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“First modeled in 1894, the sculpture is based on Fraser's experiences growing up in Dakota Territory; as he wrote in his memoirs, ‘as a boy, I remembered an old Dakota trapper saying, 'The Indians will someday be pushed into the Pacific Ocean.'‘ The artist later said that, ‘the idea occurred to me of making an Indian which represented his race reaching the end of the trail, at the edge of the Pacific.’ In 1915, Fraser displayed a monumental plaster version of the work at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, earning popular acclaim and a gold medal.
”Within a few months, thousands of prints and photographs of the statue were sold, and in 1918 Fraser began producing bronze reductions of the sculpture in two sizes. Today, an online image search for ‘End of the Trail’ returns tens of thousands of results, as the work has been endlessly reproduced in paintings and in prints, on posters, T-shirts, pins, bags, belt buckles, and bookends. It was even featured on the cover of The Beach Boys 1971 album Surf's Up. Despite its appeal as a popular American icon, Fraser intended the work as a pointed commentary on the damaging effects of Euro-American settlement on American Indian nations confined on government reservations. Seated upon a windblown horse, Fraser's figure slumps over despondently, embodying the physical exhaustion and suffering of a people forcefully driven to the end of the trail.
“Fraser's sculpture has been interpreted in various ways: while some critics regarded the Indian's decline as a necessary step in America's westward ‘march of progress,’ others have viewed the work as a remorseful indictment of ‘the national stupidity that has greedily and cruelly destroyed a race of people possessing imagination, integrity, fidelity and nobility,’ as an unnamed critic wrote in Touchstone in 1920.”
— Shannon Vittoria
End of the Trail at the Panama Pacific International Exposition
The End of the Trail can be seen as one of the earliest views of the Native American, not as a savage barbarian or an obstacle to Manifest Destiny, but as a tragic figure in the losing fight against the encroachment of European civilization.
