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From Lagos to Lemmon

By Michael Zimny

Artists Dotun Popoola (left) and Jonathan Imafidor collaborated on a mural to honor legendary cattleman Ed Lemmon.

Sculptor John Lopez is collaborating with two Nigerian artists to transform an empty lot in downtown Lemmon into a tribute to the town’s founder. Boss Cowman Square will be unveiled on July 9 during this year’s Boss Cowman Days Celebration and Rodeo.

The square celebrates the town’s agricultural heritage and the legendary cowboy-turned-cattle baron who gave it his name. Lopez is creating a larger-than-life sculpture of Ed Lemmon, which will sit on a pedestal in the square. Artists Dotun Popoola and Jonathan Imafidor have painted a mural that depicts Lemmon leading cattle across the Missouri River.

Popoola is a curator for the National Gallery of Arts, Nigeria. Imafidor is an artist and instructor at Obafemi Awolowo University.

Dotun Popoola came across John Lopez’s work on the internet. Trained as a painter, he was experimenting with sculpture. The work intrigued him. He sent Lopez an email and received a quick response. Before he knew it, he was on a plane from Lagos to Minneapolis, then a bus to Bismarck where Lopez picked him up.

Popoola had exhibited in Miami, but had never seen a Perkins County sunset or so much wide-open space.”Where I was coming from, you could have 20, 30 people in a flat,” he says.”So populated. Everything was strange.”

But he soaked in the local culture, riding horses and branding. He found similarities between Yoruba and Lakota cultures, as well as between the cowboy culture of the American West and Nigerian herdsmen.

Popoola is a practitioner of the Araism art movement, an indigenous Nigerian/Yoruba painting technique — originated by artist Mufu Onifade — that involves layering mosaics of color on a canvas painted black. The name is derived from the Yoruba word for”wonder” — ara. Though the movement was developed as an authentic African painting technique, Popoola has explored depicting South Dakota through the eyes of Araism as well as through other techniques. (The mural at Boss Cowman Square is not an example of Araism.)

Heads Men juxtaposes an American cowboy with a Nigerian herdsman.

When some Lemmon locals began to envision the idea of Boss Cowman Square, John Lopez invited Dotun to come back and create a mural as a backdrop for his sculpture of Ed Lemmon. This time Popoola enlisted the help of friend and fellow artist Jonathan Imafidor.

Together the two artists explored intersections of American and Nigerian art and culture. Some of their work is on display in an exhibit at the John Lopez studio.

Their mural depicts Ed Lemmon and another cowboy leading longhorn cattle across the Missouri River and a vast expanse of prairie. The mural will serve as a backdrop for a larger-than-life sculpture of Ed Lemmon seated on a horse. True to the Lopez style, the sculpture is a hybrid of cast bronze, plasma cut steel and found elements that represent the regional agricultural heritage — pieces cut from an old roller mill used in grain elevators to separate rocks from grain add texture among the smoother surfaces.

Lemmon, known alternately as”Dad Lemmon” and”Boss Cowman” was a legendary cowboy who rose through the ranks from ordinary cowhand to cattle baron, running the Sheidley Cattle Company, then the L7 operation that ran cattle from Texas to Canada. One of the feats that made him famous was one of the largest cattle roundups in history.

“The open range cattle industry was just coming to a close,” says Nathan Sanderson — a historian, Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s Director of Policy and Operations and author of Controlled Recklessness: Ed Lemmon and the Open Range. “There were still some really large cattle operations out there — 40, 50, 60 thousand head or larger. And in the spring of 1902, he bossed one of the largest cattle roundups on the Northern Great Plains — probably 50,000 head, several dozen roundup wagons, hundreds of cowboys — and he did it in only a few days.”

John Lopez’s scrap iron depiction of Ed Lemmon atop a horse will be the centerpiece of the town’s artistic tribute to its founder.

Thanks to his knowledge of the range, and of the Missouri River, Lemmon played an instrumental role in the first railroad crossing, by the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad (or Milwaukee Road) of the Mighty Mo in 1907. Through his close relationship with the Milwaukee Road, he had an insider’s information on where new railroad towns would be platted, and bought some land in Lemmon. But unlike many railroad town founders, Lemmon put down roots.

“He was one of the few town builders who lived in the town of his name after the town sale,” says Sanderson.”As the community built up, he was an active participant in that. The citizens of Lemmon started calling him ‘Dad’ because he was the father of the town, and also because he was really good with kids. Lemmon’s annual Boss Cowman Celebration and Rodeo, and all of the various things in the community that are named after him testify to Ed Lemmon’s value to that particular region and to western South Dakota as a whole.”

If Ed Lemmon, literally, put Lemmon on the map, he also helped grow the cattle industry, and the legend of the American cowboy, into international exports. Now artists from his town and the other side of the world have come together to celebrate the Boss.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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The Ultimate Survivor

By Michael Zimny

John Lopez’s new sculpture captures the moment that an angry grizzly bear attacked frontiersman Hugh Glass.

On the last weekend in August, Lemmon-based artist John Lopez unveiled a new sculpture commemorating Hugh Glass, close to the spot where the legendary pioneer nearly lost his battle with an angry grizzly bear. The sculpture — depicting the pivotal moment in the Glass legend — comes at a time of renewed interest in his story.

A film biopic based on Glass’ life is scheduled for release around Christmas. The Revenant, directed by Alejandro Gonz·lez IÒ·rritu and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, features the legend of his fight with the bear, his struggle to survive and his quest to avenge the men who abandoned him for dead.

Having grown up in Lemmon, Lopez understands the fascination with the story.”I think [because of] the fact that it happened so close to our hometown of Lemmon, we have all heard the story since we learned about it in history class,” Lopez says. “And every time you drive by Shadehill or Summerville, you’re reminded of it. He’s the ultimate survivor.”

The sculpture was unveiled in front of a crowd gathered for the inaugural Hugh Glass Rendezvous at a South Dakota state recreation area also bearing his name, contiguous to the Shadehill Reservoir and Grand River National Grassland.

“Rendezvous” is the name given to a loose network of outdoor festivals for history buffs, where the facial hair and throwback clothing are reminiscent of modern day Brooklyn, but without the irony or the artisanal pickle stand. And for any group that celebrates the pioneer ethic, it would be hard to find a more rugged embodiment of frontier grit than Glass.

Lopez worked on the sculpture in his Lemmon studio earlier this year.

“The life that he had even before he was mauled by the grizzly bear, and then to crawl 200 miles after the grizzly attack, puts him in a category of frontiersman where he has a cult following among rendezvous-ers and historians,” Lopez says.

The visual aesthetic Lopez has employed echoes the chaos in the moment. While he incorporates his usual divergent mash-up of found objects, the energy of the piece is in the long flowing plasma-cut strips of sheet metal that form the grizzly, insinuating frenetic movement and fear.

What we know about Glass is steeped in the mythos of the American West. It’s probably impossible to know if he truly ate the half-rotten flesh of the same bear that nearly killed him — or the carcass of a buffalo calf he scavenged from wolves — to make it through the first few days after he was abandoned to the elements.

We know that he already had a reputation in the West as an adventurer — a tall, wiry man who wore buffalo skins and cut his hair with a knife — when he signed up for the”Ashley’s Hundred” fur trading mission, led by General William Ashley of the Missouri militia.

Frederick Manfred described his frontier ambition in the 1954 biography, Lord Grizzly. “The new, the old new, just around the turn ahead, was the only remedy for hot blood. Ahead was always either gold or the grave. The gamble of it freshened the blood at the same time that it cleared the eye. What could beat galloping up alone over the brow of a new bluff for that first look of beyond?”

We know that over a brow of the beyond, near the forks of the Grand River, Glass surprised a mother grizzly with her cubs. How exactly he survived is the stuff of lore, but he did survive, though mutilated and broken. Expedition leader Andrew Henry left Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald to give Glass a proper burial when he succumbed to the inevitable. The pair dug him a grave, then abandoned him, afraid of being caught in hostile territory. They didn’t have to steal his rifle and knife to leave him even more helpless, but they did.

Hugh Glass faces his adversary.

After the bear fight, his struggle to survive his abandonment is what entrenches the Glass legend in the frontier narrative. Though his memorialization is in some ways an American update on the sacred iconography that has kept the memory of martyrs like Saint Sebastian alive for millennia, Glass parts ways from the ancients. His ordeal is more the consequence of wanderlust than unwavering faith or innocence. Though he would learn virtue later, he’s been enshrined in the American memory for brute frontier badassery.

His road to Fort Kiowa confirms in an excruciating tableau of hardship and pain what he’s made of. Desperately, he employs maggots to eat the dead flesh from his mangled back. Recalling the biblical allegory of Job, without emulating his patience, Glass fights buzzards, wolves and coyotes, eats rattlesnakes, fashions a splint out of bear skin for his broken leg and crawls more than 200 miles.

“Three months of plain hell,” is how Manfred’s Glass describes his torment when he finally arrives. From there, legend says he embarks on a whiskey and hate-filled quest to avenge Fitzpatrick and Bridger. But by the time he finds their trail, the grizzled old mountain man has learned forgiveness, adding a moral component to his fabled resilience.

These scenes have lived in literature, and an obscure western corner of the American conscience, for nearly two centuries. With a new monument by one of South Dakota’s most innovative artists — to communicate the raw terror in his defining moment, and his stubborn will to survive — the legend of Hugh Glass is secure in the Grand River forks foothills.

The new sculpture will be on permanent display at the Grand River Museum in Lemmon.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.