The Swiss Emigration To The Red River Settlement In 1821 And Its Subsequent Exodus To The United States

Everything went wrong. Having crossed the Atlantic for about 3 months and getting stuck in the ice of Hudson's Strait for another three weeks, the band of Swiss emigrants had to row with great hardship up the Hayes River over some 6o portages, and cross Lake Winnipeg in its full length. Arriving starved, exhausted, and deprived of their belongings at the Red River Settlement just before the snows, they were told that nothing had been prepared for them. Lodging and food was there none due to a plague of grasshoppers and floods that had destroyed the harvests of the previous four years. The so-called Promised Land was bare of any prospect. Thoroughly embittered and disgusted, one family after the other headed south between 1821 and 1826, some alone, others in groups, hoping to reach present day Minnesota as their first refuge. But to get there they had to cross over some 350 miles of prairie, a veritable desert of uncharted trails and water holes, peopled by roving Sioux looking out for victims to scalp. How did they survive? That's what the reader will find out by reading this dramatic document, which is illustrated by Peter Rindisbacher, the young artist who participated in this extraordinary venture.

Everything went wrong. Having crossed the Atlantic for about 3 months and getting stuck in the ice of Hudsons Strait for another three weeks, the band of Swiss emigrants had to row with great hardship up the Hayes River over some 6o portages, and cross Lake Winnipeg in its full length. Arriving starved, exhausted, and deprived of their belongings at the Red River Settlement just before the snows, they were told that nothing had been prepared for them. Lodging and food was there none due to a plague of grasshoppers and floods that had destroyed the harvests of the previous four years. The so-called Promised Land was bare of any prospect. Thoroughly embittered and disgusted, one family after the other headed south between 1821 and 1826, some alone, others in groups, hoping to reach present day Minnesota as their first refuge. But to get there they had to cross over some 350 miles of prairie, a veritable desert of uncharted trails and water holes, peopled by roving Sioux looking out for victims to scalp. How did they survive? Thats what the reader will find out by reading this dramatic document, which is illustrated by Peter Rindisbacher, the young artist who participated in this extraordinary venture.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains practiced an archival art—narrating war exploits in large-scale paintings executed on animal hide robes, shirts, tipi covers, and tipi liners. Essentially autobiographical, the paintings were worn and lived in by the men whose war exploits they portrayed, and were made to be “read” by the public at large. Executed in a pictorial narrative style and documenting actual events, these paintings blend visual art and history. Indigenous War Painting of the Plains is the first comprehensive look at this important North American art form, covering the full corpus of war paintings from fourteen tribes across the plains. Two impediments have previously made such a book impractical: photography alone falls short of rendering war paintings for the printed page, and only about half of the surviving works have reliable documentation on their cultural origins. Arni Brownstone surmounts these difficulties by producing precise electronic redrawings and by using well-documented paintings to inform poorly documented examples, bolstered by a careful examination of collection histories. Featuring some 300 photographs and electronic redrawings, the book focuses on 83 paintings organized into four chapters covering the paintings of tribes associated with a specific geographical sphere of artistic influence. Four appendixes feature paintings combined with “translations” by Indigenous collaborators who had intimate knowledge of the depicted events. Offering vivid access to the key works of war painting preserved in 37 museums throughout North America and Europe, Indigenous War Painting of the Plains illuminates distinctions between painting styles of different tribes, reveals how they influenced one another and changed over time, and conveys a deep understanding of how war painting developed in relation to profound social changes in Plains Indian cultures.