An original acrylics painting, on canvas panel
18 X 24", unframed
$1,200.00 - ( plus $35.00, pack and ship )
( click on image to enlarge )
When the early frontiersmen in our country first began to push their way westward,
to settle the fertile lands beyond the mountains, it was fairly easy for trail blazers such as
Danial Boone, to mark the route through the Cumberland Gap. There were plentiful
stands of trees on which they could leave their ax-marks, to show the way.
Decades later, when the U.S. Army was charged with taking control of the wide-open,
prairie lands, in the middle of the continent, the new trail-blazers had to find different ways
to mark their routes. The absence of trees often meant resorting to some more
traditional, Native-American methods of trail marking, such as the stacking of stones.
One stone stacked on another might be considered accidental or natural, but a stack of
three stones left no doubt that it was done with purpose.
One of the early scouts who helped the army mark routes across the plains, was an
Indian-trader by the name of Jesse Chisholm, the son of a Cherokee woman and a man
of Scottish decent. He had a trail which led from his southern trading-post on the
Red River, to his northern trading-post near Kansas City. After the Civil War, the
Chisholm Trail became legendary, as the route used by Texas cattlemen to drive their
cattle to rail-heads in places such as Kansas City, Abilene and Wichita.
This painting is intended to represent a view out on to the wide-open prairie, unfenced
and unplowed, where the Chisholm Trail might well have crossed the land. The old,
broken slab of field-stone is not intended as a specific marker, with a specific purpose.
Its history can be left up to the imagination of the viewer. The question of its purpose
helps to add a bit of mystery. The stone could possibly mark a trail, or a land claim.
Or, on a more melancholy note, it could mark the final resting place of a wagon-train
pioneer, who was destined never to reach the promised land. A loved-one who,
sorrowfully, had to be left behind by his or her grieving family, knowing that there was
little chance that they could ever make a return journey to that lonely place on the trail..
