Twain, Bingham, and the American Narrative: Suggested Lesson Plan

In preparation for your Museum visit:

1) Please have students reread Chapter 13 (pp.70-75) of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Review what happens on the raft trip to Jackson Island and take some time to have the students narrate the events in class. What might the Mississippi River symbolize? What could the storm represent? How do the children react to the storm?

2) In order to prepare for a visual analysis of George Caleb Bingham’s Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap*, make sure that students are familiar with the following terms:

Cumberland Gap: a pass through the Cumberland Mountains region of the Appalachian Mountains at the juncture of the U.S. states of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. Famous in American history for its role as one key passageway through the lower central Appalachians, it was an important part of the Wilderness Road, which was originally a trail created and used by Native Americans. The Cumberland Gap was discovered in 1750 by Dr. Thomas Walker, a Virginia physician and explorer. The path was widened by a team of loggers led by Daniel Boone, making it accessible to pioneers, who used it to journey into the western frontiers of Kentucky and Tennessee. The pass is now part of the Cumberland Gap National Historical Park.

Manifest Destiny: The term was coined in 1845 by journalist John O’ Sullivan. It was the belief that white Anglo Saxon pioneers were destined to triumph over all other groups that claimed the land west of the Mississipi River, specifically the American Indian tribes that inhabited the land for centuries.

*It is best if teachers do not show students an image of Bingham’s painting beforehand. They will have a lot of fun making discoveries while viewing it together for the first time in the galleries.

Brief bios:

Daniel Boone (1734-1820) is one of the most famous pioneers in present-day history. He is known for spending most of his life exploring and settling the American frontier. Boone had little formal education, but was a highly skilled hunter and woodsman. He married Rebecca Bryan in 1756 and was able to support his family by hunting and farming. In 1769, he became a guide for his old friend John Findley, a fur trader, who was looking for an overland route to Kentucky. Boone, Findlay, and five men traveled along wilderness trails through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains into Kentucky. They found a “hunter’s paradise” filled with buffalo, deer, turkey, and meadows ideal for farming. Boone vowed to return with his family.

In 1775 Boone and 30 woodsmen were hired to improve the trails between the Carolinas and the West. The resulting route became known as the Wilderness Trail. That same year Boone built a fort and village called Boonesborough in Kentucky, and moved his family over the Wilderness Trail to their new home.

Boone had numerous violent encounters with the Native Americans during his travels west. In an early expedition, his son and several friends were killed in an Indian raid. During the Revolutionary War in 1776, Shawnee warriors kidnapped his daughter and two other girls, but Boone was able to rescue them two days later. Boone himself was captured in 1779 by a band of Shawnee. The Shawnee admired his hunting skills and adopted him into their tribe. He escaped when he heard they were planning an attack on the Boonesborough settlement. After the Revolutionary War, Kentucky was admitted into the Union, and Boone lost all of his property there due to lack of a clear title. In 1799 he followed his son to Missouri, where he lived for the rest of his life. (text adapted from Boone biography in the lucidcafé library, www.lucidcafe.com)

George Caleb Bingham (1811, Augusta County, Virginia–1879, Kansas City, Missouri). Born in Virginia, Bingham moved to Missouri with his family when he was a child. There is some doubt as to what his earliest training was. He studied for a time with the painter Chester Harding, but he was still essentially self-taught when he became a portrait painter in St. Louis. He studied for a few months in Philadelphia, where he learned that Easterners were fascinated by pioneer life in the West. Bingham became celebrated for his lighthearted genre paintings of life on the Missouri River. Serenity often characterizes his river paintings and landscapes, while more activity and noise enter his political subjects, specifically Stump Speaking, 1854. In his most successful political paintings, Bingham was able to unite large crowds by using carefully controlled patterns of light and dark. In later years, classical and Renaissance influences become more apparent. In his quest for further refinement, Bingham studied in Düsseldorf during the late 1850s. After this time, many people found that his paintings took on elements of artificiality and garishness that were not present in his earlier works.

The painter Bingham is often compared with the writer Twain. His pictures of life in the country and small towns and cities of the Middle West draw their subject matter and cast of characters from the same sources that Twain used in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (text adapted from Phaidon Encyclopedia of Art and Artists)