Skip to main content

A Frontier Portfolio

March 2023
1min read

Once he learned to draw—as a child in his native Switzerland—Peter Rindisbacher never allowed his talent to rest. Between then and his untimely death in St. Louis at the age of twenty-eight he produced a quantity of work that would have kept many another artist busy for a much longer lifetime; most of it was of consistently high quality. On the long crossing to his new home in America his pencil was always busy. During his brief stay at Hudson’s Bay and later, as he travelled the waterways toward Red River, he found more subjects. But it was at Red River itself that he began to work on the canvases that made his reputation. One of his first pictures, reproduced above, was painted in December of 1821, a month after he and his parents arrived at Lord Selkirk’s isolated colony. The scene is P’ort Gibraltar, an old fur post being rebuilt by the Hudson’s Bay Company on a bluff above the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers in the vicinity of present-day Winnipeg, Manitoba. Provisions during that first winter were short, and the colonists, as Rindisbacher shows, were forced to spend much of their time fishing through the ice. When he painted this picture there were only a little more than a dozen years left to him; that he used them well is evident in the portfolio on the next fifteen pages. Except where otherwise indicated, the paintings reproduced here are in the museum of the United States Military Academy at West Point; the editors wish to thank its director, Richard E. Kuehne, for his kind assistance and to acknowledge also the co-operation of the other museums and individual collectors whose paintings we have used. A major Rindisbacher exhibition will open this month at the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art in Fort Worth, Texas. Subsequently it will be shown at other museums in the United States and Canada (the italicized note on page 49 gives fuller details) for the benefit of the two countries where the young Swiss immigrant spent his productive years and whose respective histories he so greatly enriched. — The Editors

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "February 1970"

Authored by: David McCullough

The wrecker’s ball swings in every city in the land, and memorable edifices of all kinds are coming down at a steady clip.

Authored by: Frank Graham Jr.

From a way Down East came a stench of politics and potatoes, and news of a border incident that true patriots will long remember as

Authored by: Allan L. Damon

In reprisal for a Tory atrocity, Washington ordered the hanging of a captive British officer chosen by lot. He was nineteen.

Authored by: Alvin M. Josephy Jr.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty, young Peter Rindisbacher captured on canvas the lives of Indians and white pioneers on the Manitoba—Minnesota frontier

Authored by: Thomas Fleming

Benevolent father figure? Bloody-handed Cossack? Slow-witted flatfoot? Irish grafter? Brave but underpaid public servant? Check your prejudice against this inquiry into police history

Authored by: Tom Mccarthy

The lady author modelled her famous fictional creation after her own wonder boy —and condemned a generation of “manly little chaps” to velvet pants and curls

Authored by: Corey Ford

The furious speaker was Field Marshal Kesselring. The time was 1944. And the “shadow” was cast by Italian partisans and a handful of brave Americans from General Bill Donovan’s O.S.S.

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.