… One of sculptor Cyrus Dallin’s most famous statues has been lost?
Cyrus Edwin Dallin (1861-1944) was an American sculptor who created the bronze statue of “The Boy and His Dog” that stands at the entrance of Lincoln’s cemetery on Lexington Road. (That statute and how it came to be in Lincoln is a story unto itself.)
Cyrus Dallin is best known for a set of four statues of Native Americans called “The Epic of the Indian.” The fourth and most famous in the series, “Appeal to the Great Spirit,” stands at the entrance of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Lost forever is Dallin’s “Protest of the Sioux,” which was created for the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Dallin’s Native American statues have been criticized recently as “stereotypical imagery” of Native Americans by white artists. Dallin was a vigorous advocate of Native American rights, and when his series of four statues were displayed, they would have been controversial for a very different reason. When Dallin’s “Protest of the Sioux” was displayed in 1904, the U.S. Army was still waging war against Native American tribes in the Southwest. Dallin’s statue of a Sioux warrior on horseback, with fist raised in defiance against the loss of Sioux lands and way of life, must have seemed to some visitors at the World’s Fair as siding with the enemy. As one newspaper correspondent put it, “The North American Indian will make his last stand at the World’s Fair.”
Dallin’s “Protest of the Sioux” was monumental. On its pedestal, it stood forty feet high. But it was made of a perishable artificial stone, not cast in bronze like all of Dallin’s other work. After the World’s Fair, it was moved to a park in St. Louis, and reportedly one night the statue “crumbled into a heap of dust.” A cast bronze replica, only 21 inches tall, survives in a museum in Utah.
The story of how Dallin’s “The Boy and His Dog” came to be in Lincoln may be found on the Lincoln town website for the Cemetery Commission.
Donald L. Hafner
The Lincoln Historical Society
January 2021
