Other Descriptive Information

Essay: Frank Linderman's Work

By William Bevis, Professor of English, The University of Montana--Missoula1984 (Reprinted with permission of author, 1999)

"I had found a large map of the western states and territories, and that night, for the hundredth time, I spread it upon the floor in my own room to pore over it as I always had, flat on my belly. Long before this I had decided where I wished to go, but now that my dream was coming true I needed to be sure I had made no mistake in my choosing. I had to have unspoiled wilderness, because I secretly intended to become a trapper. I remember that I felt glad when the Flathead Lake country in northwestern Montana Territory seemed yet to be farthest removed from contaminating civilization. I'd go as straight as I could to Flathead Lake."

The year was 1885, and if the boy of 16 on the train west from Chicago did not know that the West was going and gone, he would know it soon after he arrived. Just the last few years, since 1883, had seen the barbed wire and railroad arrive, the buffalo disappear and the starved Indians gather in reservations. When Montana became a state in 1889, Frank Linderman agreed with his trapping friend who said, "Now she's gone to hell."

Frank Linderman was one of a number of men, white men, who came from the East to the West between 1865 and 1900 not so much to mine, or trap, homestead or make a fresh start as to "see the West" before it was gone. Some of these men, including Frederick Remington, Charley Russell, George Bird Grinnell, James Willard Schultz and Frank B. Linderman would become important, important because they saw, they cared and they reported what they had come to see--the West before it was gone. Much of their work was done in Montana, and many of them knew each other. Grinnell introduced Schultz's work, and Linderman's first book, Indian Why Stories (1915), was dedicated to Russell and Grinnell and illustrated by Russell. Their work is even more important now than when it was done and is beginning to receive the recognition it deserves.

Frank Linderman's work was varied: for a brief seven years he trapped in his beloved wilderness near Flathead Lake, and as so often happens in western history, those few years became a sort of golden age in his life by which all else was measured. He married, became an assayer, then newspaperman, then state legislator. In 1905 he moved to Helena and was Assistant Secretary of State. But in his heart he really must have believed that he, like the territory, was going to hell in that direction and after making some money selling insurance, he moved, in 1917, to Goose Bay, Flathead Lake, to write. He was forty-eight years old with a family, and he was not rich. The move was a conscious and risky rejection of business and politics in favor of writing.

Between 1915 and his death in 1938 he published, among other books, articles poems, five volumes of traditional Indian tales, two trapper novels ( Lige Mount and Beyond Law), and two recorded Indian autobiographies, one of Crow Chief Plenty-Coups, the other of Crow medicine woman Pretty-Shield. Maxwell Perkins, editor of Hemingway and many others, said, "It would be hard to write a better story than Lige Mount"; the book deserves more study than we can give it here. It is easy to see, however, that most of Linderman's work was on Indians, and that is the work on which I wish to focus.

Frank Linderman worked on Indians, with Indians, for Indians. That is, he faithfully recorded their tales and customs, he was their friend, and in politics he did all he could to help, especially in establishing the Rocky Boy's Reservation in north central Montana. Yet his name is hardly recognized outside of Montana, and I would like for a moment to consider his place in our knowledge of Indians and explain why I think he will soon be much more widely known.

In what we now call Native American studies, which began as sympathetic and accurate knowledge of Indians by Europeans and is now being transformed by Indian scholars, there was a seminal period from about 1880 to 1930. During that time, from the Indians' losing the West to the death of the last men and women who had ever known a pre-white West, much crucial work was done. Linderman was one of the last of a whole host of whites who gathered evidence and testimony during that time, when direct knowledge of the old was still possible. From about 1930 to 1970, knowledge of Indians in both popular and academic circles declined, as far as I can tell, and much was forgotten. Since about 1970, a boom in Indian studies had produced fresh scholarship and, among Indians, fresh politics, but surprisingly, much of that activity is simply rediscovering how good the old work was, and now, how precious.

For instance, the Native American poetry translations by Natalie Curtis and others at the turn of the century were excellent, and were printed with interlinear translations of texts, comments by Indian informants, and musical notations. By comparison, the new "Indian poetry" texts being printed in 1970 had sloppy translations, no commentary, and no background information. We not realize that the best we can do is reprint Curtis' 1907 book, informed as it was by direct knowledge and accurate field work.

Another instance: In the 1950s Charley Russell was widely thought to be a romanticist, a portrayer of the Wild West of movies and pulp fiction. That is one reason Montana let his paintings leave the State. Now, however, we have realized that his work is accurate and irreplaceable, and John Ewers, the Blackfeet historian, has a Russell print hanging behind his desk at the Smithsonian. Linderman, I am suggesting, was not only one of those men who came West at a certain period with certain expectations, but like some of those other men, he is beginning to be appreciated. Shultz' work on the Blackfeet is gaining fresh recognition. Linderman's Plenty-Coups came back into print through Bison Press in 1962, Pretty-Shield in 1974. Frederic van de Water's assessment of Plenty-Coups in a 1931 letter to Linderman was prophetic: "... not only a great book, ... one of those volumes ... too good for the present, that is due to be 'discovered' by someone long after you and I have died."

Those works by Linderman, Russell, Schultz and others have an accuracy and passion, an urgency, that cannot be recaptured. Chief Plenty-Coups: "I have not told you half that happened when I was young ... I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again."

Up to this point I have said only that Linderman was one of several men in the right time at the right place. But, of course, many had come West aware that something was quickly passing, yet few left us such a legacy. Grinnell and Russell and Linderman and others must each have had special qualities that stamp their work. Frank Linderman had, as far as I can tell, three qualities that made his own work what it was--indeed, made it possible.

First, he was absolutely trustworthy. Hermann Hagedorn said, "When I think of Frank, the quality that stands out above all others ... is his integrity. He lived squarely and he thought squarely." Linderman's integrity had several effects. It probably weaned him from politics, possibly from insurance, and certainly put him in the unusual position of being trusted by Indians: "... If my father came back and stood on one hill and I saw Frank Linderman on another hill I would not go to my father. I would go to Frank Linderman. You know I do not lie. This is the truth. --Day Child."

As a direct result of the Indians' trust in him from his first meeting with the Flathead Red Horn until his death, Indians came to Linderman for help, helped him, and finally offered to him, and to him only, their life stories. It was not considered wise or good for a Crow Indian to speak of the dead, which Plenty-Coups would have to do to tell his life story, nor did Indians often trust white men to tell their story with a straight tongue. But finally Plenty-Coups, said to Linderman, who was renowned in sign language: "You are my friend, Sign-Talker. I know your heart is good. I will tell you what you wish to know, and you may write it down." And when they had finished: "I am glad I have told you these things, Sign-Talker. You have felt my heart, and I have felt yours. I know you will tell only what I have said, that your writing will be straight like your tongue, and I sign your paper with my thumb so that your people and mine will know I told you the things you have written down."

Plenty-Coups would only speak, in other words, not to an anthropologist but to a trusted friend. The first review of Plenty-Coups in the Chicago Tribune remarked that Linderman was "a 'creative listener' in the sense that he understands deeply." Linderman's integrity, then, his thinking squarely and deeply, put him in the position of knowing Indians who would not speak openly to many white men, for there were few they could trust.

A second quality that stamps his work is clarity. His keen mind, keen judgment and care are evident in all of his writings. To the fine writer, clarity is a matter even of style, of sound and rhythm: "Charley Russell was the most lovable man I have ever known. My remembrances of our days and nights together, alone in camps, and of his frequent visits in our home at Goose Bay are highlights that brighten with passing years ..."

In every description, whether of nature or Butte, Indians or subways, one feels the presence of an accurate and precise observer. And, of course, that mind is keenly aware of its own limits: "I am convinced that no white man has ever thoroughly known the Indian. ... I have studied the Indian for more than forty years, not coldly, but with sympathy; yet even now I do not feel that I know much about him. He has told me many times that I do know him 'that I have felt his heart,' but whether this is so I am not certain."

Linderman was clear about what he could know, and clear about his ignorance.

The third quality that defines his contribution to us is humility. He not only got us to Plenty-Coups, but he then got out of the way. That is, I think, a remarkable achievement, and the greatest justification of Plenty-Coups' trust in him. Consider for a moment Frank Linderman's position in 1929-30. He was not a paid scholar or researcher or ethologist, nor was he seeking such a position. He was very demoralized by the low sales of his writings for fifteen years; he had written one novel in 1922, would soon write another, and was well aware that novels, especially pulp novels, were the way to make money. Here was tremendous material dumped in his lap. He had tried running the Kalispell Hotel for two years and now was poor again at Goose Bay. His only claim to fame was an honorary degree from the University of Montana at Missoula, but then, as now, we didn't hand out much cash. Yet he never considered any selfish use of the Plenty-Coups story; he was content to be the servant of the Crow tradition, carrying Plenty-Coups' message to America, and to a remarkable extent he stayed out of the book. His few appearances are graceful, sympathetic and knowledgeable. His humility allowed him to commit to a project larger than himself, and his publisher advised him directly that such important work often could not be poured into commercial molds: "Frank, I hate to think of your trying to learn 'knacks' or bags of tricks merely for the sake of pleasing magazine editors. If you were a second-rater, that would be all right; but you are a first-rater, and therefore I believe you have got to continue to be yourself and do your own stuff, and if editors can't see it the way you write it, it is so much the worse for them; and it is tough on you. But I think it would be tougher on you to try to write in a way that is unnatural to you."

How many hack writers of 1930 are now forgotten, while we are just beginning to remember Frank Linderman.

So these qualities--integrity, clarity and humility--gave birth to his work and shaped its features. We have from Linderman not only testimony of times now gone, but testimony and commentary of the finest kind. Just what we can learn from what he said so well is the next task of the scholars, and we are grateful that these archives give us the opportunity to do that work.

Linderman said in a letter of 1922: "It is hard for some of my friends to believe that I feel it a duty to, in some way, preserve the Old West, especially Montana, in printer's ink, and if I can accomplish a small part of that duty I shall die content."

We hope he realized, before he died, that he had accomplished more than a small part of his duty.