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Pioneer Mother of Kansas

Introduction

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The design for this statue was originally sculpted by Wheeler Williams in the 1920s. He submitted "Fearless" to a 1920s competition to place a pioneer woman monument in Ponca City, Oklahoma, but did not win. Thirty years later, donor D. K. Baty hired a local art student to design a monument for the town of Liberal. But Baty soon substituted Williams' older design.


Backstory and Context

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Grain dealer and grower D. K. Baty wanted to commemorate early white settlers in southwestern Kansas. Dozens of cities erected pioneer monuments between World War I and World War II. But by the 1950s, most communities had lost interest in pioneer monuments. Baty's efforts soon stalled. He and his wife eventually hired a local art student to sculpt something. Then for unknown reasons they abandoned the art student and instead had a 30-year-old design by Wheeler Williams cast as a life-sized bronze monument.

In 1959, as the Kansas state centennial approached, D. K. Baty and his wife offered to pay Carlos Frey enough to enable him to complete his master’s of fine art at the University of Kansas. Learning about Baty’s project, nationally known sculptor Wheeler Williams “offered his aid and advice to the Liberal artist in this undertaking.”1

Williams would supply far more than advice.The Batys abandoned Frey in favor of resurrecting Wheeler Williams’s Fearless pioneer mother, which he had entered in E. W. Marland’s monument competition for Ponca City, Oklahoma, in the 1920s.

In 1927, oilman E. W. Marland wanted a pioneer woman monument for his adopted hometown of Ponca City, Oklahoma. He hired 12 prominent artists to make 3-foot-tall bronze sculptures of pioneer women in sunbonnets. Those bronze models then toured the country, and Marland encouraged viewers to vote for their favorites. Marland turned his favorite, sculpted by Bryant Baker, into a larger-than-life-sized Pioneer Woman for Ponca City. Marland kept the 12 bronze models until financial reverses forced him to sell them. They are now held by the Woolaroc Museum and wildlife preserve in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

Newspaper coverage does not explain why the donors abandoned the young art student in favor of a thirty-year-old Pioneer Mother design. Perhaps they leaped at a chance to acquire a work by a much more famous artist. Or maybe Frey had embraced avant-garde art movements, and his vision did not align with the donors' desire to "glorify the qualities of [Kansas pioneer] heroines which enable them to triumph over the rigors of frontier life."2

The Batys sought to celebrate the qualities portrayed in many 1920s pioneer mother monuments. But Wheeler Williams's Fearless strayed significantly from that trope. The wide-rimmed bonnet on her head evokes a stereotypical Indian brave’s warbonnet as much as it does a white woman’s calico sunbonnet. And even though the skirt of the woman’s long gown is heavily pleated, it clings to her legs in a manner that viewers in both the 1920s and the 1950s would have considered indecent. Williams’s 1920s artistic wedding of classical and cutting-edge depictions of frontier womanhood tested the limits of 1950s decorum.

Sources

1 “Student to Design New Liberal Statue." The Hutchinson News, December 27, 1959

2 “Monument to Pioneer Mothers Dedicated,” The Amarillo Daily News, June 2, 1961.

“Statue to Be Built in Liberal City Park,” The Amarillo Daily News, December 24, 1959.

Prescott, Cynthia Culver. Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory. University of Oklahoma Press, 2019.

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