kindred spirits, wonderful evenings of good food and talk. A home filled with
cherished objects created by friends. A year that revolved around human cer-
emony, deeply understood, joyfully shared. The new studio seemed an excellent
beginning.
It had taken me some effort to convert Bob to the idea that a Christmas
tree could be anything other than a Fifties conventional cone, maybe flocked
white, with tinsel and blue lights, but now he was an enthusiast for my gnarled
jack pines covered with candy sparkling in cellophane among twinkling white
fairy lights. In a gesture of compromise, I put his blue lights around the window.

VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS 143

 He especially liked the part after Christmas, when all the candy is given away to
visitors – thus avoiding the chore of taking down and packing ornaments.
Since Bob and I weren’t married yet, I went home at night and the kids were
divided between Bob and their mom’s beds. I returned for breakfast. We set up
still lifes, one after another, and painted Indian corn, buffalo skulls, candela-
brum, and eagle feathers. We ate, talked, played, and painted all day every day
for almost a week. Bob had rigged loudspeakers to play Christmas music inside
and outside the museum. We filled the back of the pickup with hay, blankets, and
a real buffalo hide and drove around town jingling real sleigh bells, singing and
waving. The next Christmas we managed it again, and then never after that.

8. Hunting in the snow

East front of the Rockies, 1968

Another fall was very snowy during hunting season, and we could not have
gotten up high into the mountains if we’d wanted to. Bob had an elk tag this
time and we went back into foothills, Gunsmoke stoutly plowing along in snow
sometimes chest deep. Zuke, my new little pinto horse, floundered – seriously
underpowered and undermotivated. At one point the trail went up over a bank
with a pine bough hanging low over it. Bob bent the branch to go past, but
instead of holding it for me, he unthinkingly let it go just as I was halfway up.
It caught me in the chest, sweeping me out of the saddle and leaving me stuck
head-down in a drift. I felt like Charlie Brown upended by a fast pitch from his
own team. Zuke collapsed in the snow. Bob, all unawares at the top of the bank,
scolded, “Why can’t you keep up?” I don’t know about Zuke, but fury kept me
going for an hour or so.
At some points in our hunt, we walked along in front of the horses. There
was no need to lead the horses physically, as Gunsmoke got into the spirit and
practically tiptoed while scanning for elk. Bob talked to him more than he
talked to me. Zuke stayed right close, anxious not to be left alone in the wilder-
ness. Me, too.
We saw no elk, but finally got a fat muley buck and Bob put a rope on the
carcass to drag it out. Just as we broke out of the treeline on the way back to
the pickup, Gunsmoke stopped short and stared off to his right. Bob, following
his line of sight, saw a whole row of fine elk, not far away – just standing and
looking at us. Struck with buck fever and not at all prepared, he grabbed for his
rifle, but it was caught under the rope on the deer carcass. In a flurry of flung
arms and legs also worthy of a cartoonist, he actually yanked himself off his own
horse and ended up on his back in the snow with the gun pointing at the sky.
The elk watched this foolishness a few more moments and left for saner parts.

144 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Mary on Skeeter, Gunsmoke waiting for Bob. East front of the Rockies (1960s).
Photo: Bob Scriver.

Gunsmoke watched, too, but didn’t move. He might have been worried about
being shot. Bob was too furious at himself to talk as he drove back home. But I
was sitting in a warm glow that didn’t entirely come from the pickup heater.
There are two other moments that are vivid in my mind, but I can’t attach
them to specific trips. Once was when I waited on horseback for Bob to explore
ahead around a cliff that pushed up above the trail. Zuke looked up, so I did too.
At the top of the rocks, maybe six feet away, was a little group of deer, a couple
of does and their fawns standing side-by-side, gazing down at me.
“Look out!” I hissed. “There’s a man with a gun loose in the forest and
you’ll be reduced to soup!” Those big limpid eyes with their long lashes just
stared at me while they tried to take it all in. Then Gunsmoke’s feet sounded
against a rock on the trail and the deer vanished. They didn’t wheel and run
– they just vanished. I never told Bob.
He usually assigned me the role of beater. Zuke and I would ride off to the
side and a little ahead and push the deer so they would go close to him. Once
we were following a big buck, even caught glimpses of him. We were sure he had
hidden in a ragged clump of wild rosebush, so I circled around. Amazingly, I saw
the buck get down on his “hands and knees” – belly scraping the ground – and
creep unseen right past Bob. We never did catch up with him. I thought it was
a lesson in the uses of humility. The noble, soaring, bounding technique would
not have worked: it was a crafty belly-crawl that saved that buck.

VII PLASTER ORIGINAL: FIRST SUCCESS 145

 VIII

Black Tuffy:
Troubles Begin

1. About flexible molds

Browning, Fifties and forward

In the Fifties Bob had gained a huge advantage over other sculptors because of
a “secret” mold material he had found in Chicago: Koroseal™. In Rodin’s time,
molds for waxes and plasters were made of agar-agar, which is only gelatin. The
material was fragile, decomposed and distorted easily, and lost detail every time
a casting was made. We tried it once and were disgusted. Old-time collectors
took care to buy copies made early in the life of the mold, and artists numbered
their castings to make this easier. “Editions” were based on the number of cast-
ings a mold could produce without losing so much detail as to be unsaleable.
To change the number of a casting lower was equivalent to pretending the
casting had more detail than it did, and thus more value. As fine accurate detail
became an index, many artists worked over their waxes before they were cast
into bronze or even sharpened details on the bronze with small chisels and ham-
mers. Bronze, a malleable metal, will accept such techniques.
In Malvina Hoffman’s time latex molds were widely used for casting, but
they had their disadvantages: time-consuming to make, hard to stabilize in
larger dimensions, and, again, prone to blurring of detail when repeated copies
were made. They could decompose and had to be stored carefully to keep them
from losing shape entirely. In comparison, Koroseal™ was a miracle material:
tough, resilient, and storable. The tenth, the fiftieth, the hundredth copy made
from the mold, whether in plaster or wax, had as much detail as the first. But the
idea that low numbers meant higher value has persisted.
When Bob made a Koroseal™ mold he used as much caution as someone
cooking up illegal amphetamines, partly because he so loved having secrets and
partly because the process was tricky enough to be vulnerable to interruptions.

147
 Generally he worked late at night with the phone off the hook and the door
locked. The Koroseal™ came as ground-up rubbery stuff, dark red. It had to be
melted in a turkey roaster to a kind of hot syrup that poured slowly and thickly
around the sculpture. Spilled on flesh, it clung and burned painfully.
To make sure the Koroseal™ snugged up tightly into all the small overhang-
ing configurations (“anfractuosities”) of the sculpture without trapping bubbles,
Bob used a vacuum table, a smooth slab of marble with a small hole in the
middle and a pump underneath to pull out air through that hole. What made
it nearly impossible to use was the necessity of hollowing out the interior of the
plaster sculpture with an electric hand drill until it was thin enough for the
pump to pull air through, maybe a half- or quarter-inch thickness. The smallest
slip of the drill could destroy the model.
A water-clay dam was built around the hollow figure to seal it onto the
vacuum table, the motor set to pumping, and the hot syrup poured in between
dam and figure. When it cooled, the resulting mold was flexible, resistant to
tearing, and exquisitely detailed. It was not unusual for Bob’s fingerprints to
carry through from the plastilene model to the conversion into plaster and then
to the pliable mold where it was imprinted in the wax or hydrocal replicas.
Helping Bob cut open the cooled molds was a task of cooperation and
intimacy. Two chairs were arranged facing each other so we could sit knee-to-
knee. Bob brought out the special knives he had made for cutting molds, knives
that had been difficult to make and that he kept carefully hidden for fear of
someone using them for skinning or whittling or cutting up sandwiches. Only
cheap kitchen knives in the beginning, they now had double edges and kinks
bent into the blades, bends of different sizes and different distances between the
handles and points, which were filed to sharp edges. When something of the
consistency of cheese was cut with these knives, a groove was created – a gasket
– which keyed the mold for reassembly and prevented any liquid material from
leaking out. Today you can buy this kind of specialized knife from a sculpture
supply place.
The lump of Koroseal™, like a big resilient piece of meat, was cradled on
our nudged-together knees and the knives arranged like surgical instruments
alongside. The light was pulled down close. Only the flat base of the sculpture
showed at the bottom of the mold and it took Bob a moment of studying to
orient himself, visualizing exactly where the figure was inside. Then he began to
cut. My job was to support and separate as he cut.
“A little more pressure to the left.”
“Here?”
“Yeah – that’s good. Maybe a little harder. No, it’s coming too fast. Hold
still now. Don’t move. Try to tilt a little.”
“How’s this?”
“Oh, yes. That’s good. Keep that up.”

148 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 He never forgot where the anatomy was inside the mold. The stuff didn’t
cut easily, but in a while the sculpture re-emerged and the mold fell away in two
pieces. Or sometimes it was necessary to cut the mold into three pieces – not
many more, for it really was quite flexible. The color and texture always made me
think of tumescent flesh, slippery and sensuous. I thought of episiotomies at the
moment of birth. I thought of sex. “Do you think of nothing else?” demanded
Bob, passing on a comment made to him by previous women.
Then there was Black Tuffy™.

“Polysulfides ... consist of two parts – a base compound and a curing agent
– which are mixed just prior to application. Curing takes place with negligible
shrinkage at room temperature, producing molds suitable for casting gypsum
plasters and cements, waxes ... This material, although very smelly and gooey,
is a consistent and reliable rubber. Affectionately known as Good Old Black
Tuffy!” (From the website of a sculpture supply catalogue.)

“Black Tuffy™” was a “cold molding compound” for making molds that
would remain flexible. It revolutionized mold-making because it did less dam-
age to models, was relatively easy to mix (there were two syrupy ingredients
which were mixed like epoxy glue and then “gelled” by chemical reaction), and
was firm enough not to distort. There were several “Tuffy” formulations, for
instance “Gray” and “Stretchy” Tuffy, but none of them was as good as “good
old Black Tuffy.” The stuff didn’t tear easily, no heat was involved and it didn’t
require a vacuum table to get accurate detail. Suddenly it was possible for Bob,
all alone, to make a mold directly from a plastilene model in a few hours with
no waste mold.
There was only one drawback. It was sticky, thick, blacker than tar, and
got on everything. On a day we worked with it and for days afterwards black
smudges turned up everywhere – on doorknobs and light bulbs, on dishes in the
kitchen, on the dog, on the toilet seat, on the pickup steering wheel and sticking
together the pages of the phone book. It was miserably hard to get off. And it
stunk of rotten eggs.
There was another characteristic: it had to be measured very accurately in
small amounts by weight. Bob scoured the country until he found a set of sec-
ond-hand pharmacy scales with tiny increments marked on a balance beam. A
strange assortment of containers – mixing bowls, wash pans, empty margarine
tubs – had always floated around the shop with the remains of plaster in them.
Now a second flotilla appeared, this time with Black Tuffy™ leftovers. If it had
set up, it was sort of fascinating to peel out, stretching in sheets and strips. If
it had not set up, it was nasty and you’d be finding black marks on the backs
of your arms or across your face. Just passing through the shop could get it on
your clothes.

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N 149
 One Saturday when Bob was gone someplace, I decided I would clean the
shop. All day I scraped lacquer off the bathtub and sink, rubbed clean the win-
dows that surely hadn’t been touched since they were installed, hammered old
plaster stuck to the floor into chips so I could sweep it up, rounded up, sorted
and organized tools. Late in the afternoon Bob still hadn’t returned. My eyes lit
on the Tuffy-smeared pharmacy scales. Determined to take it back to its former
brassy splendor, I worked on it with steel wool until it shone. Just then Bob
walked in and bellowed. In my zeal I had scrubbed off all the little increment
marks on the balance beam. The scale would never be accurate again.
That’s the way trouble came. Small bits of darkness, unreconciled and
unresolved, turning up unexpectedly in strange places. The efforts to get rid of
them resulted in more damage than the original trouble. Doing the work meant
getting dirty.

2. The Big Flood

Blackfeet Reservation, 1964

1964 was the year of Montana’s territorial Centennial, and we were all prepar-
ing. The famous screenwriters in East Glacier, Betsey and Talbot Jennings (who
wrote the script for the movie of The Good Earth), wrote a pageant and the city
fathers – still mostly white at that time – began to look around for a director. I
made Centennial costumes to wear in parades and to dances and for the recep-
tionist girls in the museum. Then it rained.
Warm, heavy rain fell on deep snow in the mountains and water levels
began to mount in all the ponds and reservoirs. The Blackfeet Reservation is
on the east slope of the Rockies, crossed by three major drainages and many
small ones, each coming down out of the mountains swiftly, not slowing until
the prairie flattens out on the eastern wheat fields of the Reservation. Bureau of
Indian Affairs and Glacier Park managers went out to open floodgates on their
headwater dams, but found them rusted shut, tangled with driftwood, or simply
broken.
Early one June morning, the water rising and becoming more violent in
every drainage, three dams collapsed and sent walls of water charging down
Swiftcurrent Creek, Two Medicine, and Birch Creek, so swiftly and unexpect-
edly that few realized the danger in time to go to high ground. School had just
dismissed and many people had moved for the summer down to their little
cabins by the watercourses. Bill McMullen, a police officer, went to warn people
to move to high ground, and saw a deadly wall of water traveling down Birch
Creek. On the front edge the water was tumbling a dead cow end-for-end, rais-
ing a terrible dust in the compression wind that went just ahead of the water.

150 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 The Browning school principal and superintendent were among a group
who stood helplessly on a ridge at Two Medicine while two old ladies struggled
to get their flock of grandchildren into an ancient pickup, and then in their
haste stalled the motor, which cost them just enough time for the water to catch
them and sweep them away. The group of men stripped barbed wire from the
fences, tied spare tires and boards to them and threw, threw, repeatedly threw
them to within the grasp of the children, but the children were too shocked and
confused to get hold. One teenaged girl survived being swept away but, stranded
in the brush, died of exposure during the night.
Books have been written that include all the stories of the tragedy. Every
bridge was destroyed except the bridge to East Glacier, which is very high, but
the river under that bridge was traveling like a roller derby, high up one sheer
wall. Ancient Viney Chattin stood in the middle of the bridge when we went
up to see. Her bright red hair waved straight up in the wind as she shrieked to
the rest of us, “Get back! Get back! The bridge is going to go! The pilings are
being undermined!” When we called out for her to take her own advice, she
said, “I’m an old lady. I can do what I want. I want to see it go!” Luckily, she
was wrong and the pilings were safe, though they did get some rebuilding a few
years later.
At the other end of the reservation Badger Creek ripped out the old cot-
tonwoods along its banks, bent all the willows flat, and threw huge slabs of
Highway 89 off the right-of-way, each of them rearing up taller than a house
and then falling over in a somersault. It took everyone a while to realize we were
isolated, every highway interdicted. Even 4x4 trucks, which eventually began to
travel cross-country and ford the creeks, had to wait until the water went down
and the mud dried up. All-terrain vehicles hadn’t been invented yet.
KSEN radio station transmitted with generators and kept us all in touch
with each other. Bill Grissom, the superintendent of the reservation, didn’t sleep
for days. Slowly we accounted for people, dead (more than thirty) or alive, and
the stories accumulated. The local priest had gotten trapped in a tree while
checking his cows. (We hadn’t realized he owned a herd of cows until then.) A
mother had managed to get her two children onto a raft formed by a roof torn
off a house, but the turbulence ripped at them until she had to let one go in
order to save the other. A helicopter went to check on the occupants of a house
and a man burst right up through the shingles where he had taken refuge in the
rafters. Some people were never found.
Houses were filled with mud that rotted everything it touched and as soon
as the electricity was back on, the laundromats ran around the clock to try to
save anything washable. Merle Magee’s house floated, so gently that the kitchen
cabinet contents were undisturbed, and came to rest on a ten-foot-tall tangle of
trees and brush. Next to the house, a main branch of a toppled cottonwood tree
stuck up with a robin’s nest in it, the nestlings safe. The parents had found them
and were poking worms into them as though this were all normal.

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N 151
 The little village of Heart Butte was devastated. The Centennial was
cancelled. Instead we held memorial services and tried to understand what to
do next. Bob and I had few losses really, no close friends killed, no property
destroyed except the furnace under the house, but it was as though an apoca-
lypse had swept through, and it entered our dreams. Now, fifty years later, the
driftwood and gravel mostly are still where they were left by the water.
Then good weather returned, the prairie blossomed again into sheets of yel-
low and blue, and the shadows of cumulus clouds moved like live things over the
swells and hollows of the land. The government sent in money and many new
houses were quickly built. Local white ranchers joked bitterly that the net gain
was great enough that Blackfeet prayed, “God bless us and send another flood.”
The tribe cancelled Indian Days but then at the last minute reversed themselves,
saying the people needed to come together in order to restore family ties and
grieve. There were few tipis, but the drumbeat was the same.
There were no tourists since they couldn’t get through, so we had more
leisure than usual. Mrs. Stephenson, who had been going to work the front desk
with me that summer, turned gardener and planted delphiniums, poppies, and
shasta daisies in the newly created backyard. We planted grass, which came up
a uniform field of little white-flowered weeds. Bob’s mom and I spent an after-
noon pulling those up, which upset Bob greatly. “At least there was something
GROWING there,” he lamented. We were still unaware that part of Bob’s fam-
ily had left Valier. Worse than that, what was growing in Margaret was cancer
though not even her doctor knew that yet.
Bob got interested in the faces of the locals who had grown whiskers for
the Centennial and began to make characters, sort of half-portraits, who turned
into the vignette sculpture called The Dead Man’s Hand, which is Aces and
Eights – what Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he was shot. The Methodist
minister was the long tall fellow. Bob’s brother was the gambler. Hubert Bartlett,
our John Birch lumber-hauling friend, became the offended cowboy. It was the
sort of story sculpture that John Rogers had been turning out in plaster decades
earlier for Victorian parlors. Bob presented the piece in a little diorama of a
saloon with a turntable inside. It was the epitome of his corny genre side, but
everyone loved it.

3. Animals drive a wedge

We had two bobcat kittens now, litter mates but nothing alike in personality.
Rufus was a rumbustious, self-possessed kitten who nearly crowded the accom-
modating mother-cat’s kittens clear out. By the time we had given away the
domestic kittens, he was inseparable from the old gray-striped tabby and cared

152 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

nothing for us humans. At dusk the two of them went down the alley in search
of mice, visiting back and forth in fond throaty little sounds, and if Rufus got
out of line, the old Mommacat gave him a good clout, even after he’d gotten
twice as big as she was.
One day I got a phone call from a household down the alley. Rufus had
been enjoying the warm vent of their clothes dryer, which they thought was
charming, so they had invited him in and given him a little canned salmon.
Now he was camped on the daybed in their den and refused to go home. They
were due to go somewhere – could the bobcat please be removed? Rufus only
glanced up when I came in, hardly cared when I put my hands on him, but
when he realized I was going to take him out of this wonderfully hospitable
setting, he turned into a buzz saw. I barely got him outside before I had to drop
him and follow him up the alley clapping my bloody hands to keep him from
doubling back.
Gimpy was at first given to a grandmother with a small child, but in spite
of the cat’s sweet disposition and in spite of the bond that formed between the
kitten and the child, she proved to be too much for the grandmother and ended
up joining Rufus with us. The gray tabby seemed to have an infinite supply of
milk, but I supplemented with baby formula. As the kittens grew older, I mixed
puréed liver baby food into the milk – making the hole in the nipple larger
– and when the kittens ripped the nipple off and ate that, too, I knew I’d put
off weaning longer than necessary. But Gimpy seemed to have chronic diarrhea
and trouble grasping the use of the cat litter box. Maybe her sweetness came in
part from being dumb.
Inevitably she made a mess on some of Bob’s carefully prepared painting
canvases. And Bob’s reaction to excrement was always extreme. He cursed
poor Gimpy, grabbed her up, and flung her into the catbox. Today’s sanitary
arrangements for cats, so deodorized and private, were not available then, so the
kittens had a cardboard sand box inside a wood crate to support it when damp.
Gimpy’s leg slammed into the edge of that box and she screamed. My brother,
who had been studying veterinary medicine but gave it up because he was too
soft-hearted, felt Gimpy carefully – while the little cat purred – and diagnosed
a “green-stick break”, that is, not broken through but split. I demanded the
pickup keys and we drove the eighty miles to the veterinarian, leaving a shaken
and confused Bob behind.
So Gimpy had a cast on one rear leg, which was both an encumbrance
– she had to learn to swing it sideways when she came up steps or else it caught
and held her back – and an advantage – it made a pretty good weapon in the
wrestling matches with Rufus. My brother soon left – events were too painful
–and things settled down again.
When it was time for Gimpy to have her cast removed, Bob and I took her
back to the veterinarian. We held her for the vet to cut the plaster away but she
screamed horribly. “You’re cutting into her,” I said.

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N 153
 Mary the bobcat wrangler with Rufus (left) and Gimpy (right), 1963.
Photo: Bob Scriver.

“No, no. Look, this thing can’t cut flesh, only plaster.” He ran the fiber disc
back and forth on his own arm. “She’s just scared.” But when the cast came off,
the disc had not only cut the flesh, it had made a groove down the side of the
newly healed bone. The veterinarian was appalled and apologetic, but I didn’t
care because I could hardly keep from fainting and had to stagger outside and
sit down. It was Bob who comforted the cat and held her while the vet sewed
her back up.
On the way home, silent and sickened, we came to a creek where some
children were swimming and Bob suggested we stop for a little while. As soon
as we put Gimpy down, she spotted the children across the swimming hole and
struck out into the water mewing, dog-paddling over to join them. Our hearts
constricted with empathy for this poor kitten – broken, weighed down, cut and

154 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

sewn up – still wanting children to play with. We retrieved her and held her
purring between us on the drive home.
Long afterward, I was mad at the dog and took a swipe at him. Bob said
in his serious voice, “Mary, if you are angry and need to beat on something
living, don’t strike a small animal. Take it out on something big like a horse or
cow. It won’t hurt them so long as you just hit with your hand.” He must have
thought about it. But he didn’t strike small animals – he threw them like the
bobcat. Jeanette said he threw her kitten once. Another time a cocker spaniel
was around and in heat with a pack behind her. She came in the open museum
front door and Bob threw her out so hard I was afraid her back would be broken.
But he neither struck nor threw me.
One October day Bob came by before sunup on a school day. “Let’s go duck
hunting!”
“Now? What about school? I can’t be late.”
“You won’t be late. Trust me.”
We went to a little pothole just past the depot. There was a handful of
mallards. Bob thought I should be the one to shoot this time. (I had carried
a gun a few times, but I hated to shoot animals and always aimed a little off,
while pretending to be chagrined to have missed.) To my surprise I winged a
green-headed mallard, who seemed to drop like a stone into the pothole and
never surface – very strange for ducks, which float easily even dead. Dawn was
brightening to daylight across the clear sky.
Then Bob pointed out that old mallard’s beak sticking up as he slowly
snorkeled along, paddling like mad to keep himself under the water. I must have
busted a wing. I shot again, but it was hopeless – the lead pellets just bounced
off the surface of the water. “What can I do?” I was frantic, hating the bird to
be wounded, feeling how late it was getting, getting angry at the sneaky creature
for not either escaping or surrendering. Bob was laughing by now.
Finally I lost my temper entirely, plunged thrashing into the icy water and
emerged victorious, my own bird dog. But then I had to get Bob to wring its
neck for me – I tried and only succeeded in doing something excruciating that
made it gasp. I got to school barely in time and damp around the edges. I think
Bob had hoped I would catch the killer instinct, but I didn’t.

Once we went goose hunting late on a day when a front was threatening to come
through, standing in a gray wall along the mountains. We bumped around the
usual potholes a bit, avoiding the south sides of the hills where the sun shone
in summer, building up plant clumps and encouraging burrowers, and scanned
with the binoculars for geese settled down along a shore. We spotted geese on a
lake with a tumble of boulder erratics in just the right place for a hunter to hide
behind them. All the gentle hills and scalloped potholes looked the same to me,
but Bob had hunted out there so much that he knew the lay of the land. In fact,
he’d gotten geese right there before.

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N 155
 “There’s not enough cover for the pickup. You walk around behind that hill
and come up exactly opposite to those boulders. I’ll be hidden there waiting for
them. Now be sure that you come up exactly straight across and don’t let them
see you before you get there. Then charge as fast as you can. Take the .22 and
shoot it to make noise.” It was cold out of the pickup, but walking warmed me
up. I followed along behind the hill and then, when I was sure I was far enough,
I crept up to take a peek. There was no pothole lake.
Fog was rolling in. Should I go back or go forward? I decided that the hill I
had started out around had branched and I should go off to my left. When I got
over that ridge, there was no lake. Now I was baffled and disoriented. It began
to snow and I thought, oh, good. Now I could tell where I had been, at least. But
pretty soon it was snowing hard enough that my backtrack was covered.
I trudged on, always sure that the next hill would reveal a lake, and some-
times it did, but not the right lake. Someone’s cows were out there, watching me
stoically. I began to be tired and chilled. I expected Bob was really angry and
I listened for the pickup to come along behind me, but it didn’t. It was getting
dark and the fog thickened, obliterating directions. All I could tell was that my
feet were on the ground, so I knew where “up” was, but my feet were getting a
little numb.
There was no fuel to build a fire. I remembered an old Robert Taylor movie
where he killed and gutted a buffalo in order to survive a terrible blizzard by
climbing inside the warm carcass – but then the cold was so intense that the
carcass froze into stone and the last image was Taylor’s blue and ice-crusted face
staring out of the cage of ribs. Wondering if I could shoot a cow with my .22, I
tried a cluster of three shots into the air as a signal. Snap, snap, snap. The sound
didn’t carry. The only ammo was in the gun.
Finally I came to a fenceline that was different than the others. It was twelve-
by-twelve timbers with six strands of wire, built to hold someone’s experimental
band of buffalo. I knew one side of it ran along the highway. Also, about that
time, I heard the train whistle back at the depot so I could tell what direction
I was walking – towards town. I even knew what time it probably was. Late. I
hurried along the fence, feeling proud of myself for being so resourceful.
When I got to the highway, I couldn’t decide whether to try to go back
and find Bob, probably frantic by now, or go on into town on the assumption
that he’d gone there when I didn’t turn up. While I was debating, the pickup
came from the direction of town. Bob had gone in to get Bill McMullen to help
him look for me and decide whether to call out Search and Rescue. For once, I
understood that his rage came directly from fear.
To me the experience was proof that the universe can save by grace those
who pay attention. Bob, however, was embarrassed by the whole thing and for-
bade me to tell people about it. I thought at first he felt badly about sending me
off into the prairie like that – and probably his folks and Bill did give him some
heat for it – but really he was angry because in his code one is not supposed to

156 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

get lost. One is always supposed to know exactly where one is. One must be in
control. It is a terrifying burden.

4. Bob the conservative, Mary the activist

Browning, 1969

The city government and the tribe (mixed with Bureau of Indian Affairs) were
in a perpetual struggle that focused on law enforcement because of the confu-
sion in jurisdictions and the failure of any government body to allot enough
funds for a decent police department. Until now, the Town of Browning had
tried to preserve its identity as a “white” – or at least white-controlled – island
of jurisdiction inside an Indian- and government-controlled reservation. The
main symbol of this status was ordinary policing: each jurisdiction (city, tribe,
county) hired its own force and abided by its own laws. Now there was pressure
to combine, and the dwindling white community was finding it hard to resist,
but it seemed to them another symptom of their oppression and loss of control
– ironic in view of whites had done to Indians. I attended my first town meeting,
though Bob didn’t let me participate. He spoke himself, but as City Magistrate
and Justice of the Peace it was his obligation. Of course, his idea was maintain-
ing the status quo.
Still trying to be a writer, I had a column in the Glacier Reporter called
The Merry Scribbler. It started out being natural history and then drifted into
muckraking, which got me into trouble. When I wrote a piece about the mayor
not licensing his poodles and secretly running the Browning water line out-of-
town to supply his new motel, the mayor called Bob in and told him either he
made me quit writing, or he was fired from his City Magistrate job. “Get that
woman under control!” Bob quit being a judge but I quit my column, too. The
only lasting result was that one of the street characters loved yelling at me from
blocks away, “Hey! Mary Scribbler!”
Essentially, Bob was a conformist, and he was a little naive – at least I read
about things in books. Yet his local reputation was potent. He was considered
a major womanizer, insatiable. Women couldn’t stay away from him. The year
after his death an 80-year-old woman who had known him all his adult life
asked me if he were “really that good, you know, in the husband way.” Not
wanting to disappoint, I smiled, sighed, and only said, “Oh, my!”
The locals would never understand that his secret was tenderness. In short,
he seduced women by treating them as a loving mother would treat a child,
caressing and praising. Since he didn’t consciously realize what he was doing, he
didn’t know when he stopped and turned away.

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N 157
 Harold was the one whose high school yearbook legacy was his sex appeal,
so maybe that’s why in middle age Bob believed his own reputation and even
his mother seemed rather proud of it. In the larger community the idea created
jealousy and antagonism. In a community without money, sex is powerful coin,
second only to secrets. Many other women would have liked to take my place.

5. Keith Seele, James Willard Schultz, Lone Wolf and Paul Dyck
The Reservation, 1966

Keith Seele and his wife Diedericka came to Browning nearly every summer.
Keith, aside from being an Egyptologist from the Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago, was a great fan of James Willard Schultz, who had writ-
ten dozens of exciting books about the Blackfeet plus two classic memoirs, My
Life as an Indian and Why Gone Those Times? Dr. Seele had edited the book
Blackfeet and Buffalo1 from essays and stories left by Schultz and he was active
with the James Willard Schultz Society. Adopted by Chewing Black Bone (the
old man sitting on the ground in Bob’s sculpture called Transition) who was
“Ahku Pitsu” of the Schultz stories), Keith took his responsibilities with consid-
erable seriousness. A natural curator, he did everything with great care and at-
tention, from gently wiping off his Mercedes with a handkerchief every morning
to advising “Sparky,” the Boston Bull. Diedericka had been told early in her life
that she had a bad heart but that she would be all right if she would do things
slowly. Now aging, she went everywhere with a long deliberate stride, something
she had to teach herself since she was more naturally a person who rushed with
delight into new ideas and situations. The couple had never had children, partly
because of Diedericka’s heart and partly because they were often on excavations
with no medical care. Keith felt the danger for a pregnancy or a toddler in such
remote places would have meant Diedericka could not be with him.
One summer visit of the Seeles blurs into another. One fall we took them to
the park to bugle elk out of the golden, shimmering aspen, which amazed and
delighted the elderly non-hunters. We took them to the picnic spot on Cut Bank
Creek and built a big fire to roast our supper and then marshmallows. Leaning
on our elbows or sitting in folding chairs, we lingered long after midnight, until
the fire was just a red glow, while Keith told us the stories of the Egyptians he
had read in hieroglyphics. They were pretty boring, as he warned us, since they
were mostly about sharp trading among camel dealers and other such efforts to
get ahead, but maybe they were appropriate tales for us in those days of trying to
build a career. He told us that the sarcophagi were inscribed with the life stories
of the occupants and, instead of writing left to right, the Egyptians wrote from

158 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

head to foot, which meant that the writing went in different directions on the
two sides.
The Seeles were in Browning when our little black dog, named “Timmy”
because he was so timid, was killed by a car. Doctor Seele and I both cried. I
buried “Timmy” up at the cabin and the Seeles asked Bob if they could be buried
there when the time came, because it was such a beautiful place. He told them
“NO!” To me he grumbled, “I don’t want a bunch of dead people at my cabin.”
I always thought it was strange that Keith, who started out aspiring to the
clergy, so admired James Willard Schultz, a temperamental and melodramatic
writer with a bad back which possibly led him into addictions, probably at least
marijuana. (The Indian agent at the time was a morphine addict, as were many
after the Civil War.) Certainly Bob’s family labeled Schultz as “one of those
artist fellows” with the kind of genius that borders on crazy. It would have made
more sense for a scholar to admire Schultz’s friend, George Bird Grinnell, a
stable and prosperous Easterner who did his best to help the Blackfeet, except
for the ambiguous achievement of forcing them to surrender Glacier National
Park in exchange for food when they were starving. Perhaps Schultz was Keith’s
shadow, the eternal irresponsible child who craves adventure.
When Schultz’s half-Blackfeet son, Lone Wolf, died, his ashes were re-
turned to the reservation for burial alongside Yellow Wolf, his uncle, and Bird
Tail Woman, his grandmother. His mother had been Fine Shield Woman, a
Blackfeet and Schultz’s first wife. Lone Wolf, or Hart Schultz, had mixed emo-
tions about his father, who had gone on to remarry. Lone Wolf’s ashes were
returned by his wife Naomi, his adopted son Paul Dyck, and Paul’s wife Star.
They were a colorful trio.1
Paul claimed to be a direct descendant of Van Dyck, the famous painter,
and he certainly looked it with his characteristic Van Dyck beard and long
curling hair. The family had been collectors of Plains Indian materials for gen-
erations and Paul claimed to have trunks of invaluable artifacts. He wore blue
denim western outfits, custom-made by a tailor, a Southwest Navajo hat with a
flat brim, and boots with “doggin’ heels,” which boosted his height.
Intense, opinionated, and bitter, Paul alone would have been formidable.
His wife Star looked like Melina Mercouri and wore tank tops with her jeans,
Navajo hat and massive turquoise jewelry. She was as American as Paul was
European, with her easy loose-limbed stance and a big grin in the middle of her
sunburn. In everything she did was a kindness and attention that made up for
Paul’s abrupt judgments. He knew it. They were a wonderful team. Paul painted
abstractly, using egg tempera glazes to create haunting images of Indians – more
reminiscent of Bodmers or Catlins than Russells – in deeply lacquered chiar-
oscuros of shadow and glint. Here was a REAL artist, we thought respectfully.

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N 159
 I wrote the following for the Glacier Reporter:

Lone Wolf, whose legal name was Hart Merriam Schultz, died at St. Mary’s
Hospital at the age of 88. He was born in the old Montana Territory in 1882
on Birch Creek on the Blackfeet Reservation. His father, James Willard Schultz,
adopted the life and ways of the Blackfeet in 1877 and married Natahki (Fine
Shield Woman) in 1879. Until Natahki’s death in 1903, the family lived on the
reservation. After that they divided their time between Arizona and Montana,
establishing residence in Arizona in 1908. Lone Wolf was an artist from his
early childhood and won national recognition as early as 1904. He worked as
a cowboy and horse breaker and gained renown as an expert horseman.

Burial took place on the afternoon of June 19, 1970, with half a hundred friends
and relatives in attendance. The ceremony was simple and drawn from Lone
Wolf’s Indian heritage. Four willow wands, each topped by an eagle feather,
marked the grave of Last Rider (Louis Champine). Susie Redhorn spoke an
Indian prayer. Paul Dyck lowered the engraved copper container, and Mrs.
Schultz replaced the first spadesful of earth. The eagle feathers were given by the
widow to friends and relatives of her late husband as mementoes of times gone
by but well remembered.
A year or so later, when the business of the estate was cleared up, Naomi
went quietly out to the backyard with Lone Wolf’s heavy old revolver, knelt in
the grass and shot herself. She did not want to live without him.

6. Overwork and blow-ups

Browning, 1969

Through the 1960s, because many of the cruelest blows to the Southern Piegan
Blackfeet had happened in the 1860s, the reservation was half-consciously
walking through the centennials of massacre, starvation, and pandemic. One
hundred years was a short enough period of time for the old people to remember
their parents and grandparents telling first-hand stories of the grief and despair
and, finally, numbness. Trauma still echoed through Blackfeet lives, unhealed
and unfinished – even unrecognized. Bob, in the times when he thought he was
an Indian, would say, proudly, “You know we never were defeated in a battle.
We never signed a surrender.” That was true, but eventually the Amskapi Pikuni
were ground into submission.
At the Indian Days parade, Bob loaned his much-prized restored spring
wagon for some dignitaries too old to walk, but a pack of able-bodied politi-
cians also jumped on the wagon, breaking it. On New Year’s Eve our next-door

160 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

neighbor, a prosperous grain-farming Sioux who with his Blackfeet wife had
double-dated with Bob and Jeanette, got drunk on our booze and assured us it
would be a happy day when all the white men were run off the reservation ... and
it would come soon ... and that meant us.
We loved small dinner parties and though I wasn’t much of a cook, we
threw them often and spontaneously in those days. I mastered three menus:
steak and baked potatoes, chicken and corn on the cob, and a small canned ham
over which I dumped a can of raisin pie filling. Bob always made fry bread in the
electric skillet, sometimes at the table. My Hollywood friends came and I quar-
reled with them. Bob’s aunt and uncle came from Quebec. Nick Eggenhofer,
grand old illustrator, and Dick Frost, tactful museum curator, came. George and
Sandi Gray returned from New York City. It was a steady stream, on and on.
We ate in the backyard, where you had to guard your salad or “Thunder”
the pony would eat it. He had a real fondness for Green Goddess dressing. One
summer day we had a crowd and some man came out with us, sat down, and
pretty soon pulled over Bob’s plate and began to eat from it. Foolishly I had
fixed individual portions: a small steak, corn on the cob, fry bread, and indi-
vidual strawberry shortcakes with rum in the whipped cream. Bob had gotten
up to fetch something to show around or to settle a question in the shop, and
when he came back, this man was just tucking away the last of his shortcake.
Pretty soon the man thanked us and left, but we never figured out who he was.
Everyone had thought he was a friend of someone else.
When the DeVicqs, Bob’s former in-laws, were visiting, I had an abscessed
tooth, drove myself to the dentist, lost a lot of blood, and came back in a rage.
Bob took one look at me and steered me across the street to the café for some-
thing cold to drink. Hélène’s spoiled little girl came along with us. I grabbed
her hand to cross the highway and she kicked me in the ankle. Without pausing
I kicked her back. I think Bob explained about the dog being killed right on
that spot. Then I went out to the studio, took my pain pills, removed all my
clothes, got into bed and pulled the sheet over my head. I was tired of restraint
and tact.
One summer the two Great Falls girls we had hired to be the receptionists
in the museum (and live in my attic room) became so wild and unreliable that
I fired them on impulse. Since there were no replacements, for the rest of the
summer I worked from 6 AM to 10 PM, quickly running to the café across the
street for a hamburger when things were slack. Bob kept the same schedule. No
more afternoons en plein aire.
Bob had hay fever and slept in the bathtub for a week or so. He said I didn’t
keep the bedroom clean enough. I suggested that he get allergy shots, since the
animals slept with us, but that idea went nowhere. Secretly, I thought it was psychic
hay fever. He knew I thought that and held it against me as another betrayal.
A fellow who had bought a plaster Pullin’ Leather, the early bucking horse
supported by the fence, brought it in for some changes. He had been studying

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N 161
 the whole matter of where the rider’s hat had fallen, touching the ground by its
brim, and had decided it was in the wrong place – it wouldn’t have fallen there
at all. Soon it was clear that the guy just wanted to argue with Bob, maybe
because he thought it would make him closer to a famous person and maybe
because he was fond of challenging people and powering them down. In the end
Bob smashed the little plaster hat on the floor. “The problem is now solved,” he
announced.

7. Into the Wind, Bucky, and breaking points

The reservation, late Sixties

On a fall day roaring with wind we went out some side road, idly checking the
territory, and Bob spotted a pond with geese in a little bay, all sleeping but one
sentinel. A dry irrigation ditch, fairly deep, ran from near the road all the way
down to the bay. It was a perfect setup for an ambush. We parked and began
to belly crawl. Bob took the shotgun and I had the .22. Luckily there weren’t
very many stickery wild roses growing in the ditch we plowed through on our
elbows. It seemed as though we crawled for an hour. The ditch meandered back
and forth in oxbows, so it was much longer if you followed it instead of walking
straight.
At last we were there and jumped out into a great thrashing mass of geese.
Bob was blasting away, shouting, in an ecstasy, orgasmic. I snapped my little
.22. Geese fell on our heads and shoulders like sandbags, knocking us silly. If
there were any wounded, they got away. We had five dead geese to lug back to
the pickup, quickly because we were over the limit. Bob was very excited and
proud, but I wondered why we were doing it. His answer was a sculpture of what
he saw in his mind’s eye, five geese leaping into the air, held up by each other’s
wing tips and called Into the Wind.
At that time no one had a sculpture like it and it did well at exhibits. Today
there are lots of versions of this idea, none quite so fabulous as the Kent Ullberg
fountain in Omaha, Nebraska, which fills a public square with fifty-eight soar-
ing life-size Canada geese that seem to fly through the walls of buildings. But
at the time five little geese in a tabletop pyramid seemed an achievement. I had
wanted to put two of them on top of our wedding cake, symbolic of partner-
ship, but both mothers and Bob objected. “Mary is notional,” explained Bob’s
mother.

Some years there were lots of pheasants and other years we walked a long way
without seeing anything. We bought a springer spaniel from Bill Spencer, who
owned the Brighten-Up Shop in Great Falls where we got art supplies. Bucky,

162 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

short for Buckshot, was just a little pup when we first took him out and we had
no older dog to teach him anything, but he had a champion mother and his
instincts were strong. The first time we winged a bird, it went down in brush
and we urged Bucky to go after it. “Pheasant!” we repeated hopefully, trying
to make it sound like the most wonderful thing possible. Bucky charged off,
full of excitement. When we found him again, he was looking eagerly in every
direction in hopes of spotting one of those pheasants – while he stood right on
top of a hen paralyzed with fright. When it flew up, he fell over backwards.
“Pheasant!” we yelled, pointing. Then he got the idea.
“Ducks!” worked out a little better. At first he tried to pack a duck along
with us, but it was as big as he was, so Bob cut off a wing for him to carry. The
little liver-and-white pup held his head high, like a lion proudly dragging an
antelope. He was a great retriever, plunging into any kind of water. When he was
older, he went into St. Mary Lake after a goose, so late in the season that chunks
of ice floated on the water. Bob said he was afraid for a while he was going to
lose his brave-hearted dog.
When it wasn’t bird season, Bucky would carry the camera, trotting back
and forth through the grass to pass it from one of us to the other. Or I could give
him a note when supper was ready and Bucky would take it to Bob, wherever
he might be.
Someone brought in a young marsh hawk with a hurt wing and we diverted
a leg off Eegy’s daily gopher. The hawk was aggressive and territorial. It pounced
on the leg, hooked its strong little beak deep into the meat, and gave a mighty
yank – which threw it over backwards because it pulled the gopher leg out from
under its own feet. Hawk jumped up, bristling with rage. “Who did that? Come
out and fight!” Over and over this happened, while we laughed. I thought about
how often I did the same thing to myself.
Since the hawk couldn’t fly, we let it loose in the shop. Bucky would sneak
up on it, gently pick it up from behind and carry it around until it had dog
slobber all over it. This enraged the hawk, but all its flapping and kicking only
made Bucky squint to protect his eyes.
Once when I had a litter of kittens growing up in a box on the back porch,
I came out to find Bucky squashed into the box with kittens and mother cat. He
looked a little sheepish, but blissful. When we acquired a pet fox, Bucky was her
playmate and I made a linoleum cut of the two of them to use as our Christmas
card. “Who needs Donner and Blitzen? We have Bucky and Vixen!” Everyone
thought Bob did the art.
When Bucky was grown, he went foraging everywhere. In winter the snow-
banks drifted high enough against the back fence for him to get out. Someone
on Willow Creek was trapping and left beaver carcasses around which Bucky
packed home. Then he was hit by a snowmobile so that one side of his face
sagged. One fine spring day I was sitting beside him on the front steps of the
Museum, hugging and petting him, talking to him as though he were human.

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N 163
 Fox cub plays “hop on Bob” (1960s). Photo: Mary Scriver.

“My dog, my soft dog, my own dog.” Somewhere in there the dog slipped from
being a surrogate child to a surrogate lover. Bob came up just then and his face
was a study. Not too long after that Bucky disappeared. I don’t think he was
shot. I think Bob gave him away.
There was a similar dynamic with Bob’s earlier Springer spaniel, Blackie.
Jeanette loved the dog and lavished attention on it. But so did Bob. The dog was
devoted to Bob and followed him everywhere. If the dog couldn’t get into the
pickup to ride, he would think a minute and then meet Bob at his destination,
or so claimed Bob. In the divorce Jeanette had to leave Blackie behind and
mourned. I never saw him alive, and I’m not sure how he died, but Bob kept his
body in the walk-in freezer, meaning to do a sculpture some day.

164 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Bob the incubator – we never found out what kind of hawk this was (1960s).
Photo: Mary Scriver.

Like Bucky, the bobcats roamed all over. Then they disappeared. Years later
someone told me that the local kids had stoned both cats to death. They were
pets, so they weren’t wary. I always hoped the stories were lies, but probably not.
Two other animal deaths bothered me. One was a baby weasel that cried
and cried, no matter how carefully I fed it and kept it warm. At last it died. The
information I was missing was that it needed its rear-end massaged in order to
evacuate its bowels. I should have been using a warm washcloth or sponge to
gently wipe it.
The other was the albino ground squirrel. A boy sold it to Bob for a dollar
or two. It was only a baby and I took it up to school in the bottom of a bucket
with some horse oats and grass to eat. The students were rural Blackfeet and
yet never really looked closely at the animals. One of the girls was cuddling the
two-inch “gopher” when it had a seizure. Crowding around, we could see the

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N 165
 little pink open mouth and quite human-looking tiny tongue. But no teeth. I
hadn’t looked closely either. This baby was not equipped to eat solids. We sent
off someone to the home-ec room for formula and took turns dripping it into
that little mouth.
“Gophy” survived and thrived. She lived loose in the studio except when
the bobcats came in. Once someone let a bobcat in just as I let the gopher out of
its cage, and I made a dive for it in time to catch it inside my two hands, but then
the bobcat caught my two hands in her four sets of claws – while the frightened
gopher bit me from the inside. Most of the time things worked out better.
The gopher loved to hook the sheets from underneath where they hung over
the edge of the bed, hoist itself up, and burrow around under the covers. Bob
had built a music cabinet that she could barely fit under. One day she decided
to build a nest in there and gathered some good materials from the bathroom,
where she enjoyed spinning all the toilet paper onto the floor. With a big mouth-
ful gripped in her teeth, she came galloping through the room and dived to go
under the cabinet. But her head was a quarter-inch fatter with the paper in her
mouth. She rammed and rammed and rammed until she finally got some of
it inside the space, then crawled in and pulled. A strange sight to see the toilet
paper unrolling from the bathroom, down the hall, across the carpet and under
the cabinet, evidently all by itself.
Another favorite pursuit was jumping into wastepaper baskets to rummage.
She died of the most ridiculous of hazards, jumping into the toilet one day when
no one was there to rescue her from drowning. I wept and wept, which Bob
thought was excessive for a gopher, but I imagined the desperation of being
trapped and drowning.
There was evidently a strain of white gophers rather than one mutant.
The boy who sold them to us cleverly kept their location secret. Another white
gopher was in a little cage with one-inch mesh, which we put out in the grassy
yard and moved now and then so the gopher could graze. But a strange dog got
into the yard and in the effort of trying to get the gopher out in order to eat it,
dragged one hind leg through the wire and broke it. Playing nurse, I scrubbed
the wound with green soap and dosed it with B.F.I. powder, getting bitten in
the process. Bob set the leg as well as he could but we couldn’t figure out how
to make a splint on an animal shaped like a croquet ball. Finally he just sewed
the leg onto the gopher’s stomach. When it healed, the gopher chewed off the
thread. Then the bobcat clawed the top off its cage, and ate it.
In the fall of 1970 there was a swan season out at Dandy Jim’s. We went out,
found a few young swans, and used our strategy with good success. Except that
one swan was only winged and it took off across the prairie on foot. We ran it
down and captured it at the cost of bruises and pinches from its strong beak.
The dead swans, gutted, went into the freezer. (When it came time to thaw
them for roasting, I had to shear them like sheep or it would have taken days
to warm the flesh under the thick down.) The live one Bob wanted to study,

166 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

so it went into the bathtub, the pink bathtub where Bob spent so many hours
behind the sliding glass doors. The swan was furious, attacking us every time
we peeked, and the bottom of the tub was soon decorated with swan dung. I cut
open the stomach of one of the dead birds to see what it was eating. Pale shoots
of some sort. I bought a couple of cans of bamboo sprouts as an approximation,
but the swan would have nothing to do with them.
In a few days, so we could take baths, we moved the swan over to the horse
barn and put it in a stall. Bob hadn’t made a model yet – there was no time. The
sight of that white indignant bird – a mythic swan, no less – in the dark stall still
reeking of horse urine though I’d shoveled it out as thoroughly as I could – and
the act of swinging the heavy door shut on it ... I was upset. In fact, something
broke in me.
We both loved animals, loved having them in our hands and interacting
with them. But I began to feel that the price was too high, that we were forcing
suffering upon them in order to please ourselves, particularly since they were
wild creatures not meant to be pets. I hadn’t wanted children because I felt I
couldn’t protect and guide them adequately, but now here was the same problem
with the animals. And I didn’t feel that I was supporting and guiding Bob very
well either – he had doubts about me, too. It didn’t seem as though my devotion
was as whole-hearted as it once had been. His mother remarked on it.
Twice Bob came to me for reassurance. The first time he had been in the
shop using the grinding wheel when the grindstone split in half. Evidently no
one had checked it for cracks as they ought to have. The two halves spun at high
velocity past Bob’s head and out the window, then punched a hole in Bobbie
Anderson’s roof next door, missing Bob by an inch. “I could have died,” he
panted.
“But you didn’t die – you’re safe.”
He became angry. “You don’t understand. It was ME. And I almost DIED.”
The other time was when he had gone over to the barbed wire corral to
put out hay for the horses. It ought to have been a pole corral, but there hadn’t
been time and money was a little short. He got there just in time to see a small
boy throw rocks at Gunsmoke in order to make him run. The horse could easily
have been chased into the wire and been badly hurt, maybe enough to require
euthanizing. Bob had thrown the kid down, grabbed a big stone of his own
and was about to bash the kid’s head in when he came to his senses. “I almost
KILLED!”
There was nothing to say.
Violence and death were everywhere. In those years half a dozen of my
students committed suicide. One of them was the son of Bill Cochran, Bob’s
rodeo advisor. The boy, a student of mine, was just beginning art training and
had obvious talent.
When Carl Cree Medicine’s brother came around while Carl was working
in the shop, Bob always disappeared, telling me to deal with him on grounds

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 that women can handle drunks. (Jeanette could.) It was known that the brother
had killed his sister, so I was afraid of this man until one day I noticed him
watching my hand as I waved it around when I answered the door. I was hold-
ing a modeling tool but plainly he thought it was a knife and was very meek,
obedient, and jumpy. In the course of writing this book, when I read through all
the old Browning newspapers, I came to the account of his tragedy. The sibs had
been young teenagers, drunk, quarreling, and the gun was simply handy – it was
an impulse. The brother was devastated by what he had done. The death was not
because of toughness, but because of weakness.
While I was teaching in Heart Butte, twenty years after Bob divorced me,
a female Highway Patrol officer stopped a pickup and, when she went up to the
driver’s window, was shot point-blank in the chest. An outsider, a drugged-up
hitchhiker, was driving Carl’s son’s pickup. The son was on the seat, shot dead. I
remembered that boy when he was just a little curly-head with his arms wrapped
around Carl’s leg. The Highway Patrol officer survived.
The boundary between life and death is like the interface between mold
and casting – one is shaped by the other, one begins where the other ends. And
it can be unpredicted, unseen, almost uncontrollable, almost the same as the
boundary between control and out-of-control. Life and death are not any differ-
ent on a reservation than other places, but murders, suicides, abuse, and violence
are part of ordinary life, because both victims and killers, some convicted and
some not even prosecuted, are friends, neighbors, students, even relatives. Only
recently has there begun to be reflection about the consequences of such trauma
for both individuals and communities. In the background of the reservation
always looms the American holocaust of the indigenous peoples.
The only reassurance possible is religious. There has to be some anchor
point or explanation for why human beings should be pressed so hard, often by
the people they were closest to and loved the most. In the twenty-first century
the Catholic churches are crowded and the small Pentecostal congregations are
intense. But still too many reach for the wrong “spirits.”

8. Hunting again, Sweetgrass Hills

We went hunting in the Sweetgrass Hills, which are volcanic cones on the
Canadian border, east of Browning. They are more properly called “Sweet Pine
Hills” because what grows there is balsam fir.2 Scientists find the hills fasci-
nating because they are refugia, high enough that they weren’t scraped bare
by the glaciers. Farmers honor them because they are water-makers, filling the
underground water table that supplies the wells. Wives love them because when
they lift their eyes to the horizon, there is something to see. The Blackfeet went

168 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

there for visionquests, and their low rock walls, the outline of a body just high
enough to cut the wind for a person lying down, are still there.
We camped overnight and when evening came we were startled to see how
many campfires were around us. Trying to forestall trouble, we put on our day-
glo vests and rode around to the other camps to show them our white horse and
pinto horse – NOT deer-colored. Everyone was cheerful and assured us they
would be careful. About half the hunters were Blackfeet.
Just before dawn, we rode on up towards the ridge. At the first little flash
of sunlight coming up, a bullet sizzled past between my head and Zuke’s head,
like a bumblebee going by impossibly fast. It took a moment to figure out. A
few more bullets came quick, but not so close. We couldn’t tell where they were
coming from so didn’t know whether to cross the ridge for safety or double back.
Then we spotted the shooter: it was the son of one of Bob’s old hunting partners
from Browning. He’d been firing with a scope on his rifle and the deer he scoped
had gone right past us. The lenses made his field of vision so small that he didn’t
see us until his buddy socked him in the shoulder and pointed.
Bob, enraged, took off down the hill at the kid, who was sitting on the
ground. Bob’s rifle was already out. He took Gunsmoke practically into the
kid’s lap, so that when the horse sat down on his haunches at the last moment,
his front feet were almost touching the young man’s jeans. Then Bob put two
high-powered bullets into the ground about three inches on either side of the
paralyzed hunter, right by his knees. “How do you like that?” he demanded.
We wheeled and rode off fast. No one shot at us. Down the hill, halfway
back to camp, I realized that the camera had bounced out of my saddle bags.
“We’re going back to get it,” said Bob through clenched teeth. I was in favor of
just forgetting it – it was a cheap camera – but Bob said he wanted the photos on
the film. Zuke was exhausted, hardly able to travel down the hill, much less up.
“I’ll go alone,” said Bob. He turned Gunsmoke back, scanning the ground,
and the shooter – still stunned – now scrambled for his life. Many years later he
assured me he was convinced Bob was coming back to finish him off.
With camera in hand, Bob returned. “Let’s go some place safe. Let’s go
explore the gold mine shaft on Gold Butte. Underground.” When we bumped
away down the road, still expecting more bullets from hidden shooters, we
looked up at a hogback in the distance, just in time to see three hunters in a
jeep jump out after some elk. They had failed to set the brake and the jeep,
unoccupied, sailed out into space with its doors flapping as though flying. We
were totally uninterested. We just left.
There were no legal consequences to any of this, which is not the same as
saying there were no consequences.

V I I I B L A C K T U F F Y: T R O U B L E S B E G I N 169
 IX

Mother Mold:
Wives and Others

1. About mother molds

Once a flexible mold has been made in a layer around the plaster original, a
second layer, a cradle of plaster and burlap, must be built around the soft flexible
mold so it will keep its shape. The thinner the soft mold is, the more durable and
enclosing the mother mold must be, but it needn’t be beautiful or smooth – just
strong. And it has to come off without crushing the contents. Seeing a row of
mother molds on a shelf tells you nothing – they are ugly, haphazard, like ob-
jects left under the sea until they encrusted with salts. Giant oysters with rough
barnacled shells, big enough to grip you by the leg, but with soft tissue inside the
shell to satin-pad the bite. That soft tissue is the vital part of the mold, which can
easily distort if it is unsupported either from the inside or the outside.
The surrounding case of something hard is made like a doctor’s cast over a
leg with a broken bone. But it needn’t be smooth – in fact, it has knobs of plaster
so that it can be wrapped in bungee cord to keep it closed without slipping.
This shell holds the soft mold in place while it is being filled or while it is stored
– either closed, maybe with a casting inside, or open – halves lying side-by-side
on the shelf. The armature supports sculpture from inside, as the skeleton in the
plastilene, but the mother mold is a kind of exoskeleton, a crustacean shell.
Bob’s early heavy Koroseal™ molds were resistant to distortion, but even
they could collapse or stretch, especially with larger pieces. Thick molds are
more expensive, heavier to handle. Even Black Tuffy™ molds curl and lose their
elasticity unless rubbed with a secret plasticizing fluid that was carcinogenic.
Someone who swore us to secrecy gave us a small bottle, but Bob would never
let me use it and was nervous about using it himself.
It’s easy to see how the metaphor of the soft vulnerable creative surface in-
side the rough container works for an artist. The ungiving but protective encase-

171
 ment of convention and custom closely embraces the tender and impressionable
creative imagination inside, whether it is empty or filled with a new casting.
The mother mold must be a means – never an end. And it can be confining. If
it is distorted itself, there is no hope of a good casting. It preserves the shape of
the back of the flexible mold, just as the flexible mold preserves the shape of the
sculpture, both molds hard-against-soft but in opposite ways. No one buys an
artist’s mother molds. It can only be of use when the flexible mold it supports is
included, and then only to someone who knows how to cast, to go from nega-
tive to positive. When the sculptor dies, asking in the will for the molds to be
broken to prevent more castings, it is the mother mold that can be smashed. The
rubbery inner mold must be cut or ground to destroy it.
After Bob’s death the mother molds of his sculptures were taken to the
dump where a bulldozer ran back and forth over them. I don’t know what hap-
pened to the flexible inner molds.

2. Ellison Westgarth Macfie Scriver

Human beings are not sculptures, but they are molded by their mothers, and their
mothers are molded by their own mothers. Bob’s mother’s mother, Josephine
Creller MacFie, was the German daughter of a Quebec clergyman. In fact, the
house and farm where Wessie grew up were built by her grandfather Creller
and only became the MacFie place when Josephine married George Hawley
MacFie. George was an easygoing man, which balanced him in marriage with
the very proper Josephine. Though Wessie happily loved both her parents, it
was probably Alice Chew, the household helper, who was the closer nurturer
since she took care of the small daily routines. When Josephine MacFie came to
Browning to visit her daughter, which was more often after she was widowed,
Thad spent more time at the store than usual.
My theory about the marriage of Thad and Wessie, who had an age gap of
eight years and who had hardly seen each other in the near decade Thad had
been in the West, is that Thad chose someone healthy, in contrast to his own
bird-like mother who lost so many babies. But in choosing the young, energetic,
pleasingly plump Wessie, he was walking into a set of expectations that he shared
but could not fulfill. The assumption was that, like his brothers, he would soon
make a fortune so that Wessie would raise her children in the kind of comfort
she had known. But the frontier was closing. Drought and world war haunted
the reservation. Thad never struck it rich, though the family never suffered and
the little boys were perfectly happy with their circumstances.
The two-story Scriver house in Browning is generous by local standards, but
at its heart it is old and has no foundation. It never had electrical outlets or heat

172 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Photo: Bob and his mother with “Peter Pumpernickel” (1960s).
Photo: Mary Scriver.

upstairs and had no central heating. The bathroom and kitchen plumbing were
add-ons, as were the glassed-in front porch, the breakfast nook, and the master
bedroom. But it was a beautifully decorated house downstairs, with especially
fine mahogany furniture from the Minneapolis Scriver furniture store in the
dining room. Creller silver was wrapped in plastic and stored in the sideboards
and china cupboards. Carpet covered the rather uneven floor. An upright piano
and a grandfather clock lent an air of class, but Thad sat in a modestly priced,
locally bought recliner and Wessie did her needlework in a “lady chair,” a small
armchair. No Scriver bronzes were on display.
I suspect that Thad was not an emotionally accessible man or else learned
to withdraw to protect himself. Both his sons were like that. I think Wessie

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S 173
 Fiftieth wedding anniversary of Ellison and Thaddeus Scriver.
Left to right: Harold, “Wessie,” “Thad,” and Bob Scriver. Photo: Don Schmidt.

found an emotional intimacy with her second son, Robert. She invested him
with her love of music, culture, and achievement – her conviction that he was
exceptional. In fact, she moved her hopes from her husband to her son, so much
that he had to learn to fend her off, mainly through secrecy – sometimes with
defiance. This pattern persisted into his own marriages.
Wessie was a strong but not a haughty woman. She used her inherited
money to buy a series of small houses around Browning and rented them until
her death. (This was a common pattern in small towns.) After each tenant – and
turnover was high – she went over herself to scrub out the place, repaint, and
– usually – supervise the replacement of the toilet. Laurel, her granddaughter,
says that these rentals were the bulk of her income while living and the majority
of her estate at death. Thad never interfered. She invested her private means in
Bob’s enterprises but Thad, as far as I know, never did.
She was a woman raised in ease and plenty who had taken on hardships
over which she had no control and who felt that in this way she had earned the
right to govern her son’s lives. Josephine would have had the same assumptions.
When – earlier – “Robert” had gotten Alice pregnant (or she had managed to
get pregnant by him, depending on which point of view one chooses to take),
Ellison Westgarth MacFie Scriver reacted with outrage, physically attacked her

174 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

alarmed son, and never really got over it. When “Robert” eluded her by enlisting
in World War II and then staying in Edmonton with his new wife’s family, she
intervened and was able to bring him back. The failure between the two of us
to reach an accord was a small tragedy. If I had been more mature, I might have
been a daughter. The fourth wife, privately complaining of interference, did not
openly quarrel, maybe because Wessie was very different from her own mother
and maybe because Wessie passed on fairly soon.
In all she did, Wessie was only acting as her mother and grandmother would
have in the small Jane Austen-type world of Clarenceville, Quebec. Many other
mothers in Browning felt as free to interfere in the marriages of their children,
particularly sons and particularly in the period during and after World War II,
when mothers were beatified for their sacrifices.
When I tried to understand what Bob’s women – both the wives and the
others – had in common that we would be so receptive to him, the conclusion
I reached was that all of us, like his mother, yearned for nurturing and that
Bob knew how to give it – but then he would fear intimacy and withdraw. This
naturally drove us crazy.

3. Alice the high school kid

Browning and Malta, 1937–1943

Alice, the first wife and the mother of Bob’s children, was 19 years old, a senior
in high school, when she became pregnant in 1937 and “had to” marry Bob, her
23-year-old high school teacher. He changed her name to his in the class grade
book, then he drew a horse’s head on the other page. After two children, she
divorced Bob in 1943, remarried, had four more children, was widowed, and
then – late in life – married a third time.
I barely knew Alice. She was not one to hold grudges. Hardly college-
bound, she soon remarried someone she loved. Bob had nothing to do with her
next four children or the death of her second husband. Old ladies I asked said
she had the meanest mother on Government Square but that her father was a
sweet, patient man.
In any case, despite their being nearly the same age, the marriage between
Alice and Bob was hardly between equals. It did produce the only two children
Bob would have. To maintain control at home, Bob resorted to violence, at least
in dealing with Alice. I’ve never heard about him striking the children, though
Alice’s second husband did. The worst incident was when Bob went to get the
children from Alice’s mother, who refused to give them up to Bob. In the grap-
pling struggle he broke her arm.

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S 175
 Margaret and Jim Scriver in Edmonton about 1946.
Photo: Jeannette Caouette Scriver Chase.

176 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 This badly dysfunctional marriage was interrupted by World War II or it
might have been worse. As it was, Bob was shamed to himself and the com-
munity – they did not forget. But I was brought up short when I described him
slapping Alice in the face to his 80-year-old cousin Margaret. “I’m sure she
deserved it,” said the starchy former schoolteacher, whose grandmother was also
Josephine Creller Macfie.
Alice had little to do with Bob’s development as an artist. In photos taken
of her during the summer she accompanied Bob on his annual pilgrimage to
Vandercook, she stands in front of major sculptures looking bored, tired, and
sweaty. Alice was too young and her influence too thin. She was overwhelmed
by the unyielding shell of Bob’s family.

4. Jeanette the firebrand

Edmonton and Browning, 1946–1959

Jeanette was a different story, a flexible mold but one that didn’t fit the pre-exist-
ing shell and one determined to have control. When Bob’s vocation was music,
she was right there recording his band on the radio, dancing with friends while
he blew his horn. When he decided on taxidermy and the series of souvenir
animals, she was working beside him. But she had her own mind and no inten-
tion of stopping her own pursuits.
Bob didn’t marry Jeanette so much as he married her whole family. The
three surviving siblings, Jeanette (the oldest), Hélène and Maurice (who was
a “surprise” late-in-life baby about Margaret’s age) were small, intense, physi-
cally strong, mentally clever, and emotionally extravagant. They grew up in
Morinville, a tiny French-Canadian town north of Edmonton. Their father,
from an easygoing, fun-loving, music-making family, and their mother, from a
much more religious and rigorous family, were both Catholic. Jeanette’s father
ran a pool hall with a barbershop. Cathedral bells rang out over the village and
Jeanette sang in the choir. As the oldest of all the cousins, she had been praised,
cherished, and carried around like a princess, except that her mother always
resented her for some reason – maybe just that. When Lucille, the second baby,
arrived, Jeanette claimed the child as “hers.” Then came Hélène, so much pret-
tier and sweeter. Hélène was mother’s girl, a star who did a Shirley Temple act.
When Lucille, aged 12, died of rheumatic fever, the family was devastated,
especially Jeanette, who was twenty. In fact, she may have had a mild case of the
disease herself that was not taken quite seriously enough. Moving to Edmonton
to make a new start, the parents ran a mom-and-pop store and Jeanette started
her own beauty shop a few blocks away. Maurice attended the Jesuit boarding

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S 177
 Jeanette and Bob at her parents’ house, 1945. She was madly in love.
Photo: Jeanette Caouette Scriver Chase.

school, eventually becoming a college professor and artist. Hélène married a

hockey star named Stan DeVicq.
It was wartime. When all the young Canadian men had gone overseas to
defend England, young small-town women had flocked to Edmonton to occupy
their jobs. Then the U.S. Army Air Force came into the war and established a
base in Edmonton. Suddenly the town was swarming with handsome young
men who might take a bride back to legendary California. Glamour reigned
in the evenings and Jeanette was a genius at hair and style. All the women who
visited her beauty parlor were ga-ga over Bob, “Jeanette’s Americain.”
At the Caouettes he learned a major repertoire of French-Canadian jokes.
“Robaire, what’s een zee empty box, “ Jeanette’s dad would ask. Then, roaring
with mirth, “Nothing! Eet eez EMPTY!” The plan was to build a music studio
next to Jeanette’s beauty parlor, with an apartment upstairs.
Maurice was pulled into the couple’s life as a surrogate son. Jeanette’s uncle
hunted, and he took “Jeanette’s Americain” along to look for moose. Once Bob

178 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Jeanette and Bob, wedding picture, 1946. Photographer unknown.

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S 179
 wanted to collect some snowy Arctic owls to mount and sell, but the uncle was
occupied, so Maurice, still a child, went along because he knew the roads. After
retrieving one white owl, Maurice announced it was only injured. Bob told him
to squeeze it hard under the wings until its heart stopped. The sensation of a
warm feathered life stilled to death haunted Maurice the rest of his life.
When Bob was honorably discharged on November 7, 1945, the soldiers
were flown back to Cut Bank airport. Earl Old Person, not yet Blackfeet chief,
played in the Blackfeet Band which welcomed them home with a circle of fancy
dancers. Earl said that when Bob got off the plane, he didn’t rush to his family
– instead he dropped his duffle bag and began to dance with the celebrating
Indian dancers.
In a few weeks Jeanette arrived to meet the family at Thanksgiving dinner.
When Bob unexpectedly took a flash snapshot, Harold dove under the table,
then went into the bathroom to throw up. Later the family realized he’d been
hospitalized for a while to treat what we now call post-traumatic stress syn-
drome. He had married Hazel on leave.
Returning to Edmonton, Bob and Jeanette married on January 4, 1946, at
the courthouse, with her family present but not his. She had made the elegant
tailored suit she wore. Bob had a job as first chair trumpet and arranger for a
popular band at the Trocadero in Edmonton. In the daytime he gave private
lessons.
Then suddenly the elder Scrivers arrived and packed them up for a return to
Browning. Jeanette was stunned, her family astounded. “We paid for Robert to
be a music teacher, not a band leader,” said the Mother Mold. Also, Bob could
only have legal custody of his son Jimmie while he was in Montana. (Lawyers
said there was no hope of Bob getting custody of Margaret, so he didn’t try. She
was devastated.) The couple was expected to live with the senior Scrivers in Bob’s
boyhood bedroom.
Desperate after a quarrel, Jeanette moved to a nearby motel apartment,
carrying her belongings over in her arms. Thad confessed to her sadly that he
would like to help her, but it would only inflame Wessie if he did. The couple
finished the summer in the cabin at St. Mary, but it wasn’t the same as when Bob
lived there with Alice. In the fall they moved into Wessie’s rental house across
the street from her. Though it was a duplex, Jeanette felt that this was truly “her”
house and set about improving it.
When Bob went back to Vandercook to get a master’s degree in summer
1950, he invited Jeanette to come along with him to Chicago and she was de-
lighted to go. The first time they stopped to get gas, Bob turned to her and said,
“I bought the first tank of gas, so you can buy this one.”
She was indignant. “If this is the way you invite me to come, I’ll go home on
the train!” Pretty soon he agreed to pay for the gas and they went on. He began
to sing “Chiru-biru-bim” to her and everything seemed better. At Vandercook
she took classes on how to teach marching, baton twirling, and rope spinning,

180 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

so she could organize the kids back in Browning. Joey Peterson, six years old, be-
came her star rope-spinner. (Jealous Bob never liked rope spinners after that.)
The second summer in Chicago, Bob left Jeanette in Browning with a lot
of trinkets to sell, among them his own little figurines, in a rickety converted
gas station on the highway through Browning. Harold Boyd and Bill Byrne,
students from his band, went with Bob to Vandercook. While in Chicago, he
worked for a Japanese family who made plaster castings. He modeled a seated
cavalier and made a mold for it.
Also, he discovered he knew one of the staff taxidermists at the Field
Museum and hung around learning everything he could. Carl Akeley was his
hero, a very fine taxidermist and animal sculptor. Of course, he spent a lot of
time in Malvina Hoffman’s Hall of Man, the site of fine bronze portraits of more
than a hundred people from around the world.
Arriving back in Browning and expecting a hero’s welcome from Jeanette,
he found the little souvenir store locked. When he asked in the bar next door,
the owner told him, “Oh, she went off with some salesman to tour the Park.”
It was Dick Flood, who later became a major Western art entrepreneur. Bob’s
imagination went volcanic. When Flood brought Jeanette back, they found a pile
of merchandise outside the little shop and a big scrawled “for sale” sign on top.
By winter of the last teaching year, Bob was miserable. He couldn’t fit back
into his old teaching life. He had caught the superintendent of schools, his en-
emy, stealing from the band’s pop machine. The man later left with a bagful of
embezzled money, but was never convicted because he had coolly destroyed all
records. With Jeanette’s support, Bob quit mid-year and went to Whitefish to be
the foreman for an ice-cutting crew run by Freddie Stone, the son of the Stones
with whom Bob had spent his summers as a youngster.
In spring 1952, he began his new plan for a taxidermy shop, another major
departure from his mother’s plan for him. During the summer Jeanette lived at
the cabin and operated a souvenir shop in St. Mary. In 1953 he began to build
in Browning. Jeanette worked as a cashier, a clerk, or a bookkeeper, to support
them while Bob disassembled the old Ammons warehouse on the town square
and rebuilt it on the highway. An old rancher remarked to me, “I always thought
Scriver worked Jeanette too hard,” but she seemed to want to do the work.
Jeanette was, Bob said, the best apple-box carpenter he ever met. Since they
practically lived at the shop, she invented a kitchenette there. This was a woman
with a mouth and a temper. When fully aroused, she threw things, which Bob
thought was hilarious. His laughter, of course, only egged her on, which was
hard on their crockery.
One evening he became jealously convinced that she was stepping out on
him – actually she was taking tickets at the show house – and waited for her
in the darkened bedroom. He slapped her across the face. The results were not
the same as slapping Alice. Jeanette’s parents had been battlers and her mother
usually had come out on top. She reacted quickly. Groping for any heavy object,

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S 181
 she found the alarm clock and threw it as hard as she could, hitting him dead
center in the forehead, knocking him cold. When he awoke, he discovered her
standing over him with the baseball bat she usually kept behind the front door.
He never struck her again. Or any other woman.
But that was after things had begun to go wrong. Jeanette took a pattern-
making course by correspondence and started up a business making custom
cowboy shirts and then buckskin jackets in her sewing room upstairs. Bob set
up his art studio in a room off the living room, carrying little dishes of water
from the kitchen to make his plaster castings. Photos show him in plaid flannel
shirts, slightly pudgy, with his hair curled by Jeanette, who insisted she had to
practice perms to keep her skills. He was mortified when a “hook and bullet”
journalist caught him with his hair in pink foam rollers.
Jeanette and Margaret became very close. When Margaret graduated from
Valier High School, she immediately married Albert (Butch) DeSmet. “Johnny”
Skogen, the stepfather who escorted the bride, said that if Bob showed up, he
would shoot him. Bob and Jeanette dressed up and went anyway. There was no
incident. The DeSmet children were born in 1956, 1959, 1960 and 1961.
After John Skogen died, Alice couldn’t handle the teenaged Jimmy, so he
moved in with Bob and Jeanette. Margaret had proposed the idea of him going
to their dad, because all her life Margaret believed her dad could fix anything. It
was actually Jeanette who “took hold” of Jimmy. She told me there was nothing
she loved more than managing a man-child.
By this time Jeanette was increasingly plagued by mysterious symptoms.
She slept late in the morning but was still nearly paralyzed with fatigue – or
maybe it was depression. Wessie came over to scold her. When Jeanette went to
the doctor, he put her on tranquilizers. After a year, he said he didn’t want to
extend her prescription and she would have to make some changes in her life.
One day she went out to drive somewhere but Bob, to prevent her, had taken
all the wheels off the car and hidden them. That afternoon her older woman
friend helped her take an armload of buckskin shirts to Cut Bank, where she
used them to make a down payment on her own car. She was no softie.
Bob had begun to have “secret” affairs, though everyone in town was quick
to inform Jeanette, even an earnest old Indian lady who came to her door. When
Bob asked for a divorce, Jeanette was already fed up. Margie helped her to pack.
Jeanette claimed that Bob prowled outside the house in the dark that night,
possibly armed. Bob said that his mom watched all day, noting what went into
the car, and calling him now and then to report.
One day when cleaning, I found a packet of letters and read them. The
writer was educated, clearly in love with Bob. He responded, writing notes in
the margins that left no doubt. She had been married to someone else at the time
of her writing and Bob was married to Jeanette. They planned to divorce their
spouses to marry each other. Before they could do that, she became pregnant

182 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

by her husband and decided to remain with him. Bob’s divorce went through
anyway.
On October 16, 1958, Jeanette went to court and swore she was broke, had
no way to make a living, and had been thrown out of the house by Bob, against
whom she asked for a restraining order because he had threatened her. She said
nothing about being struck, but rather complained that she had to work around
town to support the household while Bob put all his money into the business.
She said that when she asked for necessary money, he told her to “go get a job”
and that he accused her of “bad moral character” and was extremely jealous.
She said he required her to “wait on him hand and foot” and to “subdue herself
to his, the Defendant’s will.” (Jeanette was never known to subdue herself to
anyone’s will.)
Jeanette described herself in terms of the defiant French nonconformist
who is never going to get along with the prissy, self-important English. She was
also a terrific flirt and often teased Bob by being a little too friendly with other
men, especially his friends. Oddly, he liked the excitement of that, or so he told
me. He called it “playing chase,” and compared it to the games he played with
the little pet fox. (The context was that he felt I would be more interesting if I
would do that same.) It was an effective but dangerous way to deal with fear
of intimacy and also made him feel he had “won” over other men when she
returned to him.
After the divorce action began, Bob wooed Jeanette all over again, made a
nude portrait of her called “Jay.” (Which the copyright office misread as “Joy,”
which was not too far off since Bob said he was trying to capture the emotion
she showed when he came back from a trip.) He talked her out of any alimony
except $1,000 and the little log cabin that had been the St. Mary tourist shop.
But before she left town, she went to the jewelry and clothing stores and ran up
major bills for which he was liable. She had outsmarted him again.
In the years after Jeanette left, Bob and Jimmy, plus other strays, ran a
disorderly, defiant bachelor household. Wessie came with her key and cleaned
house or washed clothes while the men were gone, picking up what clues she
could from whatever she found. She couldn’t quite encompass the situation. (In
1958 and 1959, both of Thad’s brothers passed away, which pressed him more
deeply into his quiet interior life.)
On November 26, 1958, Harold Prestmo (Alice’s brother who had been
damaged in wartime training exercises) committed suicide. Bob had promised
Alice to get Jimmy to the funeral and he did, but George, Alice’s brother, was
much offended that Bob wore his buckskin hunting jacket – blood, fringes and
all. Surely it was meant to be offensive.

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S 183
 Nuclear family, 1959, just before it scattered. Butch DeSmet, Jim Scriver,
Bob Scriver, Margaret Scriver DeSmet, Jeannette Scriver, Baby Charmaine DeSmet.
Photo: Bob Scriver (using self-timer).

5. Arlene the ideal

Browning, 1959–1962

A notable romance was with Arlene, my immediate predecessor. She had dropped
out of school, pregnant and unwed, and was waiting tables until her baby came.
She asked Bob, as City Magistrate and Justice of the Peace, to intervene to stop
a man who was stalking her. Soon she went to work for Bob. The baby was given
up for adoption. Her own mother had abandoned the family when Arlene was
very small.
It was a surprise to me to discover Arlene’s birthdate and realize she was
only three years younger than me. Arlene, as several have remarked, was like
Marilyn Monroe, a blonde sexy kitten. Bob was hopelessly and recklessly in love
with her, but after a permissive beginning, she managed to convince him that
he should withdraw to being a father-like protector. He continued in that role
for the rest of his life.

184 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 When Arlene joined Bob’s household, rivalry over her is probably what
broke the group up. She liked the boys her age, especially Jimmy. Nevertheless,
she worked hard in the studio and museum, well enough for Bob to leave her in
charge while he took his first big art shows to Los Angeles. He asked Arlene what
she wanted as a gift and she asked for a dress from Frederick’s of Hollywood,
the Sixties version of Victoria’s Secret. He bought a dress he described as “pretty,
pink and well-made,” and said he didn’t see anything wrong with it.
Bob made a bust of Arlene, which he meant get carved in pink alabaster,
but that was never done. He gave the plaster an ivory finish instead of bronze.

6. Mary the English teacher

Browning, 1966–1970

My “mother mold” was not so different from Bob’s. My mother was a Daughter
of the Oregon Pioneers. Her great-grandmother crossed the prairie on the
Oregon Trail. Her grandmother, a spirited young woman from a prosperous
family, died of infection after the birth of her second child, a boy. Her first child
was my grandmother, raised by a harsh and snobbish stepmother, made always
uncertain of herself. My mother, the oldest of four daughters, was close enough
to her fiery political father to make my gentle, insecure grandmother a little
jealous. John Pinkerton made it a point to brag that his daughters were as tough
and competent as any boys.
My mother had married late (I was her first child, born when she was
thirty) and the plan was two children, but she had three – two sons. I was a
needy smart-aleck of a little girl whom she treated more as a little sister than
a daughter. My legs ached and then I had tonsillitis. It made my mother feel
desperate when she couldn’t meet the demands of all three of us, and she was
often impatient if not angry. When I got to school, I did well there. At home I
was often spanked or switched.
My mother had been pulled out of college because of the Depression, so
when I started high school, she went back to college and got a teaching degree as
she had intended. Her plan was for me to get a teaching degree and to live close
by, still a “little sister.” I thought marrying Bob was a brilliant solution – he had
the status, the money would come, and I would not be accused of hogging the
spotlight because I was just serving his genius. I did not want children. College
had not had the effect on me that my mother had hoped. Instead I had joined
a theatre crowd focused on originality, inner strength, and creativity. The last
thing I wanted to do was go back home and teach school.
In wrapping myself around Bob Scriver, I myself was molded, though I
proved to be more unyielding in some respects than either of us expected. When

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S 185
 I was given the Blackfeet name of Meekskimyahkee, “Iron Woman,” Bob liked
to say it was because of my disposition. But he also said that I was a master of
tenacity and determination – that if I said I would do something, I could be
counted on to keep my word.
In August 1961, having come to Browning to teach high school English,
I walked up to the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, expecting a corny
tourist attraction. Bob was working alone in the shop. Ernest Thompson Seton’s
book Two Little Savages was dear to my heart and Yan (which I pronounced
like “yam”) loved taxidermy shops, so I did, too. At Northwestern my acting
professor, Alvina Krause, had assigned her students to memorize and “become”
a statue from Malvina Hoffman’s Hall of Man at the Field Museum, so I knew
them well enough to discuss each individually. These shared memories swept me
into Bob’s world quickly.
Then I didn’t see him again until January, when I invented a scheme to ask
him to speak to my classes. He took me home and cooked supper: cracked wheat
and deer steaks. He sat me on the sofa, knelt in front of me to take off my soaked
boots, put his sheepskin moccasins on my feet (they just fit), and gave me a long
talk about why his Rungius painting of a moose was better than any other paint-
ing in the world. It was Bob’s first “real” painting. I still think it’s marvelous in
its evocation of the green and gray New Brunswick mountains where a moose
stands among downed logs. I felt nurtured, both physically and with ideas.
The first night I stayed over, he kept saying I couldn’t at the same time
he handed me his pajama tops and put on his pajama bottoms. I was a sexual
dunderhead with no experience at all, but entirely too well read, and convinced
it was time to be initiated. I think he really didn’t believe that I was so innocent,
but he knew exactly the right moment to tell me about his vasectomy. He said,
“Don’t you go claiming that you’re sacrificing something by having sex with me,
because you’ve got to enjoy it as much as me or you shouldn’t be doing it.” Made
sense to me. Anyway, my mother always said no one would want me and he had
proved her wrong.
It wasn’t just the sex I enjoyed as much as he did. I was the only wife who
didn’t hate Browning and the wind, who joyously rode horseback, drove the
pickup, skinned bears and poured bronze. I thought it was a wonderful adven-
ture – and it would make a good book eventually. It would be fair to say I was
the only wife who really embraced Indians and Blackfeet history. Even with
the advantage of being young, I could barely keep up with him. We talked and
talked – or rather he talked. I remembered. I went home and wrote it down.
If he reached for his hat, the dog and I were in the pickup before he got
there. If he bullied me, insulted me, tried to push me down and turn me away, I
just didn’t pay any attention, any more than the dog did. On the other hand, if
I gave it up and walked away, he was knocking on my door, needing me back. I
was exactly the kind of girl Wessie would have wanted in 1937: white, educated,
Scots, and a teacher. Unfortunately, I wasn’t born until 1939.

186 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Bob and Mary at the Moiese Bison Range in the fall of 1962.
Photographer unknown.

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S 187
 Marriage of Bob Scriver and Mary Strachan, November 27, 1966, Westminster
Presbyterian Church, Portland, Oregon. Left to right: Paul Strachan, Margaret Paul,
Mary Strachan, Bob Scriver, Mark Strachan, Harlan Hansen. Two girls: Michelle on
left, Charmaine on right. Photo: Yuen Lui Studios.

In 1964–65, after the flood, we had an unsettled school year. Three daugh-
ters of school officials got pregnant. The school board met and decided that this
was caused by schoolteachers having affairs. Eight, including me, were identified
and notified that their salaries would be frozen. Everyone left but me. I signed
a contract for 1965–66, just to prove they couldn’t run me off, and told Bob
that either we got married in 1966 or I would have to move on. When I was all
packed, he said his mother thought we ought to get married because it would be
good for his career. He had a catalogue and showed me we could get a diamond
ring wholesale. It wasn’t very romantic and I was tempted to just leave, but I
didn’t. I couldn’t imagine life without him anymore.
The diamond was a quarter-carat, very high quality, and his mother seemed
to think it was hers. She constantly fussed that I shouldn’t wear it in the shop but
if I wasn’t wearing it, she wanted to know where it was. After the divorce I sold it
for grocery money ($200) and Bob was upset. He refused to wear a ring, saying
it was too dangerous because it might catch in machinery. (Late in his marriage
to Lorraine he wore one briefly.)

188 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 The wedding was in November in Portland. I insisted that everyone be
in it and that it be in a church, since his first two weddings were Justice of the
Peace fly-bys. His folks came, Margaret was the matron of honor, Charmaine
and Michelle were the junior bridesmaids. My brother was Bob’s best man. My
mother managed everything, except that Bob’s mother picked out his wedding
suit and bought it for him. She also kept him from wearing his cowboy boots,
which I wanted.
Just before Margaret and I went up the aisle, I hugged her and she flinched
with pain. It was cancer, still undiagnosed. Even not knowing that, I wept right
through the ceremony, not a good idea with glazed kid gloves and no hankie.
Bob’s new suit appeared to have a hankie in the pocket but was only fake points
stapled onto cardboard. Margaret said afterward she was about to tear a strip off
her petticoat. The Clan Macleay bagpiper my mother had hired led us across to
the reception hall and Bob slipped him more money to keep him playing.
At my mom’s I went to pack the wedding presents into the footlocker Bob
had brought, but they wouldn’t all go in, and I was near screaming with frustra-
tion. Gently, Thad Scriver put me aside, knelt on my mother’s braided front
room rug, and expertly packed everything. After a small wedding dinner at a
restaurant, we got right on the train and went home, back to work. On the train
Bob and I began to discuss a divorce before we slumped into exhaustion on each
other’s shoulders. His folks sat up, just behind us, alert and unfazed. Divorce did
not become a reality for four more years. By that time I had the unreasonable
idea that by marrying Bob I had killed Margaret.
Our actual divorce was in November 1970, but I stayed on in the house,
then out at the ranch, over the next winter. I didn’t stop going out to dinner
with Bob or leave the reservation until 1973 and then only because Lorraine had
moved in with him.

7. Lorraine the widow

Browning and Vancouver Island, 1972–2002

The fourth wife, Lorraine, was also the widow. I can find no record of a marriage
ceremony. News reports begin to describe her as Mrs. Scriver about 1973, and
she always reported her marriage date as August 15 that year, which was Bob’s
59th birthday. She said the ceremony was performed in New York City at the
21 Club, but I don’t think they were in New York on that date. The law had
changed since Bob divorced me: now it defined a common law marriage and
stipulated an automatic division of property in case of divorce. There was a lot
more property by that time, no way that alimony would be $1200. I asked him

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S 189
 Bob and Lorraine Scriver, 1975. Photo: Buster Ruetten.

once if he had married her and he said, “I was only really married once.” He told
Hélène the same thing. But it was only a point of pride.
Born in 1924 (which made her ten years younger than Bob), Lorraine was
a secretive person. From her own accounts she was abandoned by her mother
back on Vancouver Island, so young that she needed to be fed, bathed, and
clothed by adult neighbors who took her in. Her father, at least partly Indian,

190 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

went to Alaska and died there, possibly murdered. Her mother remarried and
had two sons with the second husband but refused to let Lorraine back into the
household.
In 1941, when Lorraine was a beautiful teenager, she married Max Caldwell,
a gingery, deaf, bald clerk and saxophone player when I knew him. They were
in Alberta when some sort of trouble developed around Max and the Caldwells
moved to Browning where Max was hired to work at the Browning Merc. He
was a nephew of the Robert Starrs, who were investors and employees. The
Caldwells lived next door to Bob.
Lorraine was a lifelong alcoholic, which suited some purposes. She would
never abandon Bob, because she was too needy, and she could never dominate
him because she couldn’t hold her focus. By eight o’clock every night she was
anesthetized, so he didn’t have to relate to her except during the day when he
needed her to take notes and answer the phone. In return he made her eat proper
meals, which extended her life, and he kept her sheltered. Over the years they
shared enough good times, mostly out at the Flatiron Ranch, to become attached
to each other. Severe childhood abuse would explain many of her otherwise
irrational actions. Like Bob’s other women, she wanted him to protect her, but
then didn’t trust him. Something in him wanted to heal wounded women, but
he ended up despising them.
It fell to Lorraine to help cope with the deaths of Bob’s mother, brother, son,
and granddaughter. More than that, his health – including brain function – was
disintegrating. It was clear that, like his father, he was having small strokes, with
at least the 1988 incident being major. His heart bypass in the mid-nineties was
only partly effective. He became indecisive and subject to abrupt mood swings.
His schedule of medications was so complex that he needed a chart. For a while
he was diabetic but stabilized on a diet.
His lawyers and inheritors need him to be depicted as mentally competent
in the last years, but in fact, he probably was not. (Even earlier, Jeanette and I
both wondered about lead poisoning from the plastilene constantly rubbed into
his hands and clothes.) But Lorraine was never in good health either. Frankly,
no one expected her to outlive him, not even Bob.
Lorraine worked in the shop, doing the same jobs I had done. When she
divorced Max, he didn’t attend the trial or contest it, though he was served
papers twice. She used the same lawyer Bob had hired for me when we were
divorced, so Bob may have paid for her divorce. Max died of cancer in 1994
without remarrying.
In 1977 Wessie, aged 89, had a heart attack and was taken to the Indian
Hospital. The whole family was there, Lorraine and Laurel both a little tipsy.
Lorraine was very worried about Wessie’s diamond rings, which were sub-
stantial. When Wessie was declared dead, the nurse brought the diamond rings
out and put them in her hand. “Oh,” cried Lorraine. “They’re still warm!” Then
she handed them over to Laurel, bypassing both Bob and Harold. I had assumed

I X M OT H E R M O L D : W I V E S A N D OT H E R S 191
 the diamond rings came to Wessie from Thad, because she wore them with
her wedding rings, but they were inherited from Wessie’s Macfie maiden aunts,
Aunt Annie and Aunt Lillie.
Bob hung a formal portrait of his mother, complete with her Barbara Bush
pearls, in the shop, where she smiled benevolently until his death.

192 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 X

Lost Wax:
Crucifix, Pieta, and Margaret

1. Making a wax duplicate

Making waxes was the first step of the real bronze casting process. We used the
“ciré perdue“ method: ciré meaning wax and perdue meaning lost. It’s a wonderful
name for a process, echoing Proust with overtones of tender memory. Wax itself
is plastilene with the sediments removed, responsive to haptic pressure and body
temperature as well as the sharp knives of the glyptic sculptor that cut and shave
harder waxes. Some people model directly into wax, but at this step we melted the
wax and painted it into molds until it was about a quarter of an inch thick.
At first we thought we needed some kind of special casting wax and or-
dered various densities, melting points, and hardnesses, discovering that the
consistency and characteristics of wax vary widely. Then later we began to use
local beeswax mixed with other waxes and to control the colors with wax dye.
We melted up our mixtures of wax in second-hand deep-fat fryers and turkey
roasters because they had thermostats and could be moved around the shop
from table to table. We lived in terror of the thermostats going haywire, allowing
the wax to get hot enough to explode. At night Bob would be nearly asleep and
suddenly jerk awake to go check the shop one more time to make sure they were
all turned off.
Once we began to use beeswax, the air was honeyed. We strained out dead
bees and other debris by pouring the melted wax through old nylon stockings. I
always had plenty of ruined stockings while I was teaching. (We were required
to dress up in those days – no trousers, much less jeans.) Once I was in the shop
full-time, I rarely wore anything but jeans, so we depended upon Wessie, who
wore nylons even doing housework. Melted wax that stuck to the bottom of the
fryer or got stranded on the edges would char, turning dark and grainy. Above a
certain temperature smoke stung your eyes, which was a reminder to check the
thermostat.
193
 To make a wax, nestle the flexible plastic mold properly in its supporting plaster
“mother mold” on the table. Wedge scraps of wood or plaster under the edges to
stabilize it. Then, with a cheap paintbrush, paint in a layer of wax, coating evenly
all over the inside of the mold. Some books show the artisan pouring the closed-up
mold full of hot wax, in and out like casting a plaster, but we didn’t get good results
with that. Putting the two halves back together took a good eye, but it worked for us.
Bi-symmetry was the first thing Bob checked if another foundry did a casting, and
they often failed.
A core of investment, the fireproof plaster, had to be poured inside the bodies of
horses or other thick shapes to keep them hollow. (Cellini referred to it poetically as
“the soul,” but when digging it back out, it was not so exalted.) The core inside was
pinioned with small stainless steel nails that pierced through both investment and
wax. We cut out a “trapdoor” of wax, filled the wax inside with investment, and
then spliced the piece we cut out into a sprue, one of the wax rods that would make
a channel for the molten metal, so that it would cast as bronze. After the casting the
bronze piece was welded back in place.
“Spruing a wax” is another job for delicate fingers and an engineer’s eye. It
means adding long tentacles of wax – the “sprues” – which will melt out when the
mold is baked to leave the tubes into which is poured the molten bronze and other
tubes through which gases can escape. Where to put them, what size they ought to be,
and how firmly attached are all crucial considerations. Everything is consciousness of
flow and deftness at fusing wax with a hot steel blade.
While working, keep a bowl of cold water handy, so that if the wax spatters on
your hands, you can plunge them into the water for relief. Otherwise hot wax just
keeps right on clinging and burning until it’s cool enough to be peeled off – maybe
with cooked skin attached. None of us even considered using gloves. The warm work
was pleasant in winter. After a while we stopped trying to work in warm weather
because the waxes wouldn’t hold their shape, and anyway, warm weather meant
interruptions from tourists and customers.
Stubby sprues on the base hold the wax off a piece of glass. A cage of more slender
sprues converges above the wax into what would be a drain spout when the mold was
turned upside down. At first we made plaster molds for sprues in various sizes, all
cylindrical and smooth as candles. Soon we could see no particular advantage in that
and simply poured out sheets of wax and cut long strips out when needed, as though
working with leather. When the cast bronze was chipped out of the investment, the
square edges of the strips made them easier to distinguish from the actual sculpture.
They also tended to prevent vortexes from forming when bronze was poured.

When the wax was done, we enjoyed writing on the bottom. The back of the
saddle on my casting of Lone Cowboy has my initials on it, and the underside of
the sculpture is dedicated “to my partner.” (“What do you want me to write?”

194 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The cool room for waxes. There are several bronzes in this wax (1980s).
Photo: Buster Ruetten.

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 he asked, taking the romance out of it.) I drew the little curly face I often put
at the end of letters. We used a tiny hot stamp, like a brand, to add “Bighorn
Foundry,” and the year. The big portrait of Linderman holding his saddle that is
now at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City has a dozen hidden initials
on it, inscribed with pride by the craftsmen who made it. I’ve forgotten where
I put mine.
Once a wax is complete with sprues and vents to let molten bronze in and gases
out, pack it into investment the consistency of Cream of Wheat, which hardens like
cement or plaster. One of Bob’s little strategies was to interrupt the wax sprues with
small waxes of On the Prowl or Bellowing Bull or some other small bronze which
would cast along with the major figure. The value of them sometimes paid for the cost
of casting the bigger piece. The resulting mass of wax embedded in investment goes
into the bake oven to “lose” the wax. At first, liquid wax melts out. Then chemical
wax molecules must burn out of the investment. The big ones take days.

2. Portrait of a polo player

Santa Rosa, Anacortes, 1967

In the fall of 1966 Bob and I had been married in Portland, taking only the
minimum of time off because of the workload. In spring of 1967 we left on a
trip I called our “late honeymoon.” The previous summer a customer had asked
for a portrait of her husband on his polo horse in action. We had promised to
travel in May to their ranch in Santa Rosa. It was an expensive commission and
Bob was full of nerves. But we got off to a good start when we stopped for gas
in Ritzville, Washington, and the service station owner got so excited by the
bronzes we were carrying along to show to galleries that he insisted on calling
the local newspaper.
The reporter showed up in a trenchcoat with his hat-brim turned back, just
like the movies. He whipped out his little notebook and began to ask questions.
“Would you say that art is always the product of suffering?” he demanded, mov-
ing a frayed toothpick to the other size of his stubbly lips. “It’s like – the agony
and the ecstasy, right? This fellow here, look how he’s suffered!” He picked up
No More Buffalo, the old warrior standing with his useless spear. “Now show me
one with ecstasy!”
Bob was enchanted. They talked a long time while I sat on a curb in the
sunshine and enjoyed listening. Ritzville is high plateau country, dry land wheat
farming, and clouds unhurried and fluffy as proverbial sheep wandered across
the sky. Not quite ecstasy, but very pleasant.
In the wind-scourged Columbia River gorge we were on territory that I
knew very well but Bob had never seen before. I guided him to what used to

196 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

be our favorite family Sunday afternoon destination: Maryhill Museum, just a
hundred miles east of Portland. The land is sun-blanched except for green lawn
irrigated from the nearby river so that Maryhill stands as an oasis of Lombardy
poplars and smooth lawns. Built originally as a mansion for Sam Hill’s beloved
wife, Mary, it was never occupied because of Mary’s death. Sam, from the same
railroad family that built the Great Northern through the Blackfeet Reservation,
had a friend, Mrs. Spreckels of the sugar fortune, who persuaded and funded
him into creating the museum. An early coup was the acquisition of the jewel-
embroidered cloth-of-gold robes and throne room furniture of the Queen of
Roumania. The rest is an eclectic hodgepodge of surprises, much influenced by
the taste of Mrs. Spreckels. I guided Bob up the stairs into the room of Rodin
castings. Who would expect them here? Mrs. Spreckels had a lot of connections
and a great feel for the notorious. There was no guard and Bob gingerly put his
hands on the plasters, which had been made in Rodin’s studio and undoubtedly
handled by the master. We tipped up the bronzes and peered underneath to see
what we could decipher about the casting. There were no heroic-size pieces, but
many familiar ones.
Downstairs again, I had almost forgotten the small Theodore Riviere
bronzes and still know very little about the sculptor, but Bob liked them almost
more than the Rodins. Two bronze entourages of Bedouins in flowing robes
and their elegant Barb horses, possibly scaled an inch to a foot, had captured
someone and were carrying him away in a cage on the back of a camel. It had to
be a historical or literary event, but we didn’t know what.
When we got to Portland, my mother agreed to take us on a quick tour
of the major heroic bronzes of the city: A. Phimister Proctor’s equestrian Teddy
Roosevelt, Rough Rider downtown in front of the Art Museum, George Fite Water’s
Abraham Lincoln in the South Park blocks, Pompeo Luigi Coppini’s George
Washington, Emmanuel Frémiet’s Joan of Arc in Laurelhurst,1 Roland Hinton
Perry’s preposterous elk statue in the horse and dog watering fountain by the
Multnomah County Courthouse, Gutzon Borglum’s Harvey W. Scott on Mount
Tabor, Alice Cooper’s Sacajawea in Washington Park, and, not far away from her,
the Hermon A. MacNeil sculpture called The Coming of the White Man.2
At the Portland Art Museum we came into a gallery space where docents
were being trained. Eager, female, and terribly well-dressed, one of them was
asking breathlessly, “Don’t you think that art is a series of essences?” After that,
when we wanted to seem pretentious, we would ask each other, “Don’t you
think art is a series of essences?” One day Bob turned to me thoughtfully and
said, “Y’know – art really IS a series of essences!”
When it came to heading south, we had a battle. Bob wanted to explore
gold country and I was yearning for the ocean. We tussled our way along until
we got to Santa Rosa and stopped at a pay phone to make a courtesy call to my
cousin. Bob flipped through the phone book – I thought randomly – and came
up with the phone number of Jeanette’s sister, Hélène. My cousin wasn’t home,

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 but the sister-in-law was, and nothing would do but that we come to spend the
night. It was her husband, the hockey star, who insisted.
The house was elegant, very Marin County, and dominated by two huge
abstract paintings by Maurice, Jeanette’s brother. Hélène, the sister, as Bob had
said, looked like a more slender, less experienced Elizabeth Taylor. Maurice was
the focus of attention. He had just finished a European bicycle tour and was in
terrific shape, tanned and with a small beard. Bob exclaimed, “He looks just like
Jesus must have looked!” Now he was resting before returning to Quebec, where
he was a professor of French. He had reformed his family name, returning from
Caouette to Chaillot, the older version.
Everyone was united in criticism of Jeanette, that fiery and opinionated
woman who got everything she ever wanted, except Bob. She had spent a good
part of her life persecuting her sister, according to Hélène, and I heard many
unflattering vignettes about her outrageous behavior. It seemed to be a family
pastime. I began to have a sneaking fondness for her.
Bob had once showed me a botched portrait of Hélène in a long purple
robe that he had tried to paint years ago. The fact that he had kept something
so amateurish and still had the intention of finishing it someday – so he sighed
– meant that she was still important to him. The unobtainable princess, perhaps.
After that she haunted our marriage, just as she had haunted Jeanette’s and
would haunt Lorraine.
At the Walters’ Bob was beginning to have nerves. We turned into a long
drive lined by eucalyptus trees and geranium beds. When we passed the stables,
a bony, long-eared old horse was standing in the sun, his lower lip hanging down
in slap-happy relaxation. “If that’s the famous polo horse we’ve been hearing so
much about,” Bob declared, “We’re going to turn right around and go back.”
The Walters were delighted to see us and showed us our room, which
opened with sliding glass doors directly to the swimming pool. We went down
to the stables and lifted the mockup of the sculpture out of the van. The resident
cowboy showed up with his five sons. All of them were skinny and redheaded,
and it was obvious that dad was handing down his big black cowboy hats as they
wore out. Each hat hovered at a descending height and each was increasingly
disreputable, until the last little fellow had a very dubious hat indeed. It also had
a great deal of newspaper in the band to make it small enough for him to wear.
They stood in a row and exclaimed in unison, “Goooollleeeeeee!”
But the next person to appear was the trainer with that ugly horse, droop-
ing along in good-natured cooperation. The trainer, bent on demonstrating his
expertise in the area, looked at the mockup and stated flatly that the “lead” (the
foot which the horse tends to step out on most strongly, something like being
right-handed) was all wrong. In no time we were embroiled in a major argument
about leads. Bob grew more and more exasperated. Finally he said, “Well, that’s
it. I’ve had it. Put the mockup back in the van and go get the suitcases, Mary.
I’m not doing this.”

198 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Mr. Walters scuffed dust with his toe and pondered over his folded arms.
He reminded me a bit of Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh. “Would you give me just
a half-hour?” he asked at last. “After this long drive down here, surely you could
just give me a bit more time. If I can’t change your mind, we’ll call it even.” We
had a rather healthy advance tied up in this commission.
“Oh, all right.”
“Go saddle Why Worry? “ Mr. Walters instructed the trainer. That was the
horse’s name: Why Worry? It suited him. Mr. Walters himself disappeared to
change into jodhpurs. We stood around in the yard, trying to look confident,
while the row of redheaded lanky males in graduated sizes squinted at us and
spat expertly into the dust. At last they directed us over to the polo field.
Mr. Walters mounted up and walked his relaxed horse out along the fence.
Pretty soon he broke into a gallop, then gradually built up speed. Round and
round the field he went, while we all leaned our elbows on the white-painted
board fence and squinted into the perpetual sunshine. Round and round again
and now he was traveling. The horse’s lower lip had pulled in, and huge nostrils
flared out like the mouth of a trumpet. His tail was up and his gut was sucked
in. Great veins raised under his skin and his feet drummed the ground. This was
a GORGEOUS horse, full of life and intelligence!
“See why I like the old fellow?” asked Mr. Walters, pulling up in front of
us and working to keep his seat on the pancake saddle while the horse danced
powerfully under him. He was a big man, but the horse acted as though he
weighed nothing. “There are other horses that are prettier, but this one is the
one that likes to play polo!”
“Yahoo!” yelled Bob. Overcome with relief, he threw his hat on the ground
and stomped – actually stomped on it! I never had seen anyone actually do it.
The redheaded boys were respectful. But they didn’t stomp on their precious
hats. “Get that mockup back out of the van, Mary. We’re going to start work
this very minute!”
And we did. I sat on a stool and held the horse, sometimes supporting his
head on my shoulder when he conveniently laid it there for a rest, and flicking
his lower lip to keep it pulled in when Bob worked on that end. When the light
went bad, we returned to our room for a swim, then had an elegant supper in a
dining room graced by Scriver sculptures Mrs. Walters had bought the summer
before. Bob discovered chutney and declared it wonderful. Feeling very daring,
we went for a quick skinny dip in the dark before collapsing into bed.
Early in the morning we lay listening to the California quail calling outside,
feeling this must be the height of luxury and wondering if we had time for an-
other swim before breakfast. A heavy padding of feet and whooshing of breath
came through the slightly open sliding doors: “Sagacious Sagamore” – “Saggy,”
naturally – the basset hound pushed through. Like an insolent butler, he looked
us over and went around the room checking our luggage as though he suspected
we had hidden some table silver. Then he went to the door and scratched to be

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 let out. I hurried to do it, afraid he’d mar the paint. The next two mornings he
followed the same routine. The second night we ate out at some elegant place
and discovered what a sommelier was. (A wine steward, complete with a little
tasting spoon on a string around his neck.) When we got back to Browning, Bob
played the part with Coca Cola for the edification of the locals.
The last day was tense, as Bob was struggling to get a likeness on a head the
size of a walnut and Mrs. Walters didn’t think it was quite right yet. It was hard
to get her husband to hold still. Finally he just came in and took a nap flat on his
back in the dining room. That did the job. We qualified for the next step in the
commissioning process and Mrs. Walters wrote us our check.
“You know what I’d really like to have,” she said, softly. “It sounds kind of
funny, I know, but what I’d really like is a Crucifix. Do you ever do religious
things?”
Bob’s enthusiastic response threw her. “Sure! I could do it! And I know just
who can pose for Christ, too! Would you like to meet him?”
“No, no, no! That’s not necessary.” Bob saw he had derailed her and calmed
down.
“Do you have specific ideas about how this ought to be?”
“Yes, I would like him still alive, not hanging dead, and at the point where
he says, ‘Eli, Eli, lamach sabachthani! ‘: ‘Father, Father, why hast Thou forsaken
me?’“
So it was a deal and we drew up another contract. Then we stopped back in
Santa Rosa to arrange for Maurice to come pose.

3. Bob’s daughter dies

Anacortes, 1967 and 1968

On the way home I INSISTED on going out to the coast and found a detour
on the map that looked as though it would be short. In fact, it was a twisty,
winding, coast range road overrun by barreling logging trucks. We went on and
on while it got darker and foggier and our mood deteriorated. That night we
slept in the van above the sea lion caves on the Oregon coast but couldn’t really
see them, only hear them yelp. The tourist facility wasn’t open. When we found
a phone and called Anacortes, we learned that Bob’s daughter was scheduled
for surgery.
She had had symptoms before leaving Valier in the summer of 1964 and
had gone to the doctor with no result. Over the next months, she was waiting
for health insurance from her new job to kick in. She never had a job better than
waitressing in a supper club, so it couldn’t have been very generous insurance.

200 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 When Margaret and the kids had come for Christmas in 1965, she told me
that she didn’t think things were right, but the doctors couldn’t find anything.
About this time she married Ken Paul and they came on a trip together to
Browning to tell Bob and visit some of Ken’s relatives. Ken was an enrolled
Blackfeet Indian, mixed-blood, and Margaret was worried about what her dad
would say, but Bob made no complaint to her or to anyone else that I heard.
In fact, May Paul, Ken’s mother, was an Augare, and Calvin Augare had al-
ways been one of Bob’s best friends. Ken was big and smart, someone Margaret
couldn’t dominate, which I think was a relief to her. Her doctors had told her
that her abdominal pain was basically psychosomatic, due to the stress of her life
as a single mother with four small children and limited income.
Margaret’s pain continued without a diagnosis until she was taking many
codeine pills in a day just to get her work done and, if she were bumped, she
cried out. Ken called the doctor and told him very definitely that he was sending
Margaret, and he didn’t want her to leave the doctor’s office without knowing
what was wrong. This time, they found the cancer.
It was at this point that we called from the Oregon coast. We didn’t stay for
the surgery, but took Lane home with us. Rory was still a baby and stayed with
his mom. Jeanette took the two girls. In photos that Jeanette took of the girls,
they sit side-by-side, looking miserable and scared.
August 21 was the “Night of the Grizzlies” when two women in Glacier
Park, one on the east side and one on the west side, were killed and eaten by
grizzly bears. This was totally unexpected, devastatingly gruesome, and unac-
countable. Somehow it became entangled in our minds with Margaret’s cancer.
Bob was upset that no one asked him what he thought about grizzlies, since he
considered himself an expert, but the Craighead brothers in Yellowstone and
Chuck Jonkel in Missoula had already moved the subject to a higher level with
their more scientific approaches.
When Margaret came to get Lane, hitching a ride with a girlfriend, she was
much thinner and very quiet. She sat on a grassy hillside at the cabin, wearing
a white shirt and white shorts, sun in her red-gold hair – already otherworldly.
She said she could feel the cancer growing back. We pretended that it was only
her imagination, but it was clear that she knew more about her body than the
doctors did.
Oddly, it was Hélène who called us the day after our first wedding an-
niversary to say that she had heard through Jeanette that Margaret was in very
rough shape again. This time we took the train to Anacortes, thinking that it
would be the fastest and easiest way. In fact, there had been a derailment near
Troy so that we had to transfer to a crowded bus to be portaged across to intact
track. There was a single mother with four little kids who reminded us so much
of Margaret and all her trips with the kids for Christmas that Bob and I each
adopted a child to hold. In the middle of the night they disembarked in some

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 small eastern Washington town and we were relieved to see the family swept up
in the husband’s arms. That was the ecstasy.
It was strange to sit in Margaret’s kitchen eating peaches she had canned
the summer before, visiting with Alice, Jeanette, Jim, and Ken. Jeanette had not
seen Bob since his show in Los Angeles in 1961 and she shook with emotion. She
was very definite about everything. At one point she and Alice got into an argu-
ment over which one of them had gone duck-hunting with Bob out to Buffalo
Lake, leaving the car on what seemed solid ground on that frozen fall morning.
After hiking clear around the lake, they returned to find that the ground had
thawed, becoming a bog that sank the car to the tops of the wheels. Digging it
out took all their energy – whichever “they” were – and the last of the light. Bob
was noncommittal, saying he couldn’t remember which of them it was. Maybe
it happened twice.
When Bob and Alice were both in Margaret’s hospital room at the same
time, she took their hands, one on each side of the bed, and said, “I’ve been
dying to get you back together.”
Margaret had been unable to take Sacraments since she was divorced. Now
Jeanette applied for an annulment of the first marriage and she was successful.
The local priest was faithful in supporting Margaret. He told her that she was
becoming more and more beautiful as her eyes became larger and larger in her
thinning face. He said her eyes were windows to her soul.
Alice had a lot of theories about what started the cancer: maybe it was
when Margaret, three years old, had her appendix out. The old doctor had let
Alice stay during the operation. She talked about how he lifted out the tiny
mass of her baby intestines and put them on her chest while he found the ap-
pendix and how he was smoking a cigar the whole time. “Maybe the ashes fell
in there.” Other times she thought it was the spinal Margaret had during labor
with Charmaine. It seemed to all of us that there should be some cause for the
cancer. I thought maybe environmental pollution in Anacortes, an oil-refinery
town where flares were not far from Margaret’s house. They said another young
woman up the street had developed the same cancer. None of us had heard of
Gardner’s Syndrome and the doctors never spoke of it. It is a genetic predisposi-
tion towards intestinal polyps, which makes people vulnerable to carcinogens.
Margaret had it, Michelle discovered in the medical records years later.
At one point while Margaret was still at home, she had needed a pain shot
(the cancer involved her spine) and the nurse who was supposed to give it to her
didn’t come. She tried to give it to herself, but couldn’t, so she asked Charmaine,
who was very young – under ten years old. Charmaine couldn’t do it either, and
the two of them were weeping in agony when Alice came and gave the shot.
Finally the kids were sent to Butch, their biological father. Margaret’s strongest
wish was that the children stay together.
There was another crisis and we went to Anacortes in the van so we could
take clay. Setting up a studio in Margaret’s room, Bob made a bust of her, much

202 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 To See Eternity – portrait of Margaret Scriver DeSmet Paul by Bob Scriver, 1967.
Photo: Mary Scriver.

to the fascination of the hospital staff. Her hair had been cut for the hospital and
she asked for it to be long again. Bob was saying he might call the portrait Prairie
Daughter, and made her hair blowing in the wind. When he brought it back to
the house, both Alice and Jeanette wept because they hadn’t realized how much
her face had changed. By the time we got the bust home to Browning, its name
had become To See Eternity, and the wind in her hair was a cold death wind, but
we never told her that.
Chemotherapy was in its infancy, and the particular drug given to Margaret
was violent in its side effects, but it did shrink the tumor down and give her more
months of life. She was able to be home for Christmas. Then another emer-
gency call from Ken. She was receiving one c.c. morphine per hour and it wasn’t
enough. She begged for the morphine for the last fifteen minutes of every hour.
Alice would go out to the nursing station and demand that a nurse respond.
This time we flew, with Ken picking us up at Sea-Tac. Margaret’s weight
had fallen from 165 pounds to 93 and she was very weak. We were there for
the actual operation, because they thought she might not live through it. The
doctors said they took her intestines out and hung them up on a stainless steel
rack, sorting through to see what could be saved, but they were like wet facial

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 tissues and could hardly even be handled. They packed back what they could
save. The doctor wept.
When Margaret came out of surgery, she was fighting to get the oxygen
mask off her face, though she was barely conscious. “I don’t NEED that!” she
insisted. Ken and Alice got into a shoving match over who should comfort her,
actually pulling her back and forth on the gurney. Margaret said faintly, “Can’t
you just leave me alone?”
She died on Mother’s Day.
Bob’s folks had taken me aside and said they didn’t think I should go with
Bob to the funeral. The more I pushed Bob to tell me what to do, the more he
clammed up and pulled away. In fact, this was the way he responded to grief:
turning away, becoming silent, a shapeless stone. It seemed to me that everyone
would be relieved if I were just gone. I was going to join Margaret – or maybe
exchange places with her. This was when I slashed my wrist, then relented. No
one said anything about it.
This time we drove in the little red van. It was gorgeous spring weather and
all the orchards were in bridal bloom. We took the baby pet fox, wearing a silver
harness. The first night we stayed in Ken’s house, sleeping on the kids’ bunks. I
had been supposed to put in the sleeping bags, but forgot, so it was my fault if we
were cold. There was no bedding, but I found a mattress pad and put it over the
two of us, wrapping us tightly together. We hardly slept – there were too many
dreams and strange sounds in the cold house.
Girl Scouts and others kept bringing food to Margaret’s house, but there
was no one there to eat it. On Friday was the Rosary and we, non-Catholic, fled
to Arlene’s. She took us through the Boeing plant where they were just building
the first 747s, and we were impressed. Arlene’s cats tolerated the fox, so we stayed
overnight. She slept on the couch so we could have her bed.
Alice’s emotions came out as anger. I was not to be allowed to ride in the
family car and I don’t remember how it was resolved. One of the half-sisters from
Alice’s second marriage was extremely pregnant. When we got to the graveside,
Bob wanted me to sit beside him but there weren’t enough chairs and I thought
the pregnant half-sister ought to sit. He was white with rage and I remember
his forefinger on the chair, bent backwards with force. Jeanette appeared at the
funeral wearing a mink stole though it was quite warm, because she wanted to
annoy Bob. They had had a quarrel over mink skins once. (He noticed and was
annoyed.) In the cemetery she marched around examining the flowers to see
who sent what. Bob had chosen a white gardenia cross with a spray of red roses,
as well as a heart of pink roses on behalf of the kids.
Ken had ordered an expensive casket and the funeral director was con-
cerned about who was going to pay for the funeral. Bob wrote him a check for
half of the cost, figuring that it would cover the man’s expenses and Ken would
be responsible for the profit part of it, but that was the last of our money.

204 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 We left after the funeral, anxious to get home. Bob drove as long as he
could, but finally was overcome with exhaustion somewhere past Idaho. Then
I drove, hallucinating, determined to cope, occasionally drifting over into the
shoulder gravel or across the yellow line. Luckily, there was no traffic. Finally, to
keep me awake, Bob began telling me every detail about every woman he’d ever
gone to bed with. Both of us were out of our minds with fatigue and emotion. I
tried to remember for later, and we kept breaking into hysterical laughter.
By the time we got to Kalispell, neither of us could drive. It would have
been suicidal to try to cross the pass through the Rockies. I was in favor of
just sleeping beside the road, but Bob didn’t think it was proper. I suggested a
motel, but there wasn’t enough money. (Neither VISA nor ATMs existed yet.)
At last I saw a campground that didn’t cost much, and we stayed there, sleeping
on the ribbed floor of the van with nothing but coats and some cardboard for
cushioning. Again, we wrapped tightly together to keep warm. We woke up stiff
and sore and made it home by 10 AM. Bob had a kidney infection. I never could
remember what he told me that crazy night, except something about a woman
he had had 29 times in hotel room number 35–or maybe it was 35 times in room
29. I never suspected that it was an old joke among bragging men.

4. Maurice poses for Jesus

Browning, 1967 and 1968

Maurice came to pose that summer before Margaret died. It became obvious
that he would have to pose really hanging from the cross, not standing on a
stool or shelf. Therefore we dragged in timbers and lashed a rough cross upright
from the beams of the studio. Though we teased about using real nails, stirrups
on the cross-piece let him hold himself in position. He was only able to suspend
himself for seconds at a time, but in that short time his whole body changed.
Veins stood out, his skin stretched taut over bones and straining muscles, and
his face became suffused with blood. Bob had to work quickly. Even so, Maurice
had some permanent damage to his shoulder.
Maurice wove a story. At one time, raised a Catholic, he had wanted to be
a priest. But a year before posing, while studying French in Paris, he had fallen
in love with the beautiful niece of Yves St. Laurent, the French couturier. Just as
they had begun to plan a life together, she was killed by a bus. His faith, indeed
his sanity, was shaken by this tragedy. Now, experiencing the Crucifixion of
Jesus through both the spiritual concept and his strained body, he began to find
meaning again. (Maybe all this was true – maybe not.)
We had been doing research on practical matters, drawing on doctors,
ministers, priests, an Egyptologist, and stacks of books. Mostly we discovered

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 that few actual facts are known though many traditions exist. It is possible that
the cross was T-shaped as El Greco painted it. No one knows whether Jesus was
permitted a loincloth. It may be that because of the scarcity of wood, he carried
only the crosspiece of the cross while the upright remained erected on Golgotha
where it had been used for previous Crucifixions. Whenever we were in doubt,
we used common sense. All the doctors agreed that nails driven through the
palm of the hand would not support the weight of a man. But if they were put
through the wrist between the two bones of the forearm, they could not tear out.
The early accounts of the Crucifixion use a word that can be interpreted to mean
“near the hand,” so we decided to put the nails in the wrist.
We found that in order to breathe Maurice had to pull himself up. Medical
opinion is that death in crucifixion comes largely from asphyxiation because
the chest muscles are drawn so tight. To live, a man must try to pull himself up
to fill his lungs until he is too exhausted to lift himself. The Corpus became a
struggling, tormented figure – even his toes and fingers curled with pain, only
his upturned face was touched with hope as he strained for breath, the metaphor
for Spirit.
Browning, Montana, is a small town and soon people were beginning to ask
about what was happening. A photo of Maurice hanging on the cross appeared
in the local paper and the next morning there was a little knot of Blackfeet
children standing across the road, whispering, “That’s where they did it! That’s
where they crucified Jesus!” A high school girl brought in a poem she had writ-
ten about the Crucifixion and we received an anonymous letter containing what
purported to be the only authentic description of Jesus.
Sculptor and model, working together from breakfast until dusk every day,
kindled between them a mood of creativity that brought them to a rare harmony
of minds. In the evenings Bob completed two busts of Maurice – one an impres-
sionistic study of Christ’s head and one of Maurice himself, severely classic. The
two sat far into the night with a strong light shining from the side of a bust while
they turned it slowly, watching the movement of the line and mass as the edge
of shadow traveled over the surface. They discussed endlessly whether the line
of a shoulder should be broken by a lock of hair or if the curve of a wave in the
hair echoed too obviously the curve of the ear. Bob was never so happy: THIS
was being a sculptor!
One of the locals cracked, “I hope Scriver knows enough not to put Jesus
on a horse!” All that summer people asked to see the Crucifix. It is small, about
eighteen inches long, and people seemed disappointed at first. They expected
something life-size.3 When they held the figure in their hands to look closely,
they began to respond. A Catholic priest from Rome expressed his approval
through an interpreter and hand gestures. His tactful comment was that he was
relieved to see that it was “beautiful and understandable instead of the jumbled
ugliness that seems to swamp us sometimes.”

206 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Christ Head, 1968. A study for the small crucifix called “Eli, Eli” for which
Maurice Chaillot posed. Photo: Mary Scriver.

The veins, the tiny thorns, the facial expression were eloquent. The chased
and burnished bronze was given a light green-brown patina so that all detail
would be readily apparent. In fact, Bob kept making me do the patina over,
which I couldn’t understand, until it was Christmas and one came to me as a
gift. Somehow, even though I had helped pour bronze and patinaed all the cast-
ings, I hadn’t known we cast that many. Bob loved fooling people right under
their noses. He hid the casting in the mop bucket (“You’d never look there, I
KNEW that!”), and the do-overs had been new castings, not repeats.
When Maurice was through posing, we drove him up to Calgary for the
return flight. That last night we stayed at the St. Mary cabin to save an hour’s
driving on the way north. Our supper was chunks of meat on sticks, roasted in
the fireplace and eaten folded into bread. Lane was dubious about such casual
cooking at first and set his meat on fire a couple of times because he was in a
hurry, but soon he got the knack and a taste for it. Meat juice was running

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 down his chin, and we teased him, but he didn’t care. He and Maurice decided
it would be better to sleep out under the tall tree in the yard than in the little
loft over the front room. Bob and I slept in the doorless bedroom. We were all
exhausted.
In the darkest part of the night I woke up. We had not wired the cabin for
electricity yet and no lamp was handy. I was drawn to the front door, which was
standing open. Out there in the moonlight on the ground were the big and little
figures of Maurice and Lane in their sleeping bags. Over them stood a small
black bear, licking Lane’s face. She looked at me standing in the doorway in my
long white nightgown. I don’t know how I knew it was a female bear. She made
no sound and neither did I. Somehow our minds seemed attuned.
Pretty soon, she moved away into the darkness of the brush. I went quietly
back to bed. In the morning I thought I had dreamt the incident, but a week
later someone shot a small black she-bear at a nearby dump. Since it was sum-
mer, meaning the hide was worthless, she was just left there. It must have been
the same bear. I grieved. And I wondered what it meant. Was it Margaret? There
is a photo of Margaret’s mother, Alice, under that very tree. Next to her a small
black bear, shot by Bob, is hanging from the tree.
Between the idea and the delivery of this bronze, perhaps eight months
passed, an unusually short time. Completion of the polo player ran parallel, and
that piece also turned out beautifully with the horse extended and the graceful
arc of the long polo mallet sweeping overhead. In part, Bob was hurrying the
Crucifix because he wanted to give a casting to Margaret before she died. When
we spoke to Mrs. Walter about reproduction rights, she thought carefully. Her
decision was that since the portrait of her husband was a personal thing, she
wanted the reproduction rights to be hers, but because a Crucifix has meaning to
many people, she didn’t feel she should limit reproduction. We took Margaret’s
casting to her just before her third surgery on December 9, 1967. They told us
that it was put into her casket when she was buried, but that might not be true.
By then Bob had already made arrangements for Maurice and Hélène to
return to pose for a Pieta, as a follow-up for the Crucifix. There was no commis-
sion for the Pieta. It was meant to be a memorial for Margie. Though Bob knew
the Michelangelo Pieta, he also knew that the term refers to a whole category
of sculptures that show the dead Jesus in his grieving mother’s arms. On some
deep level, this was a portrait of himself holding Margaret. I wish he had actu-
ally made that sculpture – himself with the dead and emaciated daughter in
his arms, more King Lear than Pieta. It could have been a breakthrough into
an entirely different level of creation and would have escaped the speculation
that in some sense he was making a self-pitying portrait of himself in his own
mother’s arms.
Hélène, a devoted Catholic, was just enough older than Maurice to make
her credible as his mother instead of his sister. I had made a costume for Mary
(“Della Robbia blue”) that according to my Lucy Barton costumer’s reference

208 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

book was historically accurate, though it was heavy polyester crepe so it would
drape nicely. Hélène could not sit in one position long enough for Bob to get
all the folds just right, so I made a surrogate from my dress dummy, rolling up
towels to create thighs. One kitten took to sleeping in “Mary’s lap.”
One whole day was taken up with meeting airplanes in Great Falls as
Hélène, Maurice, and the two receptionists for the summer flew in. Maurice
came from Quebec, looking very much the elegant tweedy professor. He had
shaved his beard off, leaving the mustache, which shook Bob up a bit, and he
had marijuana in his pocket but had not been challenged by immigration. That
shook Bob up even more.
We had a shortage of bedrooms – or rather, beds – that I couldn’t quite solve.
We had our own bedroom with a double bed and in the front room the foldaway
double sofa bed. My idea was to put Hélène on the sofa bed and Maurice on a
pallet in what we called “the Indian room.” Seeing the look on Maurice’s face
at bedtime, Bob didn’t think a pallet was good enough. A professor needed a
real bed. Hélène announced Maurice could sleep with her – after all, he was her
brother and much younger. It would be entirely innocent, like their childhood.
No one even considered a motel.
In the end Hélène somehow ended up in bed with Bob and I – me in the
middle. One of the favorite Jeanette stories was about her inserting herself into
Hélène’s marital bed “to talk.” The way I remember it, Hélène did stop in the
doorway to talk to us on the way back out to the front room after her turn in the
bathroom, then sat on the end of the bed, and pretty soon got chilled so came
under the covers on the other side of me. I could see that once again I was going
to pay the piper for Jeanette. It was an interesting night. Not much sleep.
I kept thinking about how this would sound when I came to write it in a
book. It struck me as funny, like being a sophomore in college again. The next
morning I plunged off to Cut Bank to buy a rollaway for the Indian room.
When I look back on all this, it strikes me how devilish we thought we were and
how silly in reality.
The four days of posing were very tense. Hélène was in the bathroom for
over an hour every morning, doing her facial exercises and macquillage, so
the rest of us got used to traveling to the shop basement bathroom, gruesome
though it was. One night we listened to records and Hélène ended up in tears
because she couldn’t hear what she presumed the rest of us heard. The remainder
of the evening was devoted to explaining the music to Hélène. She was utterly
charming at all times.
We had talked to the Browning coroner about whether the body of Jesus
ought to have veins standing out on it and he told us that as soon as blood
pressure was lost, they disappeared. All day we talked about such macabre but
practical artistic problems while Bob worked, and then in the evenings we ate
what we thought of as gourmet food (pressure-fried chicken from Angie’s),
drank Cold Duck in little personal bottles which Bob thought were the height

X L O S T W A X : C R U C I F I X , P I E TA , A N D M A R G A R E T 209
 Pieta, 1969, to memorialize the death of Bob Scriver’s daughter.
Photo: Mary Scriver.

of sophistication, and talked. Under the influence of a little too much Cold
Duck, Bob demonstrated how eagles mate – at 3,000 feet above the ground with
their talons locked as they free-fall – by leaping from the back of the sofa. I’d
never seen him drunk before.
The resulting sculpture was exquisite. Everyone was quiet in front of it.
For years Bob was afraid to try to transfer it to plaster. This Pieta, the Crucifix,
the portrait of Margaret, and the two busts of Maurice – one in classic style as
himself and one romantic as the suffering Jesus – were a special small category
of personal work. They were the very best Bob could do, worthy of Malvina
Hoffman or Daniel Chester French or even Augustus Saint-Gaudens. They
never sold – they were not cowboy art.
At the end the four of us – Bob, Maurice, Hélène, and I – went up to
East Glacier to have a blowout celebration. Bob wore his wedding suit and his
To Tell the Truth! silk cravat, Maurice did his fancy college professor role, and

210 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

both of us women dressed in our most elegant black dresses and “diamond”
earrings. (Hélène’s were real.) We all had much champagne, getting tiddly on
relief as much as alcohol. Afterwards in the dark we walked across the hillside
golf course that fronts the Big Hotel and noted that the long slope was perfect
for rolling on the grass. Somehow, Bob managed to orchestrate a rolling race
between Hélène and I – off we went like spinning logs with Bob and Maurice
cheering us on and running ahead to see who would win. It felt wonderful on
that plush grass under a mountain night sky full of summer stars. We could have
rolled on and on forever like a scene out of a post-modern short story – gathering
no moss. But the police came along and fixed their spotlights on us. “What’s
happening here?”
Bob the Judge went over to finesse the officers while Hélène and I sprawled
breathlessly on the lawn with grass in our tousled hair, checking for lost ear-
rings. Maurice became invisible somehow. That moment was one of the happiest
times of Bob’s life. In the last months of his life he kept telling people about it.
Danger, triumph, glamour. And TWO women, neither of whom was mad at
him just then.
We drove Maurice back across the border to catch the plane in Calgary.
He wore one of my broad-brimmed straw hats and a blue shirt I had bought at
Goodwill because it reminded me of a French peasant’s smock. This time the
officials turned out his pockets at the port of entry, but he had used up his stash
in Browning discreetly. Bob and I exchanged glances, still not worldly enough
to stop being scared of demon drugs and suddenly aware of how much presenta-
tion counts in the world.
Once the dishes and sheets were washed and the furniture was back where
it belonged, I took a box of tissues, drove far out on the prairie, and sat crying
for over an hour. Too many realizations about Bob, including his continuing
infatuation with Hélène; too much role-playing in order to keep the peace; not
enough sleep; not enough reassurance. If we were waxes, surely there ought to
have been more vents to let the emotion escape. The pressure built far too high.
A lot of illusion burned off.
At the time I didn’t notice that Arlene, who had seemed such a likely rival
and evoked such bitter jealousy from me, was beginning to fade from Bob’s ico-
nography. Now it was sweet Hélène who increasingly featured as the wide-eyed
child-woman, the unconditional admirer, the exquisite proof that he was a man
of consequence and power. By this time Arlene had moved to Texas. He was
always dependable about helping her, but the demands did have a cooling effect.
Hélène’s elegance made him restless about my appearance. If I had time
at the end of the work day, I used it to read – not to do pedicures. I wore work
shirts and jeans and went barefoot in summer. I was gaining weight and cut my
own hair. One day in the middle of a quarrel, he burst out, “Look at you! You
have a pot belly and your feet stink!” It was true. And I really didn’t care.

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 After the completion of the Pieta. Left to right: Mary Scriver, Bob Scriver,
Hélène DeVicq, Maurice Chaillot. Photographer unknown.

5. Lost in grizzly country

St. Mary, 1969

In the ten years I was with Bob, he changed in his relationship to hunting, one
of his few philosophical shifts. In youth he had been proud of being a sharp-
shooter so strong he could pack out a quarter of elk by himself. But late in his
fifties and with his cornea scarred by an infection, he couldn’t compete with his
own younger self. Now – identifying with the animals – he wasn’t even sure he
wanted to kill. He would really have rather gone hunting alone, but I trusted

212 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

him – thus boosting his confidence – and probably could go for help, if neces-
sary. With me along, he felt he could risk a few more times out there where he
wanted to be, revisiting favorite spots.
In particular he had been yearning to go up into Glacier Park above St.
Mary Lake to an elk lick he had often visited as a kid. (Probably he hunted there
as a young man – not for elk but for grizzly. It was, of course, illegal, but less well
enforced in the days before airplanes and radio contact.) Now he just wanted to
see the place again and maybe to hear the elk bugling.
When we unloaded the horses, a thick pea-soup fog rolled in, so we couldn’t
get our bearings by looking at the peaks above us, but Bob felt sure he was on the
right trail, which thinned and branched as we went; in a hour or so he wasn’t so
sure. It had been decades since he was there last. All sounds were muffled. The
horses were hyper-alert. It seemed to be getting colder. Mostly we were listening
for grizzlies. Bob had packed his breakaway .22, which comes apart so as to be
easy to hide, but it would have been no protection. A .357 magnum pistol would
have been better.
By afternoon we’d blundered into an old burn and the deadfall was en-
tangled in every direction. The path was gone, so lost we couldn’t even double
back. Silvered old snags with sharp-ended stubs lay like jackstraws, and the
horses’ feet went down into brush that gave way suddenly, so that a snag in
the wrong place would pierce their bellies and pull out their guts. I wondered
whether the .22 would dispatch a horse in agony. By now we weren’t thinking
of bears and knew it was cold enough – beginning to convert the fog into snow
– that the bears wouldn’t be thinking of us, but groggily finding their dens. Still,
fresh horse blood and guts....
Bob began to have leg cramps. He got down and limped around in a small
cleared space, but then could hardly get back on. This was not a place where I
could hike out for help or even get out on one of the horses, because I didn’t
know where to go. We had no flares or even a space blanket. I had no matches
– maybe Bob did. The snow was making a backtrail for us, but then obliterating
it in a few minutes.
In the end we found a trail and came out, not quite where we thought we
might. The fog lifted to cloud and broke apart enough to see landmarks. Bob
was so chilled when we got into the pickup that he shook too hard to get the key
in the ignition, so there was finally something I could do to help. But we both
knew we’d been dancing on bones, and not just bones of the forest.

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 Part Two:

Crescendo
 XI

Investment:
New York City

1. Old-fashioned plaster investment

Investment is refractory plaster – that is, a heat-resistant variety of gypsum – that

is used as a mold by embedding a wax version of a sculpture and then melting
it back out. This one-use mold – a second waste mold – will be destroyed when
the wax has been melted, burned out, and the resulting empty space refilled with
molten bronze. Once the bronze has cooled, the investment is simply knocked
off. It is soft, sometimes mixed with insulating materials like vermiculite or
perlite. The earliest prehistoric investment molds were probably mud of some
kind, maybe mixed with manure to keep it cohesive. The alternative would have
been to chip a mold in stone. Once again, haptic versus glyptic – soft substance
shaped or hard substance cut.
Investing the wax could be back-breaking. We had devised a big drum
mixer for preparing the dry powders. In an unheated back shed mixing was
lonely, dusty work that no one liked to do. Harvey Heavy Runner did most of it
and often did not wear his mask because the work made him pant. There didn’t
seem to be anything toxic in investment, it just clogged up your nose. We didn’t
know that one of the ingredients, Zonolite from Libby, Montana, was the kind
of vermiculite that is contaminated with cancer-causing asbestos. In those days
we thought of asbestos as a benign substance and used both vermiculite and
straight asbestos for all sorts of things. Bob would mush a handful of asbestos
with water and slap it on something he wanted to insulate when welding close to
it. Harvey was a heavy smoker: he died young of lung cancer.
The men felt no responsibility for checking supplies. Many times, right in
the middle of investing a big mold, they came from the back shed to announce
there was “no more” plaster or perlite or grog. The stuff had to be shipped in
from Seattle with long delays and many chances that things would go wrong:

217
 the railroad would send it to the wrong place or the containers would break
open or the wrong thing would be sent. We had so many big drums of material
around that it was hard to tell what was where and which was full or empty.
One afternoon Bob sent a man into the basement with a felt-tip marker to look
into every drum and box and mark the empty ones clearly on the outside. When
we looked later, he had carefully drawn “MT”. He was illiterate, but had gotten
someone else to show him how to make this “brand.” (I color-coded all the
file folders – green tabs for this and red tabs for that – so that the men could
put folders in and out with some approximation of order. Once in a while I
re-alphabetized within a color category.)
When a wax of a sculpture is ready to “invest,” clear a space because the final
mold is often quite large, several feet across. At the beginning of building the invest-
ment mold, the wax replica of the piece stands on a sheet of plate glass with stubby
feet made of wax attached to the bottom. From its top, which will be the bottom
when turned upside down for baking, rise long rods of wax from each high point that
converge in one thicker piece of wax where the melted wax will run out.
Investment mixes like plaster: sprinkle the powder into the water and mix from
the bottom to make no bubbles. But it looks different. We used gray dental invest-
ment, fiercely expensive because it was intended for dental use in very small amounts.
It took fine detail, was durable enough to bake a long time at high temperatures, and
must have had something metallic in it, because silvery paisley patterns form on the
surface like oil sheen as it is stirred. When it begins to be creamy, paint it onto the
wax with a small paintbrush, then – as it thickens to pudding – pile it on, until the
wax is coated for a thickness of half an inch or so.
Follow gray investment with layers of plaster/perlite/grog mixed according to
ancient recipes. Bend expanded metal lathe into a cage to fit over the increasingly
bulky “package” of investment, and then begin the urgent, spine-straining work of
mixing the investment, pouring it in, and using hands as squeegees up the sides of the
wire to keep the stuff inside until it thickens enough to stay. A wire prong, especially
where the metal lathe was cut, often gashed our hands, so that we left streaks of blood.
Gloves don’t allow enough control. Our hands dried and cracked from the lime.
For a small tabletop bronze, the resulting block of refractory plaster might be a
couple of feet tall. A little button of wax at the top (about to become the bottom) is
a hole when the wax melts out of it. Attach a short length of pipe, a six-inch nipple,
where the wax drains. Before pouring in the molten bronze, close it by screwing on
a cap. At the bottom (about to become the top) attach a cone to make a funnel shape
for pouring in the metal. Take the finished investment mold out to the foundry. You
might need a hand truck.
In the foundry oven the mold heats very slowly, then gradually gets hotter until
the melted wax runs out. At 1200 degrees, the water in the investment bakes out, the
wax residue burns out, converts to chemicals and gases, and finally everything but
dry investment is completely gone. By then the mold glows cherry red. We used an old
hollow car aerial as if it were a straw to taste the air from the mold to see if it were

218 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

The second Bighorn Foundry. The bake-out ovens and the electric hoist.
Photo: Buster Ruetten.

X I I N V E S T M E N T: N E W YO R K C I T Y 219
 ready. If the mold is too hot too long, it begins to crack and flake. In winter, which
is the best time to cast, the snow melts back from the foundry walls and green grass
grows in the warm ground.
At night Bob woke every few hours, as though we were ranchers calving,
and went out to make sure everything was secure. When the time was right, the
mold, sometimes so heavy that it required a chain hoist, was carefully moved
over to the sand pit where it was buried in damp sand to within inches of the top.
Now we would have to hurry to cast or the damp would go into the mold.
In those days the ceramic shell or silica slurry method had not yet devel-
oped, but even after it was available, we stuck to old-fashioned plaster invest-
ment because of concern for the quality of the surface. Silica shell investment
sometimes has to be sandblasted off, which destroys edges and pits surfaces. The
graininess of the silica persists on the surface of the bronze and is sometimes
polished off. This interferes with the artist’s intentions.
Nevertheless, silica slurry, developed for space age industries, is so much
easier that it has changed the whole nature of the sculpture business. The wax
is dipped in slurry, rolled in pulverized silica (glass), and dipped in slurry again
until a shell is built up. (I call it “chicken-fried casting.”) The thin shell burns out
quickly, fusing into a hard but gas-porous surface. No struggle with sprues and
vents. No days-long bake-out. People need very little practice to succeed.
Because of the ease of this technique, small art foundries sprang up every-
where. (Kits are available.) Bronze casting lost much of its mystique and expense
so less skillfully conceived and executed sculptures were cast and sold for less
money. (One former foundryman told me that several times he had to kindly
advise people that their sculpture really needed a bit more work.) The differences
in the quality of the final bronze were subtle enough that most people couldn’t
see them. But the difference will always be detectable to an educated eye. Or
ear. Shell-casting might not “ring” so true. The rigid glass investment resists the
shrinking of bronze as it cools, which forces the metal to either pull apart or
become honeycombed, especially in slender places like legs. Given a fall or blow
with enough force, weak spots could even break,

2. To Tell the Truth! and Malvina Hoffman

New York City, 1965

In 1965, the same year that the Cowboy Artists of America were forming in
Arizona unbeknownst to us, New York City called – Bob was asked to be a con-
testant on To Tell the Truth! The groundwork had been laid in 1964 when Bob
had begun to exhibit bronzes with juried New York City shows. Lone Cowboy
went to Audubon Artists, Fighting Elk to the National Academy of Design, The

220 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Last Warrior to Academic Artists, Fighting Elk went again to Grand Central
Galleries, where it sold. We kept a big scrapbook in the museum, which was
encouraging to customers who wanted some kind of assurance about what they
bought. New York City impressed Montanans.
An article about Bob written by me had appeared in American Artist be-
tween an article about Maurice Sendak and an article about Norman Rockwell,
which we thought was pretty good company.1 The photo story by Irwin Bauer
with the sculptures out on the landscape had appeared in True.2
Even my school principal was impressed and let me take a few days off with-
out pay so I could go along, though Bob and I weren’t married yet. It was the
first time Bob had flown since the U.S. Army Air Corps days of being hauled to
Alaska with no parachutes. (When Bob had inquired about them, his sergeant
said, “Look out the window. You don’t want to land down there alive.” It was
solid unmapped mountains.) The wheels, right under our seats, retracted with a
“whomp” that made Bob jump.
In New York, the hotel the TV producers had put Bob in looked sleazy to
us. Bob directed me to stand by the suitcases and face the opposite way from
him while he checked in, so I could guard our stuff. There were a lot of rather
strange-looking people around and a lot of African-Americans. (We didn’t know
to call them that.) Bob was wearing his cowboy boots and hat, which attracted
stares and comments. (Also, he wore a money belt which he was afraid people
would know about.) One squat little lady with apricot hair and eyelashes as long
as my fingers cooed, “Hiya, cowboy! You busy later?” Neither of us could tell
whether she was kidding. Bob blushed and stammered.
When it came time for me to get my own room, I wanted to pay in advance
for fear of spending my money shopping and not having enough for my hotel
bill. Strangely, the desk clerk resisted. “Really, ma’am, I don’t think you want to
do that!” At motels out west one always pays in advance because the car will be
packed at dawn and you’ll drive off at 6 AM, leaving the key chucked through
a slot. I insisted.
We went off to rehearse for the show. We had been told that Bob was not
to wear a white shirt, and I had talked him into two silk shirts, one black and
one peacock blue, but these were rejected right away. They said silk shirts would
be a dead giveaway that Bob was an artist. Someone was sent out for a blue and
white striped shirt. They had to take Bob’s shirt partly off to see what size, since
he didn’t know. His mom always bought his shirts. Then we were free until the
next day.
We called George and Sandi Gray, our painting partners, who took over
the rest of the evening. The go-go craze was at its height so we went to a place
that featured go-go cowgirls: topless table dancers in white boots, fringed mini-
skirts, and holsters with silver six-shooters. George had thought we’d enjoy the
irony, but Bob hated it. At midnight we claimed exhaustion and went home.

X I I N V E S T M E N T: N E W YO R K C I T Y 221
 Crossing the lobby where we’d seen the “sinister” dark faces, Bob stopped
short. He heard music coming from the club on the other side of the block,
which connected through to the hotel lobby. “Duke Ellington!” he breathed.
A galvanizing surge of energy went through him. “Cat Anderson! Hey! I rec-
ognize these guys! These guys are GREAT MEN!” The club was packed but
Bob produced a quick series of bills and suddenly we were sitting right by the
band, exhausted no longer. We even stayed when the comedienne came on, an
unknown named Joan Rivers. We thought she was awful – no chance of success.
And then the band was back. We tottered off to bed at 3 AM.
Early in the morning Bob came tapping on my door. His room was impos-
sible. He only had a shower with no tub and his closet didn’t have a lock like
mine. Could he shave in my tub (he always shaved in the tub) and put the suit-
cases in my closet? We dressed together. At the studio, wearing my homemade
pink Chanel suit, I stood by with my clipboard ready to run errands for Bob,
but the production staff took me for one of their own go-fers and sent me out for
coffee. I was proud to manage that without a hitch – I found the coffee shop and
didn’t spill – but Bob was panicky without me there.
The two “phony” Bob Scrivers turned out to be pretty nice guys, one a
shoe salesman (so he would know about leather and tanning) and the other one
an amateur hunter (so he could talk about animals). Bob had brought gifts for
them and was soon busy coaching them on how to impersonate him. In all the
spare moments I slipped off to the pay phone to try to arrange a meeting with
Kennedy Galleries, which we had decided ought to be our target. Or maybe the
Bartfield.
The big moment arrived. The three “Bob Scrivers” stood up very high with
bright lights shining into their faces so that the real Bob squinted and blinked
and teared until he was in danger of tumbling down the steps. Orson Bean, who
cleverly asked a contentious question about why it was that taxidermists never
give a person back the right deerskin but always one that is smaller, made Bob
angry enough that his real self flashed through. Orson was the only one who
guessed correctly. Kitty Carlisle Hart insisted that Bob was NOT a real sculptor
because he said that the famous statue of the drooping Indian on the rack of a
horse called The End of the Trail was done by Fraser and she just knew it was
Remington. At the end of the show where everyone mingles on the set she was
still arguing about it. I myself wanted to ask Orson Bean about his experiences
with the Orgone Box, but didn’t dare.
All too soon we were past the moment of glory and out on the street with
galleries to visit, though I hadn’t gotten any firm appointments. The TV people
refused to let us carry any of the big bronzes around with us because of insur-
ance liability, but we had the small ones and photographs. Rudi Wunderlich at
the Kennedy was very nice, but he was already handling Harry Jackson. Perhaps
in the future.... We couldn’t get into the Bartfield gallery because it was closed,

222 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

but we almost dislocated our necks trying to look through the windows at the
wonderful jumble of stuff inside.
At the Bernard Black Gallery we saw for the first time the French Animaliers,
a whole school of very fine bronze-makers who specialized in animals – some-
times exotic and sometimes familiar – usually in agonistic poses like a jaguar
strangling a deer. I had been reading about them but they were far more wonder-
ful in actuality. Bob ended up buying a Barye, a gorgeous bronze, so we could
study the patina, he said.3 The patinas on these animals were quite different
from what we were used to on Russell bronzes, which tended to be almost matte
and very dark. These were glossy and near iridescent. Bernard Black described
them as being like the peel of an apple, a deep glaze of subtle color.
Then we taxied off to our first real art foundry, Modern Art, where John
Spring ran things. It was a huge, dark, old warren of buildings full of hidden
doors and peculiar spaces. The men were mostly Italian, it seemed, and we were
there when they poured, cursing and yelling – turning to apologize to me in
English when they realized I was present. Instead of using pig molds, they poured
the excess bronze into hollows in damp sand around the mold, which caused a
lot of exploding pebbles and spitting hot metal which, in turn, provoked another
round of cursing and yelling when the hot spatters hit the men.
Bob Spring, the son, was patining – steam rose in clouds as he heated the
bronze, painted on the chemical solution, waited for it to react, and then repeat-
ed the sequence, squinting to see what was happening. A little ray of sun from
somewhere helped the dangling light bulbs and glanced off Spring’s blazing red
hair. These guys were the best in the business, masters of the trade. It all seemed
very nineteenth century to us, probably because everything had begun then
and hadn’t changed since. These foundrymen had served all the great American
realistic sculptors, the people Bob revered.
The biggest event of the whole New York trip was arranged quietly with a
simple phone call to Guldie, Malvina Hoffman’s companion. We were to visit
at “157 Sniffen Court,” which we already knew about from books. Hoffman’s
autobiography, Yesterday Is Tomorrow, had just been published and we each were
carrying a copy. Shaking with anticipation, we stopped at a flower stall where
Bob bought a dozen long-stemmed red roses for Malvina. I chose anemones for
Guldie. When we got to the door of 157 Sniffen Court, we stood for ten minutes
before ringing – not because we were afraid, but to make the moment last.
Guldie let us in, saying it was fortunate for us that “everything” had just
been brought back to the studio so as to decide on some ultimate fate. Malvina
was dying from emphysema, caused by years of inhaling dust while sculpting
stone, and Guldie begged us not to tire her by staying too long or getting her too
excited. We promised. We would have promised anything. In the bit of time we
had to wait, we walked wide-eyed among the many sculptures, large and small,
so familiar and yet all new – most of them being seen by us for the first time
as solid objects instead of photographs. It was dark in the high, deep space and

X I I N V E S T M E N T: N E W YO R K C I T Y 223
 pieces were half-in, half-out of the light so that the experience was like dream-
ing, things coming and going from perception. My clearest memory is the small
portrait of Anna Pavlova dancing, kept safe under a glass bell.
Upstairs, Malvina lay on her monument de repos, the big divan that took up
a corner of the room. Our impulse was to fall to our knees beside her, but we
managed to offer our flowers in a civilized manner. Guldie went off to get tea
and cookies. Bob and I stumbled all over each other trying to tell her how much
she and her work meant to us. The moment Bob cherished most was when he
asked her about using calipers, a practice that was mocked by Montana peers as
somehow cheating. He complained, “They make fun of me for doing it.”
“Oh, tell it to the Marines!” she snapped. (I thought of Alvina Krause,
the acting coach who required us to study Hoffman bronzes. She would have
snapped just that way.) Malvina praised Bob’s horses’ feet and fetlocks. “So few
get them right.” She seemed pleased by us and signed our books for us. But
then she began to fade and Guldie very firmly ushered us out. We stood out in
the darkened mews, once the courtyard of stables, again trying to prolong the
evening. How could we tell people about it? How could we bear to share such an
experience with anyone else, even in retrospect? It was a sacred moment.
When we got to the hotel, my room had something stuck in the lock so my
key couldn’t get in. “Someone has tried to break in and their key broke off in
there,” I decided.
“Come on to my room. We can call the front desk from there.” But when
Bob used his key, which worked, the door came to an abrupt halt against the
safety chain and a hoarse terrified voice cried out, “Who’s there? What do you
want?” We backed away fast and ran for the elevator.
At the front desk the clerk listened to our stories and called the manager who
sat us down for a fatherly chat. “You paid for your room in advance, am I right?”
“Yes. But I didn’t pay for tonight in advance, because we were going to the
galleries and there wasn’t time and....”
“Ahem. How to put this? You see, in New York when one stays in a hotel
one doesn’t pay in advance unless one only intends to stay ... well, part of the
night, if you see what I mean?”
Very slowly it dawned on me that paying in advance meant that one was
using the room for sex, perhaps professionally. Bob’s room was explained more
simply. All his effects had been moved to my locked closet, so the cleaning staff
assumed he was through with the room. There was no indication that he would
be back. We went off to bed feeling a little dizzy.
Bob sent Malvina a casting of Prairie Buck, the lively little pronghorn
antelope, and she admired it. He had ordered a casting of the Semang Pygmy
with the long blowpipe she had done for the Hall of Man in Chicago. When it
came he took No More Buffalo out of the niche made for it in the fireplace of the
studio and put the Semang Pygmy in. It had been cast at Modern Art Foundry
and had a pleasant brown patina. The hair was full of tiny bubbles made when

224 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

the wax was invested. This is called “pearling.” If we had cast it, someone would
have spent an afternoon with a tiny chisel knocking them out, but they weren’t
offensive.
A year later Malvina Hoffman died and we had a note from Guldie to
which we never responded. It was ungrateful and negligent of us, but the truth
was that we simply didn’t want to admit she was dead. We wanted to imagine
her forever there on that pillowed divan, saying “Tell it to the Marines!”
Nothing very definitive came from being on To Tell the Truth!, though
everyone locally was impressed and finally saw Bob as a Real Sculptor instead
of a clever taxidermist. The Browning bank that had turned down Bob’s request
for a loan to buy the original Rungius moose painting, saying art was not worth
anything, had closed so they could watch the show. The Montana Historical
Society began to take an interest and that’s when the little committee came
up from Cody, where the Buffalo Bill Museum and the Whitney Museum of
Western Art formed a cultural center. It was clear that New York City was still
the location of the Gods and Temples, even for Western art.

3. A Moose hunt
Swan Hills, Alberta, 1969

In the late Sixties there was a vast area of northern Alberta that was about to
be flooded by a new dam. The government wanted as many animals as possible
to be hunted out before then, so moose permits were easy to get. John Hellson
knew a naturalist at the Provincial Museum who he said was a master woods-
man and tracker. We went FAR north, north of Whitecourt, north of the Swan
Hills, where the last remnants of the prairie grizzlies were seen. Prairie grizzlies
were monsters – made into necklaces their claws arch from neck to shoulder-
point on a big man.
The new Provincial Museum was just being completed and we were im-
pressed. Doors tall enough for a giraffe or a totem pole led to the workrooms.
In one hallway was a wire-mesh-lined box labeled “Danger – dermestids! DO
NOT OPEN!!” Dermestids are the little beetle/spider creatures who quickly
scuttle away when one turns over a dead animal. They are kept to clean bones
but will eat entire collections of Indian artifacts. The naturalist was not ready
and would meet us up north.
We put up camp in a last grove of aspens and alders before the vegetation
became hunched-over sub-arctic conifers, dark and twisted, with straight roads
bulldozed through in a grid pattern for the seismologists. As we sat by our fire,
yellow alder leaves drifted on the wind into Bob’s hot water mug, which he
claimed tasted better than the finest China tea. The naturalist told about some

X I I N V E S T M E N T: N E W YO R K C I T Y 225
 friends who had slept in their station wagon and woke up in the night, rocking
around as though in a boat at sea. A grizz was standing there with front paws
on the roof, trying to roll their car over to get them out. Luckily, it was a big old
heavy car that wouldn’t quite go over. I had a little trouble getting to sleep, even
though Bob slept with his rifle. He had put me on the outside so I wouldn’t sleep
next to the naturalist.
It was lucky that we’d scouted around a bit and found a place where a
moose had been regularly crossing one of the minimal roads, because it turned
out this was the naturalist’s first moose hunt. Before light I warmed some
canned Franco-American spaghetti in a frying pan to get us moving. We had
been walking a short while when we heard gunfire. When we got to the moose
crossing, there was only a steaming gut pile. Back at the campfire, a little covey
of ptarmigan had surrounded the remains of the spaghetti and were speculating
on its edibility, using first one eye and then the other. The naturalist left.
After a nap, we packed up and decided to just cruise the cut-lines, but as
they thawed, they became muddier than we anticipated. Bob had to chain up.
Then we came to a worse patch and the sounds and handling of the pickup told
us we had lost a chain. Looking back, there was only mud. The chain had been
left at the bottom of the muck. We would need both chains to get out, but how
could we find the lost one? I had a brainstorm and set out bare-footed in the rut,
squishing through the cold mud until I stepped on it.
On the paved road out, a fine, healthy coyote crossed the road in front of us,
leaping at a glossy raven who was dive-bombing him. It was hard to tell whether
the bird was after the coyote or vice versa, and also hard to tell whether the
attack was serious or just play. The vignette was so vivid that we often recalled it
years afterwards. Both creatures are notorious trickster symbols. Were they us?
What I didn’t know until the writing of this book was that Bob was re-
tracing old trails. This was where he had come with Jeanette’s uncle, long ago
when he was a soldier, young, strong, and invincible. We hadn’t just driven into
the north but, for him, into the past. We even drove through the little village
where Jeanette grew up and where he was “Jeanette’s Americain.” Then the whole
future had stood before him. But he had gone back to Browning. Jeanette said,
“If only Edmonton had been a big enough city to have an orchestra. If he could
have been first chair, we would still live there.”

226 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 XII

Casting Bronze:
The Buffalo Bill Historical Center

1. Casting bronze: a review

Browning, Montana, 1962–1999

When bronze was hot enough to melt, we felt we had captured a comet by the
tail and treated it with enormous respect. As well we might: anything that hot
will go through flesh as though it weren’t there. The spirits of ancient people
breathed over our shoulders. It was a ceremony in which the crucible became
a chalice. Not just the prerogative of industrial giants, bronze casting is done
by small groups in Third World countries all over the planet and has been for
millennia.
Malvina Hoffman spoke of inventing a bronze-melting furnace in the fire-
place of a studio in Paris. In Browning a local teacher and a border patrolman
who were making antique rifle replicas managed to cast metal by rigging a hair-
dryer with a charcoal barbecue to make a furnace. The resulting long Kentucky
rifle with elegant bronze butt-plate and trigger-guard had a tiger-maple stock,
so handsome Bob ended up buying it to hang on his fireplace in the studio. If
something that basic would work, Bob felt sure that a small furnace he and Billy
McCurdy had built in the garage of his mom’s duplex would work. It held a
twenty-pound crucible, so we could cast only something small. He chose a pony
head with the reins made of very small cord and invested the wax, complete
with the cord.
In 1962 we fired up for the first time, Bob’s mom watching from across the
street with her hand on the telephone in case of fire or even explosion. But the
little furnace didn’t seem to get hot enough. The pony head investment mold
had been burned out and buried in the sand, and the metal had turned to liquid
– reluctantly – but it wasn’t as hot as we thought it had to be. We called Joe
Evans, a sheet metal and furnace man, and he came to see what he could do.

227
 After more adjustments, none of which raised the temperature, we went to the
drugstore across the back alley to have root beer floats while we brainstormed.
We hadn’t thought to get ingot-molds for excess bronze and we didn’t want to
pour the molten bronze out but we couldn’t let it set up in the crucible because
when it cooled it would expand and crack the expensive graphite vessel.
The consensus was to go back, see if the temperature had gone up any more
after our last reading, and if it hadn’t, just pour the bronze into the horse head
mold and figure on making another one, since it would probably fail. So that’s
what we did. The metal was about 1850 degrees. It went in like pouring cream:
no steam, no smoke, no explosion, no perceptible change in the mold. We had
the exact amount of metal necessary. It was an anti-climax. We didn’t have any
idea what might have happened inside the mold, but it seemed important to “let
it set.”
The next morning Bob was up at dawn knocking the mold apart with a
hammer. After a bit of cleaning it was apparent that the pony head was perfectly
cast.1 Even the cord had been reproduced exactly. There was no sign of gas,
shrinkage, or any of the other hobgoblins that haunt foundrymen. “Huh!” said
Bob. “This is a lot easier than I thought.”
Behind the museum across town, we went ahead with the reconstruction
of the coal shed into a proper foundry and bought or made the equipment to
support a sixty-pound crucible. The next eighteen castings poured in the new
foundry were total losses. A different major mistake every single time. Only
blind “stick-to-it-ivity” and a lot of expensive phone calls to Richard Randall,
an artist and foundryman in Minneapolis, kept us going. Being able to cast our
own bronzes was an advantage, both because of the cost and the quality, but it
was also a limitation, because Bob’s energy could only go so far. Regrouping
mentally to try again took more energy than any physical task.
Industrial smelters and casters were as near as Great Falls or Calgary, but
when Bob started, no one except Charlie Beil in Banff had an art foundry. A
foreman named Kalafat in Black Eagle, across the river from Great Falls, agreed
to show us around his industrial sand-casting operation. He assured us he could
“ram” and cast a teacup in a damp sand mold with no breakage and perfect
reproduction.
Bob took measurements of Kalafat’s bake-out ovens, which seemed very
simple: rows of tubes centered over holes in pipes with space for air to join the
gas – essentially a rank of Bunsen burners. We went home and tried to duplicate
them but discovered that welding the apparatus together made it writhe and
curve so that the tubes were no longer over the holes – it wouldn’t work. It took a
couple of local rancher-welders a couple of days and a certain amount of whiskey
to achieve an approximation. Then we could bake out our molds.
But the furnace for melting the metal was even harder. We knew to sink
the furnace into the ground, so that if the crucible burst in the heating chamber
(a steel barrel lined with refractory brick), our feet would be safe. An ancient

228 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Kirby vacuum cleaner motor pumped air into the bottom of the chamber. It
wasn’t hot enough.
We got the Petrolane gas man to come take a look and give us a professional
opinion. “Wal,” he opined after long thought, “You’ve either got too much gas
or too much air in there.” Gas and air was ALL that was in there. But we had
no way of calculating the relationship between them. We ordered the gas line
enlarged. It still wasn’t hot enough but the gas bill was horrendous. We added a
second Kirby motor, but still it was not hot enough.
Finally, consulting and discussing, we came to the conclusion that the key
was the way the gas and air were mixed. Bob made a circular collar with holes in
the top for the gas to come out and changed the angle of the air stream so that
it shot in on a slant and set up a whirlwind. Then it was hot enough. An intense
green flame spun in the vent hole of the firebrick lid – it looked like a neon sea
anemone from a strange hellish planet.
The pyrometer was a major investment, probably the most high-tech thing
we had. After all, the crucible was just a graphite pitcher and the cradle and
tongs we used had been made by Bob welding up scrap steel. The pyrometer
handle had a meter mounted on it, and then there was a long jointed rod with
a thermocouple in it that had to have its tip dipped into the molten metal, but
not too deep. A chart told us what various colors meant in terms of temperature
– cherry red is not molten, maybe 1700 degrees, and the whitest hot at 2300
degrees is too hot to pour, on the edge of vaporizing. The “right” temperature
was about 1950 degrees, give or take, depending on the figure being cast. We
tried to match the readings we got off the pyrometer with the color equivalents
of the molten metal. The old-timers would look and say, “Oh, yellow – that’s
1800 degrees.” It didn’t matter how many little charts we found in books, only
experience could teach us. I was the pyrometer operator and, leaning over a little
too carelessly, flash-burned my bangs off more than once.
The top of the metal had a kind of glowing foam on it that had to be
skimmed off. Then you had to knock the skimmer against the floor so the hot
glop would not harden and stick. Slag. That’s what they called it. We wore ga-
loshes so that if we stepped on it, the burning would stink so bad that we’d know
to step off before a hole burned in our boot. Bob loved to skim slag. We wore
canvas coveralls, plastic face masks, and knit stocking caps in case of exploding
metal.
There was a theory that if you broke up a Coke bottle to get pieces and
threw them in on top, they would melt but float and form a seal that kept air
out. Air was an enemy because molten metal reacts and transforms, making gas,
which will create bubbles in the casting. We tried the glass trick. It was fun,
though it’s harder to break up an old-fashioned Coke bottle than one might
think. And it seemed to make no difference in the quality of the metal.
At first we thought of mixing our own bronze by combining copper, tin,
lead, and zinc. Scrap was pretty cheap, and all went well until it was time to

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 put in the zinc, which was in thin sheets. We had read about all this and sort of
knew that zinc had a melting point much below bronze, and yet we didn’t see
how to mix the metals without getting the bronze molten. Bob tossed in some
zinc, which immediately vaporized into green smoke. Knowing it was poison, we
dove for the outside door. Now how could we know what our careful proportions
amounted to in the crucible? Bob crawled in on his belly and threw more bits of
zinc in, but the result was the same. We finally settled for bronze made of copper,
tin, and lead. “There are many formulas,” we assured each other. And told each
other again the story of Cellini, who couldn’t get the proper alloy of copper until
he rushed into the kitchen and seized the pewterware to add to the bronze.
Richard Randall, our advisor, told us we were silly and endangering our-
selves to use scrap anyway. Unknown exotic metals could be deadly. We should
go to silicon bronze and resign ourselves to buying pigs. Maurie Weissman,
Great Falls scrap entrepreneur, came up with a huge load of scrap silicon bronze.
It was originally meant to be gun cartridge casings and was in ribbons about
an inch wide wound into a flat disc a couple of feet across. We had to unwind
the ribbon, make it into a bundle, and then toss it through the hole in the lid.
This was a high labor enterprise, but it didn’t take brains. One advantage was
that it melted quickly. When this stuff was gone, we went to Herculoy pigs that
could take an hour or two to melt. It would seem as though it would never melt,
just getting redder and glowing more – then suddenly it converted to a shining
puddle.
When we had reached the point where our system actually worked, a couple
stopped in the museum who were English engineers doing post-doc work at
MIT. Their specialty was foundries, so we took them out to inspect. “It’s raaaly
QUITE preposterous, but it seems to wouk!” exclaimed the owlish man to his
wife. We so enjoyed mimicking them all winter. They’d been in Mexico and
wore serapes and sandals made of old tires. We loved them.

2. One hundred bronzes

Browning and Cody, 1969

At the end of the nineteenth century a symbiotic triangle formed among railroads,
national parks, and fine landscape painters.2 Railroads urged the development
of grand national parks and promoted them as “the Cathedrals of Democracy”
so they would be destinations for tourist travel. Then railroads subsidized artists
to portray the parks in the most grandiose terms: Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902),
Edward Moran (1829–1901), John Fery (1859–1934) and others used huge
canvases and the newly developing impressionistic techniques of painting light
and mist to give the long vistas and waterfalls transcendent qualities. The first

230 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

national park and one of the earliest to be sanctified this way was Yellowstone.
Glacier was developed later and had a dark sub-theme, which was the evasion of
Prohibition possible because it was on the Canadian border. The popular Glacier
artist featured by the Great Northern Railroad was Winold Reiss (1886–1953),
who portrayed Blackfeet from reservations on both the Montana and Alberta
sides of the border.
Yellowstone and Jackson Hole, Cody, all in Wyoming, were “old money.”
Many of the ranches had been founded or owned by the big industrialists when
they first made fortunes in the nineteenth century. Ernest Thompson Seton and
Teddy Roosevelt were down in Yellowstone interfering with the bears before the
Blackfeet had agreed to “sell” Glacier National Park. (They were starving at the
time.) Buffalo Bill, with his many east coast and European contacts, made Cody
into a “society” town, sophisticated in terms of the arts.
The Whitney Museum of Western Art began very simply with a huge
portrait of Buffalo Bill on horseback, done by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney
(1875–1942), the granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt himself. The idea was
suggested by W.R. Coe in 1922 and was welcomed by Mrs. Whitney, who had
seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. In fact, her children had ridden in the
stagecoach as it was “attacked by Indians.” (Cody died in 1917.) She was a horse-
woman, and men were often the subjects of her sculpture.
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney3 was one of several New York women of the
upper classes who became sculptors in that period. Anna Hyatt Huntington
and Malvina Hoffman were fellow students at the Art Students League and in
Paris, where they studied with Rodin. In childhood Gertrude was the subject of
a bas-relief by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and she studied with both James Earle
Fraser and Daniel Chester French. One of her studios was in the Greenwich
Village mews emptied when horses were replaced by motorcars. For a while
Malvina Hoffman was working in Proctor’s studio just down the way. This
was the Gilded Age and American bronzes shone. Mrs. Whitney had earlier
completed a memorial statue for the Titanic, featuring a young man with arms
outstretched (meant to suggest Jesus on the Cross) which became the Leonardo
di Caprio pose in the movie.
Mrs. Whitney bought the land in Cody on which her portrait of Buffalo
Bill stood but did not attend the dedication because her daughter was being
married at the time. Eventually the museum itself was built on this land. Mrs.
Whitney’s son Cornelius, called “Sonny,” donated money for the actual museum
building, which ruffled the feathers of the female members of the family who
thought he should have been putting his money into the Whitney Museum of
American Art in New York City. Maybe he thought of it as more of a “guy” sort
of museum or maybe he was thinking of a Montana ranch not far away where
his father often took refuge.
It was an important “New York-type” institution where Harold McCracken,
THE expert on Remington, ran the show. Looking back, he wrote of being

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 handed the keys to a huge shell with an apparently endless terrazzo floor, which
he was able to fill with the help of the Knoedler Galleries, Rudi Wunderlich of
the Kennedy Galleries, the Coe family, and a collector named Weiss. When we
became involved, a small pre-existing Buffalo Bill log museum full of memora-
bilia was about to merge with the Whitney Museum, beginning a transforma-
tion into “the Smithsonian of the West,” which eventually included a museum
of Plains Indian materials, a natural history museum, and a firearms museum.
McCracken, when we knew him, was a small bald man with ears that stuck
out and a cigar always somewhere around. Between chutzpah and clever reckon-
ing (the two basics for directors of art establishments), he had parlayed a writ-
ing career based on exploration and wildlife into a slightly plusher occupation
as an art expert. His nineteenth-century point of view about the exceptional
white man conquering nature contributed to the Remington/Russell paradigm
that has controlled much of Western art ever since. Many Western art experts
have entered the field through traditional history rather than aesthetics. They
have been ready to supply additional narrative to image, especially portraits and
events already storied. Their attention was on the subject, not the technique. Or
possibly they looked to the artist himself to be the exceptional hero.
One late spring day in Browning, 1968, a little scouting party arrived from
Cody: Richard Frost (curator of the Buffalo Bill memorabilia), Nick Eggenhofer,
and a younger artist (meant to do the bulk of the driving). Frost was an enor-
mous friendly man who said all the right things. He was especially impressed
by the bust of Bob’s daughter Margaret, called To See Eternity, which had just
been finished in the clay.
Nick Eggenhofer (1897–1985) was a classic old illustrator, specializing in
pen-and-ink sketches of horse and mule transportation. Bob listened spellbound
while Nick explained how he dealt with the IRS when they questioned his de-
ductions for books and papers to use as research resources. They asked for an
itemized list but he ignored them until one day an auditor showed up in person
and demanded to know exactly what Nick had bought that year. So Nick got a
good-sized cardboard box, emptied all his jacket pockets and dresser drawers of
the miscellaneous receipts that had accumulated there, and handed the box of
paper bits to the auditor. The IRS decided to accept Nick’s estimate.
The visit must have gone well, because after a while we got an invitation from
McCracken and then some strong hints – well, DEMANDS – that McCracken
be allowed to attend our impending Thunder Pipe Bundle Transfer. It was clear
that he thought of this as some nineteenth-century event and himself as an
adventurer privileged to attend, like Osa Johnson in deepest Africa. We had
intended the Transfer to be private. But Bob agreed and from then on there was
a series of high-handed “requests” based on not-quite-correct assumptions that
somehow put the spotlight on McCracken instead of Bob.
In the end McCracken wrote an essay about the event, published in a
booklet along with an essay by Paul Dyck, whose expertise cannot be ques-

232 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

tioned. In fact, Paul and Star Dyck were in Browning during the Transfer and
also attended. McCracken’s short, poorly edited and politically incorrect piece
hardly mentions Bob and features McCracken’s ordeal in the hot tipi (he claims
the temperature went to 120 degrees – maybe confusing it with a sweat lodge)
despite his spiritual response to the sublime experience. The frontispiece of this
small publication is a photograph of Bob’s sculpture The Opening of the Medicine
Pipe Bundle, which McCracken insisted on calling a diorama.
But the reward was major. McCracken asked Bob, “How many bronzes can
you have for me by next May when we dedicate the new building?” Bob blurted,
“Oh, a hundred!” In the year after Margaret’s death, we cast 107 sculptures for
the new Buffalo Bill Historical Center, incorporating the Whitney Gallery of
Western Art. Now we were getting into the big time, we told ourselves. On May
22, 1969, the governor declared “Bob Scriver Day in Montana.”
The pride was extended to the whole reservation when Bob held an open
house. I baked cupcakes for weeks beforehand and dumped them unfrosted into
the freezer. Unfortunately, because I didn’t freeze them separately on cookie
sheets beforehand, they came back out as sacked-up gummy masses of cake in
pleated pastel cups. My mother (who came for the event) and Wessie stood in
the little galley kitchen piling up frosting on top of each glob until they could
pass for party food. (We needn’t have worried – they disappeared in about ten
minutes.) Timberjack Joe, a contemporary mountain man, came in his buck-
skins, shooting off his old black powder gun, and claiming that some Blackfeet
kids had officially given him the name “Beaver Tooth.” In Browning terms it
was truly a gala event.
Afterwards, when everyone was gone, we realized that in the museum we
could hear water running somewhere underneath. Bob, my mother, and I went
out to the access to the crawl space under the museum, which was in the fox’s
cage so she could take shelter. The sound was definitely coming from the hole.
A flashlight revealed a black lake with skulls (fox food) floating everywhere.
The fox’s eyes glowed from where she’d taken refuge in the floor joists. She was
constantly overturning or defecating in her water dish, so I had trouble keeping
her supplied with clean water. In the confusion she had been neglected long
enough to become desperate from thirst and gnaw through the plastic supply
pipe to the fishpond.
Bob’s voice was shaky. “The shut-off is in there – underwater – in the deep-
est part. It’s about six feet deep in that corner.” We stared at each other. He said,
“That water is right off the Rockies – ice cold.” His bad heart meant he couldn’t
possibly go in there. Over my mother’s protests, I crawled in, waded down into
the hole, submerged, and found the shutoff underwater. It compensated for my
guilt at imagining the poor fox so thirsty. The trouble was that feats like this
made me seem too powerful to Bob. He felt less proud than indebted.
A big truck came from Cody to get all the bronzes. Bob and I drove down
for the May 31 dedication and opening. We stayed in the guest house of the

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 Mary and Bob Scriver at the Buffalo Historical Center in Cody, 1969.
Photo: Jack Richard.

Richard Frosts, a garage converted into a wonderful clubhouse stuffed with col-
lectible objects. The diplomat Frost supported, suppressed, and smoothed over
situations one after another – always with intelligence and good judgment. He
made an excellent foil for the volatile little McCracken, who drove things to
their conclusion.
Bob took both his suits. I had made myself two dresses for the occasion:
one white and one black, and brought a lot of costume jewelry to get through
the four-day marathon social schedule. The first event was a dinner party with

234 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

the Frosts. Other guests were Joe and Mary Back of DuBois, Wyoming; Mr.
and Mrs. Jess Frost; Mr. and Mrs. Nick Eggenhoffer of Cody; and Mr. and
Mrs. Robert Rockwell and daughter of Corning, New York. Joe Back was a real
cowboy packer and self-taught artist who also wrote humorous books for tour-
ists. Jess Frost (Dick’s brother) was a Cody taxidermist, Nick Eggenhoffer was
already our friend, and the Rockwells were and are among the solid collectors
of Western art. Wild stories flew and we had a wonderful time. Dessert was one
beautiful éclair each. Neither Bob nor I had never eaten an éclair with a fork
before – we were more used to maple-frosted Long Johns from our fingers.
The next day there were pre-lunch cocktails to honor McCracken and
Frost. After lunch was another champagne reception and preview for the major
contributors and the board. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney (“Sonny”) and his
wife, Mary Lou, were there. They had begun painting in the previous year and
had asked that their artwork be shown in the museum. This caused a little panic
among the staff, since the landscapes were about what you’d expect from begin-
ners – a good start. The dilemma was solved by hanging them on a “special”
balcony out of the way.
An anticipated “shoot out” with Harry Jackson was staged at this reception
without us having any idea what was happening. We’d hardly heard of Harry
except that his work was handled by Kennedy Galleries in New York and was
similar enough to Bob’s that Rudi Wunderlich thought it would cause a conflict
of interest if he represented Bob as well. As it turned out, the Coe family – major
supporters of the Center – were personally fond of Harry and tended to push
his work, which put Harold McCracken’s back up. Someone told us McCracken
was so intent on having Bob’s work for the opening because he was hoping the
rodeo pieces and The Opening of the Medicine Pipe Bundle would trump Harry’s
big stampede and range burial bronzes. Of course, feuds are good for business
when one needs publicity.
Harry was a long-time veteran of the New York art scene. A friend of
Jackson Pollock’s and student of Thomas Hart Benton, he famously raised grub
money by selling his authentically worn jeans to Bob Dylan. Harry had been
traveling with the abstract expressionists, then the most dramatic and American
of painters’ “schools.” He knew about the famous rivalry between Pollock and de
Kooning, buttressed with Life magazine stories about both outrageous geniuses.
In fact, he’d had his own major Life magazine story. And he knew a dramatic
moment when he came to one.
A hush fell on the huge reception space. People cleared an aisle between
Harry and Bob as Harry strolled across, his boot heels ringing on the terrazzo
floor. Bob raised his head from conversation to see what was going on.
Harry looked like a smaller version of Bob – built much the same, bearded,
with an attitude. He came up, stood eye-to-eye with Bob, pulled out his hand
in a “draw” motion, and said, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “My
God, man! I’m damned happy to meet you! Your work is so goddamn good!”

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 The two men shook hands. Harry threw an arm over Bob’s shoulders and sug-
gested, “Let’s you and I go talk someplace private, pard.” People stepped back
to let us out.
We spent the afternoon in one of those tall, old-fashioned booths in a café,
talking and whooping and pounding the table in agreement on almost every-
thing. The shootout was a big bust.
On Friday evening there was a barbecue supper at the Two Dot ranch home
for 250 of H.P. Skogland’s closest friends. As it happened, Skogland had once
owned the 3C-Bar Ranch near Browning, and Bob found Dick Curtis, the fore-
man, whom he knew, so he felt he belonged. It was another hard-drinking party,
as much out-of-doors as in, and I was beginning to develop a bad cold.
Saturday morning we all gathered at the Cody High School Auditorium for
speeches of dedication. McCracken declared that everything at the Center had
been financed by private money and, by God, they would dig trenches in the
lawn and fight the government hand-to-hand to keep them out. (This was before
Vice-President Dick Cheney was on the Board of Trustees.) Bob was seized by
this attitude right down to the moment he wrote his will, which stipulates that
NOTHING go to any federal museum.
Then we all trooped over to the brand new center with its high glass entry
full of Scriver bronzes, and Peter Kriendler, member of the board of directors
and owner of Club 21 in New York City, cut the ribbon, accompanied by a fusil-
lade from Timberjack Joe, professional mountain man. It had been Kriendler’s
inspiration for the Winchester corporation to issue a special rifle to finance the
wing of the building to house the Buffalo Bill memorabilia. From then on Bob
used Club 21 as his badge of privilege – he would say, “We were in New York
at Club 21 when we decided that.” Later Bob made a sculpture for Winchester
and remained on good terms with Kriendler. In fact, I think Bob really felt that
Club 21, with its rather raffish history as a speakeasy, was more his style than the
Salmagundi Club with its hushed voices and fine paneling.
Lunch was in the Cody Auditorium, and this time we were seated with
Marquita Maytag (the closest Bob ever came to a patron), Dr. and Mrs.
McCracken, and Mr. and Mrs. Wolf Pogzeba of Denver. Wolf, also a Western
artist, was beginning to cut a deal with Bob for one of the big rodeo bronzes.
Any selling was very low key. Except for Bob’s bronzes, the art on exhibit was
borrowed from museums or from the Whitney collection. And these people had
enough money that they didn’t have to ask about prices. Wolf’s determination
to have a rodeo bronze was the exception.
Back at the Center afterwards there was a huge open house. Timberjack Joe
hung around on his horse with his pet fox and Tuffy, his dog, who sat on the
horse with him. Mary Lou Whitney went to pet the little fox and fleas from it
hopped down the arm of her elegant pink suit.
That night there was yet another supper dance, this time given by Mrs.
Henry Coe for 125 guests at Pahaska Tepee, Buffalo Bill’s hunting lodge, now

236 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

a tourist resort. The cocktails were served in Buffalo Bill’s historic log hunting
lodge where Prince Rainier’s grandfather had stayed when he came from Monaco
to hunt. The fireplace was a huge stone affair with the hors-d’oeuvres on a steam
table in front of it. By this time, between alcohol and cold remedies, I was losing
mental traction. I stood in front of the fire, longing to hike up my skirt in back to
toast my legs. I could see Bob talking to someone but shooting warning glances
at me, since he knew that’s what I wanted to do. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney
himself came over and invited me to have another cocktail wiener in barbecue
sauce. “They’re really quite delicious,” he assured me. I was so goggle-eyed, he
probably wondered if I were one of the many taxidermy specimens.
This was the Vogue magazine crowd. Photographers and a flurry of pretty
girls raced up and down the stairs in a cloud of scent and excited whispers. The
photos were printed some months afterwards. But the real action was the men.
Bob leaned in with them, their brandy and cigars, though he rarely drank and
had given up smoking. Deals were being made. Power was being flexed. And
there was a lot of gossip, but not about art. The men discussed land, commodi-
ties, and the stock market. The whole thing was worthy of Edith Wharton and
probably the characters were roughly the same – New York transplanted for the
season only.
What we didn’t understand at the time – and I didn’t learn until I read
Flora Miller Biddle’s book about the Whitney Museum of American Art4 – was
that this is the way one “grows” a major institution that needs millions of dol-
lars and a very special combination of personalities to guide it. The seemingly
random talk and socializing was really a way of sorting through who was serious
about the goals of the museum, who could contribute much-needed millions to
the endowment, and who could lend the directors prestige and respect in the
political context. Bob and I were blissfully ignorant.
By the time we got to supper, about 9 PM, I was staring with my mouth
hanging open and could hardly eat. Thyra Thomson, Wyoming Secretary of
State, had come with us and sat across the table. She was wearing an exquisite
emerald satin dress that was just a teeny bit too tight around the décolletage
so that her soft bosom swelled over it just slightly. I would have liked nothing
better than to have laid my head on it and taken a nap.
Mary Lou’s entourage was having a noisy time.5 It was the period when the
St. Laurent “gypsy look” was big – she was in blue with big dangling earrings
and very beautiful. She finally sent someone over to tell me to stop staring at her.
By popular demand, Harry Jackson took up his guitar to sing cowboy songs. We
went back to the Frost’s for a nightcap. I can’t remember a thing anyone said and
I doubt Bob did either.
The next morning there was a fancy Sunday brunch, complete with booze
in the orange juice, at the Irma Grill, a restaurant at Buffalo Bill’s Irma Hotel.
Then we headed north. Paywindow, Bob’s explosive bucking horse on one foot,
had been on the cover of the official event program. There had been a huge article

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 on Bob in the Billings Gazette the week before the opening. And McCracken
said, “Bob Scriver is the best Western sculptor in America – bar none.” It was
a great quote, which we immediately seized and took to the bank. Of course,
McCracken in turn went around saying, “Bob Scriver was nothing until I gave
him exposure.”
Like a bronze ingot, Bob’s reputation had gotten hotter, not seeming to do
anything until suddenly it went molten, capable of taking on a new shape. We
had been working hard in the shop, filthy and longing for suppertime, trying to
understand how to recover from some error or how to invent a way to do some-
thing we hadn’t done before, getting angry over some small matter, or panting
with exhaustion after some feat of strength. There would be a rap at the door
announcing people whose names we knew, but whom we’d never met, people
who had the power to make or break a reputation. They might offer a fabulous
opportunity, or they might take offense over a blunder on our part and firmly
close a door we had depended upon to be open.
On that June 13 Bob was awarded the Gold Medal purchase prize for
Buffalo Runner at the Cowboy Artists of America show in Oklahoma City. Fred
Fellows accepted the award on behalf of Bob. We were too exhausted to go, too
tired to care very much.
A lawsuit came out of the order taken the night we sat by Wolfgang
Pogzeba, the artist. He had ordered Layin’ the Trap, the big rodeo piece de-
picting team roping. Somehow Pogzeba and Steve Rose, owner of the Biltmore
Gallery in Scottsdale, were connected and Wolf was acquiring the bronze by
trading a Rungius painting of an elk through Rose. We tried not to take orders
at the show, because it was all so confusing and because we had acquired a
huge backlog while we put everything else off in order to create “100 bronzes”
for the opening. But during the cocktail party at Colonel Cody’s old log ranch
headquarters, Bob was somehow talked into a trade. Or maybe not. It was all
rather fuzzy. It was particularly fuzzy to me. We’d been much handicapped by
an environment where all the napkins were cloth, so could not be used to record
information.
Steve Rose was easygoing, a businessman and outdoorsman who seemed
straightforward and clear-headed. It was Wolf Pogzeba who was hard to pin
down. He was part of a younger crowd, a bit of a jet-setter, and what we called
a “wheeler-dealer.” Things fell apart. Wolf’s bronze had been sent COD, he
didn’t have the money to get it, it was returned, and Bob sold it to someone else.
Wolf sued, claiming that was HIS numbered casting of the bronze, though he
couldn’t pay for it right then. Probably he had a buyer for it whom he may have
lost because of the complication. The most dubious thing Bob did was grind off
Wolf’s number and cut in the next number. With modern technology it was
impossible to tell in what order the castings had been made.
Bob’s next problem was that by the time this case got to court, he had
divorced me, his star witness. I was in Portland, Oregon. My testimony probably

238 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

got him off, though the judge complained that he would have to deal with at
least seven different issues in different parts of the Montana business code in
order to reach a conclusion. (There was no jury.) He did decide in favor of Bob
– that he had a right to resell the bronze once the original party had refused the
COD and that sending things COD was not some kind of outlandish practice.
The part about the numbers was of no matter to him.
What the trial uncovered was the incredible complexity of the Western art
scene. Many buyers were industrial capitalists and speculators pushing around
money in great quantities through all sorts of manipulations, mostly involving
credit. Wolf didn’t have actual custody of the painting that he had proposed to
trade, nor had the arrangement been recorded. There was a long chain of swaps,
agreements, and exchanges that had to take place before he could actually ship
the painting.6
The case was ironic since one of the rules Bob had developed was a strict
policy of sending people their bronzes in the sequence that they were ordered.
Otherwise, it was a temptation to cast the big important stuff to get the money
out of them, until the little pieces were very late, which seemed unfair. In 1970
the waiting list was almost two years long, but the alternative would have been
to expand or use another foundry, and Bob didn’t want to do either because it
meant losing control and quality. In subtle ways his insistence on control may
have choked off the risking that would have taken him into the art big time.
Most people were patient, but McCracken would call and storm that “his”
clients wanted their work NOW and that meant TODAY. They were important
patrons of the Whitney and he was only doing his job, but it felt like an attack on
our integrity. Bob could not bring himself to stand up to McCracken. It wasn’t
just that he controlled Bob’s reputation now, but also that pleasing McCracken
felt like pleasing his pop.
We hadn’t been able to finish The Opening of the Medicine Pipe Bundle,
which McCracken had ordered in a hand-painted version, in time for the grand
opening exhibit in Cody in 1969, so we had substituted a casting sprayed red
ochre, the same as the artist’s copy Bob kept for himself. The next April, after the
Cody show, Bob was in the hospital because of his near-fatal heart attack. He
annoyed the hospital laundry folks by painting Cody’s set of these figures with
oils while in his hospital bed.
In the record-setting April 30, 1970 blizzard, driving our poorly maintained
little red van, I delivered the naturally colored version just in time for a May
1 seasonal opening. I begged to postpone leaving Browning with thousands
of dollars worth of bronzes in the little van with slush up to the hubcaps and
no visibility. But Bob was too intimidated to call and say the works would be
coming a few days late. So out I went, do or die. After a major, life-threatening
adventure, I made it.
On the way home, a U-bolt broke and the drive shaft fell out of the van.
Luckily, I glided to a stop by a phone booth, standing alone in miles of empty

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 country. (No cell phones then.) In a minute a cowboy rode up on a horse with
my drive shaft across the front of his saddle. I offered to trade him the van for
the horse.
Again, Bob was more threatened by my success than he was admiring or
grateful. Maybe because it was clear that we were both overmatched by the Cody
scene, with its emphasis on old money and high society, he found me lacking.
I knew better than he that some of my resistance to all that elegance was old-
fashioned Protestant Irish contempt for pretense and snobbery. He needed one
of the Caouette girls. Or his mother, who had expected to join such society.

3. Harry Jackson
Cody and Browning, 1969

Harry Jackson did indeed charter a plane and fly up. No fooling around with
amateur foundries in the West – his foundry was in Italy. We were impressed,
though his plane was no Lear Jet – just a small hired plane such as ranchers use.
In the taxidermy years, we often met such planes out at Starr School, where
there was a level field and a windsock. The pilots would contact the sheriff in
Cut Bank, who called us on the phone to alert us to drive out as quickly as we
could to chase the inevitable cows off the field. Harry’s plane was met by us and
a small crowd of Blackfeet kids, whom the pilot eyed nervously. He threw out
Harry’s bag and promised to return the next day after spending the night in Cut
Bank where he could refuel.
Clearly Harry was sizing us up to see if he should worry about Bob as a ri-
val. We took him up to East Glacier for supper, driving the spectacular loop over
Looking Glass Pass, which is like a small version of Going-to-the-Sun – long
vistas through jagged mountains. At the top, an eagle joined us, soaring over the
van. We took this to be symbolic, a blessing, though we all sort of knew the bird
was hoping we’d provide a little road kill.
At bedtime we opened up the folding sofa for Harry, but when he went past
the bedroom door with his toothbrush, he was still talking and he ended up
sitting on the foot of the bed talking to Bob until birds began to sing outside.
He did not get under the covers. There was no drinking. Harry couldn’t drink
because of his wartime head injury, which sometimes pitched him into epilepsy.
He had a natural outrageousness that Bob envied. In an infamous article in
Fine Art Collector, Harry announced, “I’m the most unhobbled, fence-jumping
bastard the art world has produced in fifty years. Many have tried to rope me;
all have failed.” Harry could name-drop famous New York artists, Wyoming
cowboys, and movie stars. In this article he drops Bob’s name as “one of the few
whose works brighten my life.”

240 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Both Jackson and Scriver were constant winners with the Cowboy Artists
of America, but neither of them really fit the organization all that well. Harry
finally resigned, but Bob was too cautious to quit, though he never went to the
shows and trail rides unless they issued an ultimatum. When CAA went its own
way, both sculptors accepted an invitation to join National Academy of Western
Artists. In 1973 Jackson and Scriver collaborated on a seminar about bronze
casting to accompany the exhibition. It must have been a humdinger.
But the one thing they had in common became more marked over the years,
and it was a tragic feature to share: both suffered from brain damage. Harry’s was
straightforward – a battle-inflicted head wound from his war correspondent days
that earned him (technical) total disability for the rest of his life. Bob’s was far
more subtle, at first only a small shift in personality after his heart attack, hardly
perceptible and easily attributable to a difficult temperament. By the Nineties he
showed an inability to come to decisions or to control his mood swings – and an
increasing terror of death. People assumed he was drinking a lot.
Customers for expensive art are mostly people who make money through
the management of capital, however they got it. Thus, investment is the lens
through which they see art and by which they judge it. People still insist that if
equal amounts of money had been invested in the stock market and the paintings
of Remington, the better return would have been made on the Remington art.
The advantage of bronzes over painting is that a painting is fragile and might be
destroyed before one could cash it in except through insurance. But bronzes are
too easy to copy – some refuse to buy Remington bronzes because of the flood of
unauthorized castings. In art there is always an element of gambling.
After the big Cody show, Bob was fond of saying, in a quote from Charlie
Russell, “Any time I cash in now, I win,” but he wasn’t talking about money. He
just couldn’t imagine anything more triumphant than coming home from an
event like Cody where his work was alongside the bronzes of major American
sculptors like Fraser and Remington.
We used to say to each other, “What would you do if you had a million dol-
lars?” and then answer ourselves, “Oh, build a museum and studio in Browning,
Montana, and make bronzes.” But later, when Bob actually did have million-
dollar sales, he discovered that the feds got half the money, the state got 11 per
cent, and if the remaining $400,000 were invested at 10 per cent, the result
would be roughly a beginning schoolteacher’s annual income.
When I had been in acting class back in the Fifties, we had played a differ-
ent game, called “What’s Your Price?” It was meant to build resolve to face the
hardships of a theatre career. Would you give up this part if it meant you could
go to Europe? Would you become a movie star if it meant you lost your wife and
children? We knew the truth was that sometimes a person would come close
to missing a key audition if it meant having time to drink a hot cup of coffee.
In retrospect it seems that Bob’s price was four marriages, his children, and his
health – at least.

X I I C A S T I N G B R O N Z E : T H E B U F FA L O B I L L H I S TO R I C A L C E N T E R 241
 4. A jubilant hunting trip
East Front of the Rockies, 1969

Decades ago, when A.B. Guthrie, Jr. was still unredeemed from destroying his
health by drinking, we went horseback hunting with Bill McMullen and his
son at Two Moons, Guthrie’s ranch. The terrain was foothills with jack pines in
mosaic, covered with maybe a foot of snow. Bill was in favor of strategy, so we
split up – you go here, you go there, and we’ll all meet again over on that ridge
in the distance.
Finally it was getting late, I was seeing tracks everywhere heading in every
direction but no actual animals, and I was wondering if I were lost for sure.
Then Zuke, my goofy horse, took over. He stopped obeying any sign I gave him,
put his nose to the ground and – sniffing like a hound dog – decided where he
thought we should go. Pretty soon I could hear the others.
Just as we broke out of the trees, a dozen elk came thundering by with Bob
in close pursuit, swinging his lariat over his head. We had no tags for elk and
I have no idea what he thought he was going to do with one if he roped it, but
both he and Gunsmoke were committed to the chase. Gunsmoke was originally
broke for bulldogging, so no doubt he expected Bob to jump off onto the elk
as soon as they got close enough. Lagging behind, the McMullens came along
laughing.
We wound in and out of the scattered pines – Bob turning so sharply that
sometimes his stirrup touched the ground – until a fence stretched across the
space. The elk went on over and for a minute I thought Bob was going to try to
jump Gunsmoke, too. But he didn’t. He was euphoric for days afterward. I don’t
remember whether we filled our deer tags.
If Bob had never been a sculptor, this would have been life for him. If he
had been asked to give this up, even for something like the Cody show, the price
would have been too high. With his career, as with this roping exploit, he spent
all his time thinking about the chase and none thinking about what he was
going to do when he achieved his goal.

242 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 XIII

Molten Bronze:
Cowboy Hall of Fame

1. Moment of truth

Actual pouring of the molten bronze was the payoff for weeks of careful prepara-
tion and an infinite number of tiny details – the alloy of the metal we were
using, the temperature of the investment when we mixed and applied it, the
attentiveness of the person painting wax into the mold, the quality of the mold
and its setup – all the way back to the original conception and design of the
plastilene. If the mold had been burned out bone-clean, and if the metal was
exactly the proper temperature, the melted bronze slipped in like fate itself. But
even a small, abrupt turn in a sprue-channel, creating turbulence in the stream
of metal, might lose a leg or half a face.
We could only see the stream enter the mold and then had to imagine
how it was flowing, whether it was cooling, where a small pocket might have
formed. Atoms and molecules, dancing and interlocking in ways beyond human
comprehension, were acting according to rules we novice foundrypersons – like
all the centuries of craftsmen before us – had to obey, no matter whether we
knew them or not. It was important to move slowly, to let the forces interact at
their own speed. An Indian crew was helpful, because they were instinctively
deliberate, waiting for the right moment, and they moved smoothly.
That twisting iridescent stream of 2,000-degree metal was without mercy.
If a pour failed, all the planning, effort, time, materials, and care were simply
gone. Deadlines missed. Customers angry. Maybe even orders cancelled. As Bob
said, “All you can do is the best you can do.” Or later, he would say, “You can
only give it an honest try.”

243
 The second Bighorn Foundry. These are the two furnaces sunk in the floor. The
homemade tongs are the originals that Bob welded up. Photo: Buster Ruetten.

244 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

2. The Western art boom

But he wasn’t in control of everything. What had been a solitary calling in a

small reservation town was now being swept up in a whirlwind across the na-
tion, a fascination with what it meant to live in the West. An artist must live in
his own time and place, at the mercy of larger forces.1
As the field of Western art grew and defined itself through the Sixties and
Seventies, not only artists appeared and came of age. At the same time wealthy
people created fine collections, which often developed into institutions, and then
new careers formed around the development of those institutions. The older
galleries such as Knoedler, Bartfield, Kennedy, Grand Central, Graham, and
others contributed their accumulated expertise and inventories of fine American
artists. Work that had gathered dust for decades was now brought out to claim
recognition as the brilliant historical archive it was. In those days before the
Internet, it was all managed via phone calls and mail – or when things got
close to a climax, someone had to catch a plane and go see. Even the value of
contemporary Western art skyrocketed in the Seventies.
By 2004 the money in Western art impressed everyone. In July the Coeur
d’Alene Auction in Reno sold a large landscape by Thomas Moran called Mists
in the Yellowstone for $4,928,000. The 2004 total Western auction sales was
eighteen million dollars, a jump from the 2003 total of ten million. Total sales
on the opening night of the 2004 Cowboy Artists of America show in Phoenix
was $2.6 million. That same October Alterman Galleries in Santa Fe at their
auction posted more than four million.
At the Cowboy Artists of America show one artist, Howard Terpning, sold
a painting of three Indian women, Three Generations, for $200,000. (He would
also sell 550 prints of the same painting.) At the Makers of the American West Show
at the Los Angeles Autry National Center, the museum bought from Terpning
a large painting of Indians at a waterfall called The Force of Nature Humbles All
Men for $800,000. At the 2004 Alterman Galleries auction Terpning’s Time
Stands Still sold for $222,500. R. Brownell McGrew, a contemporary painter of
Navajos, saw Salah-Tso Goes to the Sing sell for $288,500. An historical painter
of Indians, Joseph Henry Sharp had painted Hairy Moccasin, which sold for
$222,500.
To put all of this into perspective, Charles Saatchi, a trendy British art
collector, the following January, in 2005, sold to an American Damien Hirst’s
Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living for a rumored thir-
teen million dollars. Saatchi had bought the “work” in 1992 for $93,000. It is
not a painting, but an actual dead shark floating in formaldehyde. One cannot
help hoping it will not end up in the Whitney Gallery of American Art. It WILL
NOT end up in the Whitney Gallery of Western Art.

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E 245
 3. C.M. Russell Museum Benefit Auction
Great Falls, Montana, 1970 to the present

Sometimes marketing strategies came together through insight and acts of cour-
age, creating a new paradigm that lasts for years afterwards. Someone would
just be struck by “the way to do it.” At a time when many were questioning the
nature and goals of human beings and the very sanity of art, realistic Western
paintings and sculptures of earlier days provided a rallying point. The American
Renaissance sculptors, after all, had based their work on the great Greek classics,
the source of democracy.
One couldn’t say Western artists were Edwardian, though that was the
right time period. Perhaps they were Teddy Rooseveltian. Certainly Teddy
knew many of them and posed for several of them. More than anything else the
artists and buyers of the Gilded and Progressive Age saw themselves as part of
“the Grand Narrative” of the American West: Lewis and Clark, mountain men,
Indian “wars,” open range ranching, homesteaders, prospectors, the railroads,
and so on. We all know the books and the movies with their swelling symphonic
scores as the hero prevails in the end.
In Great Falls, where Charles M. Russell had established his studio (a log
cabin made of telephone poles that his resourceful wife built for him next to
their home), a small museum contained the collection of a neighborhood friend
of Russell, Miss Josephine Trigg. Besides paintings, the objects she had accumu-
lated were small and charming: letters, dinner party placemarks created of paper
and wax, heads of walking sticks – the kind of thing that Russell constantly
produced. The idea took hold in the community that the place ought to be
developed to show major paintings.
In 1970 the Great Falls Ad Club accepted the charge of raising money to
expand this museum and inaugurated an annual auction on Russell’s birthday,
March 19. The first one was an evening in the Rainbow Hotel, prefaced by a
champagne reception because it was feared that unless people were a little tid-
dly, they wouldn’t bid on the art. After all, many of the attendees were used to
livestock auctions where their livelihood depended on shrewdness. It is generally
accepted that the driving force among a circle of dynamic people was Norma
Ashby, a television personality.
All the art had been donated by Montana artists, including Stan Lynde,
creator of the comic strip Rick O’Shay. His wife at the time, a pretty little blonde,
and myself, a buxom redhead, were surely among the youngest guests and the
most affected by unaccustomed champagne. In our elegant clothes we were
playing tag in the huge open basement of the hotel until a scandalized manager
caught us and returned us to the auction. It was an innocent time.
Bob refused to donate art for auction because he had a horror of no one
bidding and was afraid that a precedent of low prices would be set. Therefore,

246 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

he offered to donate a bronze casting of his buffalo skull, suitable to be mounted
on a plaque and awarded to someone with a close connection to Russell. In the
early days these were friends and relatives of Charlie. This practice continued for
forty years, until the recipient had to be someone who, for instance, had written
about Russell.
Today this auction, enormously successful and key to the growth of the
C.M. Russell Museum, is a complex week-long festival with half-a-dozen auxil-
iary shows and auctions. Drawing people from all over the continent, it is sited
in a sprawling motel in which all furnishings are removed from the guest rooms
so they can be converted into galleries for individual artists. The main auction
costs a hundred dollars just to attend and bids come in from around the world
over the telephone and the Internet.
Related shows and auctions occupy other motels. After thirty-five years of
development, they say that interesting side deals are made in the private rooms,
not always involving art. Scams have developed, like agreeing to buy each other’s
painting for an inflated price to establish a high value. (An old racehorse owner
trick.) Or setting a high “hold” price on a piece so that no one buys it in the
auction, and then selling it for slightly less in the hallway “offstage” so that no
percentage has to go to the Ad Club. In spite of such shenanigans, the event
is so glamorous and prestigious that it is imitated across the continent. Young
women in evening gowns carry the art across the catwalk and the newspaper
breathlessly adds up the money.
These days Western art auctions and purchase shows spring up like circuses,
then disperse when the horse trailers of bronzes and paintings head out after-
wards. Determined artists with good connections and cell phones can travel the
continent around the calendar, just like rodeo cowboys. Buyers who don’t care
to hit the road can participate in auctions live over the Internet. Gallery and
organization websites provide transient catalogues, as well as selling the tradi-
tional ones that become valuable archives, while other websites track prices and
availability. [Link] notes the highest price per square inch for each artist.
Slick Western art magazines depend upon the income from full-page ads.
The C.M. Russell Museum is now an elegant complex occupying a city
block and exhibiting major national artists. Miss Trigg would be flabbergasted.
I’m not entirely sure she would be pleased.

4. Dean Krakel, cowboys and Indians

Oklahoma City, 1965 to the end

An illustrative case of a person inventing a career based on American Western

art might be Dean Krakel, a mild-mannered history professor who evidently

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E 247
 stepped into a phone booth and emerged as a super-developer of art museums.
His first big Western museum director job was with the Thomas Gilcrease
American Institute of History and Art, which grew out of the vision and collec-
tions of a one-eighth Creek Indian whose government-allotted land happened
to be in the middle of an oil patch. Krakel attributed much of his Western art
education to soft-spoken, courtly Tom Gilcrease (1890–1962).
As a young man already wealthy, Gilcrease had decided on the spur of the
moment to go see what Europe was all about. An ocean liner trip later, he was
walking the streets of Paris, learning everything, but especially how to value fine
art and history. Collecting both major historical documents and early Trans-
Mississippi Western art beginning with Catlin, he endowed a building to house
his collection in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Before his death he gave it all to the City of
Tulsa, where at first it was treated as a commodity rather than the vision it was.
The Gilcrease has remained a landmark collection. After Tom Gilcrease’s death,
Krakel moved on to the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, now called
the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.
At that point – 1965, about the time Bob Scriver was entering New York
City juried exhibits – the Cowboy Hall of Fame was little more than a shell of a
building, some major debts and a concept. Krakel energized it with the world-
view and experience he brought from the Gilcrease. One of his first acts was
buying a collection of C.M. Russell paintings and sculpture for $500,000. The
board balked until an appraisal of the collection came in at $1,050,000, which
suddenly made the price seem a bargain. It also shifted the definition of value to
dollar amounts, not aesthetics.
In 1963, when still with Gilcrease, Krakel had visited Laura Gardner Fraser
(1889–1966) in her Westport, Connecticut, studio in pursuit of a bas-relief,
twenty-one by four feet, called Oklahoma Run. The Frasers were part of the
American Renaissance of Beaux Arts sculptors rather than the Remington and
Russell action-genre types then coming into popularity. Laura was a younger
member of the group of female sculptors that included Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney and Malvina Hoffman. Laura had made a bas-relief of the reckless
Oklahoma Land Rush that ensued when Indian lands were opened for white
settlement. Her husband, James Earle Fraser (1876–1953), was the sculptor of an
image that lives on in the American mind: The End of the Trail. Many a person
in the United States has owned a Fraser sculpture, because he was the designer
of the Indian head/buffalo nickel, but most people, like Kitty Carlisle Hart,
don’t recognize the name. He was also an important early mentor to Gertrude
Vanderbilt Whitney.
Returning from the 1892 Chicago Columbian Exposition, Fraser, a North
Dakota boy, had been inspired to make his first small version of The End of the
Trail to illustrate what an old trapper once prophesied: “The Indians will some-
day be pushed into the Pacific Ocean.” Laura Fraser (thirteen years younger

248 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

than Fraser) was his student and then an instructor under his direction until he
married her.
When the San Francisco Panama Exposition opened in 1915, Fraser repli-
cated The End of the Trail two-and-a-half-times life-size. The image was enor-
mously popular, appearing on ashtrays, postcards, china plates, bookends, and
so on. Said Fraser wrily, “I have been told more than $250,000 worth of prints
and photographs were sold of the statue. Who got the money, I don’t know. I do
know that I didn’t get any of it. As a matter of fact, everyone knew of the statue,
but no one seemed to know its sculptor.”
At the end of the exposition, all the statuary, which was simply made of
hard plaster, like the sculpture in Chicago at the Columbian Exposition, was
pushed aside to disintegrate into rubble. Without Fraser’s knowledge, another
man – for $400 in shipping costs – managed to get the plaster statue to Visalia,
California, where it joined a sculpture called Pioneer by Solon Borglum.
While Krakel was still working to raise money to acquire the entire Fraser
studio contents, Laura Fraser died. The Frasers’ executor contacted him and
they were able to reach an agreement. Included in the sale to the Cowboy Hall
of Fame were individual heroic portraits of Lewis and Clark, as well as a major
statue of Lincoln and some small originals of The End of the Trail. Then word
came to Krakel about the original Panama Exposition plaster casting slowly
disintegrating outdoors in a Visalia park. Reclaimed, it would be a magnifi-
cent image to stand in the huge peaked windows of the Cowboy Hall of Fame.
Krakel thought of it as the Pieta of the American West. (Actually, it became a
rallying image for militant Native Americans declaring, “We’re not dead yet!”)
The rest of the story is worthy of a book its own, which Krakel wrote.2
Krakel’s impassioned, push-the-envelope approach to the Cowboy Hall of
Fame filled it with top-notch “Western” art financed by wealthy men without
them quite realizing what they were accomplishing. He invented all sorts of
strategies, displacing money from one pocket to another, telling one man the
other would pay for half if the first would put up the other half – then going to
the second man with his fingers crossed to work the deal the other way. Krakel
was strongly convinced that irreplaceable art was just then becoming available
for one crucial moment and one had to act fast or lose it forever. This was the
same conviction has controlled much of American understanding of the West,
especially Indians.3 It is also crucial to auctions, which have sustained “one cru-
cial moment” through the decades.
Sometimes Krakel created partnerships, such as the one with the Cowboy
Artists of America. But he had a tendency to push his views hard and to put his
institution’s welfare first. So did the Cowboy Artists of America. Inspired by a
good time on a working ranch (followed by a evening of bonding in a pub) they
had joined together in 1965 to promote and protect each other. Their criteria
had to do with being working cowboys and social buddies. Krakel wanted “great
art,” which he tried to encourage with awards and purchase prizes. At first the

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E 249
 mixture of grand new museum and colorful cowboy artists worked wonderfully,
though many were sober artists with many years of illustrating magazines but
no horseback time.
Gradually the independent-minded CAA got crosswise and pulled out so
they could control their own shows and membership. Krakel simply organized
a new institution, the National Academy of Western Art, which included only
the cream of CAA (those who had won awards) plus other outstanding Western
artists. It was possible to belong to both CAA and NAWA. Bob Scriver and
Harry Jackson joined this second organization, as did Clymer, Lougheed, and
Eggenhofer. Harry stepped out of CAA and so did Ned Jacob, who had begun
his career as a skinny teenager in Browning, Montana, and had continued under
the wing of Ace Powell, Bob’s lifelong friend, until Ned left for the Southwest.
Eventually Ace’s son David was admitted to membership in 2004.
The Cowboy Artists of America exhibited together once a year and sold
their work through a bidding system, which stirred up a lot of excitement and
significantly boosted the prices – in fact, higher than a hawk’s nest. The auctions
became glitzy events where people wore tuxes and Stetsons, beaded chiffon,
and Dolly Parton hair, all carefully recorded in slick lifestyle and Western art
magazines. Competition for the best art was fierce. The feel is more Hollywood
than high society New York.

5. Bill Linderman
Denver and Browning, 1967–1970

The energized Cowboy Hall of Fame stimulated the Professional Rodeo

Cowboys’ Association, which had been evolving into a powerful body of profes-
sional athletes, to commission a heroic-size bronze portrait of Bill Linderman,
one of their founders who repeatedly won the All-Around Rodeo Championship
year after year.
Once again something that had happened in the past affected Bob’s career.
A phone call came from Eddie Costell, a former employee and rodeo hand
from the early Fifties. In spring Bob had bought the inevitable dead calves for
their hides, which he tanned and sold. Whenever a dead calf was brought in Ed
would jump into the pickup, tie up the calf’s legs as though he had just roped
it (not easy when the calf was frozen), untie it and throw it out of the pickup,
jump down and tie it, untie it and throw it up on the porch, run up and tie it,
untie it and throw it through the front door, pounce on it and tie it up yet again.
When he began to compete at calf roping again, he won more money than he
ever had.

250 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Now he saw a chance for Bob. Someone had done a trial sculpture of Bill
Linderman for the PRCA, but no one liked it. Why didn’t Bob hurry up and
submit one? It was like a replay of the Russell statue contest, except that this
time Bob was prepared. In no time he had mocked up two statues, one of Bill
holding his saddle alongside and the other leaning over to buckle his chaps.
Our favorite was the latter, because it was graceful and natural looking and we
thought his face would be closer to the viewer.
Bill Cochran, who kept Bob’s freezer operating, was another local rodeo
hand who came onto the team as advisor. He turned out not just to be techni-
cally accurate, but also a terrific source of ideas. He saw rodeo as a kind of
art form, with names for animal temperaments and strategies. Rodeo people
stopped by regularly. They were tough critics who fell in love with getting the
saddle just right, supplying props and posing.
Linderman, three-time All-Around Champion in the days when cowboys
were rough and unshorn, had grown up near Red Lodge, building up huge
shoulders by mining underground coal. One hot day, hoeing rows in the sugar
beet field, he had thrown aside his hoe and gone to rodeoing. More than merely
tough, Bill had insisted that rodeo cowboys clean up their acts and get a little
class. He had been an original member of the “Turtle” Association which pre-
ceded the PRCA. (The version Linderman joined was a reincarnation of one
organized in Boston, of all unlikely places, as a kind of cowboys’ union.) When
he became the head of the PRCA he said rodeo hands would have no credibility
until they dressed nice, talked nice, and paid their bills. He made it a point to
set an example.
People constantly told us stories about his generosity – money lent, good
deeds done – and his gallantry. Once some ill-advised hand got smart with a
waitress and Bill, whose arm was broken, knocked him out with his cast – which
also smashed the plaster. The ultimate story about Bill was that of his death.
He’d eaten in the Denver Piggly Wiggly, a favorite spot, and had paid with a
check. The cashier had asked him to put his address on the check, so Bill jok-
ingly wrote “Heaven.”
In a matter of hours he may have gone “home,” for he left to catch a plane
that crashed on takeoff and burst into flames. They say that Bill was seen to
come out once, but he heard others screaming inside and went back to rescue
them. He never emerged again. No movie cowboy could top Bill Linderman.
We were more than a little nervous in the air when we flew to Denver, but
more in danger in the Denver taxis, especially since we were carrying the two
carefully done portraits of Linderman, still in fragile plastilene until all changes
had been made. Once, the taxi swerved like a steer and Bob made a quick grab
for the little statues, while I was thrown across the seat. He knew his priorities.
The committee liked both maquettes, but – as we had suspected – loved having
the paraphernalia of the saddle in the portrait, so that was the one chosen to be
enlarged.

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E 251
 Gene Pruett, President of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association,
and good friend of Bill Linderman, tries his hand at a sculptor’s calipers, 1967.
Photo: Mary Scriver.

Costell met Scriver at the PRCA office and they started to work. Before
long everyone in the office was stopping by to watch Bob, and as the afternoon
wore on even Gene Pruett, the president and one of Linderman’s closest friends,
was working on the clay, making tiny changes with a slender steel modeling
tool. When we left for home, the chosen portrait stayed at the PRCA office to be
judged with three other sculptures.
Bob’s portrait of Linderman was unanimously chosen by a committee:
Gene Pruett, Dean Krakel, George Williams, and one other whose name didn’t
get recorded. The contract was signed. The statue was to be heroic-size (life-size
plus one-fifth). The finished bronze statue, of course, would be slightly smaller
due to the shrinkage of the metal when it was cast, but it would seem life-size.
This time Bob knew the importance of a strong, well-proportioned armature
to support the hundreds of pounds of clay he would use. Research on enlarging
methods identified two alternatives: an elaborate machine called a pantograph;
or a scaled framework built in proportion around each of the statues so as to
form a three-dimensional set of reference points for measuring. He decided on

252 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

the latter approach as more apt to be accurate and began to measure. With his
grandson’s help – six-year-old Lane made a good welding torch holder while
Bob pounded on the metal – he soon had a provisional skeleton which was to be
changed again and again as the work went on.
Using a battery of step-ladders, we started piling clay on. This was the sum-
mer Margaret, Bob’s daughter, had her first cancer operation and Lane stayed
with us. During the August week she was in Browning, Margaret helped by lo-
cating points of reference on the small sculpture with straight pins, writing their
location in a notebook – 2 down, 1 left, 6 deep – until she had what appeared to
be a dictionary of secret code. Then Bob began finding the same points on his
clay mass – end of nose, shirt buttons, belt buckle – marking each with kitchen
matches. He left the heads of the matches sticking out, mostly because they
might react with the clay in some unforeseen way. Tourists observed all this
from the Dutch door into the front and one cleverly guessed, “Well, when the
clay is finished, I guess you’ll light all the matches at once and that will bake the
clay – right?”
Bake is what plastilene exposed to open flame will NOT do! With an oil
and wax base, it burns! Every time Bob was making progress, it seemed, the
armature would come poking out in the wrong place. To keep from starting over
he would strip back as little clay as possible to get at the iron with the cutting
torch. Even with wet asbestos packed around the iron, the clay would splutter,
burn, and drip flaming gobs onto the floor. Lane now became head bucket boy,
pouring water where it was needed. Sometimes Bob had to yell at the museum
receptionist to help.
When the statue was finally pointed up, it looked like somebody, but not
Linderman. To the sculptor’s chagrin, people kept taking photos and publish-
ing them without explaining that the sculpturing had only begun. People are
naturally a little suspicious about portraits anyway and some assumed the worst.
Friends of Linderman stopped in constantly to give advice – which Bob took
seriously until he noticed that their descriptions conflicted.
Gene Pruett made arrangements for us to receive photos and Linderman’s
clothes, boots, and hat. We never did find any one person with shoulders wide
enough, hips narrow enough, or head long enough to fill Bill’s clothes. But one
fellow had a back like Bill’s, and Calvin Augare had hands like Bill’s, even to a
knuckle knocked down in a fistfight. The Levi people sent an enlarged photo
of the championship buckle that Linderman had worn in the plane crash, since
the original buckle was melted. In the end Bob simply had to lock himself into
the shop at night with the best photos and work until photos of the statue and
photos of the real man matched, without losing the personality.
The Turtle Association saddle Linderman was holding proved to be more
work than any other part of the statue. Turtle Association saddles have no horn,
some say because it’s safer without a horn to prong the cowboy in the gut and
some say because the early cowboys could pack more saddles into a car or plane

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 for traveling between rodeos. Bob found a saddle in the local saddle shop that
had actually once belonged to Linderman. For extra luck, it had a broken tree,
which meant it had to be completely dismantled for repair. The saddlemaker,
named Bell, let Bob do the dismantling.
As the sculptor removed each piece of leather, he made a scale drawing.
notes on construction and a pattern one-and-one-fifth life-size. Each leather
section was duplicated in plastilene, even down to a basket weave pattern one-
and-one-fifth life-size. Then as the saddlemaker reassembled the real saddle on
a new tree, Bob assembled the clay saddle around an angle-iron tree. The results
were so realistic that people kept thinking it was leather and leaving fingermarks
on it. A few ultra-realistic touches were added by scraping a one-and-one-fifth
life-size spur rowel over the seat.
Pruett drove up from Great Falls in a blizzard on Thanksgiving, 1967, to
check the rough clay model . The next spring, when the clay was nearly done, he
brought Rusty Spaulding, Linderman’s mother, to give the final approval. Bob
had made the statue’s head detachable so he could work on it without standing
on a ladder. The head was on a table in the house, and when it was obvious Rusty
was trying not to look at it we began to worry. Finally Bob asked straight out
what Rusty thought. For a long moment she looked at the face and her eyes filled
with tears. “I just don’t know what you could do to make it better,” she said. “I
never noticed before, but he had eyebrows just like mine!” Then we understood
why she hadn’t wanted to look.
When the clay was finished, Bob decided to make a plaster piece mold,
impressions of the clay in a series of plaster sections keyed to fit back together.
One day sculptor and crew started at the statue’s feet and by five in the afternoon
it was entirely encased in what appeared to be a giant plaster cast. In real life
Linderman had no doubt worn his share of casts, but not all over at once.
The plaster sections became molds into which were painted layers of hot
wax 3/8" thick. The thickness was critical and had to be kept even. We bent
paper clips so they had a kink at 3/8" and pierced the wax to test it as we went
along. When the wax sections were separated from the plaster, they were stuck
back together to form a replica of the clay statue in hollow wax.
For ease of handling, Bob kept the sculpture separated at the collar and the
belt. The saddle was kept separate, too. We had used brown wax. At one point,
while the sections of Bill were standing in the closed museum to stay cool, some
tourists talked their way in there, and one evidently thought the brown wax was
chocolate – he took a big bite out of the belt buckle. We didn’t find the damage
until after they had gone, or we could have identified him by his teeth.
Bob’s daughter, Margaret, who had helped him begin the statue, died in
May of 1968. He had not dared to start his furnaces to cast when he might have
to get to his daughter at any moment. In May all the copper companies went on
strike so it was impossible to get any bronze. Then the weather was too warm to
start the small foundry without fire danger because the roof was so low.

254 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Someone told us about a foundry in Regina, Saskatchewan, that would
pour the metal in a couple of months. We loaded the wax in the little red van
and drove the 600 miles. Bob decided to chance it, though he hardly knew the
foundry people, and left the wax in a potato cellar to be kept cool until it could
be invested and poured. Every time we called to ask, the foundry assured us the
rough metal casting would be ready very soon. But it never was.
Finally, Pruett called to say in a few days he was coming to see what prog-
ress we had made. We hadn’t told Pruett about the Regina foundry and weren’t
sure what his reaction would be, so I was sent to pick up whatever the foundry
had done. They had done nothing. The wax was just the same. Bob wanted it
back as quickly as possible. I drove back on rough roads, and vibration began to
crack the wax. At every small town I stopped to buy more electrical tape (Duct
tape wasn’t invented yet.) to try to hold it together, until the wax looked like a
mummy.
The only course of action was to enlarge our foundry so we could cast the
statue ourselves. We ripped up the floor to install another melting furnace and
replaced a wooden wall with cement block so we could extend the bake-out
ovens. We had to find more reliable burners for the oven and install a more
elaborate electrical hoist system to handle the 150-pound crucibles of molten
bronze. Most important, the roof had to be raised at least three feet. We waited
for calm weather, cut the roof loose and jacked it up enough to lay three more
courses of cement blocks on the supporting walls. Just about the time the roof
was teetering on the jacks, wind hit: gusts up to seventy and eighty miles per
hour are not unusual in Browning. For a day the only thing that was keeping the
roof more or less on the foundry was the long-suffering neighbor’s tool shed and
a telephone pole in the alley, which prevented the roof from moving sideways.
As soon as the foundry was functioning again, Bob had to cast some orders
to pay the bills. When the below-zero 1969 January weather settled in, we decid-
ed to make a test run with both crucibles on two three-foot busts of Buffalo Bill
for the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming. The bust investment
molds were each four to five feet square, weighing a thousand pounds. They had
to be made in the unheated foundry as they were too large and heavy to move
from the shop, but we had to go straight from making the mold to putting them
in the oven, so they wouldn’t freeze and crack.
The sand pit in which we packed the investment molds was not big enough,
so we tore up some floorboards to dig another pit during the two weeks the
molds were baking. The temperature had been so far below zero so long that
even with the ovens going it took two men with a jackhammer three days to dig
down four feet.
Then we were short of investment without knowing it. Only the outside
cage was covered with investment when we ran out. If we turned on the ovens
to keep the foundry warm, the wax would melt and distort. If we left the mold
incomplete until we could pour the investment into the cage, the outside would

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E 255
 freeze and crack so the molten bronze would escape. Finally we wrapped them
in electric blankets and insulation and hoped for a quick delivery of more sup-
plies. The molds were baked until all traces of wax and moisture were gone. They
were hoisted to the pit for packing, but one was jarred and cracked slightly.
When we poured in the bronze, the molten metal escaped through the
crack, pushing aside the wet sand packed around it, easily penetrating the metal
lining of the pit, and setting the floor of the whole shed on fire. Half the crew
kept pouring metal while the other half pried up floorboards to fight fire. In
their excitement they spilled water on the other big mold, causing it to crack.
We dared not call in the enthusiastic volunteer firemen, who would splash wa-
ter everywhere and demolish the building. We melted and poured three times
– nearly a thousand pounds of molten metal. Not until 1 A.M. were the cracks
full enough of cold metal for the molds to fill up. Our practice run had been
a disaster. Only weeks of welding and grinding – all of it done by Bob – saved
the busts.
After a lot of planning and tinkering to eliminate some of our problems,
by spring 1969 we were ready to try a big pour again. Holding our breaths, we
invested, baked, and poured the big Linderman statue’s head. When we broke
away the investment, the face emerged smiling and flawless.
By August the sculpture was nearly all cast. The last mold, which held the
base and the legs to above the knees, weighed two tons. It took five men, one
wife, and three grandchildren two days to put the investment on the wax and
two house movers (J.T. Ingram and helper) two more days to roll the mold into
the oven. After weeks of baking, temperatures were so intense that the brick
floor of the oven turned to glass. Because all the Indians had gone fire-fighting,
our crew by this time consisted of friends and relatives, sweating and gulping
salt pills with water. We heated both furnaces twice so as to have a little extra
metal. But when Bob went to lift out the last crucible, it suddenly split in half,
dumping 150 pounds of bronze into the bottom of the furnace. The glowing
metal hadn’t quite filled the mold, but we couldn’t do any more. We left the
mold to cool overnight.
The mold had been too big for the sand pit, so we had enclosed it in oven
lids with a chain around them and packed wet sand between. Next morning
Bob alone, too anxious to wait for help, cut the wires and released the chains
holding the lids together. Several hundred pounds of brick, steel, and sand caved
out on his leg, all but breaking the bone. But the metal had filled the mold just
to the bottom of the base – Linderman was cast! What everyone had told us
was impossible was accomplished. Bob, lying on his back with ice packs on his
swollen leg, didn’t feel so bad after all!
As each rough casting was chipped out of the investment, it was lightly
sandblasted. Every gas pocket had to be braised and every protrusion ground
off. Thirty-dollar steel rotary files lasted only minutes on the hard silicon bronze
alloy. Miraculously, the sections that had been cut apart in wax fit back together

256 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

perfectly when reassembled as separately cast pieces of bronze. With ropes and
chain hoists holding him up, Linderman was welded together until he stood
alone.
The sculpture, now too big for the door, had to be moved out into the light
for patining, so Bob tore out one side of the foundry and called in his house
movers again. By September the first blizzards hit. The men put up a plastic tipi
with a plumber’s pot for heat and went on working. On November 4 the moving
van came and Linderman was carefully hoisted aboard with a forklift. The trip
to Oklahoma City should have taken only three days but a week passed without
any word. When we couldn’t stand it any longer and called, we heard that the
van was evidently lost in Texas – possibly hijacked. Finally someone spotted an
item in the Great Falls paper noting that the statue had arrived safely. No one
had thought to tell us.
The heroic statue of Bill Linderman was dedicated at the annual Rodeo
Historical Society luncheon at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma
City during the National Rodeo finals in 1970. Charlotte Linderman Parsons
unveiled the statue of her father. Mike Linderman Galley, Rusty Spaulding,
and Walt Linderman were all special guests. There stood the real King of the
Cowboys with a row of flags and a blue sky behind him through the glass wall.
He looked down on the crowd with that quirky little smile, a bit younger than
some remembered him.
The annual trophy awarded by the National Cowboy Hall of Fame to the
National All-Around Rodeo Champion became the one-fifth-life-size version of
Scriver’s portrait of Linderman. The first winner of the trophy was Larry Mahan.
His name and the names of the other winners went under the larger-than-life
portrait in the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Mahan eventually accumulated
a whole row of the statues.
Bill Linderman, larger than life and now immortal, stands there with his
saddle. But the memory I cherish most is his mom, Rusty, in her old family
ranch house near Red Lodge. We stopped by to visit one day and caught her just
finishing up the chore of bagging chicken carcasses for the freezer. Not a young
woman, she had raised the poultry, killed and picked them the day before and
was now whirling around her kitchen in bare feet, racing the clock to get them
frozen. With a little help from Lady Clairol, her hair was still red, glowing in the
sunlight streaming through the high old-fashioned windows. On the hard-worn
table was a big oxalis plant, its green shamrocks also glowing. A cowboy hero’s
mom in a classic ranch kitchen: it was worthy of a painting.
The Linderman dedication had plunged us back into the excitement of an
institutional gala. At the Rodeo Historical Society luncheon we found that many
people were genuine old Westerners and their stories were absorbing. Spotting
Jim Shoulders, another legendary rodeo hand, Bob was suddenly struck with the
idea of making his portrait and pitched the concept to him. Shoulders, feeling
it was much too “previous,” objected “I’m not dead yet!” (The sculpture did

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E 257
 eventually get started in plastilene, was burned in the museum fire in 1976, and
then reconstructed and cast in bronze.)
What really seized our attention was the huge rescued statue of The End of
the Trail. While the Linderman was being dedicated, the two-and-a-half-times
life-size original plaster from Visalia was in a temporary building where Cesare
Contini was making the plaster piece mold to send to Italy for casting.
Contini was from that guild of fine workers the Frasers and their fellow
sculptors (including both Malvina Hoffman and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney)
depended upon for help. In fact, Cesare’s father had worked with James Fraser in
the Twenties. Bob was enthralled by the whole project and could hardly prevent
himself from getting up there on the scaffolding to help Contini. He had a
thousand small questions about technique and Contini was delighted to have
someone ask, but Krakel wanted us out circulating with the guests, charming
the money. Bob used to say, wryly, “Making sculpture is not show business, but
selling sculpture is.”
Still, Contini working on that huge plaster was as close as Bob could come
to his ancestral spirits. It was a little ironic that nearly forgotten careers, show-
ing up here in the bastion of the CAA, changed his relationship to his own
work, lending it dignity, and pushing aside Charlie Russell. He was more of an
American sculptor than a cowboy sculptor. To him from then on, monumental
commissions were proof of accomplishment.
Krakel had captured another studio, that of Charles Schreyvogel (1861–
1912), a rival of Remington’s who had lived in Browning for a while. When we
went into the hall where the studio was replicated in a huge case, Bob gasped
and bumped me with his elbow. A small painting, beautifully done, portrayed
the Rocky Mountains, just as they appear from the picture window of Bob’s
studio in Browning.

6. The National Rodeo Finals

Oklahoma City, 1970

At the National Rodeo Finals in Oklahoma City: we were ecstatic. Linderman

had become an entry point to the whole world of professional rodeo, one of the
most authentic communities we ever shared. Competitions were impossible to
fake. Everyone understood that you might fail, might be badly hurt, even killed,
but also you might make top dollar. The only way a person could fall short was
by not making an honest try. One might think competition would keep people
apart, but these people were always watching out to help the other guy. They
were generous about including Bob.

258 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 As a kind of show biz gimmick, Freckles Brown – a bull rider from way back
– had been scheduled to ride “Tornado” – an old-timer champion bull about to
be retired. The bull had only been successfully ridden for the full allotted time
once, and that was by Freckles. Darned if Freckles didn’t manage to ride him to
the buzzer again. Bob decided he had to make a portrait to commemorate the
ride. He scared up a tape measure somewhere and we went around to the pens.4
Normally, bucking bulls are pretty docile between rides. As a little girl,
I’d loved to feed them handfuls of grass through the fence of the pens of the
Livestock Exposition in Portland. But Tornado was not feeling either docile
or retired. Bob made a quick sketch of the bull on a tablet and then I was sup-
posed to get the measurements. “What’s the width of his shoulders, Mary?”
Clinging to the top of the not-too-tight pen, I leaned back as Tornado surged
right straight up, knocking my steel tape aside. At some point I lost my earring
down into the chute under the bull’s feet but decided it was wise to just consider
it an offering to the rodeo gods. Then we went over to the hotel and measured
Freckles, which was a lot easier.
Later I was behind the chutes waiting for Bob and spotted Ben Johnson
not far away. I stared like any starstruck idiot. Ben, noticing, sauntered over
with his hand out and said, “Hello there. I’m Ben Johnson.” No one told me to
stop staring. He was a prince of a man and a terrific actor. Bob wasn’t impressed
then. But in the last years, when he was in and out of the hospital, I sent him
a videotape of My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys in which Ben Johnson
played an aging man who resists being trapped in a retirement home. THEN he
appreciated the actor.
Since the Cowboy Hall of Fame awarded prizes for the best Western mov-
ies, books, and so on, it was natural for Ben Johnson and other cowboy movie
stars like Joel McCrea, Tom Selleck, and Bill Farnsworth to attend events. By
the turn of the millennium the whole thing had woven together into a “lifestyle”
complex that supported several slick magazines like The American Cowboy and
Cowboys & Indians. Real estate out West, their appropriate furnishings, and
elegant clothing were part of the mix. Everyone enjoyed it and the exposure was
good for business, but it was expensive. Industrial Cowboy Art, complete with
moguls and entrepreneurs.
Because of the rodeo connection, Bob began a series of major bronzes,
extravagantly romantic in style, one sculpture for each event plus portraits of
the contestants, both human and animal. These are the bulk of the “hundred
bronzes” shown in Cody. They are itemized in Bob’s book, which he called An
Honest Try, the title of the bull rider piece. Bill Cochran posed for the bull rider,
since it had been his event, and the bull was “White Lightning,” from the Reg
Kessler rodeo stock.5
We went over to Reg’s winter ranch to measure the bull, who didn’t even
have to be run into a chute. The whole bunch of bulls stood around in the snow,
peacefully grinding up their hay. The biggest problem was that the light was so

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E 259
 poor in the foggy weather that they became two-dimensional silhouettes. It was
impossible to make out the muscling on the dark animals.
Bob brought home a Brangus calf and a doggin’ steer which both lived
in the backyard to be handy for modeling. The calf made my life miserable
by butting me every time I crossed the yard, so that I had to carry a stick with
me. The steer had lovely manners but developed a big lump on his jaw, which
required the veterinarian. We finally sold them, which was a relief, both because
I could cross the yard and because I wasn’t awakened by the calf ramming the
house under our bedroom window at dawn because she was out of hay. I was
grateful that Bob wasn’t quite crazy enough to buy a bucking bull – or maybe he
just didn’t have enough money, since they cost a fortune.
When we attended the Flathead Rodeo, following the Kessler stock, the
grandkids were with us. To keep them from being bored, Bob bought them a
white rabbit, but he turned out to be allergic to it, so I bought baby shampoo
and food coloring. Every day the kids washed the bunny and dyed it a new color,
which kept them interested.
On the way back through Marias Pass after the rodeo, Bob sat on the floor
of the van to hold onto the plastilenes and keep them upright while I drove. The
kids and rabbit had gone to sleep, even with the pet magpie hopping around on
their heads. It was late and someone began tailgating us, probably reacting to
the Glacier County license plate, which is widely recognized as being from the
Blackfeet Reservation. They came dangerously close.
At the last turnoff before a long downhill stretch with no guardrail, I be-
came fearful that we might be knocked over the edge. Yelling, “hang on,” I
swerved off the road. Bob must have been dozing or maybe was just hanging on
to too many things – one horse went over on its nose, mushing it flat. Bob was
enraged. It took days for the adrenaline to wear off, but at least he was alert for
the rest of the trip and the kids woke up to help hold on.
The rodeo pieces were explosive and extravagant. This was a major change
in Bob’s style, which had always been too peaceful and detailed for some people.
But only the action pieces were rough and impressionistic. The portraits of
the individual contestants, human or not, were detailed and at rest but alert.
Personality shines out of that ornery Brangus calf.
In 1981 another smaller set of bronzes, one for each event, was made depict-
ing rodeo events of the early 1900s for the High School Rodeo Association. Bob,
with Bill Cochran, sat with bits of clay and made squeeze-ups of typical bucking
strategies which were later developed into small bronzes: Twister, Hooker, and
Spinner. Over the years a steady stream of commissions came from the PRCA in
Colorado Springs, many of them portrait busts.

260 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

7. Asger Mikkelson
Browning, 1970–1975

As Bob became better known, fans became more persistent. One evening Bob
and I were piling bricks from the bake-out oven and hurrying so we could go
eat supper when there was a great scrambling in the rubble chute to the alley.
In clambered a distinguished-looking man in a suit. We stood with our mouths
hanging open while he introduced himself as Asger Mikkelson from Bozeman,
an admirer.
Bob found his voice and read him the riot act about admiring an artist so
much that work was interrupted and the artist was prevented from creating.
“Oh,” exclaimed Asger. “I see what you’re doing here. Let me help.” Taking off
his jacket, he went to piling up bricks. Bob couldn’t resist that. It turned out
that Asger was a fine photographer and he became the key to Bob’s first book,
An Honest Try, in black and white. The bronzes were taken outside to be photo-
graphed and Bob wrote an explanation for each. The book won a prize from the
Professional Printers. By the time it was published in 1975, I had moved back
to Portland.
The events described here mostly happened through the late Sixties – the
CAA invitation to join came in 1967 and NAWA in 1973. Bob continued
to exhibit and win prizes throughout the Seventies and Eighties. The rodeo
series remained in circulation at shows around the country, including one at
the Montana Historical Society in Helena, Montana. An Honest Try, the bull-
rider piece, was reproduced at one and one-half times life-size in Kansas City,
Missouri, commissioned by the J.C. Nichols Co. to stand in front of the Board
of Trade Center. In 1973 the Glenbow Foundation in Calgary, Alberta, in its
persona as the Riveredge Foundation, purchased the entire thirty-three-bronze
rodeo series for a quarter of a million dollars. The money made possible the
purchase of the Flatiron Ranch.
Rodeo brought Bob some of his best friends and proudest moments. The
contestants were people who obeyed the protocols, did their best, but sometimes
couldn’t help bursting out of all bounds, becoming destructive. They abused
themselves more than they intended to hurt others. But they were changing,
like everything else. The old-timers who broke an ankle, splinted it with a motel
pillow, and drove a heavy old road car full of sleeping buddies and shared gear
to the next rodeo where they doped up on veterinary drugs and competed on
no sleep and a little whiskey – those men were being replaced by young family
men, athletes who might not be able to ride a horse unless it was bucking and
who got investors to spot them for a small airplane, so they could conceivably
compete in two simultaneous rodeos if they weren’t too far apart, thus boosting
their potential winnings considerably.

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 Bob was commissioned to do many portraits of the old-timer rodeo hands
for the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association in Colorado Springs. This was
an “ethical society” of a sort, and the ethic was to give your all, do your damned-
est, but to help the others. It went a lot deeper than the Cowboy Artists of
America taking a trail ride together, because it grew out of real physical danger
and the necessity of an occasional violent life-risking chance in order to make
a buck.

8. Meltdown of a marriage

Up until now I’d been conscious that my politics were quite different from Bob’s,
but I’d just kept quiet about my liberal ideas. Now he began to harangue me
about them. I’d sit as close to the pickup door as I could and wish I could put
my fingers in my ears. He ached, his heart felt funny, his legs were stiff – he com-
plained to me, as though I were withholding the power to heal him. If I suggested
he go to the doctor, he scoffed and belittled. Neither would he take medicine
beyond 222’s, a blend of aspirin, caffeine, and codeine available over the counter
in Canada that was probably keeping him alive by thinning his blood.
The doctor said he had too many red blood cells and should give blood
as often as he could, but most of the phlebotomists hurt him too much. One,
a little nun in Kalispell, was almost painless and Bob was so thrilled that he
declared he was going to give her a big kiss. She disappeared and a big male
intern came back with his orange juice. She wouldn’t come near him again.
Finally he did go to the doctor, who warned him he was in imminent dan-
ger of a heart attack. (Harold had already had one a couple of years earlier.) Then
the doctor called me into the office and explained heart attacks with a plaster
model. He emphasized that if I didn’t do EXACTLY what Bob said, to always
sooth and humor him, he would die. After that, every time I showed signs of
being an independent human being, Bob would clutch his chest. And I’d do
what he said.
What saved us for a while was a trained chef at the supper club attached to
the new motel. We’d stagger up there late in the evening, too tired to do more
than wash our hands, our clothes filthy and our hair full of plaster dust. The
friend would seat us in the most remote dark corner and cook for us: steak,
lobster, Baked Alaska. Luxury food, beautifully presented. While we ate, he’d
come sit with us and spin all sorts of wild adventures.
The doctor gave Bob a stress test. He had no treadmill so he got Bob to step
up and down on a little stool. “You need to get more exercise,” he said. So Bob
came home, made a little stool, and stepped up and down on it until he had a
heart attack. I tried to stop him.

262 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Harold and I almost could not get him to go to the Cut Bank hospital. I
don’t know why we didn’t call an ambulance or take him to the Indian Hospital.
It was a long forty-mile drive in a heavy snowstorm. That night he nearly died.
The doctor said if we could see his heart, it would look as though it had been
struck by a bullet.
He was hospitalized for a month. I visited every evening, taking him air-
plane and rocket models to keep him busy and the newest kittens, tucked under
my coat. Once the doctor came back unexpectedly and Bob shoved the kittens
under the covers where the short hospital gown revealed a new “mouse” for their
play. The doctor never did figure out why Bob was making such strange faces.
In the late Sixties, when the money began to come in, he would accuse me
of wanting to clean out the bank account and leave. Or after we got the little
Two Medicine ranch, which he bought without consulting me, he accused me of
wanting to take it. I did love it intensely, but his fears were totally unreal, much
like his accusations that I played bridge too much when in fact I didn’t know
how to play bridge. Jeanette played bridge. He was getting his wives mixed up
with each other.
At least once in 1969 I really meant to go and loaded everything into the
van. I begged, “Just tell me that you love me,” and he answered, “If you can’t tell
whether I love you, then you don’t love ME. If you truly loved me, I wouldn’t
have to explain anything to you. You’d just know.”
So I left and visited relatives in Oregon for a few weeks. My mother was
angry at me. My aunt said, “Men are all children. He doesn’t know what he
wants. Just go home.” I bought three books about how to save a marriage and
sat along a stream in Idaho to read them. Then I went back, and caught him
with another woman.
Other times he said sadly that I had simply outgrown him. That was closer
to the truth. It was his sheltering of me, his challenges, his demanding that I find
out things for him and always be there for him, that had made me grow. One
of the essential and paradoxical patterns in the West is that in order to survive
the struggle a man needs a strong woman, but because he must always keep her
under control, he must be even stronger.
Now that Bob had a reputation as a sculptor the quarrels were more public
and more people felt free to intervene for their own reasons. Often Bob and I
fought on a Saturday, when the crew wasn’t around, because they were uncom-
fortable with our wars. Once I was out in the house, in the bedroom, my face
red and swollen with crying, when I heard Bob come in with other people. I
knew who they were: a dentist and his wife who intruded almost every Saturday
the weather was good. I did NOT want to be quizzed by them, so I got into the
closet and hunkered down among the shoes. Damned if they, led by Bob, didn’t
troop right into the bedroom, open the closet door and stand there in a row,
gaping at me.

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E 263
 Earlier in the relationship I’d gone to a psychiatrist in Great Falls. At this
point we went back to the psychiatrist together (though Bob said, in a very small
voice, “Don’t you think it’s kind of ... weak to go ask for help?”) He showed
the shrink the adding machine tape of what we’d sold that year: a quarter-of-
a-million dollars worth of bronzes. Of course, that was gross, not profit. But it
impressed the shrink, who sort of fell in love with Bob and explained to me that
Bob was trying to get his father’s approval. I knew that.
When the divorce talk came, Bob said, “Now, Mary, I’ve spent all this time
teaching you everything I know. It was like a college course or an apprenticeship
for you, so actually I shouldn’t have to pay you any alimony. Instead you should
pay ME tuition! But I’m willing to call it even.” This actually made sense to
me. I think it seemed dignified. (I didn’t point out that I’d worked in the shop
without wages for four years or that my writing had helped his career.) We
agreed that I would need some startup money when I went back on my own, and
he wrote me a check for $1200.
Then we went hunting, and ended up stuck in the mud with our arms
wrapped around each other, crying desperately, and he called the divorce off. He
told me to put the money in a savings account in my name, because he might
not have enough money to divorce me later.
A year later we had another terrible quarrel and this time he threw a can of
bamboo sprouts so hard it went through the kitchen window, the storm window
over it, the porch window and the window of the pickup parked outside. We
were out of control.
I went to bed and didn’t ever want to get up. But I was afraid to get drunk,
so I took four of his Nembutals. He took two every night to sleep since his heart
attack. The next thing I knew, he and a nurse friend of his were walking me
around. They decided I was okay and put me back to bed. I woke up in a day
or so and the Nembutals were still there, so I took four more and went back to
sleep. I had a doctor’s appointment in Lethbridge, Alberta, in a couple of days.
Bob paid the nurse to take me up there, which must have been like escorting a
helium balloon. I was on a great binge of euphoria. The doctor was Chinese and
scolded, “You must obey husband! Very bad to quarrel!”
What I didn’t know was that Bob had instructed the nurse to check me
into the hospital and leave me. She bought me a nightie and housecoat, gave me
a five-dollar bill and left. About the third day I called Bob to see when he was
coming for me.
“I’ve divorced you. I forbid you to ever come back to Browning.” Then they
gave me a shot to put me back to sleep again. I had a psychiatrist in the hospital,
a blue-eyed Scot with a beard, very Sean Connery. I told him what Bob said
and he laughed and laughed. I was amazed. “He can’t do that,” said the doctor,
rolling his r’s. “You can rrreturn to Brrrowning.” I called the country clerk who
confirmed that Judge McPhillips had granted the divorce, though the papers
were a year old and I was un-represented.

264 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 I called Bob who finally said, “Well, it’s Pop’s birthday tomorrow. I’d better
come get you so you can wish him happy birthday.” His pop was paralyzed from
his final stroke, unspeaking. We took some kittens down to show him and he
smiled. Bob’s mom seemed not to know what had happened, but she was only
pretending.
We just went on as usual. Finally Bob’s mom objected to me living with
him, so I went out to the Two Medicine ranch and spent the winter with the
horses and cats. That saved me. Every day I walked the fence around our prop-
erty, a couple of miles of barbed wire, and then came back to write and draw
alongside the wood cookstove. I had no car but Bob brought me groceries. Every
day was full of grace.
In February he took me to Las Vegas with him to visit Billy Byrne, his
favorite student, and the Woody Herman band with which he played. If it was
meant to be seductive, it didn’t work. I wondered if this were what Bob thought
of as success: threadbare glamour, low-grade addictions, tired stage shows, and
sordid motels. I sat in the bathroom and watched a cockroach roam around in
the tub while Bob snored, exhausted.
Louis Armstrong was playing and Bob was suddenly inspired to go back-
stage. Louis was backstage, all alone, cleaning his horn. Suffering from his own
heart ailments, he was obviously tired to the bone. (Some said his handkerchief
was full of cocaine to kill the pain, that you could occasionally see white powder
on his face.)
Bob began a pitch to make a portrait bust of him and Louis kindly resisted.
Bob pressed harder, saying he’d had a heart attack and wanted what might be
his last sculpture to be of Louis. Louis said, “Then you know how I feel, man. I
just can’t do it.” I tugged Bob away, still protesting, “It would only take a little
while to make measurements....” Louis shook his head sadly.
Towards spring Bob was paying a trapper to catch pregnant bobcats live
and store them in the ancient chicken house. He wanted the kittens for pets.
He didn’t remember to get food out to them very often, so clearly he had no
background in prenatal care. The cats were terrified, anguished, starving, freez-
ing. If any of them had given birth, the others would have eaten the kittens.
The so-called food was mostly skulls, so it looked like a charnel house in their
dark, reeking prison. I talked to them through the window but it only made
everything worse – they’d bounce frantically off the walls.
I’m ashamed to say I didn’t free them because I was still dependent on
Bob. I saw myself as one of them. He let them out when it was clear there were
going to be no kittens, though I don’t know how well they could do with their
trap-maimed front feet. By then the season was so late that they were no good as
fur, which is what saved their lives.
At his mom’s prompting, Bob gave me the little red van. When the gumbo
road dried up so I could drive in and out, I got a job with the school. When I

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E 265
 Bob as Legendary Sculptor, about 1975. Photo: Buster Ruetten.

266 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

had rent money, I moved up to East Glacier and he would occasionally come to
take me out for dinner.
Many years later I was in Helena at a gas station when a woman from
Browning stopped me. She had been in court the day Bob got his divorce. She
told me that afterwards Bob went to a bench in the hallway, sat, and cried harder
than she’d ever seen a grown man cry, so hard she was a little frightened. It was
important to her that I know. I took a lot of comfort from that. She said she
went home and told her husband if he ever divorced her, she’d take him for every
penny he had and then beat him black and blue.
In 1971, after the legal divorce, I was living up in East Glacier. I had stayed
out on the ranch that winter but in the spring a neighbor had gone into the pig
business. It was Calvin Augare, Bob’s hunting partner, whose life was drifting
a little out of control. The trouble was that the pigs were unconfined. Some of
them got into the habit of coming upstream and rooting around in the ranch
yard. They could get so eager around the edges of the house that they actually
lifted the little cabin off its railroad tie foundations.
Bob lost his temper at the constant destruction. One day he shot several
good-sized hogs, then realized that Calvin’s temper was just as intense as his
own and he was likely to get “thumped” at the very least. But he was not strong
enough to drag the hog carcasses into the pickup so he could dump them up
in the mountains for bears to eliminate the evidence. He called me to come to
the ranch and help. I turned him down. That was probably the real moment of
divorce. I felt I had given the marriage an honest try.
I left East Glacier in 1973 and returned to Portland, where I became the first
female animal control officer in Multnomah County, the second in the State of
Oregon. Bob wrote the recommendation that got me the job. I was thirty-four
and immediately started on coursework at Portland State University, but in the
end I went to the University of Chicago to become a Unitarian Universalist
minister.

X I I I M O LT E N B R O N Z E : C O W B OY H A L L O F FA M E 267
 Part Three:

Diminuendo
 XIV

Chasing:
The Thunder Pipe Bundle

1. How to “chase” a bronze

When the investment is knocked off the rough casting of a bronze, what emerges is not
anything anyone would recognize, but rather a blank, a potential. The bronze encage-
ment of the sprues and vents must be cut off, the places where they were attached must
be filed down, and every flaw must be searched out and addressed. This is not exciting
or particularly rewarding – just a hard job that has to be very carefully done.
In the Fifties when Bob first began trimming small models in plaster, he used a
little Dremel tool, a handheld hobby grinder and drill. Often it overloaded, stalled,
and burned out. Pretty soon he had three of them: one in use, one being sent for repairs
and one coming back from repairs. Ten years later when the Bighorn Foundry was
really operating, the grinders were flexible shaft industrial equipment that would
cut steel and that rarely failed. To operate them, one needed ear-protecting headgear,
goggles, and a good deal of muscle. When we were only doing taxidermy, the shop
was a quiet place where we visited as we sewed and pasted. We sang along with the
radio, learning the words to the songs. Now each of us worked in noise-imposed
isolation with no chance to exchange news or ideas. By quitting time we were much
more tired and a little cross.
On the early small plaster animals it had been possible to trim flaws with little
rasps and knives. Holes were filled in using a paintbrush and a saucer of water with
a tiny island of dry plaster in it. But on the bronzes, one used a set of chisels and
the big grinders. Holes had to be welded or brazed, then ground down to match the
surface around it. (Brazing uses high-temperature solder, welding does not.) This
was arduous, exacting work – a little too much pressure and the surface was cut
too deeply, had to be re-welded. The cost of a mistake was high and we were always
under time pressure. Sharp bronze slivers crept into one’s clothes and hair, miserably
working their way into skin. It was necessary to wear goggles or a face visor as well

271
 Chasing the cast figure of The Winchester Rider with an industrial flex
shaft grinder. Photo: Buster Ruetten.

272 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

as the ear covers, so we got sweaty and couldn’t hear the phone or intruders. After we
rigged the phone to a loud bell, anyone working late on quiet projects was harshly
startled if it rang.
The hardest task of all was getting the investment out of the inside of the casting
so the patch could be welded shut. We used hoses, crooked wires, dental picks, sand-
blasting and everything else we could invent to get the hollow really clean. Otherwise
the leftover investment would react to moisture by starting an efflorescence over the
outside. Mostly the job took persistence. These are the kinds of foundry tasks people
don’t like.
We never did much with little mallets and hammers to take advantage of the
malleability of bronze, though in the past some artisans were masters of the tech-
nique. Many writers about sculpture spend time talking about the quality of the
surface: what sort of materials will yield what kind of responsiveness, how the surface
will affect the patina, how light flows along it and leads the eye. The best sculpture
photos will show this.

2. Blackfeet religious ceremonies

Browning, 1963 to 1999

“Chasing,” in the sense of working on the surface of metal, is the second dic-
tionary meaning of the word. An even earlier meaning is in the root word,
the French “ciseleur,” literally chiseler, which in English slang means one who
cheats or swindles. The first meaning is pursuit, and in this sense Bob ordinarily
loved the game of “chase.” But his pursuit of fame began to be entangled with
swindlers. Far from being a peaceful, protected place, a reservation – especially
an American reservation – is so much in conflict among the people that it is
like stones on a lakeshore, rolling and tumbling against each other. Poverty and
trauma paralyze some, but drive others to find a new way to be in the world.
By 1965 the pressure and risk of being a sculptor was crushing Bob. We
no longer talked or took time off to paint or ride. Customers and tourists were
always underfoot. The phone rang constantly. Life was about only one thing:
bronzes. Desperately needing a source of personal inner strength, Bob turned
to traditional Blackfeet religion, in part because he could understand it – more
than that, felt it in his bones and heart – and in part because the Old People
among the Blackfeet had always been his friends and protectors, literally from
the moment of his birth. If Douglas Gold is correct when he says that in 1914,
when Gold arrived on the train and “Robert” arrived in his mother’s bedroom,
there were about forty white men on the reservation, then Bob must have been
one of the first white births.

XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE 273

 Since he came to the Amskapi Pikuni as an infant, to him the only “real”
Blackfeet were the ones he knew as a child. Blackfeet love children. This is so
basic that any Blackfeet who abuses or despises children is that much less a
Blackfeet. Bob grew up with Blackfeet buddies, in and out of their houses, eat-
ing at their tables and “sleeping over” in their beds. His hunting partners were
Blackfeet. As an adult he taught the children, so they could lead the whole
reservation with their music and he formed his pickup bands around Blackfeet
musicians. He was a veteran of World War II, just like Blackfeet young men. His
employees were always Blackfeet. Then there was the oddly intimate relation-
ship between a judge and his clientele. Even I, acting as informal bailiff, got to
know all the street drunks in town, and a jolly, friendly, mostly harmless bunch
they were. But Bob’s mother made the taboo on Indian wives stick: he never
dated Blackfeet girls.1
As Bob grew older and the publicity about his art career became more
feverish, the younger warriors began to feel resentful and then competitive. By
the time AIM rhetoric filled the air, some people had settled down to hate Bob
Scriver, even as others attached themselves to get a little reflected glory. Fewer
and fewer really knew Bob or what he did. They saw him in the cafés and in the
newspaper. It’s a truism around Browning that almost everything successful gets
attacked and tested – Bob no less than other projects.
Our understanding of Blackfeet religion was hard-won, gradually achiev-
ing definition and detail as we converted from readers to participants. I hesitate
to describe anything because immediately there will be an outcry, some of it
from people who think they know better, some from people who feel it should
be secret, and some offering money to be included in it. Far too many people
romantically believe it to be a mark of distinction, a way of being better than
others, and there are always opportunists ready to accommodate them.
The most “high church” ceremony might be the Horn Society, which we
were able to attend only for a few hours with special dispensation. The Blackfoot
reserves in Canada have been able to sustain their old ways and language more
successfully than the people on the United States side, because the Canadians
(historically, the Throne of England) were not afraid to paternalistically shut the
borders of the reserves – no whites in without permission and no “Aboriginals”
out without permission. This both protected and confined them.
In the past, Horn Society “doings” were discussed by anthropologists in
Latin, so as to protect the uneducated who might get the wrong idea. Nowadays,
anthropologists like Alice Kehoe simply state the facts, which are not so shock-
ing to today’s ears. The ceremony is meant to encourage fertility in grass, bison,
and humans – in part with ritualized coition. We didn’t know that and didn’t
find it out there.
What Bob and I saw was a huge circle of people with their lodges pitched
behind them. At one point the holiest of the men ran around the outside perim-
eter of the circle, carrying significant long staffs with a curve on the end, and we

274 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

could see that it was hard on some of the older ones. Louis Plenty Treaty, one of
the most conscientiously religious people I’ve ever met, was a runner. We were
told that if one of them tripped, it would be a terrible sign. Louis, over eighty,
was struggling heroically to keep his feet. He is one of the Bundle Keepers Bob
portrayed, and he sometimes turned up in Methodist or Catholic brochures
because of his face and braids.
Bob and I had our faces painted in a huge lodge created by stretching sev-
eral canvas “skins” over poles erected with two “centers” at the top. Sunlight
filtered through the colored canvas as through stained glass, falling gently on
the women sitting below. Our faces were painted sulphur yellow with two ver-
million stripes, one across both eyes and one through the mouth and out to the
jawline. We were told not to wash our faces off until after sundown. Then we
were excused to leave. We drove south along the Rocky Mountains, along the
route of the Old North Trail, the long landscape slipping through our memories
of the day.
Several hours later we got to the border, having rather forgotten about our
faces. The border agent came around to the window to ask the usual questions,
Bob turned his head at the last minute, and the agent’s shock was very satisfac-
tory. We kept poker faces and let him be the disconcerted one.
Medicine Pipe Bundle ceremonies and Beaver Bundle ceremonies are de-
scribed and photographed in The Old North Trail by Walter McClintock.2 In the
early Sixties, no one paid much attention to whatever it was that happened on
Moccasin Flats or in the houses of the more traditional people. In the opinion
of many, the participants were old and backwards. The conservative Baptists
and Pentecostals called them Satanic and would have burned the Bundles, or
so they said.

3. Blackfeet ceremonial objects

European precious objects are made from materials that are hard and shining,
which means they are often metal ornamented with gemstones. The qualities
of metal are the chill, the “ting” sound, the sharp points and edges for needles
and knives, the ease in heating liquids. Blackfeet clearly treasured needles, awls,
hatchets, and knives. Lewis and Clark carried small scissors and medals for gifts
and trade.
After millennia of heating water by dropping hot rocks into a puddle made
by lining a hole in the ground with rawhide, how those old women must have
loved their copper tea billies with neatly fitted lids and bails for hanging over a
fire. Just a few minutes over the coals boiled water for an “infusion” of whatever
herb they fancied. And buttons – what an innovation were bright metal buttons

XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE 275

 on clothes, not for closings so much as decorations. Metal thimbles for punch-
ing a needle through leather. Big three-edged needles that would even penetrate
thick leather. The people made cases of rawhide or tanned hide, fringed and
decorated, so as not to lose these precious things made of metal and so they
could be kept handy, identified as their own.
Even now the appeal of glass beads in strong colors is quick and sharp,
especially the blue of sky and the red of blood. Brass beads and the dusty pink
ones – almost mauve, the color of the inside of a mouth. Faceted beads and
bigger red beads with white insides. Sometimes sewn on black velvet or rough
red wool, Stroud cloth from Stroud, England. Glass beads and brass falconry
bells were traded to the Blackfeet long before white men actually appeared, just
as Pacific Coast dentalium shells and red Sioux pipestone had been traded across
the continent.
Blackfeet holy objects are mostly organic: bone, wood, hide, ivory. When
one takes them in hand, they are soft, warm, easy to hold, without sharp edges
or points that bite. Stones might be iniskum that look like miniature buffalo
and fit into one’s fist (baculites) or are coiled like a snail (ammonites). They were
rubbed with red ochre until they were like skin, silky and red. Porcupine quills
were flattened between the teeth and woven into embroidery, fitted around the
shafts of eagle feathers. Eagle down, orange flicker feathers, the skins of whole
birds and small animals so old that some are extinct or endangered, like kit
foxes. Some hollow bird bones were for sucking out illness, some were made
into whistles, and sets of Hand Game (also called Stick Game) might have
markers made of human finger bones, cross-hatched with the same marks as
the red ochre stones of Blombas, Africa, seventy thousand years old. The oldest
Bundles include scalps. Everything smells of tobacco and sweetgrass, included
to discourage insects as one would put lavender in a linen closet.
In the old days Blackfeet were used to hours of tedious, arduous, repetitious
work with their hands – chipping and scraping hides, rubbing plants into fibers
for spinning into ropes, making fire by friction, chipping arrowheads, and drill-
ing holes in bone by twirling something hard and sharp. They did it quietly, daily,
together, telling stories and jokes or smoking small pipes. No one complained. It
was habitual, taken for granted, like our crew doing taxidermy work.
Perhaps you have knit a sweater and know how everything that happened
while you knitted becomes part of that garment. Maybe you knew who the
sweater was for and pictured that person wearing it. That’s how it was for Indians.
The small daily incidents of their lives were worked into their tanning. The face
of the family member shone up through new moccasins as their relation’s fingers
beaded them, for each pair was fitted to a specific person. Sometimes there was a
tragedy, a turning point, a conversion or decision, that became part of an object,
maybe something ceremonial that needed to be commemorated, given power.
Then the object was Sacred. Paul Dyck associates the first Thunder Pipe Bundles
with the first smallpox epidemics.

276 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 A Thunder Pipe Bundle is a pipestem three feet long, a “calumet,” made on
a white man’s lathe. It is decorated with the entire tail of an adult golden eagle,
fanned out and beaded or quilled along the spines of the feathers. Brass falconry
bells, round and shanked, made in England, hang clustered to represent the
Pleiades. There are bright silk ribbons, ermine skins (white is a sacred color
– they never used the dun summer skins) and usually the entire skin of some
colorful bird. On one it is a fighting rooster. On the Little Dog pipestem it was a
green parrot, complete with glass eyes. The Last Star Pipestem has a wood duck,
an exceptionally striking bird.
Religious objects were gathered into themes, rolled up in cloth, swaddled in
buckskin and enclosed in rawhide cases for transport on horses. They were never
in wooden boxes, as white people would keep them: drawers, cupboards, trunks.
White authorities sometimes do not treat Bundles with respect – to them it
signals lack of value. Scientific instruments are kept in boxes. Silver flatware
is stored in lined boxes. Jewelry goes in jewel boxes. But to the Nitzitahpi, the
soft Bundles – often the size of babies – are alive, to be held tenderly against the
body. Only the modern dead are boxed – the ancient dead were Bundled.
Bundles, especially personal Bundles for one’s own use, are likely to include
small strange things cast off by whites, like tiny porcelain dolls (were they to
induce a miscarriage or to encourage fertility?) mixed in with actual scalps and
little drawstring bags of paint. One startling Bundle contained a handful of
surgical hemostats. This Bundle turned out to be less than sacred – it was a
quilling kit. The hemostats made it much easier to flatten and insert the quills.
Cast or stamped metal stars from jewelry or furniture, coins, and medallions,
small metal boxes for pills or matches, flints and strike-a-lights, all might be in
Bundles.
Bundles had bearing on the welfare of the whole band as well as the Keeper.
A Bundle came to have its own songs and dances and to require certain obliga-
tions and restrictions from its Keepers. Since the Plains Indians were nomads,
all their possessions had to be portable, so early Bundles were limited in size to
what a person or dog could transport. Late Bundles (like the Beaver Bundle,
possibly honoring the fur trade as a source of wealth) could be as big as a horse
could pack.

XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE 277

 4. Bob cuts the rawhide
Browning, 1963

Maybe the beginning of Bob’s sense of Sacred Doings goes back to Sun Lodge
Ceremonies he witnessed as a child and never forgot. He could still sing the
song of the men on horseback bringing willow branches to the big round Sun
Lodge with a forked tree in the middle. Maybe it continued when there was a
Sun Lodge Ceremony in Browning in 1963. Darryl Blackman was the sponsor
of the ceremony and he was close to Bob, often did bits of work for him or sold
him artwork. That year his grandmother had become ill and Darryl pledged
to sponsor a ceremony if she recovered, which she did. She was too young to
be the Holy Woman, only Bob’s age, but she probably qualified in terms of
virtue. An ancient lady, totally irreproachable, came down from Canada. The
age and virtue of this person is the key to the ceremony – if she is flawed, the
consequences will be played out in a year of disasters and deaths. But there is risk
for the woman, because she must fast for days.
When the big framework is assembled, someone must cut rawhide strips
for bindings from a stinking soaked hide by starting a knife at the edge and
carefully paring off a continuous concentric shape. Joking, the managers of the
ceremony came over to Bob and insisted that he do the nasty job. Pressing the
town judge into service was pretty funny, especially since some of them had
done the equally repulsive job of cleaning skulls for him. Since he was a taxi-
dermist, they could be confident that he had the skill to handle the slimy stuff.
Despite his pretended reluctance, he was moved to be included in the ceremony,
even in such a lowly role – which some experts claim is quite important. More
than anything, he wanted to belong to these old-timers he’d known so long. He
loaned them a buffalo skull (after it was painted it stayed on his hearth in the
studio) the same way he often loaned them back their big drums after they had
pawned them to him.

5. Cree healing ceremony, Blackfeet bundle opening

Browning, 1967–1999

A few years later, when we were under enormous pressure to turn out work for
Cody, as well as worrying about Margaret’s cancer, the wall of one of the bake-
out kilns collapsed onto Bob’s leg and bruised it to the bone. His leg swelled
and was intensely painful, but he would not go to the doctor. Hearing of this,
some old Indians came quietly to ask Bob to participate in a healing ceremony.
It was a Cree ceremony and Bob never did get the name of it right. A telescope?

278 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

A rocket? He never could remember. But he went with them and was amazed
by what happened.
The little house they took him to was sealed with blankets taped over the
windows so it was totally dark. There was singing and drumming, the wings
of something brushed his face, objects moved noisily around the room, and
he was prayed over. After that, he began to heal. We had been quarrelling and
I remember sitting in the dusk on the outside back steps up to my little space
under the Museum eaves when he came home. He said quietly, “I prayed for
you, Mary.” I think he meant it as a gift, and I took it that way. For a while he
had a quiet heart.
The grandkids came and, even though he had been sworn to secrecy, Bob
re-enacted the healing ceremony for them. He covered the windows so it was
dark and had an eagle wing to brush faces and make flying sounds. Shoes hit the
wall. The kids were big-eyed. They were already spooky, worried, even shocky
from their mother’s death. Maybe it helped them, but maybe it just scared them
more. Such ceremonies have their dark side.
Bob never did participate in a sweatlodge, which has become a popular
initiation ordeal for white people who want to participate in Indian religion. So
far as I know, he was never asked, but if he had been, he would have said that his
heart couldn’t stand it. That might have more than one meaning, especially in
terms of sweat lodges run as psychological confessionals, like AA meetings.
Besides the old people who were the actual practitioners, Bob was get-
ting a lot of advice from John Hellson, a curator of ethnology at the Manitoba
Provincial Museum, and from Adolf Hungry-Wolf, who also had been acquir-
ing Bundles but made a living by producing books about Blackfoot life. Both
men had acquired Bundles through transfer. John – short, bearded and tooth-
less – was an ex-pugilist and amateur anthropologist from Cornwall, England.
Adolf – a handsome slender man – was Austrian, raised in California. Both men
had married Blood women from excellent families and used them to get access
to material. (Both are now divorced.) Both had children from their marriages
and both lived in Canada.
Other than John and Adolf, no other whites seemed aware that ceremonies
were still practiced. Bob had been friendly with the two early curators at the
Museum of the Plains Indian next door, Claude Schaeffer and John Ewers, the
recognized experts on the Blackfeet, but they talked about horses and war. Tom
Kehoe, the third curator at the Museum of the Plains Indian, was interested in
tipi rings and buffalo jumps. Alice Kehoe, later in life, wrote about ceremonies.
Warily, Bob accepted Hellson and Hungry-Wolf. Over the decades the
careers of John Hellson and Adolf Hungry-Wolf separated sharply. Adolf re-
mained a member of the community and gradually learned every song still left
in existence. John Hellson began to make a little money, got a set of dentures,
and from then on seemed changed. Bob felt close to John Hellson and trusted
him more than he ought to have. It was John who got him more and more

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 excited, then wanted to sell him sacred objects. Adolf was a participant/expert
with no intention of sharing his prestige or selling objects, but Hellson was
interested in turning a profit – finally to the point of breaking the law.
In the Eighties and later, through contact with Hellson, Bob bought objects
from a man named Flaherty, whom he acknowledges in his book, Blackfeet,
Artists of the Northern Plains. This man was a very dubious character indeed,
even more so than the coyote artifact buyers who constantly slunk around the
reservation. I believe that Bob’s need to be privileged, to be “the one who knows,”
even magical, and his yearning to be admired, blinded him to the swindles that
entangled these people or made him think he wouldn’t be drawn in to share
some guilt.
He was especially anxious to somehow overpower the Neo-Traditionalists
in order to end their attacks on him. When we first were involved in Bundle
Openings, those youngsters were still in grade school, so a decade later he felt they
were both usurpers and disrespectful. By the Seventies the Neo-Traditionalists
were often the ones who interacted with government officials, especially when
repatriation began, so materials were restored to them as representing the tribe.
In fact, when Curley Bear Wagner, the cultural director, began to bring back
the skeletons of Blackfeet that had been in museum drawers back East, the old
people wanted nothing to do with them. So far as they were concerned, those
people were still “alive” and maybe angry.
“Sun Worship” is a view of life that requires people to live in harmony. In
fancy terms, it is a religion that is “omni-theistic” (sees God in everything) and
“ecosystematic,” (organizes the world according to the ecology). To the early
Indians all of nature – land, water, sky, and creatures – was infused with Power
and Mystery. The closest one can come in terms of Christianity is probably
“process theology,” devised by Alfred North Whitehead as a way of reconciling
Christian categories with quantum mechanics.
Of the ceremonies evolved by the Plains Indian to dramatize their attitude
toward Nature, the opening of the Sacred Thunder Pipe Bundle is one of the
most significant because it is a spring ceremony, a kind of Easter celebrating
the return of abundance. But there are other Bundles. All had materials drawn
from the land, known to tribal senses, carrying poetic concepts. The patterns
of the ceremony were deeply human, to be found in ceremonies everywhere:
coming together, marking a special time and place, sharing food and song, per-
haps dancing (slow and dignified), and going apart. If it were done rightly and
intensely, the people left renewed, restored to harmony with life.
Over the years since these various Sun ceremonies were born and practiced,
they had been forbidden by the government, suppressed as immoral (the most
important rituals address coitus and birth), labeled the works of Satan, given up
as old-fashioned and irrelevant, and just ignored out of lack of interest. Probably
the most serious damage has come from the People gradually separating from
the land itself. No longer do they take small stones and animals in their hands.

280 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 John Hellson and Bob Scriver discuss figures from The Opening of the Sacred
Thunderpipe Bundle, 1969. Photo: Mary Scriver.

No longer are they dependent on the hunting that taught them animal lifeways.
No longer do they catch eagles from camouflaged pits. Many have given up
horses altogether and ride in pickups. Even if they participated in ceremonies,
the deep poetry has fallen away. But it was there for Bob.
In the spring of 1968 he began to mock up a sculpture of a “medicine man,”
portraying Charlie Reevis, with no idea that the piece would develop into the
detailed, ethnologically accurate, and large-scale work called The Opening of the
Sacred Thunderpipe Bundle. Because Indian ceremonies often invoke spiritual
powers for the purpose of healing, the white man has mistaken the part for the
whole and lumped all religious performance as “medicine.” Disease is not the
only enemy from which an Indian sought protection through his religion. He

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 also sought to guard against battle losses, financial misfortune, quarrels, and
generally what an Indian friend called “unluck.”
In Bob’s book, The Blackfeet, Artists of the Northern Plains, I recognize
specific beaded shirts, leggings, gloves, moccasins, and horse regalia. I know
those brass-studded knife scabbards and guns. They are the materials that T.E.,
Harold and Bob had acquired before Bob met John Hellson. T.E. kept the shirts
and beaded rifle scabbards tacked (heedless of holes in the buckskin) to the wall
of the glassed-in front porch where he sat to smoke in the evening, until one day
– for fear of inviting theft – he took them down. They were beautiful objects
that attracted all eyes.
Plains Indian religious artifacts, small “pokes” and rawhide cases to be kept
hidden away, were very different. Only the initiated even knew that they existed,
much less what they were. Some of the smoky, funky old packets of strange
materials that Bob had bought from local people over the years were actually
from Sacred Bundles, but he had no idea of that. The people who sold them had
stopped caring, or needed the money, or had stolen the objects anyway. They
usually had elaborate cover stories.
There are two ways of “owning” a Bundle. One might buy the actual physi-
cal aggregation of objects and say he “owned” a Bundle. But according to Indian
ways, the only way to really “own” a Bundle is to have it transferred with its
power in an elaborate ceremony. This is a safeguard in case it is captured in
battle – so the enemy cannot use it. Traditional people felt that the real power
was not in the objects but in their use and understanding, the same as the real
power of Communion is not in the chalice and platen. The new “Keeper” not
only gives valuable horses and blankets to the old Keeper, but also assumes all
the obligations and restrictions (as does the wife) and learns all the songs and
rituals belonging to the Bundle. Often taboos were meant to protect against
modern intrusions, for instance, our Bundle required that one not turn over
meat in a frying pan with a fork. I use metal tongs, but the real old people used
tongs that were a forked branch from a willow or sarvisberry bush. (Probably
better for nonstick pans anyway.)
The Bundle used as a prototype in the ceremony portrayed was the one col-
lected by John Ewers in 1943 for the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning.
Called the “Blood Medicine Pipe,” it had belonged to Makes-Cold-Weather,
a Piegan Blackfeet, and it had been displayed for decades. The models for the
people were the last Amskapi Pikuni Pipe Keepers still active that we knew.
The first Opening we attended was in the Sixties at the home of George and
Molly Kicking Woman. The large main room was newly repainted and cleared of
furniture. Directly opposite the door side of the room hung the Bundle, from a
nail rather than from a tripod as used in a tipi. George Kicking Woman sat on one
side of the Bundle and Molly sat on the other. The men ranged themselves along
the wall next to George, the ones of greater importance, such as Keepers of other
Bundles, next to George.3 The women sat along the wall next to Molly in a similar

282 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

order. Four drummers sat in front of the women. Visitors sat in the remaining
space along the door side. Most people had brought the cushions out of old sofas
to make sitting on the floor a little easier. There were chairs for older folks.
Molly – as woman of the house and guardian of the Bundle – lifted down
the shawl-draped shape. (At some point in history a trader had convinced the
people that a plaid shawl was a necessary part of a Bundle.) Dick, George, Molly
and a helper woman (Margaret Many Guns) knelt beside it and began to un-
wrap, singing the songs and making the movements for each layer.
Inside the first wrappings, the contents were individually swathed. As each
item was revealed, Dick stood to dance with it in four directions to four songs,
so that he always ended in front of Molly and handed the object to her. As Molly
took each item, she held it to each shoulder in turn and prayed over it before
returning it to the pile of wrappings.
Then there was a break for a meal, but even that was part of the ceremony.
Sarvisberry soup was served and each person picked out the biggest, plumpest
berry he or she could see to hold during a prayer and then handed it forward to
be placed on the altar as insurance against a good berry harvest the next year.
The menu included oranges, hard tack, boiled ribs, fry bread, donuts and black
coffee with lots of sugar in it. At the end of the meal, plastic sacks and empty
Cool Whip or margarine tubs with covers were handed out and many took food
home to their families.
When the food was cleared away, the men prepared to dance with the
Bundle contents. Only the most important men asked for the Pipe itself. They
“counted coup” to establish their credentials. In the old days they would have
told war exploits but now stories tended to be trips to Washington, D.C., and
political victories. A Canadian Indian with a crippled foot from a rodeo accident
directed us Napikwans to cross our arms on our chests to show we took the
prayer to heart.
Related persons stood in place to dance and the women punctuated the
songs with ululations of triumph and pride. Mary Grounds, over a hundred
years old but alert, gave the most blood-curdling cries. After a man danced,
people gave away money to show how generous and prosperous their family was.
The Canadian with the crippled foot turned out to be the best orator of all and
when he had danced, he thrilled Bob by giving him money.
Some people represent Bundle Keepership as a great honor and tend to
brag, but the Real People know that the importance is in the obligation of pro-
tecting the People by behaving carefully and protectively. For this reason Bundle
Keepers are chosen carefully, not because of high status.

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 6. The Thunder Pipe Bundle transfer
Browning, 1969

That fall Bob had a dream. He was a small boy sitting on an elk hide and a bear
hide in a tipi, watching the warrior boast as he smoked a sacred pipe.
“I am very powerful,” bragged the warrior. “More powerful than any other
man!” It was spring and a passing rainstorm blotted out the sun ominously.
Thunder rumbled over the prairie.
“I am so powerful, I am even stronger than Thunder himself!” shouted the
warrior. The people gasped, for Thunder was one of the most powerful forces in
nature. But before they could reprimand such conceit, there was a tremendous
flash and a strong smell.
The little boy was stunned, knocked unconscious, and while he was uncon-
scious he had a dream inside the dream. He saw Thunder coming towards him,
a tall, dark warrior. “Boy,” he commanded, “You must make a Sacred Pipe for
me. I will give you all the instructions. You must keep this Pipe in a Bundle with
other objects, as I will explain to you, and only open it in the Spring when you
hear my voice. You must not smoke this Pipe. Only I will smoke it and when I
smoke, I set the hills and plains on fire.”
Thunder told the boy how to make the Pipe and Bundle and what songs
and duties must be performed. When the boy came to himself, he found the
tipi and all the people in it had been destroyed. Only he had survived, perhaps
because the elk hide and bear hide on which he sat had insulated him.
The boy made the pipe as he had been told, with many decorations of er-
mine and ribbon, a cluster of brass bells to represent the Pleiades, and the full
tail of an eagle, each feather shaft reinforced with intricate quillwork. When he
wrapped it along with the other skins of birds, he made the outer wrapping of
an elk hide and a bearskin. That was the end of Bob’s dream. When he woke
up, lying there beside me, he told it to me. I thought it was significant that in
the dream he was a boy, not a grown man. This story had been with him for a
long time.
When he told the old people in town, they said it was a dream meaning
he should become a Bundle Keeper, and suggested the Little Dog Bundle since
Richard had no wife. Bob began to go through the necessary steps. Wearing
a blanket as instructed, he went in the traditional way to present Dick with
a common smoking pipe as a formal request. In accepting the pipe, Dick ac-
knowledged the request. They saw that Bob was sincere in his wish to make the
Pipe Bundle a part of his own life. They also knew he had enough money to pay
for both the Bundle and the ceremonies.

284 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 From the Glacier Reporter:

At a solemn and ancient religious ceremony on July 31, Richard Little Dog
transferred his Sacred Pipe Bundle to Mr. and Mrs. (Bob and Mary) Scriver.
The day long ceremony took place in two tipis put together on the Indian
Days campground. George and Molly Kicking Woman assisted and directed
the Scrivers in their preparation and Margaret Many Guns acted as Richard’s
assistant during the ceremony. Tom and Margaret Many Guns had been
custodians of the Bundle since Richard Little Dog was widowed.
At least two hundred local people were fed the traditional berry soup,
boiled ribs, fry bread, hard tack and donuts. ... No photographs, tape
recordings or notes were allowed and tourists were discouraged...
The ancient ceremonies of the Blackfeet are beautiful and dignified and
should be preserved, not just on tape or film, but in the hearts and on the
tongues of young Indian people. There is a great movement among young
people across the nation to become closer to Nature and her laws, especially
as understood by her children, the Indians. May the young Blackfeet not be
the last to rediscover their own heritage.
–Mary Scriver
August, 1969

I couldn’t resist preaching, but maybe this was encouraging the aggressive Neo-
Traditionalists. I envisioned them as like obedient teenagers sitting with their
elders to learn. I ought to have known better.
To follow the old ways of doing the Transfer, Bob had gone to great pains.
Out on the campgrounds next to town he put up a lodge and hired Crazy Dog
Soldiers to keep drunks, tourists, and gawkers out. The two of us learned a
prayer and provided new clothes for Richard Little Dog and Maggie Many
Guns, as they did for us, since part of the ritual entailed exchanging clothes so
that the “Power” would know to follow us away afterwards instead of the old
Keepers. Cecile Horn and Molly Kicking Woman were hired to supply berry
soup. A young horse was bought to give to Richard along with money, tobacco,
and blankets.
Bob was particularly concerned that we be painted – not just him and me,
but also the dog, Buckshot, and his beloved horse, Gunsmoke. When the door
of the lodge was pulled back so we could go out while Richard painted the
horse, Richard mischievously pretended that Bob was giving him Gunsmoke
in exchange for the Bundle. Bob believed the ruse and was so alarmed that he
began to interrupt the ceremony, paralyzed by the prospect of losing either the
horse or the Bundle. But then Richard began to laugh and everyone relaxed.
We had to have Blackfeet names so Richard named Bob for his ancestor,
Middle Rider, whom Bob had known. The name was “Sik-poke-si-mahp”, which
means, roughly, “He who likes his backfat burned black.” Not one of those

XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE 285

 Hollywood names. Normally the wife would receive the name of Middle Rider’s
wife, but her name was “Slim Woman.” Richard looked at my ample figure and
made a tactful segue to “Iron Woman,” “Meek-skim-yah-kee,” which probably
had something to do with my iron-rust-red hair, though Bob always claimed it
referred to my disposition.
In the next years when the pressure was high – and it almost always was
– Bob would smudge the Bundle and say his prayers. We kept the traditional
routine of the Bundle as it rested on its tripod by the hearth, right under the
television where it was easy to look at, which some folks thought incongruous.
Many late evenings Bob spent fussing over a smoking pipe, trying out mixtures
of kinnikinnick and tobacco, shredding cottonwood bark on the kitchen stove
burners for smudge. It was a sensory way of being mindful, pre-verbal concepts
working deep in the mind, a form of prayer he continued the rest of his life.

7. Counting coup
Browning and Edmonton, 1976–1990

In 1990 the United States passed an act requiring that all public museums re-
patriate – that is, return to the makers – all sacred objects and human skeletons
from their collections. When Red Empowerment and AIM began to develop a
political approach to the Old Holy Ways, reclaiming them and excluding whites,
Bob did not find that easy to accept. He was an old white man who – from the
point of view of young bulls – was unreasonably wealthy.
Things had gotten worse after there was a fire in the taxidermy shop and
museum on September 11, 1975. It was about the time of the second Wounded
Knee, and the FBI pronounced solemnly that AIM did the deed as an act of ter-
rorism and claimed they had proof – but nothing went to court. The Red Crow
Café became a dueling ground where AIM sympathizers sat in small clusters
plotting and snickering, while Bob, Lorraine, and other white folks sat in a
different cluster, sneering and patronizing.
In town on vacation from Portland, one morning I sat with Bob’s group
for a while, then went over to talk to the AIMsters. At least half were former
students of mine. This “crossing over” of mine outraged Bob, who felt a person
was either a friend or a betrayer. The Neo-Traditionalists tended to be Blackfeet
Community College students, quite sure the way to a better future was by capi-
talizing on their identity. The college provided a forum for big ideas. I always
thought of the “Red Man’s Literary Club” that was formed by the first returning
Carlisle students, unfortunately stifled by government agents.
As the twentieth century ended, young Blackfeet went to their older fam-
ily members and challenged them about their heritage. Where were the family

286 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Holy Objects? Or the beaded suits, for that matter. Why hadn’t they been raised
to speak Blackfeet? What about their family history? The elders found this un-
settling and blamed Scriver. They needed the love and respect of their children.
They said, “Those white men stole them.” To Bob Scriver and some other whites,
the college was a source of trouble and a force for dissension.
Years later Bob told me – in a voice that I learned to recognize as his “sane”
voice – that the museum fire had not been arson. In the Sixties we had hired
a man who had mistaken the float valve in the sewer drain in the basement of
the shop for an obstruction. He had smashed it with a crowbar, reporting this
cheerfully as an accomplishment. The valve was never replaced because that
could only be done by jackhammering up the cement basement floor.
At the other end of the block from the Museum was a service station with
a leaky gas tank. Evidently fumes from that crept into the shop basement and
filtered upstairs. When the gas hot water heater in the darkroom came on, the
fumes exploded. If there had not been a fire in the studio, the dynamics between
Bob and the Neo-Traditionalists would probably have developed in a similar
way, but they might not have been so intense and divisive.
When Bob Scriver died, he had been considering the transfer of the
Thunder Pipe Bundle to Okan, the half-Indian son of Adolf Hungry-Wolf. He
had watched the boy grow up and liked him, but a Bundle is supposed to be kept
by a married couple, and Okan was single. As soon as Bob was gone, Lorraine
took the position that the Bundle was dead. No one has seen it since. She might
even have destroyed it, as she sometimes threatened.
In November 1999, I published a plea in the Glacier Reporter asking
Lorraine to return the Bundle to the tribe, not through the Tribal Business
Council, but through the Council of Elders, who could choose a worthy new
Keeper. I proposed that until a new Keeper was found, it not be kept in a vault
or closet, but as a Bundle suspended up in the high rafters of the Browning
Catholic Church of the Little Flower where it would be seen as safe by all who
came and where it could receive incense and prayer as reconciliation between
two cultures. She made no reply and died in November 2002, without restoring
the Bundle to the Amskapi Pikuni, the Montana Blackfeet.

8. The million-dollar artifact collection

Browning and Edmonton, 1990 to present

After Bob’s death an art auction presented for sale a casting of Bob’s large round
piece called The Opening of the Thunder Pipe Bundle. It was not the hand-painted
casting that I drove to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in a terrible blizzard,
but the red ochre one that had been sent down as a “spacer” until the hand-

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 painted one was finished. I had been supposed to pick it up, but left it behind so
it could be removed more slowly and carefully.
The buyer of the sculpture had no notion of what it all meant. His idea was
to cut it up into individual portraits to be cast in bronze and sold. Thinking
I was Lorraine, who was alive at the time, he told me all this and asked for
my endorsement. I told him to contact Lorraine, but also informed him that I
thought the provenance of the piece was clouded unless someone could explain
where it had been and how it had left the Buffalo Bill Historical Center; that
it would be a breach of copyright law to saw up the sculpture and – in fact
– separating the portrayed people would destroy the very thing that made it
valuable, which was its record of the Ceremony. Also, the Blackfeet might have
something to say about the destruction of a piece depicting a Sacred Ceremony.
He never wrote back.
Bob had never anticipated such a thing. He kept his own casting of this
piece alongside the sculpture of a Beaver Ceremony in a glass case with sweet-
grass braids. They were part of a whole series of portrayals of Blackfeet life, just
as he had discussed with Iliff McKay and Blackie Wetzel back in the Fifties. But
the Neo-Traditionalists were offended.
The Repatriation Act, the prospect of having all his artifacts seized, made
Bob crazy. He never did understand that the law did not say private property
could be repatriated – only material in government institutions – but confused
it in his mind with the right to bear arms and other right-wing concerns about
“takings”. He sent then-Senator Metcalf a letter full of raving, summed up as
a claim that anything white men had accumulated over the years was properly
theirs. Repatriation to him meant that the Scriver family’s life on the reservation
was invalidated.
He became paranoid that the U.S. Government would come with troops
to seize the artifact collection consolidated from his father’s, his brother’s and
his own acquisitions over the years. Or that someone would do a better job of
setting a fire: the Museum appeared to be stone, but that was only a facing.
It was actually very old, dry wood with no sprinkler system, which meant no
insurance. Nothing was on display – he kept it all packed up in the house,
which was guarded by an attack dog, an electrical fence, and an elaborate alarm
system. He had “forted up.”
Philip Stepney, curator of the Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton,
became interested in the Blackfeet materials and coaxed Bob to sell them to
the Provincial Museum. If they were in Canada, they could not be repatriated
by the United States government. But before Stepney could acquire them, he
had to raise funds. In the process the Scriver Collection was glorified as the
most significant and inclusive set of artifacts ever assembled, worth a million
dollars. This brought media attention from across the continent. By contrast,
the Sherburne collection – which was much more extensive – had gone without
publicity to Gonzaga University where it quietly disappeared. What is left is at

288 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane. (The Carberry Collection,
the most significant of all, is in both the Field Museum of Natural History in
Chicago and the Museum of the Plains Indian, in Browning, Montana.)
In the late Eighties a movie called Warparty was filmed on the reserva-
tion. The cynical plot revolved around young men stealing back –”liberating”
– artifacts from a museum, which for the movie was actually the Museum of the
Plains Indian but stocked with Bob Scriver bronzes. I doubt that they really ex-
plained the plot to Bob before borrowing the bronzes. Bold talk about “raiding
Scriver” went around. There were rumors about plans to rope him off his horse
during the North American Indian Days parade, in which he had traditionally
ridden. Nearing eighty, Bob might not have survived being roped and dragged,
but he had no intention of not riding. He asked Carl Cree Medicine to ride
alongside him, which Carl was happy to do. No one messes around with Carl
Cree Medicine. Aggressors stayed back.
That’s about when Bob Scriver decided to sell his artifact collection to the
Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton. A leaked inventory of objects that
had been used for insuring the collection did amount to a value of about a
million dollars if one included the value of two unrelated sub-collections, one of
RCMP materials and the other of guns. Political attacks came from all sides, but
the collection was sent up to Edmonton to the Provincial Museum.
Montana Blackfeet followed to Edmonton and “put a curse” on the curator of
the museum. The Alberta Blackfoot prayed it away, or so they said, but the curator
developed a rare cancer which proved incurable and in a few years he died. People,
both the curser and onlookers, were startled. I think everyone was operating in a
kind of dream world and never thought an actual life was at stake.
In June 1990, the Browning Mercantile burned to the ground. The old
wooden building with its oil-soaked floor had been bought by a local Blackfeet
family, who were using it for storage. In Heart Butte I heard about the fire on
the radio and drove to Browning just in time to see the last of the smoking ruins
being drenched. The fire chief, one of my original mixed-blood high-achieving
Blackfeet seventh-graders from 1961–62, came over in his big rubber coat to
offer sympathy and the opinion that “It wasn’t arson – we’re sure it wasn’t arson.”
That building was older than some of the artifacts Bob had sold.
A Blackfeet woman came and put her arm around me. “We’ll all miss that
place,” she said. “It was part of our past. I feel sorry that it’s gone. Don’t cry too
much. Times change.” The more superstitious Blackfeet said that the Thunder
Pipe Bundle was punishing Bob Scriver for selling his artifacts. More modern
folks spoke of insurance.
I thought of Mrs. Old Man Chief, ancient tiny lady, sitting on a straight
chair in the front of the store all day until she went home in the delivery van. One
day I saw her lifting her tiny moccasined foot from under her six or seven calico
skirts to get into the high “Jimmy” and put my hand under her elbow to try to
lift her up but, without meaning to, I nearly threw her onto the seat. She was no

XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE 289

 heavier than a wren and even that weight must have been mostly skirts. Maybe in
the Sand Hills she is sitting in the front of the ghostly Browning Merc.
Before sending the collection away, Bob had paid a fine photographer,
Marshall Noice, to make plates for a book, The Blackfeet, Artists of the Northern
Plains, that included everything he sent. Up at the Blackfeet Community College
the old people were seen poring over the artifact book, recognizing objects and
trying to remember who had them last. When they were pressed very hard to say
that Bob Scriver had done something evil and shouldn’t have a Thunder Pipe,
they said that the Blackfeet way was for each man to guard his own conscience.
They would not judge. The essence of a Holy Object is that it has the power to
protect itself.
The book has become a valuable reference for craftsmen and curators, but
more importantly it means that any member of the Blackfeet Tribe can buy a
virtual version of the whole collection. The first pages are a Scriver family album
of early years, evidence of their early presence in Browning.
John Hellson is disguised as “Yellow Fly.” Bob had paid Hellson to explain
the artifacts so notes could be taken along with the photos. When Hellson left,
he took without permission some of the most valuable objects, including a griz-
zly bear claw necklace. Bob sent the law after him (unlike his father so much
earlier after the bank robbery), and a second necklace, amulet, dagger, and scab-
bard were recovered. A warrant was sworn out for Hellson’s arrest, but was never
served. It was dismissed when Bob died.
Mercifully, Bob never knew that Ralph Klein, who was elected premier of
Alberta in 1992 when the controversy was still hot, and who had strong sup-
port among Alberta Indians, took the position that Sacred Objects should be
returned to their original Keepers or their families, thus kindling bitter argu-
ments within the families over which branch was more legitimate. All the agony
Bob went through in separating himself from his artifact collection had been in
vain. After Bob’s death Klein sent the Holy Bundles to the elders of the Treaty
7 Indians on the Canadian side. (Canadians identify their Aboriginal people
according to the numbering of the treaty they signed. The Cree signed Treaty 6,
the Blackfoot signed Treaty 7.)
I count in the book photographs of thirty-six Bundles. Few have the impor-
tance of the Beaver Bundle, the two Thunder Pipe Bundles or the three Natoas
headdresses. The Little Dog Thunder Pipe Bundle is the one that Lorraine had
last, though since her death I’m technically the last Keeper of it. The Last Star
Thunder Pipe Bundle came back to Bob Burns, a Babb restaurateur and rancher
who had once lived with Bob and worked in the shop. Burns, a tribal member,
is conscientiously caring for the Bundle and keeps it ceremonially alive. His
prosperity makes that possible and hopefully his observance will maintain his
prosperity.
The great majority of the Bundles were small, personal, and not particularly
impressive. No ceremonies are known for many of them. I’m curious about one

290 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

of the truly spectacular, the Bear Knife Bundle, which is a blade of frightening
dimensions connected to a bear jaw bone, feathers and many falconry bells. It is
transferred by the old Keeper throwing the knife at the head of the prospective
Keeper. If he can catch it, the Bundle is his. So whose hand caught the knife this
time? Or was it a checkbook? Over the years the Scriver collection was broken
up in small ways. Now only the book includes it all.
In the Nineties the Blackfeet began to have a solid middle-class: people with
regular jobs, nice cars, and lawns to mow. When Bundles were repatriated from
museums for those who were interested to become Keepers, the new Keepers
were not the old-time “backwards” people from up in the foothills. Instead they
were the new middle-class people who could afford the ceremonies. One of their
problems was reconciling the demanding schedule of Opening ceremonies in
the spring with the athletic schedules of their children.
The irony of this was not lost on the “Indian-looking” tribal members who
couldn’t “talk good,” as one complained in a letter to the editor of the local pa-
per. They had felt that at least they represented the old-time people, but if the old
ceremonies had become status symbols among the Blackfeet young profession-
als, where did that leave them? Every group has three parts: those who go ahead,
those who try to stay the same, and those who try to go back. Somehow, those
who go ahead had doubled back. In part because of the Neo-Traditionalists and
in part because of Bob Scriver, famous sculptor, Bundle Keeping had become
prestigious, a sign of status once more. The obligation part seemed very muted.

9. The Badger Lodge

Browning and Two Medicine, 1971

Bob attended the openings of the new Bundle Keepers but the tension spoiled
it. After a while he only went to George and Molly’s Opening on Mother’s Day
and then said he was too busy for the others. But he needed another ceremony,
one that was simply his and could not be claimed by anyone else.
Included in The Blackfeet, Artists of the Northern Plains is an account of
Bob’s Badger Lodge dream. He was on Gunsmoke and noticed a small badger
trying to pull a big piece of moose hide, maybe half of the whole thing, down
a hole. He offered to help the badger but it refused. A couple of thirteen-lined
spermophiles – striped squirrels – were standing by, making comments. Then
a large black animal, maybe a wolverine, and several big black birds came and
tried to interfere with the badger. Bob ran them off. When he made a sculpture
of this, he portrayed himself as Indian.
We were still married when Bob had this dream. If I were a therapist inter-
preting it, I would say that it is a fair representation of Bob’s feeling about his

XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE 291

 own life: making a great effort, unappreciated, unaided, and unprotected from
danger. In other words, I think Bob and the badger are the same person. But to
Bob, the badger was his father, who was lying trapped by a stroke in his hospital
bed, refusing all help, and slowly struggling down the big hole in the ground
called Death. There are similarities to classic Blackfeet stories, for instance, the
story of Scarface, who has to fight off threatening birds. (Bob made a sculpture
of this as well.)
He hoped this was a tipi dream, for he very much wanted a unique lodge of
his own. He told the story to the old people. They thought maybe it might be a
tipi dream, but they said they had lost the ways of making a proper lodge design
and bundle. Bob kept asking and mulling through that winter.
In the summer of 1971, through John Hellson, Bob consulted experts from
the Blood Reserve: Brown Chief Calf, Black Plume Sr., and Joe Gambler. They
came to agreement that it was indeed a tipi dream. The day after receiving the
new canvas skin that Cecile Horn had made him, he left with the grandkids
for the Marias Fair. A badger crossed on the road in front of the pickup. That
night there was a terrible windstorm with thunder and lightning. It was taken
as a sign.
Bob’s heart had continued to give him trouble and his new internist had
put him on a walking schedule. On one of these walks Lane spotted a dead
striped squirrel. The second striped squirrel showed up floating dead in the
swimming hole at the ranch. Bob skinned both animals and prepared them for
the Bundle.
On the way to Big Sandy for the Cowboy Artists of America trail ride,
Bob spotted a road-killed badger. It had been dead for a long time, which was
fine because what Bob needed was its claws to make a Keeper’s necklace for the
Tipi Bundle. He found among his own things: two magpies, one raven, one
Clark’s crow, and a wolverine hide. In addition, he rounded up all the iniskum,
or buffalo stones, he had accumulated over the years and made a proper pouch
for them to go into the rawhide case.
When Bob went out to the ranch to start drawing the design, a badger
crossed the road in front of him. There was badger sign at the ranch, lots of fresh
diggings. As the next week or so unfolded, Bob’s dream took ceremonial shape,
partly through his own ability to see signs.
On August 14, 1971, Bob’s dad died quietly at home. On the next day,
Bob would be 57. (It was almost exactly ten years since I had met him.) He
called me in East Glacier and I came directly to Browning. Beside the road was
a small badger, dead, which I stopped to bring along. When I gave it to Bob, he
immediately felt that it was a token of “badger-power” being given to him by his
father to use as a “flag” to fly from the top of the poles.
We spread the canvas tipi cover in the grass at the little Two Medicine
ranch. In the Badger Tipi dream it was fall – so the tipi would be yellow for
the leaves and the grass at that time. The hills at the bottom edge would be

292 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

red because many hills in the Rockies are indeed red argyllite. There were the
vertical stripes, like the striped squirrel, and four horizontal stripes which on one
side of the door stood for the four birds and on the other side stood for the four
animals. Of course the badger would be on either side of the door, facing the
door in both cases, and with its vital organs marked.
Also, the badger’s hole would be represented, not with a black circle as it
would appear to look into the hole, but blue circles, front and back, the way the
sky would look if you were down in the hole like the badger. The smoke flaps
would have the dot patterns that meant the Seven Stars (the Big Dipper) on
one side and the Bunched Stars (the Pleiades) on the other, as is conventional
among the Blackfeet. Bob would be entitled to a dream moth at the top of the
back, which normally has a horsetail in the middle if the dreamer still owns the
lodge – but Bob thought it would be better to have a badger tail. Of course, the
painting of faces would imitate a badger.
The ceremony took three days and was attended by a family of anthropolo-
gists, Tom and Alice Kehoe (who had courted while employed at the Museum
of the Plains Indian, and had been married by Bob) and their sons. Alice settled
herself to take minute-by-minute notes.
When Bob went to put the badger hide into the tubular rawhide case, he
was putting it in headfirst, but Diane Melting Tallow Hellson protested that
badgers always back into their holes. Seeing the justice of this, and willing to
share the creation of this Bundle, Bob immediately said that the badger must
hereafter always be backed into its case. He knew that it is these little rules and
analogies that make the ceremony come alive, especially if it is based on the real
living experience of having watched badgers.
Early on Saturday, all the Canadians backed out. They said they didn’t
know what to do and were afraid of being sacrilegious. Anyway, there was a
good Pipe Dance they wanted to attend. On Sunday morning early the Kicking
Womans appeared and Molly went to the kitchen to begin making a ceremonial
meal. George began to pray in Blackfeet: “Long time ago the old-timers all
believed that these spirits lived in these hills, rocks, that when they went to sleep
the spirits appeared.” Across the creek the cliffs of Two Medicine valley rose
up in steep ramparts that had killed buffalo, sheltered corpses in caves, housed
swallows and small mammals, and tempted small boys to climb.
Bob announced that only this morning he had “caught” the last few songs
that were needed, so it was time to move over to the new lodge. Towing the
heavy buffalo robes behind us, we reassembled in the new tipi, where the painted
badger seemed to float just over our heads, rather ghostly seen from the inside.
Joe Old Chief and Richard Little Dog sat on either side of the tripod. A little
more towards the center, Joe No Runner chopped together Bull Durham and
kinnikinick leaves on the old tobacco board with its brass tacks. Bob ceremoni-
ously brought in the birds and animals of the dream, swaddled like babies in
bandannas.

XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE 293

 Alfred Heavyrunner had made a fire outside and now Joe No Runner
brought from it a hot coal with tongs made from a chokecherry branch. Kindling
a smudge of both sweetgrass and sweet pine, Joe Old Chief prayed some more
in Blackfeet. The reason Bob decided to use both sweet pine and sweetgrass
was not written down. By this time he was taking blood thinner, coumadin,
which is the same ingredient that gives sweet pine, sweetgrass, and sweet clover
their characteristic scent, so in a way he had sweet blood–an affinity with both
smudges.
Bob exclaimed over Molly’s sarvisberry soup, which he loved, and we
feasted jubilantly. We had finished without embarrassment or intervention by
the Gods. Gifts of cigarettes and Bull Durham were in order and, quietly, the
ceremonialists got their pay in cash. Soon everyone had disappeared but family
and the anthropologists. Stretched out on the buffalo robes, we already began to
reminisce and reflect. The flag jingled softly overhead.
The Kehoe’s youngest son had gotten bored and whiny late in the afternoon
and had been told to entertain himself a little longer, please. Now in the twi-
light he came out of the tall grass to announce that he also had been opening a
Bundle. It was a Bumblebee Bundle and he told us about the parts of it and sang
us one of the songs. Play, worship, art – they braid together as we journey from
risk to comfort.
That night after dark, when the flag had been packed away and the cases
had been taken into the house for the night, there was a sudden summer storm
with rain coming down straight from above and lightning but no thunder. It
was a brief but drenching downpour, breaking the hot spell. The next day the
Indians said such a rain often follows a powerful ceremony, to bring life back to
the prairie grass.
After Bob’s death, when everything had been given to the Montana
Historical Society, federal agents appeared there and tried to impound the
Badger Lodge as an Indian artifact. They took many things, which were eventu-
ally returned to “representatives” of the Blackfeet. Individuals kept the most
valuable objects and the rest were sent to auction. I have no idea where the lodge
and Bundle have gone.
Bob Scriver never studied anthropology, never had a humanities back-
ground, and was not well read. He knew music, art, and his home ground. The
Indians he portrayed – with few exceptions – were pre-industrial, the people of
his childhood. He himself was pre-industrial. Even in the foundry he clung to
the old lost wax investment methods invented by the Romans rather than the
space-age ceramic shell casting. If it hadn’t been for his hired men, he would
never have remembered to change the oil in his pickups. The very idea of com-
puters enraged him.
Bob’s father was not progressive. Once the Browning Mercantile was built,
it stayed the same. Until the day it burned down, the floor was bare oiled wood.
The refrigeration and heat were modernized, the roof was patched and the walls

294 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

were repainted the same color. That was about it. No plans for expansion or
moving out to the highway. Harold also made few changes. Maybe that’s what
kept the business alive so long while others failed and left. Or maybe that’s what
destroyed it in the end.
The event I remember the most personally and deeply was very simple. One
Indian Days we had put up our lodge and slept out at the campgrounds. It was
the summer I served everyone orange juice with 7-Up in it, which Molly Kicking
Woman said made it taste “all different ways,” because of the carbonation. The
grocery store sold real buffalo meat, which we roasted on sticks over our tipi
fire and folded into bread instead of using plates. Bob had rounded up Indian
paraphernalia for us and I had made the girls red flannel dresses with “silver”
thimbles and brass grommets for decoration. He wore his buckskins, originally
made for him when he conducted the Tribal Band.
It was one of the last Indian Days to have a real bonfire in the middle.
Indian Days was simpler then. It was darker and there were fewer people. When
the dancing was getting close to the end, we dressed up and went to the circle. An
Owl Dance, the equivalent of “Good Night, Irene,” was just forming. Everyone
made a big circle with their arms around the persons on either side of them and
everyone stepped sideways to the beat of the drums. Nancy Tailfeathers held out
her arm to invite us into the circle and we danced as equals with everyone else.
It was exactly the community Bob sought.

XIV CHASING: THE THUNDER PIPE BUNDLE 295

 XV

Torch:
The Prince of Peace

1. Welding bronze
Browning, 1963 forward

Using a welding torch demands two skills: knowing the proper proportions between
gas and oxygen to get the perfect lean flame and understanding the complexity of that
flame, which is a flame within a flame, one hotter than the other. There are two huge
clanging tanks, each with a rubber hose that ends in a slender wand with a bent nose.
The mixture is controlled by a little wheel at the bottom of the wand. The flame is
visible and audible, but don’t look directly at a welding flame, any more than look at
the sun. Wear a hood or welding goggles. When the wand is burning, there is a hiss.
When it goes out, it makes a “flup” sound – a suddenly ended flutter. Little black soot
spots float in the air.
A kind of empathy for the objects being welded together guides just how much and
where the heat should be focused to make both metals melt at the same moment. The
rest is rhythm, a kind of flame-music that can be seen in the bead produced when the
melted metal unites, a line of small even waves. Bob loved this and did it well. Welding
is like having a furnace in one’s hand, creating molten metal a tiny bit at a time. People
respect it, stand back, give the welder space. Bob never allowed anyone else in the shop
to weld, though the government had taught dozens of Blackfeet this skill.
There may be the addition of a third source of metal in the form of a thin
welding rod, which is “brazing” as distinguished from welding. It always fascinated
us that ordinary bailing wire can also make do for some welding. The fourth pos-
sible ingredient is a substance called “flux,” often a form of borax, which makes the
metals “flow” (that’s what flux means). The molten metal reaction responds in some
molecular way. Strangely, powdered borax was also the substance Bob used on hides
and skins to kill insects.

297
 Joe Evans and Bob Gordon, local tradesmen, were master welders. Joe did
all sorts of metalwork, gas piping, sheet metal for home heating ducts, and so on.
Bob Gordon had been a Navy SEAL and could weld underwater. Both of them
taught Bob to draw his mind into the focus it takes to do such a thing as welding
– total concentration that shuts out everything else. That formidable focus plus
the intense sound and light make interruptions impractical. No wonder Bob
loved doing it, even when the chore was some miserable repair job on a piece of
bad casting. Even when he was inventing a hinge for a gate.
Harold McCracken had asked us to cast two huge busts of Buffalo Bill. On
one of them, half of the hat brim had failed to fill with metal. There was no time
to recast, so Bob, desperate, had to basically sculpt with welding rod. When he
finished, the problem was undetectable. Now he knew it was possible to weld a
naturalistic figure from scratch that would seem to have been cast with a crucible
– but why? Such a feat took a huge amount of energy, breathing strange metallic
fumes, getting smutted with carbon and wearing deep dents in the face from the
welding goggles. All Bob’s clothes had little burn holes in them and his hair was
like wire from the dirt. The heliarc, the big electric welding machine, helped a
lot because it was so quick and clean, though no less noisy and bright. Affording
one was a major advance. When the shop burned, the heliarc was destroyed. Bob
grieved for it almost as he did for Eegy, who also died in the fire.
When he was still learning, Bob made two big welded sculptures: in 1967
a life-size bull buffalo for Great Falls High School and in 1969 a twelve-foot-tall
rustler for C.M. Russell High School. They were made in Corten steel, which
“rusts” in a certain way that doesn’t eat it full of holes but becomes stable like
bronze. Before making the steel models, he worked out the figures with card-
board – abstracted but still recognizable. I always thought it would be fun to
plant petunias in the belly “trough” of the bison. They tell me that when it’s
placed outside in the rain (the school moves it now and then), water drains in
an anatomically correct manner. In winter the Rustler develops long mustache
icicles.

2. Losing family members

1976 forward

In albums at the Montana Historical Society, where all Bob’s archives are stored,
there is a little handful of snapshots taken on the day Bob received his Carroll
College honorary doctoral degree, May 2, 1976. Lorraine and his mother are
with him in his cap and gown – Mother in the middle. She is wearing a floor-
length red dress with a matching ruffled jacket and absolutely glowing with
pride and happiness. At 88 years of age she and her 62-year-old son are plainly

298 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

sweethearts, with Lorraine as handmaiden. According to Laurel, her grand-
daughter, Wessie had five years of Merry Widowhood, zooming around in a
new car. When she died, her assets amounted to little more than a few thousand
dollars, some rental houses, and the old foundation-less home. But no matter
what other girls her son had flirted with, she was always and finally Bob Scriver’s
earliest and deepest love.
Ellison Westgarth Macfie Scriver died on February 16, 1977. I know of no
sculpture that arises from that grief, but I’m sure she had received the traditional
box of chocolates two days earlier. Already Bob had made portrait busts of the
four family members. Harold and Hazel were taken aback when Bob took a
photo of his mother in her casket, but the photo of her he hung in the shop
was a studio portrait in her string of big costume pearls, looking like Barbara
Bush. She had had nothing to do with Bob’s sculpture career directly, except
for loaning money, but she had guided his daily life – told him when to change
his clothes and get a haircut. Now he became disreputable unless Lorraine got
after him.
By the Eighties, Bob was seriously aging. The east slope weather was hard
on him, so he bought bits of land in the Flathead Valley, a hundred miles away
on the west side of the Rockies, but then sold them again. He negotiated with
the C.M. Russell Museum, where Lorne Render and other board members went
so far as to look around Great Falls and locate a building where his works could
be displayed. But nothing clicked. The truth was that deep down he needed to
stay in Browning.
Also, I believe he had had enough small strokes to destroy his ability to
make decisions, much less withstand the rigors of moving. It was never easy
for him to choose. In the Sixties one of the main uses of the long evenings
he and I spent sitting with his folks was turning decisions over and over with
them. Philip Stepney, a resourceful man, had to use all his skills to get Bob to
surrender the artifact collection, literally working on him for years as he teetered
back and forth.
Bob’s oldest granddaughter, Charmaine, died June 27, 1980, aged 34. She
had been in the military in Florida but was on disability after being in a car
accident. Over the years she had been in many car wrecks, and the last one killed
her. She was alone. Her grave is in the Portland, Oregon, military cemetery.
She lived three more years than her mother did, but had a far more sudden and
merciful death. Bob attended the funeral and called me in Chicago where I
was attending seminary to see if I would come, but I couldn’t. I was at the most
crucial part of my training, a student chaplaincy in a hospital. He made no
sculpture connected to Charmaine except that when she was a toddler he had
made a small portrait of her called First Easter Bonnet.
People around town thought of Harold as the stable, sane Scriver son, and
so he seemed. He’d always liked to drink and fight, and enjoyed the kind of
hunting camp where men sat by the fire cussing and yarning, which seemed

X V TO R C H : T H E P R I N C E O F P E AC E 299
 normal in Browning. In fact, Harold was better known than Robert and Bob
said he grew a beard so people could tell the two apart.
When the Scriver folks were gone and after Hazel, Harold’s wife, died in
1982, Harold became a little crazy. He ended up remarrying, but it was a bad
choice: the opportunistic daughter of one of Bob’s high school classmates. Then
he was diagnosed with lung cancer. When decades earlier the doctor had told
him to give up brandy and cigars, he had merely changed doctors. Now he and
Bob became close as they worked – for the sake of the estate – to get Harold’s
divorce completed before death came. Even so, many things were lost to the
second wife, mostly Hazel’s treasures. Harold died in 1984, aged 72.
In 1985 Gunsmoke, AKA Gunnysack, Bob’s most faithful partner, died,
and Boyd Evans, operating a backhoe, buried him at the Flatiron Ranch. Bob
asked George Kicking Woman to come and perform a blessing ceremony over
his faithful beloved horse. He made Boyd promise to bury him alongside his
horse. Then he painted a fantasy of Gunsmoke with wings, flying off into the sky
in his bright red horse blanket to chase cloud bison. Mel Ruder took a photo of
Bob with the painting and printed the story in the Hungry Horse News.

3. The Prince of Peace

1982 forward

Tall and handsome, balding 72-year-old John R. McAllister was evidently a

lifelong single man. When he retired from the Air Force at age 42, he certified
to teach, and then taught Latin for twenty-three years, the last thirteen of them
in Sunburst, a little refinery town in the rimrocks just east of the Blackfeet
Reservation and nearly on the Canadian border. In the nine years of his re-
tirement in Sunburst he had masterminded a public library for the town and
energized them to completely pay it off.
In his youth “Mac” had worked on a WPA project just out of Red Lodge
in spectacular Beartooth pass, far down in the southeast part of the state. As
a devout Catholic with an ecumenical point of view, he was inspired at that
time by the idea there ought to be a statue of Jesus in that fabulous setting. His
concept was a seated granite figure four hundred feet high on a tall stone base.
The vision came back to him occasionally. After World War II he thought of it
as a possible memorial to the fallen soldiers.
When Bob attracted attention for his heroic-size Lewis and Clark figures,
John McAllister and his friend, John Barrett, remembered this idea of a huge
Jesus. McAllister still had a calendar picture he had saved that showed Jesus on
Mount Olive, his prayerfully clasped hands dropped to his knees as He gazed
around Him at the mountains. After the buddies came to see Bob, the latter

300 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

made them a little mockup in which Jesus unaccountably looked like Willie
Nelson, though none of the three aging men noticed. Bob told the media, “This
may be the best thing I ever do. John’s idea has set me on fire.” Off the record,
he also acknowledged that it might be the last thing he ever did.
A committee organized for what they called the World Peace Memorial,
which was to be 210 feet tall, 336 feet square at the base, and situated on two and
a half acres of grounds. In no time the committee was designing the parking lot,
framing up contracts, and planning a “peace award” of a few hundred thousand
dollars to be given out every half-dozen years as well as a schedule of lectures and
classes. The proposed statue had by this time become bronze, because Bob didn’t
know anything about cutting stone. The size had somewhat diminished, and
because it appeared that the highway department wouldn’t allow any statues on
Beartooth Pass, the massive granite platform had been replaced by a system of
pillars and arches, roughly pyramidal, that could be anywhere. All they needed
was a lot of money.
When Bob got some estimates, it appeared that the statue would cost as
much as twenty-two million dollars, a figure that wasn’t spread around publicly.
His fee would be fifteen per cent, or $3,300,000. But first, the little organiza-
tion had to raise $10,000 to buy letterhead stationery, postage, and lunches
for the meetings. For the next four and a half years, things went along slowly,
mostly building castles in the sky. Their logo was incredibly complex, featuring
a head-on dove with empty eyes like Little Orphan Annie. Bob interviewed
a professional fundraiser, who was cautiously optimistic and wanted to begin
with a list of the richest landowners in the state, but the little group didn’t know
those people.
Pretty soon things began to go wrong. The Independent Record wrote an
editorial opposing the statue on grounds that the money ought to go to starving
people, and it was reprinted in the Great Falls Tribune. Bob had assumed all
Christians would get on board, but they didn’t. In fact, some were offended,
seeing it as cynical on Bob’s part. The secular people of the state just shook their
heads.
In the Montana Historical Society archives is an undated letter by Bob
warning McAllister that one of three “newcomers to the group” was inhabited
by Satan. Bob was always inclined to do a little “gas-lighting” (especially with
wives), but this was a full-on psych-out letter saying that because Bob could
recognize Satan’s evil ways, he was able to spot Him, while McAllister was too
inclined to see only good and therefore was in dire danger. By this time the plan
had dawdled along for more than four years. The town of Geraldine, the most
likely prospect for a location, had dropped out, but Cut Bank was alive and
interested.
In February 1986, Bob heard that the group was considering a different
sculptor, the ultimate insult. After an ultimatum, Bob resigned from the World
Peace Memorial. McAllister demanded the destruction of all connections. Bob,

X V TO R C H : T H E P R I N C E O F P E AC E 301
 terrified that the “other sculptor” would copy his work, reminded the group
that HE had the copyright on the statue. He’d been giving small versions of the
portrait of Jesus to possible patrons and now he demanded them back so they
couldn’t be copied, but the recipients were aghast! They’d become attached to
them.
The lowest blow of all was someone’s letter to the editor saying that the
portrait of Jesus looked like an “old man straining at his stool.” Probably the
death blow to the first version of the project really was as simple as that letter to
the editor. No one could look at the pondering Jesus after that without thinking
of the comparison.
The International Peace Center, Inc., Bob’s new organization, was incorpo-
rated on April 15, 1986. A ground-breaking ceremony took place just east of Cut
Bank on August 15, 1986 (Bob’s 72nd birthday). It was explained to the media
that part of the reason for splitting off from McAllister was that the latter had
insisted on that calendar picture, “a sentimental depiction of no artistic merit”
which suppressed Bob’s finer artistic instincts. Now there would be a new and
improved pose. Bob’s new version of the pedestal featured twelve steps for the
twelve Apostles, ten pillars for the Ten Commandments, and so on. He talked
about how a person could go up inside Jesus’ head and look out. The comparison
was to the Statue of Liberty.
On the day of the ground-breaking it was hard to envision such a thing
standing on the prairie just east of Cut Bank. Wind was blowing from an over-
cast equinox sky. At most, a dozen pickups were parked in a line. A new shovel
sprayed with gilt paint and decorated with red, white, and blue ribbons was
handed around and the dignitaries, which included Bob Spring from Modern
Art Foundry in New York City, chipped at the hard dirt, making dust fly.
Everyone tried to look important and then they all left. That was it.
A billboard went up on the highway, but nothing further. By that time
the Christian politics of the area had begun to intensify. Glacier County had
attracted small Bible-based groups who wanted to be left alone but felt they
had the True Word. They saw no reason to waste money on graven images. Bob
didn’t know enough about churches to realize how schismatic and competitive
they are. He could hardly tell one denomination from another, much less the
various factions within each.
For a decade before this, Bob had been searching for some way to per-
petuate his own museum. The hostility of some of the reservation people made
Browning seem a poor long-term choice. Bob wouldn’t give up control and
wrote propositions that required guaranteed perpetual care. All across America
today there are small museums going broke because of similar restrictions and
stipulations. Even country ranchers and small town businessmen know enough
to avoid a contract that would require perpetual care in a world where nothing
is perpetual except change, and not always for the better.

302 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Now Bob had an inspiration: he would conflate the effort to build the Jesus
statue with his own struggle to create a building to house his work. The pillars
and arches under the statue became a complex of spaces which were sometimes
described as galleries and other times as chapels. There was a certain amount of
confusion. I don’t think it was deliberate – just muddled.
John McAllister died in 1987 with his dream unfulfilled, but his torch
still flickered. His friend, John Barrett, wrote wistfully in November 1988, ask-
ing about the final disposition of the estate, in particular a collection of gold
coins. A good share of the estate was supposed to have gone to the World Peace
Memorial. I saw no answer in the files.
Gradually McAllister’s Prince of Peace was co-opted as Bob turned it into
something else: a building to house the sculpture of Bob Scriver – but with Jesus
on top. Bob suddenly declared that he didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, but
only that he was a great man who stood for peace. The peace aspect gradually
expanded until the pyramid on which Jesus would sit was supposed to have a
phrase celebrating peace engraved on it in all the world’s languages, for all the
peoples. Other religions were to be included with symbols. And yet it would be
filled with full-mount big game animals and rodeo sculpture.
While everyone was arguing and angling, someone made a huge white fi-
berglass statue of the Virgin Mary that towered over Butte. It was put in place by
a giant helicopter, which got national media attention. Cut Bank ended up with
a thirty-foot cement penguin wired for sound so it seemed to be talking. Out
on the West edge of Cut Bank, at a campground overlooking Cut Bank Creek,
someone quietly put up a gentle welded version of Jesus, evidently blessing the
highway. Not long after that all the enthusiasts went crazy for dinosaurs – even
the Blackfeet (so recently incensed over losing their heritage) wanted to convert
the Museum of the Plains Indian into a dinosaur exhibit. By the time of this
writing, everyone has moved on to the idea of Lewis and Clark and how the
anniversary of that exploration would make them rich.
One can’t help but feel cynical about the whole blunder. Yet I feel there is
a sculpture among Bob’s works that deserves to be enlarged and set upon a hill.
One could say it was a personification of Peace. Sculpted in 1967, it’s called The
Sheepherder. One could think of it as Jesus and his Faithful Dog. Of course, Jesus
would be pronounced the Spanish way – “Hay-soos.” If it were up to me, right
next to it I’d start a classic sheepherder’s cairn and let people add stones to it
when they came to pray for peace.
If you ask the businessmen of the small white towns about Bob Scriver, they
will say that they admire his promotional skills. They know little or nothing
about the sculpture collection as a whole. The promotion of Bob’s projects has
eclipsed the work itself. At one point he proposed that a foundry for casting the
monument be built on site, employing eight people to be hired locally, a familiar
political ploy in a job-starved place. It wasn’t enough.

X V TO R C H : T H E P R I N C E O F P E AC E 303
 The Sheepherder by Bob Scriver, 1967. Photo: Mary Scriver.

304 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Worried about fire recurring and about running out of room for all the
bronzes, Bob finally just bought a steel building, a warehouse. He assured every-
one that when he finally located the perfect spot and received the proper offer,
he could easily move the whole thing. Almost incidentally, behind the steel Hall
of Bronze, he built a two-story foundry capable of major casting. David Cree
Medicine had the skills to run this foundry.
In 1986 the Amy Grant Show taped a Christmas production called Headin’
Home for the Holidays and included Bob. That gave him a good boast to paint on
the outside of his new steel building: “As seen on the Amy Grant Show!” They
were Christian-focused people, easygoing and admiring. Bob was especially
impressed with Dennis Weaver, who wrote a nice letter about how the world
needed peace. They didn’t play his kind of music, but they were professional and
competent musicians. During the performance the camera often looked for Bob
Scriver’s face and his faded blue eyes filled with tears of emotion.

4. Trying to rekindle the flame

Browning, 1985 forward

Hélène, Jeanette’s sister, who had posed for the Pieta, was the woman for whom
Bob “carried a torch” the longest. To him, Hélène was beautiful and compliant,
innocent and loving, but she was married and – he sighed – she was a good
Catholic who would never divorce. (He didn’t seem to think his own marriage
to Jeanette was a problem.)
Hélène had made what seemed the “perfect” marriage to a handsome, popu-
lar, hockey player, successful enough in life to pay for her elegant houses. Things
were different behind the scenes. Once Jeanette had insulted Bob by admiring
a sleek black ceramic panther and suggesting that he ought to do something
similar. Later she gave the big panther to Hélène, who used it as an accent in
an all-white room. When Stan came home late and drunk one time too many,
Hélène smashed it over his head. He dropped as unconscious as Bob did when
Jeanette slung the alarm clock at him, but there was blood. Hélène was afraid
she had killed her husband and called her dad to rescue her. Stan survived, but
the white carpet had to be replaced.
By 1968, when Hélène posed for the Pieta, she was still married but not
happy. Toward the end of our own marriage, Bob was secretly meeting her when
he went to California, claiming to be working with a foundry there. A while
after Bob divorced me, she gave up her thirty-year marriage as hopeless. Except
for a brief marriage to a millionaire in Hawaii, life was not easy for her until her
sons were mature and established enough to help her. Bob phoned her to talk
late at night and she compared him to Sinatra, calling him “Old Blue Eyes.” She

X V TO R C H : T H E P R I N C E O F P E AC E 305
 was careful to define herself tactfully as his “muse.” She was also straightforward
about NEVER intending to live in Browning.
In 1975 Peter Stremmel, of Stremmel Galleries in Reno, had arranged for a
show of Bob’s rodeo bronzes at Security National Bank during a big rodeo and
had been able to get Bob appointed the parade marshal. Bob had gone down
with Gunsmoke in the pickup, met Hélène there, and had a marvelous time. At
the time Bob was – in theory – married to Lorraine. Or maybe he wasn’t. There
would be long periods when she seemed to vanish. She lived with Bob more than
long enough to count as a common-law wife. If you figured from the time she
began sleeping over in 1972, it was twenty-seven years.
Bob remembered the excitement and praise from the original crucifix and
Pieta he had made and the intense weeks when Maurice and Hélène were in
Browning to pose. In 1987 he offered each of them $2,500 “for expenses” to
come stay for two weeks while he redesigned the Jesus statue and frankly tried
to recapture the mood. They agreed and in July, Hélène and Maurice come to
pose for the statue of Jesus.
The next week is recorded on video. In the shop, Bob, Hélène, and Maurice
worked at the portrait of the Prince of Peace. Should the feet be this way or that
way? Should there be a staff? Which shoulder should it go over? Bob insisted in the
middle of this that they talk high philosophy about the meaning of life and art.
George Montgomery, a faithful friend of Bob’s since the earliest days, had
provided an authentic Jesus costume from Hollywood. One hem of the gown
insisted on falling in three even folds and Hélène suggested that it symbolized the
Trinity. She got brushed off. Maurice, a little embarrassed by the other two calling
him “Christ” and “My Lord,” couldn’t resist joking but he said the more outra-
geous things in French, which made Hélène sputter. Bob didn’t catch them.
The faithful plastic skeleton was pressed into service once again to wear
Jesus’ robe. The effect of the skull over the Jesus robe was gruesome. Bob joked
to the skeleton, “Your people don’t seem to feed you very well.” David and Jody
Cree Medicine looked bemused, unsure what reaction to have. Jesus/Bones was
given a cigarette and a cowboy hat and Hélène was worried they were edging
close to sacrilege. In the end the skeleton was stuffed with excelsior and wound
with cloth, a mummy.
Maurice had a little shoulder damage from posing for the Crucifix more
than twenty years earlier, so he begged for a respite now and then. One of the
recurring complaints in letters to the editor about the Prince of Peace was that he
appeared to be a spent, arthritic old man. Maurice would be fifty in October on
the Feast Day of Saint Francis of Assisi. He was married with two children (and,
by this writing, three grandchildren). His demographics no longer fit Jesus.
Toward the end of the video is a meeting with the burghers of Cut Bank.
Bob had flown in one of his earliest sponsors, Ruth Beebe Hill, who had lived
through a firestorm Native American response to her novel Hanta Yo! Now wid-
owed and retired, she had brought along a professional fundraiser. Bob asked

306 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Maurice to repeat some of the insightful things from the evening sessions. In his
professorial clothes with his charming accent, Maurice eloquently expounded
on a breakthrough in his conceptualization of peace, which was summed up
in the sentence: “I stand at the Center and the light shines all around me.” He
got this from a Sioux Indian via Ruth Hill. (It might be from Black Elk Speaks.)
He proposed that this be inscribed in many languages around the base of the
pyramidal building. He envisioned a series of statues around the base of the
pyramid, each illustrating “peace:” a mother feeding her child, a boy with his
calf, a wounded soldier being given water on a battlefield – he was improvising
on the spur of the moment. The audience really warmed to this idea, but there
was no conclusion, no motion to proceed. No sale.
At the end of this video Bob took his two almost-siblings out to his small,
secret, not-quite-ranch, the sixteen-acre patch of sacred land along Two Medicine
River that he bought from Cecile Horn. Gingerly they waded through the tall
grass and wolf willow while Bob pointed out the circle of stones from his last
Opening ceremony and the circle of stones from a sweat lodge that wasn’t his,
offering his kind of gift, access to a secret peaceful place connected to his deepest
self, his “true” religion. The cliffs rose behind them, the river wandered along
in front of them, and the old cottonwoods reared up over their heads. Light
and wind sluiced through the leaves turning bronzy-yellow. When he spoke of
Christian matters, he kidded around and sounded almost mocking. But when
he spoke of Indian religion, his voice was firm and confident. He believed.
Later, after his heart bypass surgery in 1996, Bob called both Hélène and
Maurice, asking either of them to be the executor of his estate. (They declined,
feeling it would be an overwhelming job.) Sometimes he called weeping and
declaring his love for Hélène. They didn’t know quite what to make of it all, but
tried to comfort him.
In the end the Prince of Peace maquettes went to the Montana Historical
Society with everything else. The sculpture had changed subtly since its original
version. At first it was naturalistic, modeled in a fluid way, and quite human
– maybe a little too human. By the time the largest model was done, it had
become stylized, with the robes nearly pleated, ending in a fluted edge. It was
as though the small beginning were haptic, clay molded in hands. But the large
version was like a Middle Eastern glyptic stone figure, hair made ornamental,
skin smoothed, figure subtly elongated. The face is stern, almost cold. If I were
more theologically minded, I would say he had moved from the Jesus persona,
the human being of warmth and forgiveness, to the Christ persona, God on
Earth who has come to judge. Or if I were of another turn of mind, I might say
that age and wealth were turning Bob himself to stone.
There was another portrait of Jesus commissioned by Carroll College in
Helena about the time Bob received an honorary doctorate from them. The
maquette he submitted was profoundly silly. It showed Jesus holding up his
forefinger as if testing the wind and wearing a long pleated gown which looked

X V TO R C H : T H E P R I N C E O F P E AC E 307
 as though the hem ought to be turned up like one of those Art Nouveau ladies
whose skirt becomes a nut bowl at the bottom. One can easily imagine the
opportunities for satire, if only by changing which finger is upstanding. Luckily
they turned it down. It took a long time for me to remember that it reminded
me of a seated woman figure in the Bernard Black Gallery with a similar pleated
gown. I think it was a portrait of someone’s mother. Black had praised it, said
it was among the finest sculptures. In fact, he said, “Nobody else could make a
statuette this beautiful.” That must have stuck somewhere in Bob’s head.

308 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 XVI

Cooling:
Lewis and Clark

1. The journey slows

Fort Benton and Great Falls, 1974 forward

Working in a foundry, where everything is potentially hot enough to brand a cow,

makes a person cautious. Don’t lean against any surface or object without testing it
first. You’ll hear a ping or tick at unexpected moments as materials expanded by heat
begin to contract. The big investment molds, several hundred pounds, take a long
time to cool, even in a below-zero Montana winter. A Montana winter teaches that
extreme cold can also leave a mark.
Nothing stays extremely hot or extremely cold. Everything moves toward a tem-
perate peneplain where extremes no longer exist. Cooling is not something you do,
it’s something you stop doing, a state of rest while you wait. After the core of bronze
is cooled, shrinking slightly and compressing the investment around it, then it can be
revealed. Sometimes it is nothing like what you expected.
The metaphor of a life as a lost-wax bronze casting process now comes to the test.
The soft clay of the small boy Robert has been pressed into a shape by a nineteenth-
century reservation town. The mold of music seems wasted and cast off, revealing the
blank shape of Bob Scriver, sculptor. His new vocation forms around him, impressing
him with the shapes of wives, models, institutions, colleagues. And the mother mold,
while supporting, sets limits. Through mid-life, Bob is wax still hot with passion, and
then as he ages, fame packs him in place, hollows him out, and leaves him cooling.
Now the investment falls away to reveal his final shape.
What should I say about the land? Was it the foundry? The crucible, the grind-
ing? I choose to say it was the Ground of Being, a theological phrase coined by Paul
Tillich to include both Being and Non-being.

309
 2. Lewis and Clark begin
Fort Benton, 1974 forward

In Bob’s autobiographical notes he says:

In 1974 I received a rather crude looking letter on a yellow piece of paper

that had no logo or identification to show who the writer was, asking if I would
be interested in doing a statue of Lewis & Clark for Fort Benton. I pitched it
in the waste paper basket, feeling that it was written as a childish prank. On
second thought, I retrieved the letter and answered it.... I did get a reply.
This time it was very official and came from the Community Improvement
Association of Fort Benton....
“Lorraine and I went to work immediately by reading the daily journals
written by Lewis & Clark.... The situation that I chose to illustrate was when
the Corps of Discovery came to the junction of the Marias and Missouri River.
Both rivers were at flood stage, so they sent scouts up each river to find out
which one was the Marias branch and which one was the mainstream of the
Missouri. They decided on the one that had the large falls on it, because they
knew of this geographical feature from talking with Indians and trappers.
It was there that they had to portage ten miles around it to continue their
journey.
“The falls, where now stands the City of Great Falls, lies eleven miles
upstream from Fort Benton. The forks of the two rivers, being ten miles
downstream from present day Fort Benton, was close enough to be a valid
location for my statue.”

Lewis and Clark became Scriver’s central preoccupation until the end of his
life. They were historic, both national and local, major heroic figures in a classic
exploration saga. The story was about white people without being about plowing
up the grass or eating dust behind cows. A strong fan base met regularly and
maintained networks. Unfortunately, Lewis and Clark was also about killing
Blackfeet, not that white people paid much attention to that. The Blackfeet
themselves did not forget.
Halfway between Browning and Cut Bank is an historical turnout and
signboard marking the approximate location of Camp Disappointment, where
Lewis could see that the headwaters of the Missouri were turned back by the
Hudson’s Bay Divide, which is named that, of course, because north of there the
land drains northeast to Hudson’s Bay. Jefferson had hoped for the 50th parallel,
but this was the 49th. A small sandstone obelisk stands on a hill along the road.
It is much neglected, except by teens looking for a quiet place to park and neck.
Vandals have carved and painted graffiti onto it. Bob got a double “hit” from the
place. On the one hand, his father was on the original Lewis and Clark highway

310 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

marker committee and helped place the sign. On the other hand, one of the
ranches “Pop” had lost in the early years was nearby.
These chapters have been organized in a one-strand-at-a-time way that
doesn’t reveal what a braided path Bob’s life had followed. Though he worked in
“themes,” he didn’t do one thing at a time. Circumstances like the Bicentennial
letter from Fort Benton turned his attention to one subject or another, while
in the background he continued with other strands of his life. By this time he
needed a new destination, which he found by doubling back.
In the winter of 1962–63 Claude Schaeffer, the curator and director of
the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, had been identifying points of
historical interest on the Blackfeet Reservation. This merged with a Boy Scout
project to organize a tour. Mostly both groups had wanted to locate the infamous
“fight site” where Lewis and his party camped with a small group of Blackfeet
and, in a dawn skirmish, killed two of them, the only Native American people
killed on the expedition.
Lewis was not looking for Blackfeet – in fact, he hoped to avoid them since
their reputation for ferocity was well known. The brief version of the episode,
as recorded in the Journal, is that Lewis, the Fields brothers, and the intrepid
Droulliard went up the Marias to where Cut Bank Creek joined it, then fol-
lowed Cut Bank Creek past where Willow Creek (the stream that flows through
Browning) joins it. This was July 23, about a week later than the modern annual
Blackfeet Indian Days.
Since their horses had sore feet from walking on gravel, they came down
along the creek and camped for three days. The game animals were spooky,
which meant they had recently been hunted, and the weather was lousy – chilly
rain. (“The wind also has blown all day with more than usual violence from the
N.W.” – clearly a sign they were near Browning.) When Droulliard – looking for
meat – explored to the place where Holy Family Mission was eventually built on
Two Medicine River, he found among the many old camp rings some recent tipi
poles still leaning together. On July 26, better rested and fed, the foursome left
to rejoin the rest of the expedition waiting at what is now Great Falls, ready to
head for home with their mission accomplished, only weeks away from St. Louis
by boat. After crossing Badger Creek, they followed Two Medicine River.
Then they met eight young Blackfeet traveling with horses. The two groups
agreed to camp together for the night in a kind of natural corral along the river
where good grass would keep the horses nearby. Just after first light J. Fields
was supposed to be on watch but carelessly put his gun down behind him. A
Blackfeet youth picked up that gun and then the gun of the until-then sleeping
R. Fields. At the same time another Indian took the guns of Droulliard and
Lewis. R. Fields pursued the first man and stabbed him to death. Lewis pulled
his pistol and forced the second man to put down the guns he had. Suddenly
the Indians split into two groups and drove the horses up the trails out over the
bluffs. Lewis pursued the men closest to him and shot one.

XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK 311

 Twelve horses were left, a mixture of the explorers’ travel-worn horses and
the Indian horses, which turned out to be much sturdier. The four left for the
“Great Falls,” travelling as hard as they could, and by the time they reached
the mouth of the Marias to rejoin the rest, the men were among huge herds of
buffalo.
In the Sixties, Boy Scout leaders in Cut Bank, Robert H. Anderson and
Ed Mathison, were in charge of determining where all this had occurred. Since
Anderson was a pilot, they were able to check terrain and compass bearings
from the air. (No GPS in those days.) When they felt they had it all sorted out,
Wilbur Werner, a local attorney, history buff and Boy Scout leader, escorted a
party that included Bob and me out to the remarkably unchanged campsite. A
cluster of three cottonwoods still grew in the center of the meadow.
Bob continues writing about the commission for his heroic statue:

Six months of our time was spent in research before the actual modeling of
the statue began.... Two local men of the right age and build posed for Captain
Lewis (Boyd Evans) and Captain Clark (Jim Brousseau).1 It so happened
that at this time a young Indian girl was working here at the museum as
our receptionist.2 She was the right age for Sacajawea and was of Shoshone
blood, but stranger yet was that her sister was married to a French-Canadian
and had a baby exactly the same age as Pomp.

To get a consensus on what the explorers wore, Bob prepared a twenty-page

questionnaire with drawings which he sent out to all the experts he could think
of. Ned Jacob, expert in these matters, helped him to interpret and sometimes
overrule the returned questionnaires. Ned had lived with Bob once, back in
the bachelor years, and they had been estranged, even though Ned was also a
Cowboy Artist of America and National Academy of Western Artists member
for a while. Now they collaborated.
Once the probable design of Lewis’s buckskins was settled, a suit of them
was made and Boyd wore them for weeks, on horseback and off, while he went
about the work of his small ranch. Soon they had been soaked, dirtied, greased,
and creased into authenticity. By that time Boyd had a new appreciation for the
invention of the modern trouser fly – his buckskin britches had a breechclout
and leggings construction that was highly inconvenient.
Bob goes on:

One of the questions to be answered was about the clothes of Sacajawea,

Mandan-style or Shoshone? We settled on Shoshone, as she was of that tribe.
What arms did the explorers carry? We found out that the Harper’s Ferry
Armory was commissioned to build twenty-four good heavy rifles that could
knock down a buffalo or a grizzly bear, each of which were plentiful along
the route. The actual telescope that Clark used was located at the Denver

312 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Fort Benton, July 4, 1976. The Parade. Bob is riding with Angus Monroe
and his great-grandson (with braids). Photo: Mary Scriver.

Museum, Denver, CO, along with the square-shaped compass he used. The
style of leggings used by the men were made from the advice and sketches by
a famous historical painter, our good friend, Tom Lovell.3

When the deadline approached for the casting to be done, Bob called the Modern
Art Foundry in New York City. Bob Spring, the head of the foundry, assured
him everything was fine. Then, pressed harder, he said the casting was ready for
Bob to come to weld the straps on and make a final check. When Bob got there,
the casting was “done” in the narrowest sense: cast but lying in sections all over
the foundry! For the next week, Bob lived at the foundry and with Spring’s crew
welded, ground, and patined desperately. They barely made the deadline.
The Fort Benton statue of Lewis, Clark, Sacajawea, and the baby, Pomp,
was dedicated on June 13, 1976, with a major parade. Charmaine and I drove
over from Oregon to watch Bob dance Gunsmoke up and down the street, wav-
ing at the folks with a huge grin on his face. “Buffalo Bob,” people remarked.
There were Mounties, bagpipers, Uncle Sam on stilts, and “Lewis” on horseback.
(Boyd’s brother, Corky, wearing those buckskins.) Bob “unveiled” the statue
and there were many speeches.

XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK 313

 Fort Benton, July 4, 1976. Unveiling the Lewis and Clark Monument.
Bob is at lower left. Photo: Mary Scriver.

In time, the Fort Benton statue led to a second commission for a heroic-size
statue in Great Falls to commemorate the state Centennial. This time Sacajawea
would be dropped out and the dog, Seaman, plus the slave, York, would be
added. An actual Newfoundland dog posed for Seaman, but I didn’t discover
who modeled for York. This statue, at Overlook Park where the Sun River joins
the Missouri, was dedicated on July 4, 1989. Bob made a custom composite
fiberglass statue with all six figures, half-life-size, which he gave to the Lewis and
Clark Overlook Museum in Great Falls not long before his death.
From the first Fort Benton commission in 1974 to the end of his life in
1999, Bob was constantly working on something about Lewis and Clark. Bob
loved all this research and becoming an expert on gear, so he could hold forth
with great authority. There is a videotape of him addressing the Lewis and Clark
history buffs only weeks before his death. In fact, earlier in the day he had been
in the emergency room.
The stories of the struggles to finance, model, and cast these statues are too
long and complex to be told here. One of the people who attached himself to
Bob during these projects was Phil Scriver, a military retiree. At first he kidded
with Bob that he was a distant cousin (no connection was ever found beyond

314 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

the name), then became a closer and closer “cousin” (partly so that he could
check Bob out of the hospital against doctor’s orders) and finally got into a ter-
rible quarrel with Bob, who believed that Phil had actually impersonated him.
Money figured into the quarrel.
Bob’s bond with Boyd Evans became very strong, especially since he’d been
underfoot since way back when his father, now passed on, had helped build the
original foundry. Boyd asked his wife, Lila, to begin helping Lorraine, especially
when Bob was in the hospital in Great Falls. Lila, an enrolled Blackfeet, did
what she could, which was quite a lot. In fact, she was the daughter of the
valedictorian of the graduating class of Browning High School the year that
Bob was salutatorian. In the yearbook photo of the 1930 Browning High School
Sophomore Class, Lila’s mother is sitting right next to Bob. It was on her ranch
that Bob and Hiram Upham (also in the photo) went rattlesnake hunting as
recent high school grads.
As the Bicentennial of the expedition approached, Lewis and Clark became
a major preoccupation in the State of Montana. For a while most of the excite-
ment was caused by Stephen Ambrose’s book Undaunted Courage, which was
published in 1996. Bob read this carefully, calling it a “keen book – the best
I’ve read for a long time.” Ambrose hit exactly the right complex of assumptions
in him: that the pre-industrial times were the really good times, that progress
was inevitable but tragic, that white men had somehow earned their Manifest
Destiny to claim the frontier, and that all of this was tied up in heroism worth
commemorating. In short, it was what some scholars now call “the Grand
Narrative.”

3. Distinguished Achievement
Great Falls, 1990

The Governor’s Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Arts was presented
to Robert Macfie Scriver on February 3, 1990. A prelude of excellent jazz was
played. Earl Old Person sang an “honor song” and said a prayer in Blackfeet.
(I figure that over a lifetime Earl, who was a member of Bob’s early Blackfeet
band, probably did this to honor Bob on several dozen occasions, including his
funeral.)
A blossom fell from the bouquet on the table. It was rather like a bit of eagle
plume falling from an object when someone is dancing at a Bundle Opening,
which is usually taken as a sign of an impending death or loss. A grim thought
for such an occasion – but then again, I got the impression that the choices for
awards are made on the basis of who doesn’t have much time left. David E.
Nelson, Montana Arts Council Executive Director, gave an unimpassioned but

XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK 315

 Cree Medicines at the Governor’s Award ceremonies at the
C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, 1990. Left to right: Carma, Carl,
David, and Rosemary. Photo: Mary Scriver.

stubborn talk against censorship of the arts, a reference to the flap set off by
Mapplethorpe. I thought how appalled Bob and most of the other people in that
audience would be by an exhibit of Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic black-leather
photographs.
Then Mike Logan, cowboy poet in wide hat, leather vest, boots, bolo, and
big belly, said he wasn’t really supposed to have composed a poem for the occa-
sion, but that after reading about Bob the words had just come into his head.

THE SHAMAN’S HANDS

Ghost winds howl off the Great Divide

To shape the Blackfeet lands.
Their wild, free, sculpting symphonies
Inspired the shaman’s hands.

This artist’s hands and fertile mind,

Known through the world today,
Have captured, in patinaed bronze,
Lovesongs composed in clay.

316 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 They’ve sung of “No More Buffalo,”
Of old ways doomed to die,
Uncompromising fierceness in
A cowboy’s “Honest Try.”

These wondrous hands have wrought, for us,

Two captains and their men
And tiny, brave “Bird Woman”
Who came to be their friend.

They’ve spun us tales of mountain men

Who rode up trails unknown
To seek the wealth of beaver plews
In mountains hewn from stone.

This night, we join in homage,

Through all Montana’s lands,
To Robert Macfie Scriver
And his mystic shaman’s hands.

Bob rose to his feet clapping to acknowledge the honor. He said in a little voice,
“This makes me feel funny.” He was telling the truth. In spite of his hunger for
homage, he didn’t know how to accept it. Which is why the need remained.
The reception was at the Russell Museum. They presented him with a
gooseberry pie, which was an “in” joke. To tease waitresses he would listen to
the pie list and then ask for gooseberry, because it sounds funny and they never
have it. But when he was someplace with Lorne Render, he asked for gooseberry
pie and they DID have it! Luckily, he loved it. (Mrs. Stone used to bake it.) So
on this occasion they had baked him a gooseberry pie, beautifully presented in
a red-and-white cloth-covered basket. (Gooseberries are the only sacred food
allowed to dancers in the Sun Lodge. Bob said, “Isn’t that amazing? It’s been
that way all my life.” Meaning fateful coincidences.)
When I went by the shop with my photos a week or so after the event, Bob
was wearing his fancy medal with his work clothes.

4. Long quiet days in the shop

Browning, 1988 forward

In 1988 I was serving the Unitarian Congregation in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan,

and kept having a strange intuition that I should call Bob, so I did. But the

XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK 317

 person I got was a young woman trying to hold the shop together. “Help!” she
pleaded. Bob and Lorraine had had a big fight. She was holed up at the ranch,
drunk, and Bob was in Great Falls with a major stroke. I called Bob and asked
whether I should come. “Hell, yes!” he said and then fell out of bed.
By the time I’d found someone to take my pulpit for a Sunday and driven
down, he had changed his mind. Too late. I stayed a week, getting an AA repre-
sentative out to the ranch to talk to Lorraine, making sure Bob ate properly and
didn’t drive – which he was determined to do, though he could barely control
his own body. I listened to all Lorraine’s complaints, which were the same as
mine and Jeanette’s before me, and then I listened to Bob’s, which were also the
same as before. When we were in cafés, he’d write lists of the perfect qualities
of a wife on the paper napkins in order to identify where we all fell short. I told
Lorraine that if she wanted to leave, I’d help her get to the airport, help her pack,
call her brothers. I also told her that if she didn’t stop drinking, I’d come back
and move in with the two of them.
Finally I went to Bob and asked him what he really wanted. He said he
wanted Lorraine back, that when she was sober, she was the very best. Then
there was a pause and he said, “Of course, she’ll never stop drinking.” In that
pause, the die was cast.
When I got back to Saskatoon, my congregation was very angry that I had
“gone off to the States.” They forbade me to ever do that again. I resigned. I did
move back to the reservation, teaching at Heart Butte from 1988 to 1991. It
seemed as though Bob and Lorraine had stabilized in those three years. In 1991
the Superintendent finally succeeded in firing me, and I went back to Portland,
Oregon.
In the summer of 1991 Bob had four young goslings in his shop. He seemed
to prefer them to the springer spaniel puppies in the back yard. The four fowl
walked, as scientists now think that dinosaurs walked, with their heads poked
out ahead and their butts waggling along behind. They were big, almost ready
for feathers, but still downy and gray. Around they went, walking single-file and
squirting green goo on the shop floor.
Eventually, they came to their water dish and went into ecstasies of admira-
tion. “How wonderful! Exactly the thing!” they seemed to gabble, while they
dipped in their beaks and then pointed them ceiling-ward so the water would
run down inside. Each in turn splashed water, dipped a foot, all the while ex-
claiming to each other. Then one became distracted and set off again on another
perambulation, the other three hastening to get in line.
Big flat feet carefully flopped down on the plaster lumps, wood fragments,
clay globs, rocking along in perfect confidence of purpose. And soon enough
they came again to the water dish and went into exactly the same arias of praise
as before: “How wonderful! Exactly the thing!” And the whole play-cycle began
again. I watched for a half-hour without seeing any variation and made cynical
but private comparisons with the steady stream of admirers in the front room.

318 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 While the geese walked around, Bob stood at the table casting plaster
– horse’s legs, someone’s arm, a flaring tail, the stirrup leather of a saddle, the
head off a moose. Bits and pieces, as we are used to seeing remnants of Greek
sculpture. This is what he seemed to do day after day, work at bits of sculpture in
the habitual repetitions of a lifetime’s occupation. But he depended upon tour-
ists coming to the shop door to exclaim, “How wonderful! Exactly the thing!”

5. Facing death
Browning, late Nineties

Bob’s son, James Robert Scriver, called Jimmy, was diagnosed with cancer. He
died in Kalispell in August 1993, aged 51. He had been making bronzes of his
own, mostly wildlife. Towards the end he identified with his Marine veteran
community and drew his support from them. Bob attended the funeral, though
he wore work clothes. At least he didn’t wear bloody buckskin as when long ago
he had taken Jimmy to his uncle’s funeral.
In 1994 Bob’s health, problematic for quite a while, began to seriously dete-
riorate. One day he felt nauseous and didn’t eat until evening. Then he finished
off a bag of cookies while soaking in his hot tub, the only place he was really
comfortable. Suddenly he went into a seizure. Lorraine called 911, panicked so
badly she could hardly manage the door locks and alarms, and forgot to turn
off the electric fence. One intrepid tribal officer managed to get through all the
obstacles and start CPR. It was not another heart attack but a diabetic seizure
brought on by the sudden change from too-low to too-high blood sugar.
Now, added to the rows of prescribed pills plus vitamins and off-the-shelf
cures, Bob had to have a blood sugar check before every meal. Lorraine stuck his
finger with a lancet and put the blood drop in the little machine. He flinched
but submitted. In the cafés the waitresses and cooks arranged fruit and cheese
plates for him instead of the usual fried food. After a while he had been so
conscientious about his diet that he could go off that particular medicine.
Especially in public situations, he grimaced and mugged involuntarily. The
newspapers printed photos that showed him making faces, sometimes looking
peculiar. He had always been described as “internationally renowned,” but now
the reporters said “legendary.” The old-timers had been replaced by young folks
from the city who saw him as slightly ridiculous.
In 1997 Bob finally agreed to a heart bypass that had originally been sug-
gested twenty years earlier. After the surgery, for the rest of his life, he occasion-
ally had to hurry to Emergency because his internal chemicals were out of bal-
ance. Several times he ended up in the new Browning Indian Hospital, which
he much preferred. He had made a statue of Earl Old Person to put in it and had

XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK 319

 given a speech at the dedication. The doctors would bring their children to meet
the famous artist. Boyd, Lila, and their kids took him healthy frozen yogurt, but
told him it was ice cream, because he insisted that he hated yogurt. He began
wearing an oxygen cannula sometimes. “Only when he feels like he needs it,”
said Lorraine. Often it was clear to me that he was mentally diminished.
Bob’s grandchildren had gone off to their own lives, starting businesses
and raising kids. He didn’t confide in them nor did they feel they ought to
ask. He could not decide how to write his will or whether he ought to make
some arrangement while living. The natural receiver would have been the C.M.
Russell Museum where Bob had been on the board for many years and Bob felt
warmly towards Lorne Render, the director. But he could never come to a final
agreement and then Render left for another job.
Bob’s lawyer had a foundation planned, which the lawyer would admin-
ister. The lawyer already had a large collection of Scriver bronzes which he had
accepted in payment of Bob’s bill. In a hasty will before his heart bypass surgery,
Bob made Lorraine his executor. When he survived the surgery, Bob “rewrote”
his will with scissors and tape until it was practically unreadable. When he died,
all those revisions were ignored and the lawyer activated the one written before
heart bypass surgery. In the years immediately after Bob’s death, and then after
Lorraine’s death in 2002, everything was dispersed. Nothing of Bob Scriver
remains in public Browning.
One fall day in the early Nineties I had been driving back out to Heart
Butte on the “inside road,” which follows along the prehistoric Old North Trail,
when I saw Bob shoot a teal at a little pothole along the way. I parked and walked
over. He plopped the dead duck into my hand and went to pick up another that
had fallen into weeds at the pond verge. I watched him, hungry for him, while
a cold wind blew hard. My one hand was full of warm duck feathers and the
other hand held nothing but arctic wind. In the distance rose the timeless stone
ramparts of the East Front Lewis Overthrust. We visited a minute. Then he left.
Often we encountered each other like that.
I remembered the many months twenty years earlier when he was trying
to rebuild his heart through a walking program his internist suggested. He was
supposed to walk a certain distance in a certain amount of time. Even when
the weather was cold and snowy, he fulfilled the chart’s requirement. To walk
two miles, he had me drive him two miles – exactly, as measured on the pickup
odometer – up Highway 89 toward the mountains, and drop him off on the
nearly nonexistent shoulder of the road. Then I went back to the studio and
stood in the big picture window watching for him, holding the pickup keys
in case I could see he was in trouble or in case he didn’t show up on time. The
regimen must have worked: two decades later he was still here.
When he came into money, he didn’t buy cowboy sculptures, but rather
the animal bronzes he’d always loved: Rosa Bonheur’s wonderful bull, a double
handful of Malvina Hoffman animals in plaster, a wild turkey, and bronze surg-

320 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

ing rhinos by Sherry Sander. He bought Beaux Arts sculptures, a monumental
Indian chief by James MacNeil and a seated Abraham Lincoln by Gutzon
Borglum. And a double dozen John Rogers vignettes, fragile and nostalgic.
In summer of 1998 I had driven up to St. Mary, then to Babb, and back on
the Duck Lake road. I saw a dead badger by the road and picked up the solid,
heavy body, double-bagged it, and put it in the pickup bed. It was relatively fresh
– no maggots, no wounds.
When I got to the museum I carried it in. Bob was in the shop and I went
on through. As soon as he realized what I had, he backed up, saying, “Oh, no,
no! I can’t touch it! It’s my totem animal – you understand.” He wasn’t angry
– he really DID want me to understand.
Then I saw that I had made a huge mistake. I carried it back out to the
pickup and drove toward the mountains, trying to settle and think what to do.
It was true. Bob should not be handling a dead badger. The badger meant his
father, persistence, honor, and friendship. He didn’t want to change his relation-
ship to those things.
Then what did this badger mean? I decided the message was not for him
but for me. I had no impulse to create a Bundle. Driving along Willow Creek
until I came to a broad camas field, deep purple under the sun, with many
ground squirrels. I thought, “This looks pretty close to a heaven for badgers.”
So I packed the carcass out to the middle and arranged it to look like a live but
sleeping animal. I stood quietly for a moment and said prayers, including the
one in Blackfeet that I’d learned for the Thunder Pipe Bundle.
I knew what it meant. Bob was going to die. And I was not going to be with
him. I had been fantasizing deathbed scenes, last words, but this badger was
going to be the only body to which I had access.

6. Death on Bob’s terms

Browning, 1999

By the late Nineties Bob would be glad to see me, then try to impose some kind
of control or ownership, and finally pick a fight to restore distance. Once I found
him working on his autobiography, partly because he knew I was coming, I
think, and hoped for my help. He’d had the same problem finding someone to
write a biography as he’d had finding a town to build a museum for him. Simply,
he wouldn’t surrender enough control to give a writer any elbow room. So he was
doing it himself. At this point he was writing about the Sixties, when I met him.
We worked on Bob’s legal pad of memories all day.
The next day I remarked offhand that it would be a whole lot easier if we
could do all this on a computer. He broke into a raving tirade about computers,

XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK 321

 based on the enormous struggle he’d had with the publishers of his artifact
book. Pretty soon we were in a full-fledged quarrel, told each other off, and I
left. I glanced back at the last moment. Bob was making the sign-talk gesture of
breaking a stick (or arrow) in half, meaning the end.
In 1998, when it was clear that Bob had very little time left, I had brought
him a Japanese carved nut, ballyhooed as “nature’s ivory.” It was netsuke style,
about the size of a walnut, and portrayed a nude woman and an ape hanging
onto each other for dear life. The tiny woman wore a minute comb in her hair
and the ape had a teeny scrotum. It reminded me a little of a sculpture Bob had
once made of bear cubs grappling together so they formed a ball. (He’d intended
to get it cast in hard rubber for a tourist toy. “It’d make me rich – for about six
months until it’s copied.”) When we were briefly alone, I had slipped the carving
to him and he was delighted with it. After that when I called on the phone, I’d
say, “Hang on like that ape with the lady.” And he’d laugh. He carried it in his
pocket. I don’t know where it ended up. I’m not sure hanging on was the right
advice. By the end the men had to carry a chair beside him when he crossed from
the studio to the shop, so he could stop and rest on the way. But he insisted on
walking under his own power.
January 1999 was a restless month. My mother had died in April 1998, but
her estate was not being finished up in a timely way. Then a friend in Browning
called to tell me Bob had died.
How much devotion was enough? Once, while we were married and I
thought Bob was asking too much, I complained, “You must believe in suttee
like India where a husband expects his wife to throw herself on his funeral pyre
to be burned alive with his body.”
Bob drew himself up and said with great dignity, “I should think if you
really loved me, you wouldn’t want to live on without me anyway.”
When he died, I thought about that quite a bit. I was a sucker for the “if you
really love me” line. But better to stay alive and write a biography.

When Bob died on January 29, 1999, his and Lorraine’s lives fell open. The
little studio house was a wreck. The bathroom plumbing had failed, the kitchen
appliances were worn out and inoperable, and no one ever cleaned. The windows
were never opened so everything was coated with Lorraine’s cigarette smoke.
She immediately returned to drinking.
In Browning just before Bob’s funeral – it must have been Ground Hog
Day – Lorraine sent the “grandkids” (nearing forty years old) out to stay at the
ranch. Luckily, Lane’s four-wheel-drive was capable of drift-busting through
the access road. Once there, they got into a quarrel and Rory stormed out into
the darkness. By the faint ranch light he confronted some huge dark hulk and,
spooked, went back to the ranchhouse for the gun he had packed. Next morning
the hulk turned out to be a pile of fenceposts. I think it was really “Grandpa.”

322 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 The wake, funeral, and “feed” were organized by Boyd and Lila Evans, with
the help of old friends like Barbara Weathered who had helped with so many
open houses in the past. At the wake Lorraine stayed only a short time, leaving
abruptly to avoid George and Molly Kicking Woman, who came to pray and
smudge her in cleansing, because she was afraid they might intend to reclaim
the Thunder Pipe Bundle. Boyd stayed with the body and received the visitors.
At first the thought was that the crowd would be so big that the funeral
should be held in the gymnasium of the high school, but then, considering bliz-
zards, plans were scaled back to the library/auditorium. Boyd asked the Tribal
elders to sing, and they were happy to do so. Earl Old Person spoke. Father Mike
officiated. Michelle read a eulogy she had written. Teddy Williamson talked
about how Bob Scriver put Browning on the map. Someone read Mike Logan’s
poem about the Shaman’s Hands. Paul Kingston repeated the thoughts about an
artist’s creativity being like God’s that he had used at John Clarke’s funeral.
Lorraine went through the flowers and threw out all wreaths and bouquets
from people she disliked. Instead of on the ranch next to his beloved horse, she
buried Bob in Cut Bank with his parents and brother. Crown Hill Cemetery
is just north of town, across the highway from an auto wrecking yard. At the
edge is an oilwell rocker pump. The subzero wind was blowing hard. Boyd had
gathered all the flowers – rejected or not – and brought them along, but when
he tried to put them on the grave, they blew away. The three grandkids from
Oregon weren’t used to cold weather and could hardly bear it. Jim’s two daugh-
ters arrived, quarreled, and left.
The inheritors went to a bar for a stiff drink, then everyone went to the
lawyer’s office to hear the will. Each grandchild, plus Bill Byrne, Bob’s trum-
pet student and excellent friend, was to get $10,000. The rest was to go to an
institution, all of it at Lorraine’s discretion. At some point in those days, all the
paintings by Bob that had been stored at the ranch mysteriously disappeared.

An attempt to keep the museum open failed. Lorraine fired the original lawyer,
and hired a second lawyer with political connections who guided Bob’s work to
the Montana Historical Society and converted all the other artists’ work and the
real estate to cash which disappeared untraceably, though it was also supposed
to have gone to the Historical Society to help pay for a building to house the
bronzes by Bob.
For a year or so a pair of dubious characters guarded and sequestered
Lorraine from everyone, friends included. More than once, people called
the Elder Abuse Hotline about her. (It wasn’t me.) Laurel gave me the phone
number of Max Caldwell’s sister and I called her to try to contact Lorraine’s
half-brothers. The sister wouldn’t give me their numbers, but called them on my
behalf. Then Laurel herself called the half-brothers. I went to the local district
judge, who claimed his hands were tied, even if her life was in danger. Ironically

XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK 323

 Lorraine was saved when she fell and broke her hip. The hospital stay put her in
objective medical hands and sobered her up.
Since she was a Canadian citizen, she returned to Nanoose Bay, close to
Vancouver, B.C., where she built a house near her half-brothers. When she died
on November 3, 2002, the family had her cremated, and scattered her ashes
on the beach. They inherited the house, art, and artifacts in the house but not
whatever was left of the money. Interest from a mysterious “Scriver Family”
foundation was directed to Carroll College for an art “bursary,” which is like a
scholarship.

7. “The Man in Buckskin”

Valier, 2002

Recently I went out to the Boone & Crockett ranch, west of Dupuyer, to see the
equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt that they had commissioned Bob to make
in 1988. Snow squalls drifted through the peaks of the East Front, creating
those misty atmospheric scenes so beloved by impressionist landscape painters. I
took my sculpture books so the staff and I could look at other Teddy Roosevelt
portraits.
On the East Slope of the Rockies, the main principle for successful hunting
is to time it with the fall snows. The idea is to get up into the foothills when there
is enough snow in the highest country to push the game down, but only a few
inches of snow on the lower meadows for tracking. Too early and the animals
would outsmart the hunter. Too late and there was a risk of being caught in the
snow and killed by the cold.
In terms of hunting, Bob sometimes cut it close. In terms of his life, he
refused to give up, simply kept on. Never give up. Make an honest try. Go to the
utmost limit. This is the Western ethic. It is the “undaunted courage” that took
Lewis and Clark to the Pacific and back.
In the mountains the snow flags fly off the peaks and the wind is sharp.
Sun, Natoosi, sinks quietly into a shadowed horizon against a sky streaked with
cloud. Sometimes there is color at sunset, but often the sky is silver and then
suddenly dark. Almost always the wind persists. The temperature drops.
The lawyer represented Bob’s death as near-idyllic, a quiet death in the
foundry while he contentedly watched the “boys” pour bronze. The story from
other sources was quite different.
Someone had persuaded Bob into doing a portrait of Mike Mansfield, the
long-time United States Senator from Montana, whom he had always disliked
because of Mansfield’s gun control stance. Over eighty and frail, Bob had no
business doing any such sculpture. It’s hard for me to believe he would have

324 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

willingly undertaken the job on his own. There is a sound tape of him preparing
a pitch to the Mansfield committee, telling them he could convert the heroic-
size plastilene of Meriweather Lewis into Mansfield – or if necessary “the boys”
could do that, and he would do the face.
On the last day, the contract was unsatisfactory ... again. The Mansfield
committee knew Bob was close to death and I suspect they were stalling in
that expectation. They had just faxed a copy of the latest version of the contract
and he was enraged. He went to the foundry to calm down and watch a pour.
Evidently, while he was there he felt uncomfortable and went to the basement
shop bathroom.
It was an hour before anyone missed him, the foundry crew thinking he
was upstairs and Lorraine thinking he was downstairs. In the end David had to
break down the bathroom door. He had died – privately, secretly – in roughly
the same position as his first Prince of Peace statue. The compartment was the
oldest, roughest part of the complex of buildings. I think he sought it out, like
an old bear looking for a cave.
In some ways Bob Scriver was too much of an individual to be put into
a social category. Maybe he was a throwback of some kind. Certainly he was
not a “cowboy” in the sense of the Cowboy Artists of America, men who rope
and ride, brand and herd, organizing their lives around beef. (The Stone ranch,
where he spent his boyhood, raised horses rather than cows.) Though he admired
rodeo cowboys, he wasn’t really a rodeo hand either. The Indians themselves
are ambivalent about the idea of him being an Indian sculptor, though he was
so close to them all his life. In some ways, though he never lived in the East,
he had a lot of Eastern ideas mixed into his understanding of the West. He
was contemptuous of homesteaders (part of my roots) but admiring of the early
national patriots.
The answer jumped out from a recent seminal book by Daniel Justin
Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination.4 Herman describes a particular
kind of frontiersman and suggests the category of “American Native” in contrast
to “Native American.” The marker is the buckskin shirt, which distinguished
the man who hunted. At one time buckskin shirts were even suggested as the
uniform of the Revolutionary War soldiers. They had the advantage of not being
woven in Europe and they were tough.
Examples of “American Natives” include Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett,
and the inventions of James Fenimore Cooper. Close to Indians, even living
with and learning from Indians, these men were nevertheless family men rather
than military men, goal-oriented explorers rather than drifters. Herman also
proposes Buffalo Bill, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lewis and Clark, all of whom have
been repeatedly pictured in their buckskin shirts.
Herman suggests that these men, greatly admired and lionized heroes, have
a social/political contradiction in their assumptions. American hunting is still
haunted by English hunting, which was closely controlled by social class. To

XVI COOLING: LEWIS AND CLARK 325

 be “landed” meant not only that one had an income, but also that one owned
hunting rights to that land. The extreme poor and the rebellious, like Robin
Hood, were forbidden to hunt, even in order to feed their families.
When Europeans emigrated to America, they were of two types: those who
intended to seize territory in order to become the new landed gentry, and those
who expected democracy to eliminate the old hierarchy and allow every man the
freedom to depend upon his own skills in a broad wilderness. The two streams
have been in conflict right up to the present, easily traced in our political parties.
Both ideas were alive in Bob Scriver. On the one hand his ranch was posted “no
hunting” as a nature preserve and on the other he felt entitled to hunt in Glacier
National Park. On the one hand he thought of himself as Scots gentry and on
the other hand he described his Pop as a middle-class farmer ready to defend
independence and self-reliance. He identified with Blackfeet, Cree, and Métis
and yet was proud to be small-town white. Sometimes he was the moose and
sometimes he was the wolves.
Herman also suggests a religious problem, the one A.B. Guthrie Jr. so indel-
ibly described in The Big Sky. Guthrie has the original mountain men (standing
in the same place Bob often hunted, up Blackleaf Canyon) mourn, “Why do
we kill what we love?” Hunters love animals, know them deeply in unexpected
ways, even as they endanger whole species. We all love wilderness, whatever we
imagine it to be, even as we invade it. And we love fine artists, but often destroy
them.

326 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 XVII

Patina:
Overview

1. How patinas are formed

Bronze patinas are possible because copper is a metal that attracts salts and other
minerals, reacting to what is in air or water until it has created a protective skin
on the surface of the copper. Iron, by contrast, rusts away – the iron molecules
combine with oxygen and leave, until eventually there is no iron left. Bronze an-
tiquities are brought up from ancient shipwrecks with thick crusts of oxidation,
but when the encrustations are knocked off, the original object is still there. If the
foundry applies no patina, the bronze will draw its own from the air. In fact, the
metal must be waxed or otherwise sealed to keep it from continuing to add color.
Rather like ceramic glazes, patinas are subtle and sometimes gorgeous. The
most obvious is the verdigris of public statues and copper architectural detail.
For a while that color was popular because fashionable green antiquities were be-
ing recovered from the Mediterranean. Some of the rarest patinas are on bronzes
that were left sealed into tombs with decomposing bodies, so that the surface of
the object was gradually colored by the gases produced by those corpses. Many
patinas are produced by mild acid, so one strategy is to bury a bronze in sand
and over a period of months urinate on it. Artists claim that their urine has a
“signature” effect which they can vary by eating certain things.
Craftsmen can be as protective of their patina formulas as a good cook
might be of prized recipes – which patina solutions are, in a way. Nowadays
one can simply turn to the back pages of an art magazine and order bottles of
patining mixtures, but in 1962 we felt lucky to have located one ancient book
of potions, like wizard’s spells.1 In the days before the Internet the next problem
was to find sources for the mysterious sulphates, nitrates, and so on. By long
distance phone suspicious pharmacy supply wholesalers would ask, “WHAT?
WHAT are you going to do with this stuff?”

327
 When we tried to patine, swarms of questions arose, all of which had to
be resolved by experimentation. Finally, in the summer of the 1964 flood, since
there was no museum traffic, Bob decided to go to Minneapolis and find out
how to do it, once and for all. I went along to take notes.
Richard Randall, who cast Bob’s first bronzes and coached him through
the creation of the Bighorn Foundry, was literally a “high-impact” artist. This
was the Vietnam Era and he was after social comment. In a typical work, he
might take the door off an abandoned boxcar, run over the door with a tank
(borrowed), machine gun it (special permit needed), and then spray paint it with
dayglo graffiti. Taken to the elegant Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis and
hung on a high white wall with a spotlight, the piece looked, well, smashing! It
was high-octane political art.
But in his foundry Richard was a meticulous workman and experimenter.
He and a friend had cast an old cow bone with such detail that it was hard to
believe it was bronze until one tried to pick it up or noted the little thread where
the parting of the mold had been. They had invested and cast a small dead bird,
slightly decomposed, and it emerged a work of delicate filigree and thin blades
of bronze.
Quickly Randall mixed up some patina colors – me scribbling measure-
ments madly in a notebook – set out some little bronze “pigs” (ingots) for us
to practice on and lit an ordinary propane hand torch. “Don’t get the bronze
too hot – just enough to steam. That will mean it’s reacting.” Scribble, scribble.
“Don’t make the mixture too thick or it’ll just flake back off. You want a reac-
tion, not a paint job.” Scribble, scribble. “Do it gradually, a little bit at a time.”
Scribble ... and then, hey! He walked off, calling over his shoulder, “You’ll figure
it out.” His studio was on acreage with a motorcycle racetrack. He hopped onto
his Harley and began circling the track.
We tried heating and painting. I was a little distracted because Randall’s
wife was a ballet dancer and she had a studio at the house. The music drifted out
to us while she practiced. What a civilized way to live! Bob wanted to see my
notes. “What does this say? What’s that word?”
That evening we went to the Guthrie Theatre to see a Shakespeare play
(I forget which) because some of my former classmates were in it. I had made
myself a beautiful dress out of some textury brown material with blue flowers
on it. I had bought the material at a fabric shop in Great Falls that sold both
decorating and clothing fabric, and it turned out that the Guthrie lobby furni-
ture was upholstered in the same fabric as my dress. Every time I sat down, I
disappeared.
Bob looked a little glazed. He was not a Shakespeare fan and I’m not sure
he’d ever been to a play that wasn’t put on by a high school. He said he once
played in the pit orchestra for a burlesque house and disgraced himself by arriv-
ing late and tripping over the cymbals.

328 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Because the railroad was washed out west of Shelby, we had driven the
pickup to the Shelby depot and left it parked while we took the train the rest of
the way. The train returned at 2 AM. The pickup was there, but Bob couldn’t
find the keys. Reeling with fatigue, knowing we weren’t thinking straight, we
went through every pocket Bob had, plus his luggage. No luck. He shouldn’t
have driven in an exhausted state anyway, and he hadn’t taught me to drive yet,
so we went to the hotel. I didn’t know that this was where Bob used to live when
he played in a Shelby band at the Sports Club full-time during the early Fifties.
Jeanette had stayed in Browning and brought Jimmy on weekends.
It didn’t make sense to rent two rooms, since we would be back up in a
matter of hours, but before we went into the hotel, Bob cautioned me not to use
our real names. “In Montana,” he explained, “If you present someone as being
married to you, then the law is that they become your common-law spouse.” I
was impressed. Bob signed us in under the name he’d made up, but I was too
tired to keep my head straight and called him by his real name. He shot angry
eye-arrows at me. The desk man had a little smirk. We didn’t take our clothes
off or get under the covers – just fell across the bed sideways and went straight to
sleep. When we got up again at the proper hour, Bob found the keys had been
in his pants pocket all along.
When we got home, I slipcovered a little corner knotty-pine room with
white oilcloth (using up the entire Browning supply) to be the patina room. Bob
invented a turntable out of an auto axle and hub and mixed up the potions ac-
cording to my scribbles. They didn’t work. Again there were so many questions.
Finally, Bob abandoned the attempt. Essentially – not actually – he told me to
stay in that room until I figured it out and then he left. In the end, blundering
and guessing, I did figure it out and was able to show the others.
The reference for the patina we were trying to achieve was the Barye bronze
we bought in New York City in 1965. The dark mottled green with a glossy
finish was not common. Eventually we were able to duplicate it, but none of the
other foundries could do it. Some didn’t try.

2. What is a “great artist?”

Once I took an art class in Spokane. The professor said, “There are two ways to
become famous and make money as an artist. One is to jump on every band-
wagon that comes along as early as possible. The other is to do what you know
best, do it as well as you can, and stick to it no matter what the fashion might
be.” And then he added, “The trouble with the second is that you might not be
famous until after you’re dead and people finally begin to realize what you’ve
done.”

X V I I PAT I N A : OV E RV I E W 329
 When Bob and I were approaching divorce in 1970, our most bitter and
crucial quarrels were over his strategy in what was clearly going to be a successful
sculpture career. But we defined success differently. He wanted money, a lot of
it quickly, as though it might disappear if he didn’t cash in on his reputation.
Steeped in my idealistic theatre background, I felt that he should use his energy
to make fewer works of high quality – masterpieces. We were both aware that
he might not have many years left. He wanted to impress people. He wanted, as
Jeanette always repeated, “to be renowned.” With her French-Canadian accent,
it sounded like “re-known.” He didn’t want to be Harold Scriver’s little brother
any more. And he wanted his family vindicated.
His unadmitted worry was that he might lose his talent somehow and
would simply not be able to create masterpieces, no matter how much rest and
focus he had. In evidence, the complaint against me in court from the divorce
transcript: Q. “Although basically a good person, she is the type of person who
destroys your peace of mind and you can’t carry on your work or live with her?”
A. “Yes.”
In other words, he felt I had killed his muse. More likely what he was feeling
was the damage from being hypoxic during his major heart attack in April 1970.
At that point he subtly changed and in the following years grew more and more
different from the person I originally knew. By the Nineties, I was more like he
had been when I met him than he was. I told him so, which made him angry.
After the divorce he began to make small figures for dealers, often subjects
they suggested. Almost always, rather than deriving from inspiration to the
artist, they were something the dealer had seen and thought would sell. These
were sold with the right to reproduce, which relieved Bob from the struggle of
copyrighting and keeping the record of certificates of authenticity. Once they
went out the door, he was through with them, and therefore he didn’t have much
emotional investment in them.
In my judgment they are mostly trivial, often awkward, and sometimes
below his previous standards. He had indeed lost some of his talent, along with
much of his limited emotional stability and a little integrity. But in the Eighties
he was at the peak of his reputation, in part because these dealers were motivated
to promote him for the sake of their own profit. The same forces were affecting
movies and books in the United States – repetition, mass-marketing in catego-
ries, popularity as the indicator of profit.
I talked to him while he was working on a National Guard Monument
showing a guardsman with an eagle taking flight from his arm. It had none
of the kinaesthesia of Bob’s earlier work, the muscle-empathy that would put
curves and tensions into the body of the man. He couldn’t grasp what I was
saying. In fact, the lack was in his own body. By this time hugging him was like
hugging a tree.
Fashions come and go, technical means change, the social context of what
is valued evolves, and personal taste is always the crucial factor in a purchase.

330 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

All of these influence the artist as well as the customers. Years of scholarship,
museum curatorship, and analysis of Bob’s career will pass before there can be
any final verdict on his place in history among the American bronze sculptors,
a better context for him than “cowboy artist.” The biggest danger is that the
focus will be on only part of his work, whether action pieces or Indian portraits,
instead of taking an overview of all of the nearly one thousand bronzes. In Bob’s
case, the most passionate and carefully done pieces, like the “Pieta” or “To See
Eternity,” will never get the exposure of the small works that constantly pass
through auctions.
Some say that the real period of creativity for any artist is about ten years
long, usually early in life. For Bob Scriver, his best years probably began about
1959 and extended through the early Seventies, though there were a few excel-
lent sculptures outside that span, and he kept working until his death at 84.
Most remarkably, in those highly productive years he was middle-aged (45 to 60
years old). For comparison, Russell died at 62 and Remington at 48. Neither of
them left anywhere near the huge number of sculptures that Bob created.
Bob’s habit of methodically creating “sets” of subject matter, like the rodeo
series or the Blackfeet Indian series, meant that he addressed many different sub-
jects rather than specializing in just warriors or only bucking horses. Because he
made many sculptures for himself, out of love, like the bust portraits of women
and his family or the religious pieces, we have unique access to his private self.
The most private bronzes, a late series of small rough maquettes of nude couples
making love, were melted up by Lorraine, who considered them “dirty.”
Seen looking back, some of the bronzes that were startlingly new at the
time – the bucking horses on one foot or the landing geese held up by the touch-
ing wing-tips – are familiar because so many people caught on and did the
same thing – the better artists in their own way. But the sculptures keep their
immediacy because they came from his own senses, what he saw and felt.

3. The artist as customer

Eventually Bob was able to buy big “name” paintings – Russell, Remington, and
Rungius plus others. This meant that the dealers treated him with new respect.
He bought as many Fery paintings as he could find – huge murals meant to be
high on the walls of the log hotels in the railroad parks, but still undervalued.
They hung in the museum, nearly shoulder to shoulder, making a rich and gor-
geous background for the mounted animals. The “3 R” (Russell, Remington,
Rungius) paintings had to be kept in a vault for fear of theft or fire. Bob loved to
lead people down into his vault. The really special visitors got to enter the vault

X V I I PAT I N A : OV E RV I E W 331
 behind the vault! Other paintings were stored at the C.M. Russell Museum in
Great Falls in their vault.
Bob discovered that Joseph Henry Sharp (1859–1953) had spent several
summers in Glacier Park, staying on the Horace and Helen Clarke ranch behind
the Big Hotel. He found a number of the oil sketches Sharp had made around
the reservation and copied them to learn what Sharp did. One of these copies
was in the museum entry, up on the wall over the reception counter. Without
knowing what it was, I admired it because it was the view out the window of the
studio, except that Sharp probably painted it from a bit farther west, the same
as Schreyvogel had. I asked Bob if he’d sell it, saying he was really getting good.
He loved the deception – played coy and said he could actually do much better.
But he wouldn’t sell me the painting. I wonder whether it was finally auctioned
as a Scriver or a Sharp.
When Bob’s collection was dispersed, the scatterings I regretted the most
were the Ferys and the Sharps. Someone, somewhere, ought to reassemble them.
It was one of the few occasions on which I wished I were rich.

4. The Flatiron Ranch

Browning, 1980

When Bob bought the Doane ranch west of Browning, which he renamed the
Flatiron Ranch, he would creep out to a pothole pond in the spring, find a
Canada goose nest, and steal a living egg. For days he would carry that egg
around in his shirt – never breaking it while incubating it against his hairy chest
– until the gosling emerged to believe Bob was Mom. The little critter would
paddle around after Bob all summer, getting fed, talked to, and lifted into and
out of the pickup to ride with Bob so that instead of the usual dog’s head in the
passenger window one saw what was apparently a periscope. Often he carried
the bird around like a waiter’s tray with his hand flat under its breast while it
slowly rotated its feet as though in water.
One summer I dropped by the ranch to find Bob putting the finishing
touches on his goose house. He’d cut the goose door and was trying to get the
tame geese to go up a gangplank to enter. But the geese were suspicious. Since
the door was pretty big, Bob got down on his hands and knees and crawled
through to demonstrate. The geese craned their necks – then looked away as
though embarrassed by this old man in khakis.
In the good times the ranch was a wonderful refuge. Bob and Lorraine spent
most evenings out there, Lorraine doing laundry and needlework or watching
television. The mouse problem was solved by cat holes cut in the bottoms of all
the doors of the outbuildings. One back bedroom was Bob’s painting studio.

332 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

He had bought a little old log cabin and moved it to the ranch with the idea of
making a studio out of it, but that was too big a project now. He was beginning
to be so frail that merely planning took a lot of energy.
One evening Bob and Lorraine saw that the horses had gathered into a
cluster up on the hillside and were staring down into the beaver dam brush.
Curious, they thought of walking out to look, but on second thought decided to
drive in the pickup instead. When they parked alongside the horses and looked
down, they saw two pairs of grizzly bear ears rocking in unison. The rest was
hidden in brush, but they had a pretty good idea of what was happening. John
Clarke, the famous Blackfeet carver of bears, would have loved it.
In the bad times, when Lorraine was drunk at the ranch, Bob could go
to the Cecile Horn place (across the river from our original ranch on the Two
Medicine River), sixteen acres of grass and cottonwood, often used for cer-
emonials. He had a Blackfeet woman friend who sometimes went with him.
Always he tried to make sure he had a backup, a vault behind the vault, a reserve
woman behind the main woman. Evading, rather than addressing problems
was his choice, maybe because of aging. He just didn’t have the time or energy
to change.
One summer he hatched a white Peking duck which followed him around
the shop. By now Bob could hardly walk because of his hip and back, and sat
on a big block of Styrofoam while he worked. Whenever he sat down, the duck
would settle on top of his shoe, contentedly muttering to itself. If he stood up in
a hurry, it went over backwards on its little duck butt. He’d hold up the duck to
rub his cheek on it. I recognized that part of me would always be like that little
white duck, content with nothing more than following Bob around.
When he was often in the hospital, I sent him a video of I’ll Fly Away, about
a little girl who learns to operate an ultralight plane and leads a flock of hand-
raised Canada geese south for the winter. There seemed to be little or nothing
else I could do for him, short of invading Browning and displacing Lorraine,
which would bring the law down on me – it was bound to be a violent scene
– to say nothing of creating ethical dilemmas. My one attempt at intervening,
when I came down from Saskatoon in 1988, was clumsy and only drove them
underground. Towards the end I did ask him if he wanted me to come, but there
was only silence on the line.
I didn’t hear the worst stories until after he was gone. He was in bed so
much that he developed terrible bedsores, and Lorraine couldn’t seem to cope.
Lila Evans, Boyd’s wife, called the home nurses and, thinking that Bob might
be embarrassed by a woman handling his bottom, asked for a male nurse. But
when the man arrived, Bob was horrified, thinking it implied something about
his sexuality, and he wouldn’t let the nurse come close.

X V I I PAT I N A : OV E RV I E W 333
 5. The last visit and goodbye
Browning, 1998

Near Labor Day in 1998, Bob wouldn’t let me into the studio/home – he hadn’t
since he’d had the stroke in 1988. Instead, I stood in the back door of the mu-
seum, opened in hopes of cool air, and looked over the fence. The green willow
branches we’d cut by the creek and thrust into mud were now trees taller than
the museum. Dry fallen leaves were ankle deep in the yard. A few hardy asters
poked up through weeds. The light was smoky.
I had come over from Portland knowing that Lorraine was scheduled for a
repair operation on her groin. A year earlier she had been talking to Bob’s doc-
tor when she began to speak “word salad,” unintelligible. Recognizing a stroke
symptom, the doctor took her into surgery on an emergency basis and used fiber
optic technology to place several stents to hold open the blood vessels that feed
blood to the brain. In the middle of surgery she had to be transferred across
town to a better-equipped hospital. She survived, but the point of entry had
healed into painful scar tissue.
Bob insisted that he was going to drive Lorraine down to Great Falls. I
offered to drive. No dice. The crew was all away, fire-fighting. A young woman
friend who was writing a Blackfeet genealogy book offered to drive. No. He was
stubborn, erratic, and unreasonable. After waiting a half-hour for them to get
a head start, I followed, expecting to find them in the ditch along the way, but
they made it. Lorraine was scheduled to be the first patient into surgery, so when
I thought she had gone in, I went up to the waiting room. It turned out that the
doctor had shifted her surgery to be last, maybe recalling the previous fiasco,
so no other patients would be waiting. She was in bed, prepared, and Bob was
sitting alongside, holding her hand. They looked terrified.
The nurses, hearing my inquiry about them, decided I was family and
should reassure these lonely old folks. I was only there in case Lorraine died and
Bob needed help, but I couldn’t very well tell them that. When they wheeled
Lorraine away, there was only one chair empty in the waiting area but Bob re-
fused to sit in it. I felt gentle plucking at my sleeve, and here was Joe Old Chief’s
wife – small, aged and generous. “Sit in my chair,” she said. “Then you can sit
together.” They were part of the old-time Bundle Keepers. Joe, who had always
worn dark glasses because of his eyes, was finally getting them fixed.
Bob walked off. He said he was going back to the motel to wait, so I went
to Surgery Waiting. When they announced that the family of Lorraine Scriver
should go to Intensive Care, I called Bob and guided him up to Intensive Care.
As I left, the nurse was using pressure to stop Lorraine’s surgical wound from
bleeding until a second nurse could come with another bandage. Bob stayed.
The next morning very early I went to see Lorraine in Intensive Care. I of-
fered any help she thought I could give, expressed support, and gave her a stuffed

334 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

bear with a guardian angel pinned onto its sweater. She seemed to be recovering
(the nurses kept saying she was all right) but she talked about how terrible her
life was, how much she suffered, how badly Bob treated her, how she would die
soon. All the heart, blood pressure, and breathing monitors went wild. I backed
out as the nurses came.
At Bob’s motel he was just getting into his pickup. He seemed amazed to
see me, but immediately assumed some kind of plot. He talked wildly about
going broke, not having insurance, desperate straits. I put my hand on his arm,
meaning reassurance, but he jerked away, saying, “This time is for Lorraine!”
That was the last time I ever saw him. He was wearing the leather jacket he
wore in his coffin. They also included his cowboy hat, a speckled eagle feather,
and a braid of sweetgrass.

That March, 1999, I decided to attend the C.M. Russell Annual Auction which
was always held on Charlie Russell’s birthday. Surely there would be some sort of
memorial service, but there was only a moment of silence at a luncheon. Norma
Ashby, sparkplug of the Ad Club that organized the auction, told me this lack of
acknowledgement came at the request of Lorraine. The attendees had circulated
a big album in which people wrote tributes to Bob, and it was sent to Lorraine
but she made no thanks. Norma managed to smuggle a memorial into a cer-
emony at the Great Falls Lewis and Clark statue later on in the year.
Before driving north, I visited the Russell museum. A Blackfeet man was
pacing in front of the entrance, upset. He was a good-sized, handsome man in
ranch clothing and boots – not dirty and not drunk, though he undoubtedly
had been both in the past. Accustomed to free entry to the Museum of the
Plains Indian and the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife in Browning, he
had been shocked to discover that admission here was five dollars, which he
didn’t have. He had hitched down with friends to be part of the Indian art show
adjunct to the main auction. The receptionist, a volunteer Junior Leaguer from
Great Falls, had refused to let him in. Big-shot out-of-towners were going back
and forth, clearly a little afraid of this man who could have emerged out of a
Charlie Russell painting, the kind of man Charlie associated with all his life.
“I’m part of this!” the Indian protested.
I paid his admission, calling him “my friend” to make the point. When I
went to pat his “paid” sticker onto his chest, he jumped back as though I would
strike him. We divided to walk through the galleries. In a while I thought I should
get his name, so I went back over and touched him on the arm. Instinctively, he
jumped sidewise like a cat and began to apologize and defend himself.
We chatted for a minute. He had worked for Bob and he had attended
the funeral. He had no money for breakfast; could I give him a few dollars? I
gave him a ten. The only other bill in my wallet was a twenty and I needed it to
get back to Portland. Then, without warning, we both began to cry. I reached
out to shake his hand goodbye, but his hand slipped past mine and we took

X V I I PAT I N A : OV E RV I E W 335
 each other’s wrists for a moment, like some kind of secret handshake, before we
turned away to blow our noses. I felt guilty for not giving him the twenty. By
then I felt guilty about many things.
In June when my mother’s estate was settled, I moved back to Montana.
Lorraine’s hangers-on prevented any contact with her or any entry to the mu-
seum or ranch from me or any other friends of Bob’s. Beyond trying to make
phone calls a few times, I stayed away, thinking that after a while she would
settle down. Sometimes my phone would ring in the early evening but no one
would be there.
Finally Lorraine’s lawyer called the Montana Historical Society and told
them, “If you want this Scriver stuff, you’ll have to get it out of here in ten
days.” The Society employees rented a squad of U-Haul trucks, drove up in a
convoy and packed everything – listing and noting as they went. For a while the
materials sat in a rented warehouse in Helena and then a special steel warehouse
was built for them. The estimated value of the collection was fifteen million
dollars, but since the acquisition coincided with a state budget crisis, it awaits
future grants to be unpacked, curated, and displayed. The huge Symbol of the
Pros bronze that had been in the backyard of the studio was installed in Helena
behind the Historical Society Museum.
The Blackfeet Tribe bought all the Browning buildings, including the
Bighorn Foundry and Bob’s little studio home. Now the Scriver Museum of
Montana Wildlife is completely remodeled into a Blackfeet Heritage Center
that sells crafts. Lorraine gave the next-door house to David Cree Medicine,
who had been living there, and she sold him one of the shop pickups. Eloise
Cobell, the banker who bravely sued the United States Government over their
handling of Indian trusts, realized that The Nature Conservancy could enter
into agreements with the sovereign Blackfeet Nation just as it did with the State
of Montana. Therefore, the ranch was sold to The Nature Conservancy and the
Blackfeet Land Trust combined, who use it as a conference center and nature
preserve. The first manager was Norman Peterson, an enrolled Blackfeet and
former cornet-playing student of Bob’s who had walked the same mountains.
The little sixteen-acre Cecile Horn ranch along Two Medicine River was
still for sale when Lorraine died. In the end Boyd and Lila Evans bought it. They
will not interfere with ceremonial use.
Many people have written about the big skies over Montana, the radiance
of the sunlight and the magnificence of the clouds. Others have recorded winter
blizzards, the impenetrable wall of stinging white that disorients and kills those
who can’t find shelter. Not many write about the ordinary weather that comes
through on the jet stream, day after day, year after year. Quick showers, long
hot spells, gray, still days, wind, wind, and wind. We joke that there is only one
valid forecast: variable. In the life of the sculptor called Bob Scriver, there was
both heroism and wickedness, but the real meaning and worth of the man was

336 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

that he rose every morning to work to his limits, day after day. No matter what
happened or what his emotional state, he gave it an honest try.
Parts of Bob Scriver were shocking, intolerable, and transgressive. Usually
they were the excesses of his best parts, like his ability to focus, which eliminated
from his consciousness the people around him. He didn’t trust other foundries
or other galleries, so he spent a lot of effort, maybe too much, doing those things
himself. Yet for me and others he was a doorway to the world of the nineteenth
century and the Blackfeet.
Bob Scriver was not a particularly flashy sculptor, though he could make a
bucking horse stand on one foot or a group of geese balance on their wingtips.
His style varied from classical to romantic, harking back to Augustus Saint-
Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, A. Phimister Proctor, Malvina Hoffman,
and the Beaux Arts American bronzes. In the end he was more of a National
Sculpture Society/National Academy of Design sculptor, than a Cowboy Artists
of America or National Academy of Western Artists type. His work is not about
movie images, but about his own primary direct experience. As such it should
not be confined to the Cowboy Art world. We don’t know what mordants and
volatiles of theory, which historical warmings and coolings, will give his final
reputation a patina.

6. Four sculptors, four destinies

Browning, 1929

I’m still making discoveries. Sometimes, because Bob liked elephants, I would
tell him about the Oriental Theatre in Portland, Oregon, where the auditorium
was lined high on both sides with rows of realistic life-size elephants, just the
front halves, which as a child I imagined were somehow anchored behind the
wall they had penetrated. I thought maybe someone back there was hanging
onto their tails. When the theatre was demolished, the Oregonian ran a story
about the sculptor, and I saved the clipping.
The sculptor of the elephants was named Adrian Alexander Voisin (1890–
1976). Only recently have I learned more about this Paris-educated man whose
father-in-law worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and whose wife was expert
at Plains Indian sign language. In 1929, responding to the suggestion of one
of his Paris instructors, Voisin came to the Blackfeet Reservation and set up a
studio in Government Square in order to make portraits of “old time” Blackfeet
“ before they all disappear.” At that time there was a convention of sign-talkers
which was recorded in a film and also in a circle of footprints, cast in bronze, the
very ones I stood in the first time I came to Browning. I’m sure Voisin and his
wife had something to do with this.

X V I I PAT I N A : OV E RV I E W 337
 Among the portrait busts Voisin made was that of a young man who also
was a colleague: the Blackfeet woodcarver John Clarke, grandson of Malcolm
Clarke whose murder provoked the Baker Massacre, which broke Blackfeet
resistance to the United States. John was young at the beginning of the Thirties,
as handsome and proud as he was more than thirty years later when he teased
Bob for looking like a goat when we sat at the lunch counter in East Glacier.
Since John was a deaf-mute due to a childhood disease, he was formally trained
at a school for the deaf to speak sign language, and though there were differences
from Indian sign-talk, he could have spoken with Voisin’s wife. (John was liter-
ate so he also wrote notes.)
Voisin’s portrait busts, now at the Denver Art Museum, are classic to the
point of severity: faces looking straight ahead, on a plain base, usually not in-
cluding shoulders, and varying in size from six inches to two feet tall. Later he
also did busts of people from other tribes, full figures, and at least one striking
group of a hunter on horseback overrunning buffalo.
When Charles M. Russell died in 1926, his horse had been led by one of his
protegées, Charlie Beil. Beil had gone to East Glacier and now, in 1929, he must
have found Voisin and Clarke in their studio. I’m quite sure that a fourth person
was very much interested in what was going on: a 15-year-old boy called Robert
Scriver. This was probably the year that he made a river-clay sculpture of his
cousin Margaret sitting on the ground by the Scrivers’ little cowpony, Dayfly.
Beil went on to become well known for his own busts of Indians, which he
cast in bronze.2 Clarke carved his portraits of Indians in wood. Bob Scriver didn’t
made his Blackfeet busts until 1978. All three sculptors addressed many other
subjects and so did Voisin. In the Depression sculpture didn’t sell well enough
to yield a living, so Voisin fell back on earlier training in architectural orna-
mentation, designing fabulous movie theatres – like Portland’s Oriental with its
elephants – where the people went to escape their worries through the Thirties.
I’m not sure Bob really understood who this visiting sculptor was or how
Voisin’s life unfolded. He never mentioned the sculptor to me. Bill Harmsen’s
self-published book, Illustrating the Lost Wax Method: Sculpture to Bronze,
Featuring the Life and Sculpture of Adrien Alexandre Voisin, wasn’t available until
1980. The book includes sculptures of animals, very much in the tradition of
the Animaliers, and re-creations of dinosaurs, which Charlie Beil also addressed,
life-size in cement at the Calgary Zoo. Voisin had been a taxidermist and at one
point created a small museum of full-mounts. (Beil married the daughter of the
creator of the Luxton Museum, a collection of full-mounts in Banff.) There is
no record of Voisin knowing what had happened to that big-eared boy with hair
flopped over his forehead.
The four sculptors who intersected in that Government Square studio in
1929 could not have been more different: Clarke, a full-blood Blackfeet deaf-
mute woodcarver; Beil, a German blacksmith’s son who built his studio/foundry
in Banff and supplied trophies for the Calgary Stampede; Scriver, a store-keep’s

338 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Bob Scriver self-portrait still in plastilene (1978). Photo: Mary Scriver.

X V I I PAT I N A : OV E RV I E W 339
 kid who was supposed to be a musician; and Voisin, the son of a French horse-
trainer who in 1873 drove Colonel John B. Stetson from San Francisco to New
York City in a horse and carriage, and later set up a riding academy in Newport,
Rhode Island, where he undoubtedly knew Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Even
so do lives entwine in unexpected ways.
Is the destiny of Bob Scriver glyptic, cut out of hard substance, or haptic,
softly shaped by hands? To me it feels like both. It is as though Bob burned him-
self out in order to become bronze, exchanging his soft-as-wax flesh for what he
believed to be immortality. He teased me about being “Iron Woman,” hardened
by determination, and yet he was far more unyielding in his intention to be a
renowned sculptor. In the end it was as though everything had been knocked
off, eroded away, except the part of him that was a sculptor.
If I had the power, I would turn this book into a videotape now and send a
camera among Bob’s sculptures. Let it pan from face to face around the circle of
Bundle Keepers. Fade up with silhouettes of bears on their hind feet and wolves
crouched into moose horns. Zoom in to look closely at the glossy patinas, the
subtle texture of the horse’s hides, the hands gripping ropes or held out to the
sky. Bucking horses and bulls bunch their muscles, making cowboys grimace.
Women smile as their hair lifts on the wind.
Imagine a montage for all the senses. The rich smell of horses. Shreds of
cottonwood bark smudging on the kitchen stove. Eegy’s scream in the backyard.
An elk bugling and another answering. The golden flare of a trumpet blowing
jazz licks. The heartbeat of Blackfeet drums. Wind tearing at the eaves. Hail
hammering the studio skylight. And all through it Bob’s hands pushing and
twisting the plastilene, thinking a thought, seeing a shape, making it come to
life in the plastilena, Roma Plastilena, like a woman’s name. The crucible ready
to pour, hot as a star, stinking of hot metal. Steam and patina chemicals, tangy
and bitter.
World-making. Auto-salvific. Then finally the ancient peace of a sea of
grass that we all come to, regardless of fame and fortune.

340 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Notes

CHAPTER I

1 This man was the Italian sailor ancestor of Turk Cobell, husband of Eloise Cobell who
is the principal plaintiff in the lawsuit against the United States for mismanagement of
Indian trust funds. Eloise’s maiden name is Pepion, a family with many artists in it.

2 The Dawes Act broke up the reservations, which had until this time been held by the
tribe in common, into “homesteads.” The consequences of each Indian owning his
own piece of land were often tragic.

3 Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture (Macmillan, 1903 and 1924). This is a
wonderful history of forgotten artists and sculptures.
4 The Baker Massacre that broke the Blackfeet took place in 1870.
5 Adeline Adams, The Spirit of American Sculpture, written for the National Sculpture
Society, New York, 1923, is an overview.
6 The sculptor of Paris Gibson was William Ordway Partridge (1861–1930), who also
did a Pieta for the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

CHAPTER II

1 Though it would seem that the name might mean “scriver,” as in inscribe or write, some
sources say it was originally “shriver” and more related to “shiver.” The occupation it
referred to was cloak making.

2 I’m indebted for much of the family information to Doug Macfie, son of Bob’s cousin
Murrray, and also the Canadian head of Clan Macfie.
3 “Sacred Paint: Ned Jacob” by Sandra Dallas, Fenn Galleries, 1979.

341
 4 The photo book was William Farr’s The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882–1945 (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1984). Photo is on page 18.
5 Most of these stories were told to me by Wessie herself.
6 From Bob’s notes for an autobiography.
7 In The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882–1945 by William Farr, there is a photo on page 105
showing Sam Bird in hair chaps on horseback. One of the other riders is a Devereaux,
but not Charlie.

8 Today the building is operated as a restaurant decorated with photos of the old days.
9 Daniel Chester French’s first sign of talent was carving a turnip to look like a frog
in a jacket. Eventually he became the sculptor of the seated Lincoln in the Lincoln
Memorial.

10 A photograph of this classroom in the year 1913–14 is on page 60 of The Reservation

Blackfeet: 1882–1945. In the Denver BIA records is the young male teacher’s list of
pupils and their quirks, written up for the benefit of next year’s teacher. There are two
white boys in the class, the sons of Thad’s partner, Willets.

11 This was the famous Blackfeet writer, James Welch, Jr. Actually, the writer is James
Welch the third, as Bob’s pal’s father was also named James Welch.
12 See E.E. Heikka, Sculptor of the American West by Vivian A. Paladin (Great Falls:
Montana Art Investment Holding Company, 1990).

CHAPTER III

1 Quoted in Dale Burk, A Brush with the West (Missoula, MT: Mountain Press
Publishing Co., 1980), p. 128.
2 McClintock came to the reservation before the end of the nineteenth century as a
government scientist and returned annually for many years. He is the author of The
Old North Trail, which is illustrated with his photographs.

3 Weaver’s next position was with the Provincial Museum of Alberta in Edmonton,
where he created the two major sculptures that flank the grand staircase.

CHAPTER IV

1 New York: Crown Publishers, 1965.

2 It was a sensitive point with the Blackfeet as well. Trachoma had afflicted them so badly
around the turn of the century that other tribes called them “the one-eyed people.”

CHAPTER V

1 Malvina Hoffman, Yesterday Is Tomorrow: A Personal History (New York: Crown

Publishers, 1965), 69–70.

342 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

CHAPTER VI

1 Edouard Lanteri, Modelling and Sculpture: A Guide for Artists and Students. In three
volumes (Dover Publications, 1965).
2 Bill Ballantine, High West (Rand McNally and Co., 1969).
3 Barnaby Conrad III, Ghost Hunting in Montana: A Search for Roots in the Old West
(HarperCollins West, 1994).

CHAPTER VII

1 Lorne E. Render, The Mountains and the Sky (Calgary: Glenbow-Alberta Institute/
McClelland and Stewart West, 1974).

CHAPTER VIII

1 James Willard Schultz, edited by Keith C. Seele, Blackfoot and Buffalo: Memories of Life
among the Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962).
2 In Canada the Blackfoot called them the “Bloodclot Hills.”

CHAPTER X

1 Many of these sculptures were donated to the City of Portland by Henry Waldo Coe,
a doctor. I could not establish a link with the Cody Coe family, who were so generous
with the Whitney Gallery of Western Art.

2 Years later Bob bought a heroic-size bronze casting of MacNeil’s chief from this group.
It’s at the Montana Historical Society.
3 Gordon Monroe, who did Bob’s fiberglass work, made a heroic-size fiberglass Jesus on
the Cross for the Browning Catholic Church.

CHAPTER XI

1 Mary Strachan, “Bob Scriver, Western Sculptor,” American Artist (September 1964).
2 Pat Graves, “To Keep the Vanishing West,” True, the Man’s Magazine (December
1965). Photos by Irwin Bauer.
3 This bronze is also in the Montana Historical Society collection.

N OT E S 343
 CHAPTER XII

1 The little pony head was never sold. It’s now in the collection of the Montana Historical
Society.
2 For instance, “Paintbrushes and Pistols: How the Taos Artists Sold the West” by
Sherry Clayton Taggett and Ted Schwartz. John Muir Publications: Santa Fe, 1990.
ISBN 0-945465-65-3.

3 “Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, A Biography,” by B.H. Friedman. Doubleday &

Company, Inc.: Garden City, New York, 1978. SIBN 0-385-12994-7
4 The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made (New York: Arcade Publishing,
1999).
5 According to Flora Miller Biddle, it was Mary Lou Whitney who finally mended the
fences between Sonny and his sisters by persuading Sonny to put some money into the
Manhattan Whitney and by exerting her own formidable charm.

6 Some years after the lawsuit he was tragically killed in a plane crash.

CHAPTER XIII

1 A good account of the booming of Western art is included in Fred Renner’s essay at the
beginning of the book called Ten Years with the Cowboy Artists of America: A Complete
History and Exhibition Record by James K. Howard (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Press,
1976).

2 End of the Trail: The Odyssey of a Statue (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1973).
3 See Brian Dippie’s important book The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S.
Indian Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1982).
4 An account of this event is featured in W.K. Stratton’s Chasing the Rodeo: On Wild
Rides and Big Dreams, Broken Hearts and Bones, and One Man’s Search for the West
(Harcourt, 2005).

5 This sculpture, An Honest Try, displaced Lone Cowboy as Bob’s trademark image.

CHAPTER XIV

1 It was an irony that Lorraine, the fourth wife, turned out to be partly Indian. She had
always “passed.”
2 The Old North Trail: Life, Legends, and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians, reprint ed.
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).
3 For an excellent explanation of the importance of location within the circle, see
Akak’stiman: a Blackfoot Framework for Decision-Making and Mediation Processes by
Reg Crowshoe and Sybille Manneschmidt (Calgary: University of Calgary Press,
2002).

344 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

CHAPTER XVI

1 Boyd Evans was the son of Joe Evans, who helped develop the foundry. Jim Brousseau
ran a foundry in Kalispell.
2 Patty (Mrs. Don) Juneau posed for Sacajawea. The baby was five-month-old David
Guardipee.
3 Tom Lovell was one of the noted illustrators who joined Cowboy Artists of America.
One of his illustrations was in the December 1965 issue of True Magazine that printed
the photo story about Bob and his bronzes.

4 Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.

CHAPTER XVII

1 There is no better contemporary book than Bronze Sculpture, Casting and Patination:
Mud Fire Metal by Steve Hurst (Altgeln, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2005). Included are
samples and formulas for all patinas developed by Hurst over an extensive career.

2 Seven Piegans, all under eight inches tall.

N OT E S 345
 Bob Scriver Timeline

1900–1910
1901 Thad Scriver comes to Browning to work for J.H. Sherburne.

1907 Thad Scriver and Horace Willits start a mercantile called

“Willits and Scriver.” which evolves into the Browning
Mercantile.

1910–1920
1911 August 9, Thad Scriver (34) marries Ellison Westgarth Macfie (23)
at her family home in Clarenceville, Quebec.

1912 June 23, Harold Thaddeus Scriver is born in Conrad.

1914 August 15, Robert Macfie Scriver is born at home.

1920–1930
1920 Robert begins public school.

1922 Bank robbery destroys T.E. Scriver’s fortune.

1928 Robert begins high school. Plays first chair cornet in the high
school band.

1932 Graduates as Salutatorian.

TIMELINE 347
 1930–1940
1932 Enrolls at Dickinson State Teachers’ College in North Dakota
where he majors in education with minors in music and
art. His art teacher is Zoe Beiler, later noted among
midwestern female artists.

1934 Receives teaching degree. Enrolls at Vandercook School of Music

in Chicago.

1935 Begins to teach in Browning.

1937 November 20, marries Alice Permillia Prestmo.

1938 June 19, daughter Margaret Alice is born.

1939 Summer graduate work at the University of Washington in Seattle.

1940–1950
1940 Resigns from Browning and teaches in Malta, MT.

1941 Master’s degree from Vandercook School of Music in Chicago.

1942 June 8, son James Robert Scriver is born.

1943 Enlists in the Army Air Force and is assigned to the Army Air Force
Band, Alaskan Division as first chair cornet.

1944 January 15, Alice is granted a divorce from Bob.

1945 November 7, he is honorably discharged as a sergeant. He has

been playing lead cornet and doing arrangements for Bob
Lyon’s band in Edmonton.

1946 January 4, marries Jeanette Germaine Caouette in Edmonton.

In September he returns to teaching in Browning.
Through the next few years he plays with Ted Weems, is accepted
for Vaughn Monroe’s band, belongs to the Great Falls
musicians’ local, plays in a theater pit in Great Falls, and
at the Sportsman’s Club in Shelby.

348 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

1950–1960
1950 Opens first taxidermy and curio shop and meets Ralph Crosby
Smith, Brown & Bigelow calendar artist.
Police magistrate for the Town of Browning and Justice of
the Peace.

1953 Builds the first section of the Scriver Taxidermy Studio.

1954 Meets John Clymer and Bob Lougheed, major illustrators.

1956 Enters the contest for a portrait of C.M. Russell and gets serious
about sculpture.

1957 Meets George Phippen, a key figure in Western art.

1958 Main part of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife is built.

1959 April 24, Jeanette’s divorce from Bob is granted.

1960–1970
1960 Chosen to mount Big Medicine, the white buffalo, for the Montana
Historical Society.
Meets Warren Baumgartner, who gives him composition lessons.

1961 Two major Los Angeles shows in private homes.

Opens the art gallery part of the Museum of Montana Wildlife.
Invited to join “Society of Animal Artists.”

1962 Diorama room completed.

Herpes simplex keratitis nearly destroys his eyesight.
Builds studio home behind the shop.
First bronzes cast at Mendota Foundry in St. Paul.

1963 Ends taxidermy business.

Builds the Bighorn Foundry across the yard from his home.

TIMELINE 349
 1964 Submits to New York juried exhibits:
Lone Cowboy to Audubon Artists
Fighting Elk to National Academy of Design
The Last Warrior to Academic Artists in Springfield, MA
Fighting Elk sold through Grand Central Galleries.
Panhandle Plains Museum requests bronzes for exhibit and sale.
American Artist publishes article about Bob by Mary Strachan.
Article in La Revue Moderne in Paris.
Resigns as Justice of the Peace and City Magistrate.
Major flood on the Blackfeet Reservation closes down all tourist
traffic for the summer.

1965 Elected to Salmagundi Club.

Joins the International Art Guild.
Boss of the Trail Herd accepted by Audubon Artists.
Glenbow Foundation in Calgary, AB, purchases No More Buffalo,
Transition, Ovis Dalli and Boss of the Trail Herd.
Picture story in True magazine.
Appears on To Tell the Truth! game show.

1966 Malvina Hoffman and Joy Buba sponsors for National Sculpture
Society membership.
Homestead diorama for the Hill County Museum in Havre, MT
November 27, marries Mary Helen Strachan in Portland, OR.

1967 Joins Cowboy Artists of America

Commissioned to do heroic-size portrait of Bill Linderman for the
Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.
Commissioned by Mrs. Robert Walter to do a portrait of her
husband on his polo pony and a crucifix called Eli, Eli.
Exhibits Buffalo Runner with Cow and Calf with International Art
Guild in the Palais de al Scala, Monte Carlo, Monaco.
Welds a life-size buffalo for Great Falls High School.
Listed in Who’s Who in the West, the International Directory of the
Arts, and the National Register of Prominent Americans.

1968 Margaret Scriver Skogen DeSmet Paul dies of cancer in

Anacortes, WA.
One-man show at Gallery ‘85 in Billings, MT.
One-man show at the Montana Historical Society.

350 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

1969 Dedication of the new Buffalo Bill Historical Center, exhibiting a
hundred Scriver bronzes.
Whitney Gallery of Western Art purchases The Opening of the
Sacred Medicine Pipe Bundle, Return of the Blackfeet
Raiders, Whitetail Buck, and Into the Wind.
Buffalo Runner with Cow and Calf wins Gold Medal at the Cowboy
Artists of America show in Oklahoma City, OK.
Welds steel 12-foot-high Rustler for C.M. Russell High School in
Great Falls, MT.
Transfer of the Little Dog Thunder Medicine Pipe Bundle to Bob
and Mary Scriver.

1970–1980

1970 Near-fatal heart attack. Hospitalized all of April.

Buys a small ranch on Two Medicine River.
An Honest Try wins Gold Medal at CAA show.
An Honest Try on cover of National Rodeo Finals program.
Paywindow pictured in National Geographic book on the
American cowboy.
November 28, divorces Mary Strachan Scriver.

1971 Paywindow wins gold medal at CAA show.

Diorama of surrender of Chief Joseph for the Hill County Museum
in Havre. Marquita Maytag commissions a one-of-a-kind
portrait of Chief Joseph.
August 14, Thaddeus Emory Scriver dies at home after being
bedridden for a year.
Painting and dedication of the Badger tipi.
Distinguished VIP Award from radio station KSEN in Shelby, MT.

1972 Not for Glory wins Silver Medal at CAA.

June 3, Governor declares Bob Scriver Day in Montana. Show at
Montana Historical Society.
Designed Gold Medal for the Cut Bank, MT., Chamber of
Commerce to present to the U.S. Olympic Basketball Team.
One-man show of the rodeo bronzes at the Montana Historical
Society.

1973 Layin’ the Trap wins the Silver Medal Award at the Cowboy Artists
of America.
Joins National Academy of Western Art and participates in show at
Cowboy Hall of Fame.
TIMELINE 351
 Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City commissions a heroic-size
statue of Jim Shoulders.
Fort Benton Community Improvement Association commissions
a heroic-size sculpture of Lewis, Clark, Sacajawea, and
Pompey as a Montana Bicentennial Project.
Buffalo Bill Historical Center commissions a life-size bust of Dr.
Harold McCracken to present at his retirement on
his 80th birthday.
Riveredge Foundation in Calgary, AB purchases the 33 pieces of
the Rodeo in Bronze series.
Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association in Colorado Springs
commissions a bust of Phil Lynde for the PRCA sculpture
garden.
Receives a World Championship buckle as the Cowboy’s National
Sculptor.
Included in International Biographies of the World.
Commemorative medal for the Dempsey and Gibbons World
Heavyweight Championship fight in Shelby, MT.

1974 Honored guest artist at the Western Rendezvous of Art at the

Montana Historical Society.
Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association commissions a bust of
Larry Mahan.
Various persons commission small original bronzes for mass
production by others, including Rex Brenneman,
Darrell Peterson (Glacier Bronze), Stremmel Galleries,
Inc., The Outlaw Inn in Kalispell, MT., and
Robert Warden.

1975 Buffalo Bill Historical Center commissions a heroic-size statue of

Buffalo Bill Cody and a five-and-a-half foot circular
plaque for the entry.
Self-publishes An Honest Try with photos by Asgar Mikkelson,
explaining the rodeo series. Wins an award of excellence
from the Printing Industry of America National Trade
Association.
Riveredge Foundation in Calgary, AB, commissions a bust of Eric
Harvie.
Pacific Northwest Indian Center in Spokane tentatively
commissions a heroic-size version of Transition.
This institution later collapsed before the commission
could be finalized.

352 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

 Stremmel Galleries sponsors Rodeo Series exhibit at Security
National Bank in Reno. Bob is the parade marshal for the
Reno Rodeo parade.
Philip Morris commissions Marlboro belt buckle as a Bicentennial
promotion.
Paywindow and Layin’ the Trap shown at the Kentucky Derby and
then included in a touring exhibit.
National Sculpture Society exhibit includes Paywindow, the only
work by a living artist.
September 9, fire destroys the workshop and part of the Museum of
Montana Wildlife. Rebuilds by the end of the
year. Heroic-size commissions must be started over.

1976 Stremmel Galleries sponsor an exhibit of Rodeo Series at Wells

Fargo Bank in San Francisco.
National Finals takes Best of Show at the C.M. Russell exhibit.
Diploma d’Honneur from the International Arts Guild in Monte
Carlo.
May 2, awarded Honorary Doctor of Art by Carroll College in
Helena, MT.
June 13, Fort Benton Bicentennial and Lewis and Clark statue
dedication. Bob is parade marshal on his horse
Gunsmoke.
July 13, buys the Doane ranch, west of Browning.

1977 February 16, Bob’s mother, Ellison Westgarth Macfie Scriver, dies
aged 89.
Best of Show in Sculpture at C.M. Russell exhibit for The Explorers
at the Marias.
Captain Lewis and Dog Scannon commissioned by Lewis and Clark
Trail Heritage Foundation, Inc.
Bust of Casey Tibbs commissioned by the Professional Rodeo
Cowboy Association.
Bust of Senator Burton K. Wheeler commissioned for the Montana
Capitol buildiing in Helena.
Featured in the first edition of Art West Magazine.
Old West Trail Foundation proclaims him America’s leading
Western artist in All Media.
Receives the “William F. Cody” Award.
Buffalo Bill, Plainsman awarded Silver Medal by Cowboy Artists of
America.
Participates in “Show of Hands,” a documentary film by Les
Kramer.

TIMELINE 353
 1978 “Original Art Achievement Award” at the C.M. Russell Auction.
Publishes No More Buffalo to record his series of Blackfeet bronzes.
Grandfather Tells of the Horse awarded Gold Medal at Cowboy
Artists of America.
Included in National Register of Prominent Americans.

1979 Winchester Rider commissioned by the Buffalo Bill Historical

Center and the Winchester Rifle company.
Grizzly Head belt buckle commissioned by the Montana Fish and
Game Department.
Four belt buckles commissioned by the Lewis and Clark Festival
committee: Explorers of the Marias, At Camp
Disappointment, Near Cut Bank, Montana, and
Lewis Meets the Blackfeet.
Two belt buckles, The Cowboy and The Prospector, and one
sculpture, Prospector, commissioned by Banco
Northwestern in Helena, MT.
Sacajawea commissioned by Marquita Maytag.
PRCA logo commissioned as a small statue.
Bridger bust and two Frisky Colts commissioned.
Bust of Corrie Llewellyn commissioned by her husband,
Leonard F. Llewellyn.
Honored guest at the Calgary Stampede (both 1978 and 1979).
Expands and rebuilds the Bighorn Foundry after buying the lot
next door.
Part of the Rodeo Series bought for the new Rodeo Cowboy Hall of
Fame in Colorado Spring.
Everett B. Bowman, famous RCA roper, commissioned for the
Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs.
Johnny Bench, baseball player and catcher, commissioned by the
Cincinnati Reds.
Part of Rodeo Series sold to Hong Kong customer.
Participates in Society des Artists Independents exhibition at the
Grand Palais in Paris, France.

354 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

1980–1990
1980 Charmaine Marie DeSmet, daughter of Margaret and
granddaughter of Bob, dies in a car crash in Florida. She
had been serving in the military but was on disability
because of a previous car accident.
Hugh Bennett, first Secretary of the Turtle Rodeo Association,
commissioned by the Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame.
“Award of Meritorious Achievement for Outstanding
Contributions to Bring this Nation a Greater Awareness
and Appreciation of the Lewis & Clark Expedition” given
by the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation on
August 22.

1981 Selected by the Montana Arts Council as one of 22 finalists for the
“Gallery of Outstanding Montanans Project.”
One-and-a-half life-size version of the PRCA bucking horse logo
commissioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboy
Association in Colorado Springs. A second
bronze casting is at the Montana Historical Society in
Helena and a fiberglass casting is in Babb, MT,
at the elementary school, alongside a fiberglass casting of
An Honest Try.
Dale Smith on “Poker Chip” and a one-and-a-half life-size bronze of
Bill Ward on “Sea Lion” commissioned by the Professional
Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs.
A Saddle Bronc–1919, Wild Horse Race–1918, Single Steer Jerking–
1917, Bull Dogger–1916, and Steer Rider commissioned
by the National High School Rodeo Association to raise
money for High School Rodeo scholarships.
One-third life-size portrait of Descent to be placed on his grave
commissioned.
Phil and Steve Mahre, World Champion Downhill Skier twins of
Yakima, WA, portraits commissioned by White
Pass Alpine Ski Association.

1983 Participates in a traveling show of sculpture in China.

No More Buffalo, the 53-piece series of bronzes of Blackfeet culture
and heritage, exhibited for the summer at the C.M.
Russell Museum at Great Falls, MT; then for
two months at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman,
MT; and then to the National Historical Museum in
Denver, CO, for three months.

TIMELINE 355
 Bob adds “Hall of Bronze” to the Scriver Museum of Montana
Wildife.
Christ the Teacher commissoned by Carroll College in Helena, MT,
but never completed.
Earl Old Person, Chief of the Blackfeet commissioned for the Indian
Health Service Hospital in Browning, MT.
Two belt buckles: First Sight of the Great Falls of the Missouri, and
Portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri

1984 One-man show at the Cowboy Artists of America.

At this year’s Russell Auction, Bob does a quick-draw portrait of
Senator Max Baucus.
Harold Thaddeus Scriver, Bob’s brother, dies at 72.

1985 Two belt buckles: Lewis, Clark and Sacajawea, and Sacajawea
and Pom.

1986 Explorers at the Portage monument (Lewis, Clark, York and the dog,
Seaman) commissioned for Great Falls, MT.
Featured in the Amy Grant “Headin’ Home” Holiday Special
Christmas show, an NBC television special. Partly filmed
in the Scriver Museum.
Joins the National Advisory Board for the C.M. Russell Museum.
An Honest Try, one-and-a-half life-sized bronze, dedicated at the
Kansas Board of Trade.
Ground-breaking in Cut Bank for a proposed giant statue of Jesus.

1987 Increasing health problems and a serious stroke.

Concrete tipi which Bob had bought and moved across the street
from the museum is now returned to the city and placed
where it had been at the Duck Lake road crossroads.

1988 International Peace Center, an organization trying to raise money

for a huge statue of Jesus, bases a lottery on bronzes of
Buddies, two horses standing head-to-tail in fly-time.
Teddy Roosevelt portrait commissioned by the Boone and Crockett
Club. One-third life-sized bronze is placed at the ranch
outside Dupuyer.
Heroic-size Guardsman commissioned by the Montana National
Guard but never progresses past the maquette stage.
No More Buffalo accepted to the 55th Annual Exhibition of the
National Sculpture Society in New York City.

356 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

1989 Dedication of Lewis, Clark York and the Dog Seaman at the Portage
in Great Falls.
Scriver Museum belt buckle for the local high school rodeo
champion.

1990 The federal Repatriation of Indian Artifacts Act is passed and Bob
becomes convinced his collection will be seized.
Sale of the Scriver Indian Artifact Collection to the Alberta
Provincial Museum (now the Royal Alberta Museum).
The materials had been recorded in a book Bob
produced: The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains. The
collection included a gun collection and early RCMP
uniforms. The sale touched off an international uproar.
Later the sacred materials were placed in the safekeeping
of the North Piegan elders council.
June 15, the Browning Mercantile burns to the ground.
Governor’s Award for Achievement in the Arts awarded in a gala
event in Great Falls, Montana.

1991 Hornaday Buffalo Group commissioned to raise money for the

restoration of the Hornaday Buffalo taxidermy group.

1992 A series of 26 bronze panels depicting Russell’s life created for the
C.M. Russell Museum.

1993 August 26, James Robert Scriver, Bob’s son, dies of cancer. He
leaves two grown daughters.

1994 A convulsive seizure reveals Type 2 Diabetes.

The Exalted Ruler, an elk, donated to the C.M. Russell Museum to
raise money to keep the Russell painting of that name in
Montana.

1997 Heart bypass surgery

1998 Negotiations for a portrait of Mike Mansfield which never got past
the maquette stage.
After a stop at a hospital emergency room for stabilization, Bob
gives a speech to the Lewis and Clark Portage Chapter.
Norma Ashby arranged to have it taped.
A fiberglass composite of the two Lewis and Clark public
monuments, reduced in size, was gifted to the Lewis and
Clark Interpretive Center.

TIMELINE 357
 1999 Dies on January 29. Funeral arrangements made by Boyd Evans.
Memorial at Browning High School. Burial at Crown Hill
Cemetery in Cut Bank, MT, with his parents and brother.

2000–2007
2000 Forty major art works from the estate sold at auction in Reno
through Coeur d’Alene Art Auction.
September 23, personal collection of works from the estate
dispersed at auction in Kalispell, Montana, by
Coeur d’Alene Art Auction.
Museum, foundry and studio bought by the Blackfeet Tribe. The
Museum was remodeled as the Blackfeet Heritage Center.
Flatiron Ranch bought by the Blackfeet Tribe in cooperation with
Nature Conservancy in order to create a nature study
center.
Remainder of estate, after much negotiation and in spite of the
expectation that the C.M. Russell Museum would be the
beneficiary, is awarded to the Montana Historical Society.
Comprises all residual materials, including Bob’s castings
of his own work, with temporary custody of all the
Blackfeet bronzes going to the Royal Provincial Museum
in Edmonton and all the mounted animals in the
Museum of Montana Wildlife being put in the temporary
care of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
The Thad and Wessie Scriver family home is bought privately. The
Horn allotment on Two Medicine River, often used as
ceremonial grounds, is bought by Boyd and Lila Evans.
The Thunder Pipe Bundle disappears.

2001 “A Legacy in Bronze: The Sculpture of Bob Scriver” exhibit of 40

bronzes selected from the 800-plus bronzes in his estate, at
the Montana Historical Society in Helena, MT.

2002 November 3, death of Dorothy Lorraine Holdren Caldwell Scriver,

in Nanoose Bay, BC, Canada, where she had built a new
house. She had inherited land there. Her will provided
for her two brothers and niece to inherit part of her estate.
A small annual bursary award was given to honor art
students at Carroll College in Helena.

358 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

2006 March 20, Jeanette Caoette Scriver Chase passes away in Grants
Pass, OR.
“The Frontier in Bronze” exhibit of Scriver bronzes at the Royal
Alberta Museum. Honored guest is Hélène DeVicq, sister
of Jeanette, and model for the Pieta as well as several
busts.

2007 Ed Mitch collection of Scriver bronzes donated to the C.M. Russell

Museum and exhibited there for the summer. Mitch
also gave them the rights to sell a DVD of Bob Scriver
talking about his work, especially the Blackfoot series. It is
called “Bob Scriver, A Lifetime of Creation.”

TIMELINE 359
 Bibliography

By Bob Scriver

An Honest Try. Self-published, printed by The Lowell Press, 1975.

No More Buffalo. Self-published, printed by The Lowell Press, 1982.
The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains by Bob Scriver. Self-published, printed by
The Lowell Press, 1990.
Unpublished notes for an autobiography. Helena, MT: Montana Historical Society.
Compiled and annotated by Mary Scriver.

Scriver Catalogues

Coeur d’Alene Art Auction from the Estate of Robert M. Scriver, September 23,
2000.
Montana Historical Society. Scriver. 1972. Catalogue.
Render, Lorne E. Expressions in Bronze: Sculpture by Robert Scriver. Great Falls, MT:
C.M. Russell Museum, 1993.
Scriver, Bob, and Mary Scriver. A pack of postcards, each depicting a different
sculpture.
Scriver, Bob. The Sculpture of Bob Scriver. Plastic spine. Self-published. Undated.
Probably 1964.
Scriver, Bob. Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife. A catalogue of exhibits. (Mounted
animals.)

361
 Scriver Videotapes

“A Portrait of Charles M. Russell: Preserver of the Old West.” Seattle, WA.: High
Hopes Productions, 1993.
“An Evening with Bob Scriver.” Lewis and Clark Portage Route Chapter 61,
Montana, Fall 1998.
A self-produced video recording the visit of Maurice Chaillot and Hélène Devicq to
Browning, MT., in order to pose for the Prince of Peace monument, 1984.
“Bob Scriver, A Lifetime of Creation,” DVD available through the C.M. Russell
Museum, Great Falls, MT, courtesy of Ed Mitch. A half-hour of Bob
talking about his life and art. 1995.

Scriver in Montana

Ballantine, Bill. High West. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally and Co., 1969. Pp. 128–41.
Conrad, Barnaby III. Ghost Hunting in Montana: A Search for Roots in the Old West.
New York, NY: HarperCollinsWest, 1994. Pp. 47–67.
Kraft, Ernie. Untold Tales of Bison Range Trails. Stevensville, MT: Stoneydale Press,
2006.
Zion, Scotty. Been Any Bigger I’ d Have Said So! No publication date. Self-published
in Great Falls.

American Bronzes

Adams, Adeline. The Spirit of American Sculpture. New York, NY: National Sculpture
Society, 1923.
Friedman, B.H. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, A Biography. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday and Co., 1978.
Fusco, Peter, and H.W. Janson, The Romantics to Rodin: French Nineteenth- Century
Sculpture from North American Collections. Los Angeles County Museum
of Art in association with George Braziller, 1980.
Gates, Sarah. From Neo-Classical and Beaux-Arts to Modernism. Eaton Fine Art.
Catalogue.
Goldstein, Malcolm. Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United
States. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Hoffman, Malvina. Heads and Tales. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936.
Hoffman, Malvina. Sculpture Inside and Out. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Co.,
1939.
Hoffman, Malvina. Yesterday Is Tomorrow. New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 1965.
Hurst, Steve. Bronze Sculpture Casting and Patination: Mud Fire Metal. Atglen, PA:
Schiffer Publishing Co., 2005.

362 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Jackson, Harry. Lost Wax Bronze Casting: a Photographic Essay on this Antique and
Venerable Art. Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1972.
Janson, H.W., 19th-Century Sculpture. Harry N. Abrams, 1985.
Longstreth, T. Morris. The Great Venture. Macmillan, 1948. About Daniel Chester
French for young people.
Mackay, James. The Animaliers: A Collector’s Guide to the Animal Sculptors of the 19th
and 20th Centuries. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1973.
Montagu, Jennifer. Bronzes. Octopus Books, 1972.
Reynolds, Donald Martin. Masters of American Sculpture: The Figurative Tradition
from the American Renaissance to the Millennium. Abbeville Press, 1993.
Richman, Michael, Daniel Chester French: An American Sculptor. The Preservation
Press, National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1976.
Symonds, John Addington, trans. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. New York:
Washington Square Press, 1963.
Taft, Lorado. The History of American Sculpture. Macmillan: 1903 and 1924.

American Western Art

Ainsworth, Ed. The Cowboy in Art. New York: Bonanza Books, 1968.
Anonymous. Powell. Kalispell, MT: Thomas Printing, 1978. Booklet.
Boehme, Sarah E. Rendezvous to Roundup: The First 100 Years of Art in Wyoming.
Cody, WY: Buffalo Bill Historical Center. 1990. Catalogue.
Broder, Patricia Janis. Bronzes of the American West. Harry N. Abrams, 1973.
Burk, Dale A. New Interpretations. Stevensville, MT: Stoneydale Press, 1969.
Burk, Dale A. A Brush with the West. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing Co.,
1980.
Chatham, Russell, Russell Chatham. Seattle, WA: Winn Books, 1984. Monograph.
C.M. Russell Museum. Montana 1880–1910 with Henry Farny and his Subjects.
Great Falls, MT. Catalogue.
C.M Russell Auction of Original Western Art. The Advertising Club of Great Falls.
Annual exhibit catalogue. 1972.
Cowboy Artists of America. Annual exhibit catalogues, which double as directories
of the members. I had in hand 1968, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975,
1979, 1981, 1982 (Scriver now listed as “emeritus.”), 1984 (directory
expanded to include emeriti).
Crowell, Dave. Montana’s Own. Missoula, MT: self-published, 1970.
Dallas, Sandra. Sacred Paint: Ned Jacob. Santa Fe, NM: Fenn Galleries Publishing
Co., 1979.
Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas,
1982.
Dippie, Brian W. West-Fever. Los Angeles, CA: Autry Museum of Western Heritage,
1998.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 363
 Dippie, Brian W. Catlin and His Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1990.
Gelein, Frank. Harry Jackson. New York, NY: Kennedy Galleries, 1969. Catalogue/
Monograph.
Goetzman, William H., and Joseph C. Porter, with artist’s biographies by David C.
Hunt. The West as Romantic Horizon. Center for Western Studies, Joslyn
Art Museum, 1981.
Goppert, Deborah. Twelve Contemporary Western Artists. Selections from the Whitney
Gallery of Western Art at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. Cody, WY,
1978.
Hassrick, Peter H. (preface), and Deborah Goppert. Twelve Contemporary Western
Artists. Cody, WY: Whitney Gallery of Western Art and Buffalo Bill
Historical Center, 1978.
Hedgepeth, Don. Mountain Majesty: The Art of John Fery. Great Falls, MT: CM
Russell Museum, 1998.
Heminway, John. Native Faces: Winold Reiss. Bozeman, MT: Thomas Nygard
Gallery, 1997.
Hockaday Museum of Art. Winold Reiss, Artist for the Great Northern. Kalispell, MT,
2005. Includes an essay by Scott J. Tanner.
Krakel, Dean. End of the Trail: The Odyssey of a Statue. Norman, OK: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1973.
Krakel, Dean. Adventures in Western Art. Kansas City: The Lowell Press, 1977.
Lange, Dorothea, Edith Hamlin, and Daniel and John Dixon (His two wives and
two sons). The Thunderbird Remembered: Maynard Dixon, the Man and the
Artist. Los Angeles, CA: Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, 1994.
McCracken, Harold, Richard Frost, Leo A. Platteter, and Don Hedgpeth. The West
of Buffalo Bill: Frontier, Art, Indian Crafts, Memorabilia from the Buffalo
Bill Historical Center. Harry N. Abrams, 1974.
Museum of the Plains Indian. Forty and Five: An Exhibit of Paintings of Indians by
Montana artists, past and present. Browning, MT, 1964.
National Academy of Western Art. Oklahoma City, OK: National Cowboy Hall of
Fame and Western Heritage Center. Annual catalogue, 1982. Scriver is
listed only as a prize-winner, not in the directory.
Paladin, Vivian A. E.E. Heikka: Sculptor of the American West. Great Falls, MT:
Montana Art Investment Holding Co., 1990.
Peters, Gerald. The Taos Society of Artists: Masters and Masterworks. Santa Fe, NM:
Gerald Peters Gallery, 1998.
Peterson, Larry Len. The Call of the Mountains: The Artists of Glacier National Park.
Settlers West Galleries: 2002.
Price, Willadene. Gutzon Borglum: Artist and Patriot. 1961.
Raczka, Paul. Winold Reiss: Portraits of the Races. Great Falls, MT: C.M. Russell
Museum, 1986.

364 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Reiss, Peter. Native Faces. Bozeman, MT: Thomas Nygard Gallery, 1997.
Render, Lorne E. The Mountains and the Sky. Calgary, AB: Glenbow–Alberta
Institute and McClelland and Stewart West, 1974.
Reynolds, Catherine A. Cowboy Artists of America. El Paso, TX: Desert Hawk
Publishing, 1988.
Russell, Austin. CMR: Charles M. Russell, Cowboy Artist. Twayne Publishers, 1957.
Stauffer, Joan. Behind Every Man: The Story of Nancy Cooper Russell. Daljo
Publishing, 1990.
Steele, Ray. Joseph Henry Sharp and the Lure of the West. Great Falls, MT: C.M.
Russell Museum, no date.
Taggett, Sherry Clayton, and Ted Schwarz. Paintbrushes and Pistols: How the Taos
Artists Sold the West. John Muir Publications, 1990.
Taliaferro, John. Charles M. Russell: the Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist.
Little, Brown and Co., 1996.
Taliaferro, John. Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount
Rushmore. PublicAffairs (Perseus Books), 2002.
Thomas Nygard Gallery. Recounting the Old West II: Important Paintings, Sculpture
and Words on Paper. Bozeman, MT, 2003. Catalogue.
Udall, Sharyn R. Contested Terrain: Myth and Meanings in Southwest Art. University
of New Mexico Press, 1996.
Wunderlich, Rudolf. Artists of the American West. New York, NY, no date.

Blackfoot Nation

Crowshoe, Reg, and Sybille Manneschmidt. Akak’stiman: A Blackfoot Framework

for Decision-making and Mediation Processes. Calgary, AB: University of
Calgary Press, 2002.
Dyck, Paul. “The Thunder Medicine Pipe of the Blackfeet People.” In Dr. Harold
McCracken, ed., A Blackfoot Sacred Ceremony, Preserved. Cody, WY:
Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1972.
Gulliford, Andrew. Sacred Objects and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions.
Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2000.
Hungry-Wolf, Adolf. The Blackfoot Papers. Self-published in four volumes: Vol.
1, Pikunni History and Culture. Vol. 2, Pikunni Ceremonial Life. Vol. 3,
Pikuni Portfolio: Glacier National Park, Dancing and North American
Indian Days. Vol. 4, Pikunni Biographies. Skookumchuck, BC: Good
Medicine Foundation, 2006.
Stepney, Philip H.R., and David J. Goa. The Scriver Blackfoot Collection: Repatriation
of Canada’s Heritage. Edmonton, AB: Provincial Museum of Alberta,
1990.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 365
 Museums and Dealers

Asma, Stephen. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of
Natural History Museums. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Behrman, S.N. Duveen: The Story of the Most Spectacular Art Dealer of All Time. New
York, NY: The Little Bookroom, 1951.
Biddle, Flora Miller. The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made, a Family
Memoir. New York, NY: Arcade Publishing, 1999.
Goldstein, Malcolm. Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United
States. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Michalski, Sergiusz. Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997.
London: Reaktion Books, 1998.
Parsons, James. The Art Fever: Passages through the Western Art Trade. Taos, NM:
Gallery West, Inc., 1981.
Samuels, Peggy and Harold. Everyone’s Guide to Buying Art. Englewood Cliffs, NY:
Prentice Hall, Inc., 1984.
Weil, Stephen E. Beauty and the Beasts: On Museums, Art, the Law, and the Market.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983.
Werner, Paul. Museum, Inc: Inside the Global Art World. Chicago, IL: Prickly
Paradigm Press, 2005.

Rodeo

Stratton, W.K. (Kip). Chasing the Rodeo: On the Wild Rides and Big Dreams, Broken
Hearts and Broken Bones, and One Man’s Search for the West. Harcourt,
2005.

Magazines

Burk, Dale. “The Artistic Stature of Bob Scriver.” Art West, Vol. 1, No. 3. Spring
1978.
Butler, Ron. “The Big Boom in Western Art.” Arizona Highways, March 1972. Pp.
40–49.
“Cowboy Artists of America.” No author credited (copy supplied by the artists
– mostly photos). Southwestern Art Scene, Vol. 1, No. 7, March 1968.
Dyck, Paul. “Lone Wolf Returns to that Long Time Ago.” Montana, the Magazine of
Western History, Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter 1972. Pp.18–41.
Edwards, Mike W. and Nicholas deVore III. “Should They Build a Fence around
Montana?” National Geographic, Vol. 149, No. 5, May 1976.

366 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Farr, William E. “ Troubled Bundles, Troubled Blackfeet.” Montana, the Magazine
of Western History, Vol. 43, No. 4, Autumn 1993. And Response to Farr:
Letters to the Editor. Montana, the Magazine of Western History, Vol. 44,
No. 3, Summer 1994. Pp. 88–94.
Gildart, Robert C. “Creation: Robert Macfie Scriver and the Blackfeet Epic.”
Southwest Art, July 1983.
Gildart, Robert C. and Bob Scriver. “Bob Scriver and the Blackfeet Indians.”
Montana Magazine, Holiday Issue, 1982.
Graves, Pat. “To Keep the Vanishing West.” True, the Man’s Magazine, December
1965.
Harvey, Betty. “Bob Scriver.” Western Art Digest, Vol. 14, No. 1, January/February
1987.
Langley, Leonora. “George Montgomery’s Western Art Collection.” Antiques and
Fine Art, October 1987.
Mochary, Alexandra. “Great Public Western Art Collections.” Antiques and Fine Art,
October 1987.
Nelson, Van Kirke. “In Memory of Ace Powell: Don’t Shake Hands with the Devil,
or He’ll Pull You into Hell.” A tribute to Ace Powell by Van Kirke Nelson.
Paladin, Vivian. “A. Phimister Proctor: Master Sculptor of Horses.” Montana, the
Magazine of Western History, Vol 14, No. 1, January 1964.
Rhodes, Lil. “The Rainbow Hand of Paul Dyck.” Art West, Summer 1977.
Rovetti, Paul. “Through the windows of my soul... Harry Jackson.” Fine Art
Collector, Vol. 1, No. 12, December 1991–January 1992.
Scriver, Mary. “The Art of Bronze: Everything You Always Wanted to Know.” Art
West, Vol. 7, No. 1, December 1983.
Scriver, Mary. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Bronze: Part Two.” Art
West, Vol. 7, No. 2, February 1984.
Scriver, Mary. “Buyer Beware: Bronze Rustling.” Art West, Vol. 8, No. 2, January/
February 1985.
Scriver, Mary. “He Knows his Subject.” Montana Arts, Vol. 21, No. 3, February/
March 1969.
“Scriver’s Linderman Statue.” no author credited. The Western Horseman, April 1968.
“Society of Animal Artists.” National Wildlife, Vol. 6, No. 2, February/March 1968
(no author credited, mostly photos).
Steele, Ray W. “C.M. Russell Museum: A Tribute to Montana’s Master of Western
Art.” Art West, Summer, 1977.
Strachan, Mary (Mary Scriver). “Bob Scriver, Western Sculptor.” American Artist,
September 1964.
Warden, J.F. “Montana’s Really Big Show: the 10th Annual C.M. Russell Auction.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY 367
 No Author (Newsletters, etc.)

La Revue Moderne. “Bob Scriver.” pp. 19–20. 1 Janvier 1965. In French.

The Montana Post, Official Newsletter of the Montana Historical Society. “Scriver
Models Gift of Actor George Montgomery.” Vol. 3, No. 2, February 1965.
The Montana Post, Official Newsletter of the Montana Historical Society. “Scriver
Show Opens.” Vol. 10, No. 3, August/September 1972.
National Wildlife. “National Wildlife Revisits the Society of Animal Artists.” Vol. 6,
No. 2, Feb/March 1968. Pp. 21–27.
Southwestern Art Scene. “Cowboy Artists of America” (overview and individual
stories). Vol. 1, No. 7, March 1968. Pp. 24–45

368 A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER

Legacies Shared Series

Janice Dickin, series editor

ISSN 1498-2358

The Legacies Shared series preserves the many personal histories and
experiences of pioneer and immigrant life that may have disappeared or have
been overlooked. The purpose of this series is to create, save, and publish
voices from the heartland of the continent that might otherwise be lost to
the public discourse. The manuscripts may take the form of memoirs, letters,
photographs, art work, recipes or maps, works of fiction or poetry, archival
documents, even oral history.

A complete listing of titles in this series may be found at [Link].

Memories, Dreams, Nightmares: Memoirs of a Holocaust Survivor Jack Weiss ·

No. 13

The Honourable Member for Vegreville: The Memoirs and Diary of Anthony
Hlynka, MP Anthony Hlynka, translated by Oleh Gerus · No. 14

The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary-Imperialism on the North Pacific

Coast Margaret Butcher, edited by Mary-Ellen Kelm · No. 15

The First Dutch Settlement in Alberta: Letters from the Pioneer Years, 1903-14
edited by Donald Sinnema · No. 16

Suitable for the Wilds: Letters from Northern Alberta, 1929-31 Mary Percy
Jackson edited by Janice Dickin · No. 17

A Voice of Her Own edited by Thelma Poirier, Doris Bircham, JoAnn Jones-Hole,
Patricia Slade and Susan Vogelaar · No. 18

What’s All This Got to Do with the Price of 2 x 4’s? Michael Apsey · No. 19

Zhorna: Material Culture of the Ukrainian Pioneers Roman Fodchuk · No. 20

371
Behind the Man: John Laurie, Ruth Gorman, and the Indian Vote in Canada
Ruth Gorman, edited by Frits Pannekoek · No. 21

Missing Pieces: My Life as a Child Survivor of the Holocaust Olga Verrall · No. 22

Medicine and Duty: The World War I Memoir of Captain Harold W. McGill,
Medical Officer 31st Battalion C.E.F. Edited by Marjorie Barron Norris · No. 23

Missionaries Among Miners, Migrants, and Blackfoot: The Van Tighem Brothers’
Diaries, Alberta 1875–1917 Edited by Mary Eggermont-Molenaar and Paul Callens
· No. 24

Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver Mary Scriver ·
No. 25

Give Your Other Vote to the Sister: A Woman’s Journey into the Great War Debbie
Marshall · No. 26

The Way It Was: Vignettes from My One-Room Schools Edith Van Kleek, edited
by Thelma Jo Dobson · No. 27
 SCRIVER
“More than any other book that I can think of, Bronze Inside
and Out puts a human face on Western art—indeed, all M A RY S T R A C H A N S C R I V E R
art. It invites us to ponder the very nature of the creative
process.”
– From the foreword by Brian W. Dippie, University of Victoria


Bronze Inside and Out is a literary biography of sculptor Bob Scriver,

written by his wife, Mary Strachan Scriver. Bob Scriver is best known

BRONZE Inside and Out

for his work in bronze and for his pivotal role in the rise of “cowboy
art.” Living and working on the Montana Blackfeet Reservation, Scriver
created a bronze foundry, a museum, and a studio – an atelier based on
classical methods, but with local Blackfeet artisans. His importance in
the still-developing genre of “Western Art” cannot be overstated.

Mary Strachan Scriver lived and worked with Bob Scriver for over

bronze
a decade and was instrumental in his rise to international acclaim.
Working alongside her husband, she became intimately familiar with
the man, his work, and his process. Her frank, uncensored, and highly
entertaining biography reveals details that give the reader a unique
picture of Scriver both as man and as artist. Bronze Inside and Out also
provides a fascinating look into the practice of bronze casting, cleverly
structuring the story of Bob Scriver’s life according to the steps in this
complicated and temperamental process.

Mary Strachan Scriver lives in Valier, Montana, near the Blackfeet

reservation, where she has worked as a teacher, a writer, and a Unitarian
minister.
Inside and Out
[Link] A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR
978-1-55238-227-1
OF BOB SCRIVER