The Western frontier was a place of potential and inspired many stories of excitement and adventure. Some of these stories were true, some were completely fictional, and many were somewhere in between. Artists conveyed these stories in literature, visual arts, and song, the different art media informing one another.
American Western Art Inspired by Literature
James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier novel series, The Leatherstocking Tales, inspired artists to paint scenes from the books, as seen in Christian Schussele’s painting Hetty Reading Scripture to the Indians, a scene from the book The Deerslayer. Another painting by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, The Last of the Mohicans, was inspired by Cooper’s book of the same name. Both Schussele and Leutze had only spent time in the eastern US when they created these works; they experienced the frontier through the stories of authors like James Fenimore Cooper.
Poet Henry Wasdworth Longfellow drew largely from Ojibwe legends for his epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha. As an art student in France, William de Leftwhich Dodge aspired to create a largescale painting of distinctly American subject matter. He used Longfellow’s poem to find that American subject matter, painting The Death of Minnehaha. Below is the canto from The Song of Hiawatha Dodge depicted in his painting.
And he rushed into the wigwam,
Saw the old Nokomis slowly
Rocking to and fro and moaning,
Saw his lovely Minnehaha
Lying dead and cold before him,
And his bursting heart within him
Uttered such a cry of anguish,
That the forest moaned and shuddered,
That the very stars in heaven
Shook and trembled with his anguish
Then he sat down, still and speechless,
On the bed of Minnehaha,
At the feet of Laughing Water,
At those willing feet, that never
More would lightly run to meet him,
Never more would lightly follow.
With both hands his face he covered,
Seven long days and nights he sat there,
As if in a swoon he sat there,
Speechless, motionless, unconscious
Of the daylight or the darkness.
