The following text on the Remington Table is taken from a television program by Robert Hughes:

"The myth of the West is only too familiar to us today and it is so firmly embedded in the culture that Americans never get tired of it even though it only lasted a few decades and ended over a century ago. This mythic West is largely an invention created at the end of the 19th century from a blur of fact and nostalgia.

"And it is this man who did more than any other artist to create the American cowboy and influence the movies -- he was Frederic Remington. More an illustrator than a painter, Remington at the start of the 20th century was simulating a lost world of frontier fights and Indian scouts. Action painting -- it clicked into place with the strenuous masculinity that his friend President Theodore Roosevelt was preaching from the Bully Pulpit of the White House: America makes itself through struggle.

"One of his chief themes was the image of the Last Stand... Americans have been re-enacting Custer's defeat ever since it happened. The first replay was done just a year after it by Buffalo Bill Cody in 1877 using Indians who had fought in it. With Remington's help and a lot of influence from Hollywood, the Last Stand became a mythical American event.

"The root of that recurring theme of the Last Stand in visions of the American West is that sense that this place that is supposed to represent the future also represents the doom of something and it comes into the culture as a powerful symbol from the very beginning. What it symbolizes in a sense is the end of the frontier because this is a battle that marks the doom for the Indians as well because Custer will be avenged. It represents the defeat of the frontiersman (Custer is represented usually in a buckskin coat like Daniel Boone so it's his doom as well).

"But more than that, it was also seen as a symbol of what could happen in an industrialized America if the 'lower orders' -- the freed blacks in the South or even immigrant workers in the city -- were to take advantage of their power as democratic citizens and try to take over the government.

"The Last Stand accorded with a deep American anxiety that in a time of massive immigration from Europe and Asia, white Anglo-Saxon America was going to lose its identity. It would be polluted, infected, subverted, and conquered by the scum of the foreign Earth. Certainly it meant exactly that for Remington, a raving xenophobic bigot. To him, the solution was violence. 'Jews, Injuns, Chinamen, Italians, Huns,' he declared, 'Rubbish of the Earth. I've got some Winchesters and when the massacring begins, I can get my share of them and what's more, I will.'"

(In case anyone reading the above quote misses the artist's point, it is to expose the bigotry behind our image of the American West, as exemplified by Frederic Remington himself. It is the artist's belief that we must be willing to see it, apologize for it, and work together to make it just part of our ugly past, rather than to ignore it and continue the unequal circumstances of today. No one is safe from bigotry. -- Shirley Marie Dees)