Old American West

In days when red Napoleons like Geronimo, Naiche, Sitting Bull and Rain-in-the-Face were living, though caged and humbled, artist E. A. Burbank went into the tamed west to paint these broken but barbaric monarchs of the butte and trail and tepee before they fretted to death. The book Burbank has made of them is like a panorama of a fierce play-yard of grown children living by and from Nature before commerce came. The fifty-six fine plates show well the world of he Indian woman, whose outlook changed from romance to squalid routine when her wooing was done; and the world of the Indian man, the beau whose beauty to the wild beryl eyes of his belle lay not in contours but in fearful scars. Chief Sitting Bull of the Sioux, the notable whom Canada knows best, is seemly enough with his almost Caesarean bust and amazingly shrewd eyes. But Chief Blue Horse, his colleague, though his black hair implies he is not old, has a face wrecked and wracked as though by centuries.

In this book of pictures by an artist who pained the old American west from the life while some of the old life was still living, the past rises up out of the desert dust and walks up and down before one Wister and Haycox make us see this west with its realism mingled with romance, but Burbank's pictures give it to us raw. - W.E.I.

1945-04-14
Winnipeg Free Press
Page 21

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