Rarely has the state of Oregon established so affectionate and rewarding a relationship with an artist of international renown as it did in the early 1900s with sculptor Alexander Phimister Proctor. In the mid-1910s, when Proctor’s place in Oregon’s cultural development was most ascendant, he was referred to in the San Francisco Examiner as “the foremost sculptor of animals in America.” [1] At the same time, while living in Oregon and enthusiastically participating in western life, he expanded his artistic vision beyond that of an animalier sculptor to include themes from Indian history and cowboy pursuits. Scenes he observed at the Pendleton Round-Up inspired him to create his Buffalo Hunt bronze, which combined raw energy with grace and pounding action with designed elegance. His portrayal of the rodeo Buckaroo, imbued with similar aesthetic qualities, was seen as a crucial step in “putting the cowboy on the art map.” [2] Proctor, Oregon, and the people who embodied its rich frontier legacy made natural partners.
Proctor was born in Canada in 1860. His pioneer family settled in Denver eleven years later, and it was there and in the Colorado Rockies that he grew to manhood. His experiences defined him as something of a dual persona. He possessed an abiding passion for art, and, encouraged by both parents, he began drawing lessons at age twelve. His father dreamed that he would not only receive art training in New York City but also in France, and Proctor ultimately fulfilled both parental expectations by studying at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in Manhattan and the Academie Julian in Paris. He developed an equally devoted affection for outdoor life, especially hunting and camping, while he was a young boy in Colorado. As he grew up, his two obsessions wed comfortably into one career.
After completing his course of study in Paris, Proctor returned to America, established a studio in New York, and quickly became America’s leading animalier sculptor, mixing the French Beaux-Arts style of romanticized naturalism with the American tenets of nobility, simplicity, and dignity espoused by his mentor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. His successes can be seen in many eastern cities, from his huge marble Lions for President William McKinley’s Buffalo, New York, monument to the giant bronze Buffaloes that adorn the Q Street Bridge in Washington, D.C.
When, after 1910, Proctor began making appeals of patronage to western cities such as Denver, Seattle, and Los Angeles, it was Portland that first opened its doors to him. The Portland Art Association hosted a major exhibition of his sculptures in 1911 and purchased one of his most striking early works, The Indian Warrior.[3] That bronze was the first original piece of sculpture to enter the collections of the Portland Art Museum.[4] Proctor expressed his affection for Portland clearly and openly:
I like Portland better than any other city…. The people are charming and the art appreciation here is keener and more discriminating than in any other Western city that I have ever visited. Of course, I like Denver … but Portland is different, it has the breadth and breeziness of the West and culture of the East, and that, as you may well [know], is a rare combination.[5]
The relationship between Proctor and Portland, based on a belief in the fundamental value of public aesthetic enrichment, proved to be mutually beneficial. The capstone, Proctor’s impressive bronze equestrian monument to Theodore Roosevelt, stands today as a remarkable artistic collaborative achievement.
Proctor’s association with other Oregon communities was no less celebrated and mutually salubrious. In Pendleton, where the artist and his family lived for several years, he produced his elegant testament to dedication and bravery, a monument to Sheriff Til Taylor. In Salem, his homage to the spirit of frontier evangelism, The Circuit Rider, stands near the state capitol. And Eugene features not one but two tributes to Oregon’s frontier heroes, Pioneer and The Pioneer Mother.
Over a period of more than twenty years, from the early 1910s until the early 1930s, Proctor cast his favor on Oregon. The citizens of the state were and are the beneficiaries of his artistic genius and energy. To them he gave his encouragement, his personal presence, his artistic guidance, and a goodly number of what he regarded as his best works.
Lions
Proctor met Wilson B. Ayer in 1911 when the artist presented a major exhibition at the Portland Art Museum. Ayer, who was a trustee of the museum and chair of its collection committee, commissioned the sculptor to produce a bronze overmantle relief for his home. They selected lions as the subject, and the artist was inspired to create one of his most powerful animal works. Lions, as it was titled, commands authority with its series of strong, overlapping forms and contrasting textures. The powerful hindquarters and interlaced tails of the lion and two lionesses counterbalance the high head and mane of the lead figure. The focused stares of all three great cats project the kinetic force established by the patterned profusion of legs crowding the lower third of the composition.
The plaster model for the relief appeared in exhibitions of Proctor’s work in the years following the bronze’s installation over a mantle in the Ayer family home in Portland. When the plaster was shown in Proctor’s large solo show at the Gorham Company galleries in New York City in the fall of 1913, critics noted that it possessed a different quality from his other animal sculptures. “It is only occasionally here that one feels the sense of convention,” wrote William B. McCormick.[6] He found that convention in the bas-relief Lions. Another critic, Charles H. Caffin, observed that in Lions Proctor’s characteristic naturalism achieved a happy balance with the artistic.
These creatures did not show either the restlessness or the drowsy stupidity, equally pitiable of the caged beasts. Magnificently self-composed, yet alert to every sound and scent, they are noble in the ease of their untrammeled freedom. But they exhibit enhanced nobility, product of the sculptor’s own possessions of artistic control and liberty, which gives this relief a durable aesthetic value.[7]
For the city in Oregon that he considered the most aesthetically spirited of any in the West, Proctor had produced one of his most purely artistic works. Appropriately, Ayer willed Lions to the Portland Art Museum in 1935. Within a generation, however, its artistic merits had ceased to be appreciated, and Portland Art Museum Director Francis J. Newton decided the bronze might be more suitable as adjunct decoration, what was referred to at the time as “shared attention with elephants.” Newton had Lions removed from the gallery and placed on an exterior wall of the “feline house” of the Portland zoo.[8] There it suffered considerable neglect. The unprotected bronze was spattered with mortar and paint and lost the chroma of its original patina through corrosion and oxidation.[9] In 1998, the museum, under the guidance of its curator of American art, Prudence Roberts, retrieved the monumental bronze panel, ordered proper conservation treatment, and reinstalled the piece in an outdoor sculpture garden. Proctor’s city of “taste and culture” had reclaimed one of its early art treasures.
Buckaroo
On July 8, 1915, Proctor copyrighted his first bronze celebrating the American cowboy. He titled it Buckaroo, a term used in the Northwest to describe cowboys, especially those who rode and broke wild horses. In the fall of 1914, in pursuit of this cowboy sculpture, Proctor visited Pendleton, Oregon, to take in the annual rodeo. The Pendleton Round-Up was in its fourth year and already enjoyed a national reputation. Writer Charles Wellington Furlong was also in Pendleton that fall, researching a book on the Round-Up, an event that he called the “greatest of all human shows … a magnificent three-day cowboy carnival … in which the Old West stalks before one in the flesh.”[10] The scene was rich with reminders of Proctor’s early years in Colorado.
Proctor started on Buckaroo in December 1914. In July, he presented what was probably a plaster casting at the Washington State Art Association galleries in Seattle. Later that month, Lillian Tingle, a critic for Portland’s Morning Oregonian, announced that Proctor and his new statuette had moved to Portland. Buckaroo, she observed, was “full of verve and action, both horse and man typically American, typically Western.” She continued: “Yet even when, as in ‘The Buckaroo,’ the sculptor is primarily concerned with the expression of action, he never loses the rare sense of decorative beauty which is characteristic of his more monumental works.” [11] No matter how far west Proctor went, he never abandoned the essential lessons in the Beaux Arts ideal learned from his Paris instructors and his American mentor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
Tingle’s sense of the monumentality of Buckaroo proved prophetic. When in late July 1915 Proctor returned to Pendleton and displayed a plaster model of the statuette at the Frazier Book Store, the local paper excited its readership by proclaiming that a heroic-sized bronze version had been proposed as a monument for the town.[12] Proctor shipped Buckaroo to New York for further casting.[13]Buckaroo returned to Oregon somewhat sooner than expected and with greater impact when a bronze casting arrived at the Portland Art Museum in early November 1915. Another was sent to the Oregon Building of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where it was unveiled with a flourish from beneath an American flag. At the unveiling, Proctor was claimed as an Oregon artist and his bucking horse as a true testament to the state’s cultural ascendancy.[14] “[I]t reflects no little glory on Oregon in general,” wrote an admiring writer from Pendleton.[15] It was the city of Denver, however, that eventually took an interest in the work, which would find its full expression as a monument in Colorado’s capital five years later.
Slim
Proctor found a number of engaging subjects during his first season at the Pendleton Round-Up. By the time the rodeo had ended, the artist boasted dozens of sketches, any one of which could have been made into finished sculptures. He later said it was difficult selecting from “cowboys and Indians, buffaloes owned by the Roundup Association, frontiersmen, and a western atmosphere” that reminded him of what he “had known in Colorado” years before.[16] Nevertheless, Proctor focused on the theme he had come to develop, the bucking horse and rider that became Buckaroo.
As Proctor worked on Buckaroo, he also made a bust portrait of the cowboy model he was using, Bill “Slim” Ridings. Proctor portrayed Bill Ridings as alert and open. Wearing a broad-rimmed Stetson, denim shirt, and knotted bandana, Slim looks observantly over his left shoulder as if reciting some horseflesh homily for an onlooker. His mouth and eyes shaded by the hat’s brim express honesty and forthrightness, characteristics that Proctor saw as typical of western character. When he took Buckaroo to New York, the Herald pictured Proctor next to his statue of Slim as a rough western type himself. Though his headquarters were the posh Fifth Avenue offices of the Montross Gallery, Proctor was reportedly garbed in “his outfit — a buckskin shirt made from a buck he himself had killed and his buckaroo hat flung on a desk chair.”[17] The Oregonian’s art critic, Lillian Tingle, wrote:
“Slim,” a small “character” bust, is a portrait of a real man. But it is also more than a portrait; it records for future generations the typical cowboy of story and tradition. There is an indefinable something in the carriage and poise of the head and neck, the “long distance look” in the eyes, the firmly modeled chin and the lean lines of the cheek that would be recognizable as “cowboy” even without the “costume touch” of hat and knotted handkerchief.[18]
The Portland Evening Telegram offered an observation that proved prophetic: “He [Proctor] has this difference from his brother sculptors, instead of modeling young Grecian goddesses with more curves than modesty, he prefers Indians, mountain lions and bad men.”[19] Only four days later, the Pendleton East Oregonian suggested that Bill Ridings was not the virtuous cowboy Proctor had depicted in his “character” portrait. “‘The Buckaroo’ is Now in Jail,” the headline announced.[20] Evidently, Slim had sold a horse that belonged to someone else, and he was accused of larceny. The Pendleton Tribune captured the irony of the situation:
“Slim” Bill Ridings, idol of thousands of Roundup spectators and the model for, if not the inspiration of “The Buckaroo,” the latest of A. Phimister Proctor’s sculptured works which has created a sensation in Portland and Seattle as the most typical of all artist’s depictions of the Western spirit, is in the Umatilla County jail this afternoon facing a charge of horse stealing.[21]
William Hanley
Proctor won many patrons during his years in Oregon. Among the most celebrated was his friend, eastern Oregon rancher William Hanley. The Proctor family spent the summer of 1915 on Hanley’s famous “P” Ranch south of Burns, and during that time he produced a telling portrait. Working from photographs and personal sittings, Proctor avoided Hanley’s most familiar pose — wearing a wide-brimmed black Stetson — and chose instead to portray him as an orator. Hanley’s nickname was “the sage of Harney County,” and he loved to think of himself as the Northwest’s equivalent of Will Rogers. Robust, genial, chivalrous, gracious, and as broadly ambitious and humane as his ample girth, Hanley was one of the greatest ranchers in Oregon history. In Proctor’s portrait, Hanley’s gentle face and piercing stare reveal a complexity of character, as does the contrast between his barrel chest that grounds him in the frame and the unkempt silver locks that fly freely behind his head.[22]
Proctor once said that portrait work in bas-relief was the most difficult sculpture he knew. Executing a portrait in the round is difficult enough, demanding that the artist capture nuances of the sitter’s countenance as well as bring forth his or her personality. To accomplish these sculptural feats on a nearly two-dimensional surface requires an additional manipulation of planes and a purposeful distortion of proportions. The artist is called upon to provide layers of illusion that are not needed in three-dimensional work. Many times Proctor would take years to capture a proper likeness. His portrait of his closest friend, Gifford Pinchot, for example, took fourteen years to complete. He began work on two portraits in early 1902, one of Pinchot and another of his father. The son’s portrait was sent to the foundry and cast in 1916, but the father’s was never finished nor was an interim effort at a portrait of Pinchot’s mother. Proctor could somehow never bring the last two likenesses to a satisfactory point.
Til Taylor
Tillman D. Taylor was the kind of sheriff every western town dreamed of having. Pendleton, Oregon, where he served as sheriff from 1900 to 1920, knew him as diligent, honest, courageous, and savvy. Even many of the criminals that he brought to justice — by one report twenty-five hundred — appreciated his skills as a lawman and his humanity as a custodian of justice. He was “the best sheriff the northwest ever knew,” the East Oregonian reported, a man “who risked his life for 20 years in the cause of peace and order in this territory.”[23]
Proctor came to know Sheriff Taylor in the mid-1910s while the artist was in Pendleton studying cowboys and Indians in and around the Pendleton Round-Up. Taylor served as president of the Round-Up between 1911 and 1920, and in that capacity he helped Proctor secure a studio on the rodeo grounds, provided a permit for him to roam freely with his camera and sketchbook, and made other concessions to accommodate his work. It was also Taylor, according to Proctor, who allowed Slim Ridings, the model for Buckaroo, to continue to pose despite a summons for his arrest.[24] The artist and the lawman shared a close bond.
It must have come as a shock to Proctor to learn in late July 1920 that his friend Taylor had been fatally wounded during a jailbreak at the county courthouse. An immediate call went up to erect a memorial to the fallen sheriff, and by the end of August Proctor was discussing a commission with a committee formed for the purpose. Governor Benjamin W. Olcott wrote Proctor to encourage his involvement: “I understand through the press that you have tendered the commission of the Til Taylor memorial. You are the one man for this work and I trust you can take care of it.”[25]
Til Taylor was cast in Brussels and then shipped to Portland by way of Paris. The dedication took place on September 18, 1929, the first day of the Pendleton Round-Up and its twentieth anniversary as an event. With Proctor in attendance, the crowds applauded Taylor and his legacy as well as the artist’s accomplishment. A local paper reported that Proctor had “given us Til Taylor idealized somewhat, it is true and cast in heroic mould, yet the likeness is there.” Proctor was quoted as saying that he regarded the stolid, bronze figure not simply “unique in conception and execution” but also “his best work.”[26]
Theodore Roosevelt, Rough Rider
In May 1920, a Portland doctor, Henry Waldo Coe, dropped by Proctor’s New York studio, searching for the right talent to produce a monumental equestrian portrait of Theodore Roosevelt. In the studio, Coe saw a bronze relief portrait of fellow Oregonian William Hanley, and he was so impressed that he decided to look no further. Proctor was his man.
Proctor promptly wrote his friends in Portland with the news. Coe wanted a casting of the monument for a Portland park, he told them, and was prepared to donate the statue to the city. “As far as I know,” wrote Proctor, “I am the first one commissioned to do an equestrian of Roosevelt.” It seemed a natural subject for him. Roosevelt, he reminded them, had “strongly recommended me as the man to do one of Colonel William Cody (Buffalo Bill) which was proposed for Denver but which the war postponed.”[27]
Coe approved the model at every stage, and the Roosevelt family was called in for comments once the final plaster maquette reached New York.[28] In an exuberant letter to Coe, the president’s sister expressed her enthusiasm:
Yesterday I was able to go to see Mr. Proctor’s wonderful equestrian statue of my brother, Colonel Roosevelt. I can not tell you how greatly it has surprised me. The figure of my brother — and the face also — are both unusually like the original, and there is a mixture of energy and repose about the whole composition that is remarkably characteristic of Theodore Roosevelt.[29]
Vice President Calvin Coolidge attended the groundbreaking ceremonies in August 1922, and throngs of Portlanders turned out on Armistice Day for the dedication. Proctor told the crowd about his long association with Roosevelt: how they had met in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, how Roosevelt had facilitated his Boone and Crockett Club membership, how the president had commissioned him to carve the buffalo heads for the White House State Dining Room fireplace, and how his Panther had become an emblem for the Roosevelt administration.
I wanted to give the world … the impression of Roosevelt as I knew him — as, indeed, I always think of him. I most admired his fearlessness, his courage, and the energy always waiting to spring into action. I never thought of him as a man of hasty, ill-considered action. All his exuberance, all his restlessness, was only the surface that covered a quiet dignity and reserve. The popular idea of him is that he was never in repose. I wanted to show him as he appeared to me, with all his magnificent energy held in check.[30]
One of New York’s most esteemed art critics, Royal Cortissoz, had viewed the finished plaster in Proctor’s studio in April. He wrote:
With admirable insight Mr. Proctor has reflected the dramatic gesture into which this narrative might have tempted him and puts before us, instead, the character lying behind it. The Western type of horse upon which he has placed the Colonel is unmistakably a spirited animal, but it is at the moment as serene and strong as its rider. Technically this horse is perhaps the sculptor’s finest achievement as an interpreter of animals. It is modeled with breadth and simplicity. Horse and rider together make a very sound composition, effective from any point of view. Its greatest virtue is its freedom from breezy picturesqueness. The keynote to the monument is one of restrained animation. The design has a dignified unity.[31]
Circuit Rider
On January 8, 1922, the Portland Telegram announced that a former senator from Eugene, Robert A. Booth, had proposed to give the state of Oregon a statue honoring early pioneer circuit ministers. The idea had come from discussions with Proctor the preceding summer, after which Booth had offered a commission for a working model that would be enlarged into a twelve-foot-high bronze equestrian monument.[32] Booth had asked Governor Benjamin W. Olcott to appoint a site selection committee. Given the historic nature of the proposed work, many believed a location on the grounds of the state capitol in Salem would be appropriate.
Although focused on commemorating the state’s early evangelists, Booth also saw the commission as a family tribute. Booth’s father, Robert, had been a Methodist circuit rider who had come west on the Oregon Trail in 1852 with his wife, Mary Minor, and their four children. On the trip, one son had nearly died of cholera, Robert had become gravely ill, and Mary had made him promise to preach in Oregon if he survived.[33] The family settled in Yamhill County, and Booth joined the conference of the Methodist Episcopal church in 1855. His first assignment as an itinerant parson was in the Willamette Valley.[34]
Although the circuit rider’s mission had farsighted goals, the horse and the pioneer apostle in Proctor’s model seem humbled. The horse’s ambling gait and blank expression suggest a weary pace propelled by resolve rather than energy. The minister looks no farther ahead than the pages of his Bible. There is a sense of the two storing up energy for the conversions ahead, as if having crossed the continent to the Pacific shore the preacher and his message are as much exhausted as exalted. Studious and burdened, he travels from county to county through the soggy Oregon forests and fields.
The serene dignity with which Proctor had infused this work and its combination of expressive, emotive power with understated simplicity caused more than one California art critic to claim Proctor as “one of America’s foremost sculptors” and “one of the foremost exponents of western spirit and art.”[35] He had produced a work, Gertrude Robinson Ross wrote in Oregon Magazine, not simply shaped with “beauty and spirituality” but also one that left “a sense of having looked on something sacred.”[36]
It was not until April 19, 1924, that the Circuit Rider monument was finally dedicated in Salem. In the primary address at the unveiling ceremony delivered by Proctor’s early Portland patron, engineer Joseph N. Teal extolled the sculptor’s artistic prowess and western ardor:
Mr. Proctor breathes the spirit of the West. He is true to its life and to its traditions. A western man himself, fond of all that makes it glorious, of its traditions, of its history, he has put into this group the very best that is in him. Fettered by no instructions, limited by no set designs, controlled by no preconceived notions, there was committed to him the task of expressing in bronze the high ideals the donor desired to commemorate and perpetuate.[37]
Oregon Pioneer Mother
The Proctors were living in Brussels in November 1927 when the artist received an intriguing letter from New York lawyer Burt Brown Barker. Barker had seen Proctor’s Pioneer Mother in Kansas City and was familiar with the highly publicized “‘Pioneer Woman” competition promoted and underwritten by Oklahoma oil tycoon Ernest W. Marland. Although he admired both efforts, Barker’s conception of female pioneers differed greatly from those formulated by Proctor and the twelve sculptors Marland had engaged. When recalling his own mother, Elvira Brown Barker, and his grandmothers, Lucinda Cox Brown and Christina Henckel Barker, the New York attorney told Proctor he would prefer to remember them in their “sunset” years. He wanted to downplay the hardships of travel that Proctor had already documented in such an effective way, as well as the “battles and sorrows of pioneering” presented by Marland’s artists. Rather, he wanted to commemorate pioneer women as “they sat in the evening glow resting from their labors.”[38]
Proctor promised Barker that he would fit the project into his schedule, and over the next two years he developed a composition conforming to Barker’s vision. “His conception,” as Proctor remembered in later years, “was of an elderly woman sitting in repose with her hands in her lap. In her hands would be a half-closed book, her fingers marking a place. Her head would be tilted slightly forward in contemplation.”[39]
On Mother’s Day, May 7, 1932, the six-foot-high monument was dedicated at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where it was placed in the center of the Women’s Quad. E.C. Sherburne, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, voiced the feelings of many when he wrote:
As an artist, Mr. Proctor has maintained a balance between the pressure of sentiment in his subject and the demands of aesthetic soundness. While keeping design at the service of sentiment he has avoided sentimentality. He has made his composition effective in an abstract sense. This is perhaps most noticeable in the side view, which is sweeping in continuity of line, a clear cut, bold silhouette subtly accented by variations within repetitions…. The sturdy chair lends solidity to the composition and contrast to the soft, yielding lines of the figure.[40]
Notes
1.� “Fine Buffalo, Proctor Hears,” San Francisco Examiner, November 20, 1915.
2.� “Noted Sculptor, Now in Portland, Is Putting Cowboy on ‘Art Map,'” Oregonian, July 25, 1915.
3.�American Art Annual 9 (1911): 242–3.
4.�Portland Art Museum: Selected Works (Portland, Ore.: Portland Art Museum, 1996): 62.
5.� “Portland’s Art Tastes Commended by One of Great Animal Sculptors,” Oregonian, December 17, 1911.
6.� William B. McCormick, “Gallery View of Sculptor’s Art …,” New York Press, October 19, 1913.
7.� Charles H. Caffin, “Fine Animal Sculpture by Proctor,” New York American, October 1913, from a clipping in the A. Phimister Proctor Museum archives, Poulsbo, Washington [hereafter Proctor Archives].
8.� “Zoo Unveils Lion Frieze,” Oregonian, May 10, 1962.
9.� Jonathan Taggart, Treatment Proposal, August 21, 1998, Portland Art Museum Archives, Portland, Oregon.
10.� Charles Wellington Furlong, Let ‘Er Buck: A Story of the Passing of the Old West (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 7.
11.� Lillian Tingle, “Sculptor Is Guest,” Morning Oregonian, July 23, 1915.
12.� “Famous Statue to Be Exhibited Today,” Morning Oregonian, July 29, 1915.
13.� “To Exhibit ‘Buckaroo,'” Pendleton Evening Tribune, July 29, 1915.
14.� Anne Shannon Monroe, “Oregon Sculpture Is Seen by Public,” Oregonian, November 12, 1915.
15.� “Buckaroo in Oregon Room Is Unveiled,” Pendleton Evening Tribune, November 19, 1915.
16.� Alexander Phimister Proctor, Alexander Phimister Proctor, Sculptor in Buckskin: An Autobiography, ed. Hester Elizabeth Proctor (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 166.
17.� “Sculptures of the Western Frontier,” New York Herald, March 12, 1916.
18.� Lillian Tingle, “Sculptor Is Guest,” Morning Oregonian, July 29, 1915.
19.� “Cowboys Live in Clay under Skillful Hands of A. Phimister Proctor,” Portland Evening Telegram, July 24, 1915.
20.� “‘The Buckaroo’ Is Now in Jail,” Pendleton East Oregonian, July 28, 1915.
21.� “Bill Ridings in Jail as a Horse Thief,” Pendleton Tribune, July 28, 1915.
22.� See “William Hanley Succumbs Here,” Evening East Oregonian, September 15, 1933, clipping in scrapbooks, Proctor Archives.
23.� Unidentified clipping, Pendleton East Oregonian, c. 1926, Proctor Archives.
24.� Proctor, Sculptor in Buckskin, 164.
25.� Benjamin W. Olcott to Proctor, August 31, 1920, Proctor Archives.
26.� “Likeness of Til Taylor Is Work of Beauty,” Pendleton East Oregonian, August 6, 1929.
27.� “Equestrian Statue of Roosevelt to be Commenced Soon,” unidentified clipping, June 30, 1920, Proctor Archives.
28.� Kermit visited the New York studio in February 1922. See Kermit Roosevelt to Proctor, February 23, 1922, Proctor Archives. For a letter from the president’s sister, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, after she viewed the plaster maquette, see “Statue Site in Doubt,” unidentified newspaper clipping, June 19, 1922, scrapbooks, Proctor Archives.
29.� “Statue Site in Doubt.”
30.� “Statue by Proctor Is Declared to Be Virile Record of Theodore Roosevelt,” Oregonian, November 12, 1922.
31.� Royal Cortissoz, “Roosevelt: An Equestrian Monument Destined for Oregon,” New York Tribune, April 16, 1922.
32.� “Heroic Circuit Rider to Be Well Honored,” Portland Telegram, January 8, 1921.
33.� Booth family stories and genealogy records were supplied by Harriet Wittlie.
34.� Unidentified clipping, c. 1921, Proctor Archives. See also “Statue to Commemorate Heroism and Self-Sacrifice of Early-Day Pastors Created by Noted Westerner,” Oregonian, January 9, 1921.
35.� Louise M. O’Hara, “Completes Statue of ‘The Circuit Rider,'” San Francisco Call, December 27, 1922; “Honor the Pioneer,” San Francisco Journal, August 19, 1922.
36.� Gertrude Robinson Ross, “The Sculptor of the West,” Oregon Magazine, January 30, 1923.
37.� Joseph N. Teal, “The American Pioneer,” speech delivered at the unveiling and dedication of the Circuit Rider, Salem, Oregon, 1924, Proctor Archives.
38.� Burt Brown Barker to A.P. Proctor, November 3, 1927, quoted in the dedication program for the Oregon Pioneer Mother, May 7, 1932, Proctor Archives.
39.� Proctor, Sculptor in Buckskin, 192.
40.� E.C. Sherburne, “A Tribute to Pioneer Women,” Christian Science Monitor, May 10, 1930.
By Peter H. Hassrick