Indians Cede the Land – (George Melville Smith) ◄ Anterior Următor ►

Artist: George Melville Smith

data: 1940

muzeu: Smithsonian's National Postal Museum (Washington, United States)

Tehnică: Mural

George Melville Smith created murals for post offices in Crown Point, IN, (1938), Elmhurst, IL, (1938), and Park Ridge, (1940). Smith was born in Chicago on May 12, 1879, and studied as an architect’s apprentice. At 17, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago’s evening school and worked during the day as a commercial artist, then studied in Paris under Andre Lhote from 1925-26, painting in France, Spain, England and Italy. He was a winner of the Chicago and Vicinity Show held at the Art Institute in 1932 and displayed there in 1933, 1937 as well as at the Federal Art Project exhibit that the Institute hosted in 1938. Smith became the supervisor of the applied arts project for the WPA in 1936, creating a mural for Chicago’s Schubert Elementary School in 1938. Smith was a member of the Arts Club and the Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists. He became the fifth president of the Chicago Society of Artists. He died in Fayette, Kentucky, on October 4, 1952.In 1970 the Post Office building in Park Ridge was sold to the Park Ridge-Niles School District #64. The mural was to be discarded to make way for renovation. Learning of its plight, Paul Carlson, a long-standing history teacher and a founding member of the Park Ridge Historical Society, endeavored to rescue it. With the help of two students, the rescue was undertaken. The mural was first sprayed with varnish to set the surface and then pried from the wall. Upon his death in 2008, Mr. Carlson’s family was prompted to return the mural to Park Ridge, and on September 20, 2008, 38 years to the day that the mural was rescued, the group delivered the mural to the Park Ridge Public Library where it was hoped that it would be put on permanent display pending restoration. Library officials joined with the Park Ridge Historical Society for a community-wide, four-year fundraising campaign to raise $38,000 to restore the mural. Rescued from an attic where it had taken safety for 38 years, this national treasure was unveiled February 2013 at the Park Ridge Public Library where it can be viewed today. Smith’s mural, Indians Cede the Land suggests some of the geographic elements present in the Chicago area at the time the Native Americans signed treaties to give up their claims to the land. It is an area fed by two river corridors, the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, with the wilderness of the original woodlands destined to be replaced by settlement. In the mural, the Federal Government negotiators are balanced by representatives of several different tribes affected by the negotiations.While the issue of relocating the “noble savage” was a popular representation by the Government which enforced the Native Americans’ withdrawal, modern audiences with wider and more enlightened political and historic perspectives today can also appreciate that they were given little choice in their removal. This mural reflects our historical actions as well as our changing social thought in regard to our Native American heritage.Although the artist George Melville Smith painted local historical events from his imagination, he may well have been thinking of the ceding of Native American lands for what later became the City of Chicago and its contiguous suburbs, most especially Park Ridge. The Great Treaty of Greenville of 1795 relinquished many sites along important rivers across the Midwest to the United States government to allow it to legally operate forts. This treaty included in Article III a 6 mile square (3 miles x 2 miles) piece of land at the mouth of the Chicago River at Lake Michigan. This area became Fort Dearborn, built upon the site of a former fort by Captain John Whistler in 1803 and named for President Thomas Jefferson’s then Secretary of War, Henry Dearborn. The treaty also included a 12 mile square (4 miles by 3 miles) at the mouth of the Illinois River emptying into the Mississippi. The treaty called for the Native Americans to allow settlers safe passage across the portage through their lands between these two strategic points. The Treaty of St. Louis of 1816 created the Indian Boundary Lines of Chicago-land that are still important roads today. This cessation of land allowed the establishment of the cities, villages and towns of our area, particularly Park Ridge through the Treaty of Prairie du Chien of 1829 and the Blackhawk War of 1832. After the U.S. government bought the land as far west as the Mississippi River from Emperor Napoleon of France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, it still had to work out treaties with the Native American tribes who recognized neither the American or French claims to their territory.The Treaty of St. Louis of 1816 (referred to in government documents as the Treaty with the Sauk, 1816) was conducted at Portage des Sioux, Missouri, located immediately north of St. Louis, on August 24, 1816. The Treaty was signed for the United States by Ninian Edwards, August Chouteau and William Clark, the brother of George Rogers Clark of Chicago.../..