What Is a Monument to Massasoit Doing in Kansas City? the Memory Work of Monuments and Place in Public Displays of History

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Ethnohistory

What Is a Monument to Massasoit Doing in Kansas City? The Memory Work of Monuments and Place in Public Displays of History

Jean M. O’Brien, University of Minnesota Lisa Blee, Wake Forest University

Abstract. This article explores questions surrounding the memory work of monuments and place by taking up a puzzling instance of public display of history: the presence of an enormous monument to the important seventeenth-century Poka- noket leader Massasoit in Kansas City, Missouri. Given the historical location of the Pokanoket in what came to be called New England, what are we to make of the erection of this monument, in fact a replica of the Plymouth monument designed by sculptor Cyrus Dallin in 1921, as a project of civic-minded non-Indians hundreds of miles away in 1979? Using archival and visual evidence, this article examines the unique portability and profitability of Massasoit as a symbol and narrative device. Rather than fixing history in place and expressing a sense of permanence on the landscape, Massasoit’s presence in Kansas City reveals the malleability of memory and the mobility of memorials. We consider the ways in which monuments to Indians constitute a critical location for public history, place making, and memory.

On a busy street corner in Kansas City, Missouri, even a distracted passerby would have a hard time missing the nine-a nd-a-half-foot-tall bronze sculpture of the famous native leader Massasoit poised in a small public park on the edge of the tony Country Club Plaza. Being equipped with the knowl- edge of what this statue is sparks a complete disjuncture between history and place. For those unfamiliar with this iconic figure, Massasoit attained fame as the sachem of the Pokanoket people who encountered, and then bro- kered, decades of peace with the invading English on Cape Cod beginning in 1620. A bronze plaque informs the public that this is “Massasoit, great sachem of the Wampanoag, friend and protector of the Pilgrims, 1621” and that the sculpture was “contributed to the people of Kansas City, May 6, 1979, by Mr. and Mrs. Miller Nichols.” The Kansas City installation consti-

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Figure 1. Cyrus Dallin with a plaster model of Massasoit, 1920. Printed with permission from the Utah State Historical Society

tutes a curious commentary on history and place. Kansas City is, by rough calculation, thirteen hundred miles as the crow flies from the homelands of Massasoit and his Pokanoket people. Kansas City, or what came to be Kansas City, figured nowhere in the mental maps of the peoples who col- lided in early seventeenth-century Massachusetts. The sculptor, Cyrus E. Dallin, brings additional locations to this story: born in Springville, Utah, he created the original Massasoit sculpture for installation in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1921 (see fig. 1). And as it turns out, full-size castings of Dallin’s Massasoit can be found in at least three other places: in front of the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City; at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah; and in the Springville Museum of Art, Springville, Utah.1 Mas- sasoit, it seems, roughly blankets the country. The statue’s mobility appears to deny scholarly assumptions that memorials exist as a way to fix history in

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What Is a Monument to Massasoit Doing in Kansas City? 637 place and exert a sense of permanence of memory on the landscape.2 What are the qualities of the historical narrative and material representation of Massasoit that allow for memorial mobility rather than entrenchment? The story of how and why Massasoit came to reside in Kansas City and his vari- ous locales, along with some background on the Massasoit story and on the sculptor Dallin, explain the portability and profitability of Massasoit as an enduring symbol. The pamphlet for the 1979 dedication of the Kansas City Massasoit offers this account of the Massasoit story: For many years, his extensive dominion had existed in harmony and contentment. In the main, his people lived peacefully and considered themselves as his friends and children. When the Sachem came to the Pilgrim’s settlement, accompanied by several of his men, he received gifts from the English. At the time of this meeting, Massasoit was a very lusty man in the prime of his life. The Indian party was ushered into a new home with Governor Bradford and some other Pilgrims, and they proceeded to make a treaty which lasted from 24 to 50 years. The Chief returned to his place of residence, Pokanoket. This area is the present site of Bristol, Rhode Island. Massasoit was a strong and honorable man, a great Chief—ren owned more in peace than in war. As long as he lived, he was a friend to the English, despite their repeated usurpations upon his land and liberties.3 This depiction closely aligns with virtually any other snippet about the ven- erable Massasoit from the earliest sources to the present. Distilled from William Bradford’s writings, passed through “Mourt’s Relation,” and mutated to fit local accounts throughout New England over the long nineteenth century, essentially the same Massasoit story is to be found in the privately printed 1919 publication Massasoit of the Wampanoags, which also sketches out the origins of the original Plymouth, Massachusetts, Massa- soit monument. In the second decade of the twentieth century, when this story would be translated into a permanent public monument in the form of a bronze statue, Massasoit’s story had particular appeal. The text promotes Mas- sasoit as a protopatriot who, although powerful and physically capable of destruction, chose peace for the colonists while sacrificing his own inter- ests. Just as the United States emerged from the Great War in 1918 with a renewed interest in international peace and isolationism, Massasoit illus- trated that the pursuit of peace over war was in fact a manly and powerful national policy. Domestically, the nation experienced high immigra- tion in the first decades of the twentieth century; throughout the war and the period following, civic culture revolved around Americanizing new-

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Figure 2. Improved Order of Red Men, Westminster Lodge, Maryland, 1910. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Carroll County, Westminster, Maryland comers and reaffirming national heritage and identity.4 Massasoit’s story provided symbolic origins for the nation in colonial New England and suggested that “honorable” native people sacrificed their lands for the Ameri- can experiment. This narrative, which followed the bronze figure of Mas- sasoit from 1919 through the 1979 Kansas City dedication, gained mobility in two ways. First, the origin story of predestined colonialism is powerfully portable; it “fits” anywhere and everywhere native homelands have been claimed as part of the national domain. Second, the statue’s role as public art supports textual borrowing and replication rather than innovation. It is the stories behind art and material culture that make them valuable, so art dealers and civic leaders simply replicated the stories as though they were a part of the art itself; stories simply move with the objects that signify them. The Plymouth Massasoit statue that would accompany and embody the story was the brainchild of those southern New Englanders who “played Indian” in the fraternal organization the Improved Order of Red Men (see fig. 2). According to the 1919 text produced in connection with their gathering, the Red Men toured Plymouth in 1910 and encountered a

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What Is a Monument to Massasoit Doing in Kansas City? 639 bronze tablet that set them to musing on the upcoming tricentennial of the landing of the Pilgrims “on Plymouth Rock.”5 They decided that this pro- found occasion demanded some fitting monument or memorial to Massa- soit and set to work to bring the project to fruition. Former Grand Chief- tain of the Great Council Alvin Gardner Weeks wrote in 1919, Fortunately we have succeeded in enlisting the services of Cyrus E. Dallin of Arlington, Massachusetts, eminent sculptor and portrayer of Indian character, to translate [Edward] Winslow’s description [of Mas- sasoit] into bronze. . . . Mr. Dallin has created a model of the proud warrior in the prime of life, bearing the peace pipe to the strangers from across the great waters. From this model it is proposed to erect a statue of heroic size to be appropriately mounted on Cole’s Hill, immediately overlooking the famous rock against which the Mayflower’s Society of Plymouth has offered the site, and has volunteered to assume the per- petual care of the statue when erected. And so we present our case to the people of the United States in an appeal to participate in the enterprise, the purpose of which is to pay deserved but belated tribute to this great Chief, that he may forever stand guard over the gateway through which the pilgrim bearers of the torch of Liberty first entered New England, even as he kept a watchful eye over her early struggles for existence.6 Massasoit, Weeks imagined, would stand firmly in place as colonists bustled past and around him. Although originally conceptualized as a stolid gatekeeper, once sculpted into a statue, Massasoit ironically became more mobile (see fig. 3). When completed and erected, the Plymouth Massasoit monument stood alongside other iconic figures such as William Bradford: a virtual who’s who of English colonialism. The statue’s placement vis-à- vis other statues sets him firmly in a portable narrative authorizing English colonialism. Massasoit, as we had been told, hailed from what came to be called Bristol, Rhode Island, not Plymouth, Massachusetts. The sculptor they enlisted, Dallin, was born in Springville, Utah, in 1861 and was trained in sculpture in Boston and Paris. He died in 1944 in Arlington, Massachusetts, where there is a museum dedicated to his legacy. He attained a degree of fame during his lifetime, winning awards for his work, which pursued the themes of Indians, patriots, and pioneers (see fig. 4). The Springville Museum of Art declares, “Two circumstances of his early life in the western wilderness profoundly influenced him—th e proximity of the little log cabin where he was born to the lofty Wasatch Moun- tains, and his familiarity with the Indians in their Native haunts. The first awakened and fostered in him a love for sublimity of form; and the second furnished him with an unfailing source of material for his creative work.”7

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Figure 3. Massasoit statue in Plymouth, Massachusetts, ca. 1921. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, LC-D419- 14

Besides the Massasoit monument, other notable Dallin sculptures include the monumental sculpture of Paul Revere erected near Old North Church in Boston, the “Appeal to the Great Spirit,” outside the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and “The Scout,” also to be found in Kansas City.8 Dallin donated the original plaster cast of the Massasoit statue to the State of Utah soon after the Plymouth statue dedication.9 In doing so, Dallin initiated a new era of mobility for Massasoit. The plaster cast began a process in which two kinds of casting took shape: the numerous bronze repli- cas made from the plaster cast multiplied the figure, and Massasoit was in turn cast into a number of different roles in the geographic, economic, and cultural contexts in which the bronze sculpture was placed. The first public appearance of a plaster copy of the Massasoit statue

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Figure 4. Cyrus Dallin in his studio. Printed with permission from the Utah State Historical Society emerged less than a year after the original was unveiled in Massachusetts but nearly twenty-fi ve hundred miles to the west, in the Utah state capitol rotunda.10 The 1922 Utah installation helps us think about the economic and civic associations of Massasoit with public art—the vehicle through which Dallin communicated his message of peaceful cooperation that the US settlers in Utah apparently inherited from the English. According to Utah State Capitol Visitor Services: Dallin’s sculpture was first unveiled . . . at a time when Utah struggled economically. The State graciously accepted the generous gift from

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one if its most famous sons, adding to the Capitol beautiful artwork they could not have otherwise afforded. . . . During the first unveiling, Dallin expressed his desire that the state accept the gift as a token of his love for his native state of Utah. “These mountains are linked with the story of the Indian,” he said. “In setting up this man of peace, who saved the Plymouth Colony, I have a hope . . . that I might model the old Chief Washakie of the Shoshones, who, too, was a man of peace; and he wielded as potent and saving an influence over the first Pio- neers . . . as ever did Massasoit over the Pilgrims.”11 The plaster copy stood in the capitol’s rotunda for thirty-fi ve years until a charitable foundation interested in memorials to Utah’s historic figures cast the figure into bronze in 1959 and donated it to the state; the bronze moved outdoors, to the south entrance of the capitol building (see fig. 5).12 Removed during a long renovation project at the capitol, the statue was reinstalled on 5 November 2009 to some controversy. As posed on the blog Newspaper Rock, paraphrasing the position of Utah Navajo Tom Lovell, the question was: “Why honor a Massachusetts Indian in a state named after the Utes?” In Lovell’s words, “It would be like having a picture of the governor of Massachusetts in the rotunda with the Utah governor. It doesn’t make any sense. It would be like having a statue of the Pope on Temple Square.”13 The Utah State Capitol curator answered the charge on his own blog, pointing out (among other things) that the Utah State Capitol Massasoit was a gift to the state from Dallin himself and thus appropriately adorned the capitol grounds.14 So even if we can now imagine why there are statues of Massasoit in Utah, what is a monument to Massasoit doing in Kansas City? Part of the answer can be found in the fine arts market. In 1977 Brigham Young Uni- versity, the owner of the original plaster cast, handed over limited casting rights to Brand Gallery of California. The private gallery made a mold from the cast and agreed to make no more than four full-sized bronze castings. One cast went to Brigham Young University, and the other three were released to the gallery market. But Brand Gallery did not stop at four as contracted; they continued to make at least one more full-sized bronze and at least two busts from the mold. In 1981 the BYU art acquisitions committee, in an attempt to reign in the uncontrolled reproductions, considered whether they should track down the foundry and “get a restraining order on Massasoit.”15 Following the Massasoit statue diaspora, sanctioned and rogue Mas- sasoit statues alike would be cast into new roles as they resurfaced before public audiences far from Plymouth, Massachusetts. The first question, of course, was “why here?” Miller Nichols, the benefactor responsible for the

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Figure 5. Bronze statue of Massasoit on the Utah state capitol grounds. Printed with permission from the Utah State Historical Society installation in Kansas City, responded to a 1993 inquiry by a resident of Massachusetts: You asked what connection does Massasoit have with Kansas City? The answer is none except to symbolize the noble spirit of friendship at home here. It was dedicated to the people of Kansas City on May 6, 1979, by my wife and me. I found this statue from its owner in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Mr. Forrest Fenn of Fenn Galleries. At that time the

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Figure 6. Massasoit statue in Kansas City, 2008. Image in the public domain

statue was in storage in Provo, Utah. The sculptor, Cyrus Dallin, was from Utah and he spent his lifetime doing sculptures of Indians.16 Nichols had his own ideas for ways to make the Massasoit memorial fit into a particular Kansas City landscape that Nichols himself had designed. In a 1977 exchange with Fenn, Nichols inquired about removing the base on which the statue then stood and preparing it for installation on a boulder: “As you can see from the attached postcard of the Wagon Mas- ter [a public fountain in Kansas City], I carried out this same philosophy of the sculpture standing on a rock just like a live horse would” (see fig. 6).17 He corresponded with the director of the Kansas City Park Board and the Art Commission, inquiring about the possibility of donating the statue to the city for public display, and received approval.18 Fenn and Nichols also discussed the wording of the plaque, Nichols favoring using some or all of

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Figure 7. Mortar and pestle in the Kansas City installation, 2011. Photograph by Jill Eyres the prose from the plaque in Plymouth to “give it a historical tone” (it is identical except for the attribution of the donors).19 Fenn pointed out that the Kansas City installation would offer a “beautiful complement to ‘The Scout,’” also created by Dallin and sold directly to the citizens of the city in 1917 as a community-owned public artwork.20 After these private negotiations, the Massasoit memorial in Kansas City cast the figure into numerous roles as the symbol for travel, friendship and cooperation, nature, civic values, and much more. Now at the corner of a busy intersection, Massasoit stands atop a boulder bearing a plaque with the raised-letter caption, “Garden sculpture: sculptor Cyrus E. Dallin, 1861–1944. This ‘Sioux quartzite’ boulder was brought from Minnesota to the farm of Ralph Dooley at Bosworth, Missouri, by glaciers more than 500,000 years ago.” Also part of this installation is an enormous mortar and pestle that stands in mute and puzzling tribute to native people (see fig. 7). Planters and beds of native grasses, bushes, and yucca plants pro- vide a “wilderness-like setting” for the statuary assemblage at the edge of a major traffic thoroughfare.21 The commemorative plaque informs the

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Figure 8. Massasoit statue on a grassy knoll, Kansas City installation, 2011. Photo graph by Jill Eyres

viewer that the boulder was “brought” by glaciers many millennia previ- ously from Minnesota to the farm of Ralph Dooley of Bosworth, Missouri (who presumably was not at home waiting for the delivery), thus collaps- ing some five hundred thousand years of history, human and otherwise. The boulder might be thought of as conveying primordial movement—a message communicating to viewers the naturalness of Massasoit’s presence in a place removed from his own roots—a travel narrative of sorts. The boulder, together with the gardens designed to reference Kansas City’s preindustrial landscape, completed the association of natives with timeless nature (see fig. 8). One cannot help but think also about the parallels between this boulder and Plymouth Rock, that mythological icon of American origins that also embodied a narrative of purposeful, if predestined, movement.

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Nichols further explained the logical connection between the statue of Massasoit and its new surroundings in correspondence and a public bulletin in time for the May 1979 dedication ceremony. “We are combining the dedication of this piece with the Kansas City area Boy Scout Jamboree. . . . It is my hope that this figure will become a symbol of Kansas City’s Boy Scouts”; and Nichols also hoped “that the existence of this statue will be a symbol to the Boy Scouts and will be a reminder of the close relationship between Boy Scouts lore and the culture of American Indians.”22 These exchanges suggest the symbolic purchase of Massasoit as the welcoming figure who authorized English colonialism and by extension the foundation of US nationalism. Nichols reasoned that the Massasoit Memorial might hit a more emotional register for viewers when associated with the local Boy Scouts; the combination offered audiences a nostalgic connection to premodern values seemingly missing from present-day urban American life. Like the original Plymouth statue sculpted at the behest of members of the Improved Order of Red Men, the Kansas City Massasoit stood as a material reminder of nostalgic American values forged from frontier struggle. And just as the Red Men imagined the statue’s station in Plymouth, Massasoit’s role in Kansas City was to once again stand as a sentinel over the advance of American civilization. In Kansas City in 1979, the statue of Massasoit watched over the bustle of the city from its grassy knoll to remind viewers that primitiveness was both a refuge and an engine in the march of Ameri- can progress.23 Other evidence surrounding the arrival of Massasoit to Kansas City points to the statue’s additional roles in the local context. At exactly the same time the Plymouth Massasoit was erected, the real estate company of Nichols’s father, Jesse Clyde Nichols, unveiled plans for Country Club Plaza, a shopping center near the future site of the Massasoit monument in Kansas City. J. C. Nichols Company famously created the plaza as the first planned shopping center in the country. The company established the center far from public transportation nodes and hoped to attract shoppers by auto- mobile from quickly expanding suburban communities—p articularly the neighborhoods that the company also planned and built.24 J. C. Nichols and his architects wanted to construct buildings in the plaza with diverse commercial functions but connected with a shared motif; the company decided on Spanish-Mediterranean designs “as the most adaptable and elastic for our purposes.” According to an architecture critic at the time, the style was popularized in the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, and designers considered Spanish motifs to be “ideal for generating a festive, slightly exotic atmosphere that could enhance merchandising efforts.”25 In 1920, J. C. Nichols sent his architects to Spain, South America, and Mexico

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Figure 9. Street-level view of Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza. Image in the public domain

to collect ideas for building design. He later told an interviewer that his goal was to create “the feeling of an old market place of picturesque Spain [in] Kansas City.”26 The Country Club Plaza essentially created a new down- town for Kansas City around which future developments centered. Miller Nichols took over the company from his father in 1950 and vaulted the commercial landmark to new heights by adding hotels, apartments, and artwork to the plaza landscape (see fig. 9). By the time he donated the Massasoit statue to the city in 1979, the plaza indisputably dominated the metropolitan area.27 The son inherited his father’s innovative business acumen and ample resources; the New York Times reported that M. Nichols was named the city’s most influential businessman in a 1975 newspaper poll. He exerted influence in politics and cultural institutions in the city—for example, the library at the University of Missouri at Kansas City is named after him, and he was deeply involved in other civic ventures.28 M. Nichols likely recog- nized how the Massasoit installation represented an enhancement of this neighborhood-slash-in vestment in the form of public art. In contemplating the acquisition of Massasoit for Kansas City, he carefully took into con-

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What Is a Monument to Massasoit Doing in Kansas City? 649 sideration the costs and benefits, including the charitable deductions he could claim as a result of his gift to the city (which exceeded the actual cost), and no doubt he further enhanced his substantial real estate investments. The choice of a symbol of English colonialism to accompany the Span- ish colonial architecture of the area is intriguing. The earliest recorded inhabitants of the region were the Kansa, Osage, and Wyandotte, who carried on a vigorous trade with a community of French Creole traders from St. Louis. In 1821 the French “King of the Fur Trade,” Francois Chou- teau, set up the first trading post at the confluence of the Kaw and Missouri Rivers. The French fur trade post played a role in imperial connections and rivalries by outfitting American wagons for the Santa Fe Trail and serving as a launching point for French-Comanche expeditions against the Spanish.29 Given this local history, the replica of the Giralda of Seville offers the same jarring juxtaposition as the figure of Massasoit in Kansas City.30 Yet both the father’s architectural choice and the son’s public art donation offer the same mix of physical displacement and ideological mobility. The appeal of this combination can be traced back to Renaissance fine art and landscape painting, when artists exhibited refined taste by reassembling the compo- nents of a landscape far from the natural scene evoked or represented. “In terms of memory,” art historian Mitchell Schwarzer notes, artistic depic- tions of particular landscapes called upon familiar tropes to “construct a contemporary experience less from a place’s actual history than from lit- erary and pictorial conventions.”31 The Spanish colonial architecture in Country Club Plaza offers shoppers a landscape experience of colonial fan- tasy from another place made all the more appealing for its distance from the particulars of local history and modern realities of isolated automo- bile culture. The statue of Massasoit, likewise, contributes to the viewer’s experience of walking amid a colonial story of and from another place that referenced premodern values removed from commercial culture. Despite the natural features of the Massasoit installation, the fact that Massasoit had been cast as public art enhanced, rather than challenged or juxtaposed, the classical architecture of the plaza. The Kansas City Star reported that “the statue and the new setting that was created for it add a touch of glamour and class to the eastern gateway of the Plaza.”32 The physical situation of the Massasoit statue relative to the Country Club Plaza adds two layers of meaning. First, J. C. and Miller Nichols made design choices that tied visitors’ experiences and fantasies to the company’s economic for- tunes and the development of the city. Second, the visual messages of colonialism communicated in these designs seemed simultaneously exotic and safe to viewers because they did not reference the local colonial past or the vulgar consumerism in which the shoppers were engaged. The themes sur-

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650 Jean M. O'Brien and Lisa Blee rounding the statue in Kansas City ironically invoked the particular local context by omission. Massasoit’s role was not to reference the surroundings but rather to juxtapose, to invite viewers to imagine something other than what they saw around them. Nichols’s “philanthropy” in connection with the Massasoit statue pro- moted a spirit of civic pride and provided opportunities for other Kansas City businesses. In his opening remarks at the memorial dedication, Nichols claimed that “a bronze figure or a fountain . . . enhances the lives of all of us,” and the generous donations of such statuary should serve as a model for the public to consider “what the individual might do to enhance the city.” 33 Nichols suggested that the presence of public art, which he often and ironically placed on or within close proximity to his private commercial holdings, would prompt viewers to high-minded civic action even as they shopped at high-end stores or indulged in luxury services. At least one of the businesses in the plaza attempted to capitalize on the Massasoit statue by further developing this link between civic values and consumerism, as evidenced by a department store’s advertisement in the Kansas City Star in 1979: Massasoit Lives in Kansas City. If this statue looks familiar, it should. This bronze figure of Chief Massasoit, friend and protector of the Pil- grims, stands on the edge of the Country Club Plaza—an excellent reminder of the first Thanksgiving. On that day in 1621, the Pilgrims joined with their honored guests, Massasoit and his tribe, to celebrate their survival, which was due largely to the generosity of their Indian friends. A New England Indian in the Midwest? He may seem out of place, but we hope that the noble spirit of friendship he symbolizes is right at home here. Woolf Brothers.34 Massasoit was cast into numerous roles in Kansas City that illustrate the portability and profitability of the powerful but flexible symbol. The full-size Massasoit sculptures that span the United States function as multi- valent locations: part art, part history, part commodity, they resonate dif- ferently for those who consume them as elements of the public landscape. The power of Massasoit as a signifier stems from his iconic stature as the welcoming diplomat whose peaceful embrace of the English authorized colonialism. As such, his stature evokes a foundational narrative of the nation and connection to the potent symbolism and nostalgia of Plymouth Rock. This narrative is extracted and dislodged from the physical location of Massasoit’s homeland and made portable through the commodification of memory in objects that evoke that symbolism.

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Notes

1 We located a reference to a copy of the statue in the Evergreen Plaza Shop- ping Center in Chicago in 1979. The shopping center closed in 2013 and we could not locate the statue’s whereabouts. Dedication pamphlet, Western His- torical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri, Kansas City University Archives, Miller Nichols Collection, correspondence file. Assess. no. 925KC, box 28, folder 23, Art Objects—Massasoit (hereafter Nichols Collection). Another once stood in the Spokane Museum of Native American Cultures in the Pacific Northwest Indian Center. Massasoit was deaccessioned by the museum in 2001 and sold at auction. Jane Davey, Collections Librarian, North- west Museum of Arts and Culture, to Lisa Blee, pers. comm., 4 October 2011. 2 Michael Rowlands and Christopher Tilley, “Monuments and Memorials,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler-Fogden, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer (Thousand Oaks, CA, 2006), 500. Kirk Savage describes how public monuments “served to anchor” the dynamic process of collective remembering “in highly condensed, fixed, and tangible sites.” Kirk Savage, “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Iden- tity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 130. In the late nineteenth century, people vied for the power to determine public monuments because they were understood as “the people’s voice in stone, where it would remain forever.” Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Cen tury America (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 7–8. By virtue of moving outside Massachusetts, Massasoit came to symbolize national identity and origins in the local places in which the statue was installed. John Bodnar makes a distinction between official memory, which seeks to commemorate an idealized national past, and vernacular memory, which is based on local experiences and values. However, the difference between national and local memorials can fall away over time. Americans build a sense of local identity and personal meaning around national and local memorials alike, and the significance of memorial symbols changes over time along with local demographics and city leadership. John Bodnar, “Public Memory in an American City: Commemoration in Cleve- land,” in Gillis, Commemorations, 78–79. 3 Nichols Collection. 4 John Bodner, “Public Memory in an American City: Commemoration in Cleve- land,” in Gillis, Commemorations, 79. 5 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT, 1999). 6 Alvin Gardner Weeks, Massasoit of the Wampanoags (Fall River, MA, 1919), vii–xi. 7 Springville Museum of Art, “Dallin, Cyrus Edwin (1861–1944),” springvilleart museum.org/collections/browse.html?x=artist&artist_id=1 (accessed 4 Octo- ber 2011). 8 State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center–Kansas City, folder, “Massasoit—JCN Art History,” KC0106, J. C. Nichols Co. records, “Outdoor Art” (hereafter JCN). 9 Brigham Young University, Y Facts, “Massasoit Indian,” yfacts.byu.edu/view article.aspx?id=107 (accessed 11 November 2011). 10 Ibid.

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11 Utah State Capitol Visitor Services, “Chief Massasoit Returns to the Utah State Capitol,” 2 November 2009, utahcapitolvisitorservices.blogspot.com/2009/11 /chief-massasoit-returns-to-utah-state.html. 12 Ibid. The Nicholas G. Morgan Sr. Foundation paid for other notable bronze statues, including one commemorating Eliza Snow, “Leader of Pioneer Women,” in Salt Lake City. 13 Robert Schmidt, Newspaper Rock: Where Native America Meets Pop Culture (blog), newspaperrock.bluecorncomics.com/2008/12/massasoit-statue-in-utah .html (accessed 20 July 2011). 14 Utah in the Union: Utah State Capitol Curator’s Blog, capitolarts.blogspot.com /2009/03/returning-massasoit-to-capitol (accessed 4 October 2011). 15 Massasoit chronology and BYU Acquisitions Committee meeting minutes, 19 March 1981, 3, Massasoit folder, Brigham Young University Museum of Art Archives, Provo, Utah. 16 Miller Nichols to Jeane Brashears, 29 November 1993, Nichols Collection. 17 Miller Nichols to Forrest Fenn, 11 October 1977, Nichols Collection. 18 Patti Brown to Miller Nichols, 27 February 1979, Nichols Collection. 19 Miller Nichols to Forrest Fenn, 9 March 1979, Nichols Collection. 20 Forrest Fenn to Miller Nichols, 29 March 1979, Nichols Collection; Giles Carroll Mitchell, There Is No Limit: Architecture and Sculpture in Kansas City (Kansas City, 1934), 49. 21 “Nichols Donates Statue,” Kansas City Star, 6 May 1979. 22 Bulletin released by Miller Nichols, 2 May 1979; Miller Nichols to Scott Brown, 9 May 1979, Nichols Collection. 23 Deloria, Playing Indian. 24 William S. Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities (St. Louis, 1990), 236; William Worley, The Plaza, First and Always (Lenaxa, KS, 1997), 37. 25 Richard Longstreth, quoted in Robert Pearson and Brad Pearson, The J. C. Nichols Chronicle: The Authorized Story of the Man, His Company, and His Legacy, 1880–1994 (Lawrence, KS, 1994), 93. 26 Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City, 247–48; Worley, The Plaza, First and Always, 43–45. 27 Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City, 235; Worley, The Plaza, First and Always, 73. 28 “Clone of History of Miller Nichols Library,” University of Missouri–Ka nsas City Libraries, library.umkc.edu/ls/mnl (accessed 12 November 2011). 29 Darlene Isaacson, Kansas City, Then and Now (San Diego, CA, 2006), 5. 30 Although J. C. Nichols did not publicly draw a connection between the plaza’s Spanish architectural motif and the history of Kansas City, a contemporary writer for the Harvard Architectural Review offered the following explanation: “The specific choice of the Spanish colonial motifs for the center stemmed from several factors. . . . The Spanish had once had colonial control of the region where Kansas City lay; Spanish explorers had earlier penetrated into parts of eastern Kansas; and the metropolitan area had been an important departure point for the Southwest since the mid-19th century.” Richard Longstreth, quoted in Pear- son and Pearson, J. C. Nichols Chronicle, 93. 31 Mitchell Schwarzer, “The Moving Landscape,” in Robert Nelson and Margaret Olin, Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago, 2003), 87.

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32 “Indian on the Plaza,” Kansas City Star, 13 May 1979. 33 “Nichols Donates Statue,” Kansas City Star, 6 May 1979. 34 State Historical Society of Missouri, JCN. Woolf Brothers was an old and storied clothing store founded in Leavenworth after the Civil War. It moved to Kansas City in 1879 and closed its doors in 1992 due to changes in the indus- try. Daniel Coleman, “biography of Herbert M. Woolf (1880–1964), Founder of Woolf Brothers Clothing Store,” Kansas City Public Library/Missouri Valley Special Collections, 2007, www.kchistory.org/u?/Biographies, 169.

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