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Prescott, Arizona, emphasizes its "Wild West" heritage. Compare pioneer-themed monuments located in Prescott and neighboring Prescott Valley.

This 1985 larger-than-life bronze grouping in Prescott,
Arizona, depicts early white settlers to the region. It includes four iconic
figures of the mythic Old West: a cowboy, a mule skinner (or freight wagon
driver), a gold miner, and a sunbonneted woman. 

The central figure is a cowboy clad in a cowboy hat, fringed
trousers, cowboy boots and spurs. He carries a rope for roping cattle. This
cowboy evokes both western ranching culture and Prescott’s premier public
event, the “World’s Oldest Rodeo.” Its sponsor, Prescott Frontier Days, Inc., says
that Prescott’s professional rodeo has occurred annually since 1888.

According to Marguerite Madison Aronowitz, author of Art Treasures and Museums In and Around
Prescott, Arizona, the sculptor originally planned to include a Fort
Whipple soldier as the fourth figure, but his wife and father persuaded him
instead to honor the women who settled the Southwest. Like the famous Pioneer Woman in Ponca City, Oklahoma,
and a number of other monuments to pioneer women erected throughout the United
States since the 1920s, the female settler wears a sunbonnet and holds a Bible.
That Bible symbolizes her role carrying supposedly more civilized white American
culture to the West. Rather than striding westward, however, this Prescott
pioneer woman stands in her adopted home, shading her eyes against the bright
Arizona sun.

Early Settlers was
sculpted by Bill Nebeker, a longtime Prescott resident and member of the
prestigious Cowboy Artists of America. Nebeker,
whose father once worked as a cowboy in the Prescott area, has dedicated his
artistic career to “keeping the story of the West alive.”<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="Link: null">1&nbsp;</a>Since the 1960s, he has sculpted cowboys and ranch life, Native Americans, outlaws
and lawmen, military heroes, and western wildlife.

Prescott, Arizona, has been a center of cowboy and western
art for decades. But an interpretive
plaque accompanying the statue declares that it was the first public art work
erected in Prescott since the dedication of the city’s Rough Rider monument in
1907.

&nbsp;

Sculpted by local artist Bill Nebeker, this monument honors early white settlers of Prescott, Arizona. It features four iconic figures: a cowboy, a mule skinner, a gold miner, and a pioneer woman.

Early Settlers

This life-sized bronze sculpture commemorates
both Native American and settler women’s struggles to nurture their families in
nineteenth-century Arizona. A Native woman and a white settler woman stand
proudly with their children in front of a Prescott shopping center constructed
on Yavapai tribal lands.

This monument was erected in 1990
as Americans debated how United States’ past should be remembered. Scholars and
activists challenged traditional narratives celebrating westward expansion and
the supposed disappearance of Indigenous peoples. In contrast to Bill Nebeker’s
Early Settlers statue installed five
years earlier in downtown Prescott, Pat Mathiesen’s bronze pair of mothers honors
both the region’s Native and settler heritage.

Mathiesen’s Spirit of the Frontier depicts both women as relatively strong
maternal figures, but promises different futures for their communities. The
white pioneer wears a long, tailored prairie-style dress and her hair in a
chignon. She gazes confidently into the future, her hands resting proudly on
the shoulders of her school-aged son. The books clasped in his arm and proud
expression on his face assure the viewer that he is preparing to lead his
community and the nation. 

In contrast, the Indigenous
mother wears a looser fitting blouse and long skirt that combine Euro-American
and Native American styles. She wears her hair in the traditional Yavapai
style, with bangs and long hair hanging loose. She gazes downward at her infant
tied tightly to a cradle board. This pose suggests that both woman and infant
were constrained by their cultural persistence. The mother holds her child
proudly. But that Yavapai infant will not grow into a strapping scholar
prepared to lead its people, let alone the white-dominated nation. The wagon
wheel that stands behind the settler and Native figures visually promises
progress toward a more white and civilized future.

Frontier Village shopping center
was built on tribal lands in 1991 with permission of the Yavapai-Prescott
Indian Tribe. The tribe became the sole owner and manager of the shopping
center in 2012. The statue and dedication plaque were&nbsp;removed about 3 years later.

Erected in 1990, this life-sized bronze sculpture commemorated both Native American and settler women’s struggles to nurture their families in nineteenth-century Arizona. A Native woman and a white settler woman stand proudly with their children in front of a Prescott shopping center constructed on Yavapai tribal lands. It was removed after the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe acquired the shopping center in 2012.

Spirit of the Frontier as of March 2014.  Photo by Cynthia Prescott.

Spirit of the Frontier Statue

Throughout the twentieth
century, American communities put up monuments to pioneer women that depicted
them as gentle tamers of the Wild West. Most showed either young women carrying
their children and Christian civilization westward. Others showed seated elderly
women resting from their labors. At the turn of the 21st century, however,
a few cities put up statues of feisty pioneer women.&nbsp; Although monuments like this one in Prescott
Valley, Arizona, depict women in more active roles, they ultimately still cast
women settlers as civilizers.

Prescott Valley
councilwoman Lora Lee Nye commissioned artist and executive editor of True West Magazine Bob Boze Bell to
paint a watercolor to raffle off at the town’s Centennial Gala in 2012. Bell offered
a somewhat updated version of the nearly century-old pioneer mother imagery in
a painting to honor Prescott Valley's centennial. Bell said that<blockquote>Whether they
were wrangling ornery kids or dispatching hogs, chickens, scorpions and
rattlesnakes, the women who lived in the Arizona Territory had to be tough.<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="Link: null">1</a></blockquote>He remembered his
grandmothers slaughtering chickens and killing rattlesnakes with a hoe.

Bell’s painting showed a
frontier woman standing in her garden dressed in her finest clothing. She has killed one of those rattlesnakes with
a shovel. As he explained in his True West Magazine blog, Bell embraced
the traditional image of those women as civilizers.&nbsp;<blockquote>That was the point of the
whole deal, to honor the brave and tenacious women of Arizona who tamed the
West AND the men.<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="Link: null">2</a></blockquote>The title and image directly
challenged early-twentieth-century depictions of western women as passive
nurturers. Its creator was gently challenging the “gentle” label, but not the
bigger message that women did indeed “tame” the West and its supposedly wild
men.

So eagerly did Prescott
Valley residents embrace Bell's image that they commissioned a bronze monument based
on it to mark the centennial. Sculptor Deb Gessner created a 22-inch statue
based on the painting. Under Bell’s supervision she digitally enlarged that
piece to create a 10-foot-tall bronze monument. The resulting monumental bronze
was placed in front of the Prescott Valley Civic Center to honor their white
foremothers’ grit.<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="Link: null">3</a>&nbsp;It provides a historical counterpoint
to the modern buildings around it. Bob Boze Bell unveiled the statue on July
27, 2013. 

Deb Gessner’s Not-So-Gentle Tamer “pays tribute to the
brave pioneer women who helped tame and settle the west.”<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="Link: null">4</a>&nbsp;This pioneer woman holds a rattlesnake whose
head she has just removed with a shovel. She presents a more active female role
than had been typical of pioneer woman monuments erected a century earlier. Vicky O'Hara, president of the local League of
Women Voters, said that American women <blockquote>have fought for equal rights and women’s
issues throughout our history. The statue exemplifies this spirit … The women
who built the West were fighting for a better life for their families and equal
rights and an equal voice.<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="Link: null">5</a></blockquote>Some Arizonans have
complained about the Not-So-Gentle Tamer’s
attack on local wildlife. But most appear to embrace Bell and Gessner’s
depiction of the white pioneer women’s tenacity. 

<div><div> 

</div>

</div>

This monument was created to celebrate Arizona's centennial. It honors white female settlers’ grit. It depicts pioneer women as feisty characters who tamed the American West and western men.

Deb Gessner after Bob Boze Bell, Not-So-Gentle Tamer. Photograph by Cynthia Prescott.

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Pioneer Monuments in Prescott, AZ

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