Plains Indian Studies - Smithsonian Institution Libraries

John Canfield Ewers and the Great Tradition of
Artists and Ethnologists of the West
ABSTRACT
John C. Ewers is one of the nation's foremost
scholars. Throughout his career he has been able
to apply his personal talent and interest in art to
the study of the American Indian, giving him a
unique appreciation for native art forms and
enabling him to transmit that insight to the
American people through his numerous publications.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.—I am indebted to Nancy
Elliott, director of the Dartmouth College Alumni
Records Office, for copies of the file on John
Canfield Ewers, Class of 1931; and to Ned Pitkin
of Loudonville, New York, a classmate of Ewers,
for a copy of the Class of'31 31-Yr. Yearbook. Their
assistance is gratefully acknowledged. The official
ARO file also contains a copy of Professor Robert
E. Riegel's review of The Indians of Texas in 1830
from the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine of June 1969.
My contribution to this symposium honoring
Jack Ewers and Waldo Wedel might honestly be
titled "A Personal View during Fifty Years," for
I have known them both since the early nineteenthirties,
a period that encompasses our professional
careers as anthropologists. I met Jack at
Dartmouth and Waldo at Signal Butte, my one
foray into archeology and my introduction to the
Plains. Afterward, we three were colleagues at the
William N. Fenton, State University of New York at Albany, 1400
Washington Avenue, Albany, New York 12222.
William N. Fenton
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Smithsonian. I am happy to acknowledge these
two fine gentlemen and eminent scholars among
my friends today. We share in common an interest
in the interface of history and anthropology,
an approach that has come to be known as ethnohistory,
and our contributions are as varied as
the problems we have researched. Wedel's use of
the direct historic approach in the prehistory of
the Plains and his contributions to archeological
and natural science will be treated by other participants
in this symposium. Ewers has linked his
own talent and training as an artist to historical
interpretation of objects and paintings of the Old
West and to field work among the horsemen of
the Northern Plains, producing both books and
monographs and creating entire museums that
bring his visual acuity to the public. Having
identified the two scholars with the tradition of
historical anthropology at the Smithsonian, and
saluting Wedel, I now confine my remarks to the
career of Jack Ewers.
Jack and I met in a senior seminar in sociology
taught by Andy Truxall, who was afterward president
of Hood College in Frederick, Maryland,
for that was the nearest an undergraduate could
come to the science of culture in the Dartmouth
of our day. Jack was a class behind me, but we
graduated together, since I had dropped out the
previous year after discovering that I abhorred
businesss administration and finance. With the
age-graded structure of Dartmouth undergraduate
life, we had not previously been thrown together
in classes and other activities. I had known
Jack in passing as an editor o{ \hc Jack-0-Lantern,