The End of the Trail

Arts of the Americas

1918

James Earle Fraser (American, 1876–1953)
Cast by Gorham Co. Founders

The End of the Trail, James Earle Fraser’s best-known sculpture, has come to symbolize the genocide of Native American peoples amid relentless westward expansion. In 1894, the year after the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the 17-year-old Fraser, then a student at the School of the Art Institute, produced the first version of this bronze sculpture. (The Art Institute’s sculpture is a later model and cast.) Reenforcing the conception of the so-called vanishing Indian, the work portrays an exhausted Sioux drooping over his equally weary pony; both rider and horse have reached the end of the trail.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Arts of the Americas

Artist: James Earle Fraser
Title: The End of the Trail
Place: United States (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1918
Medium: Bronze
Inscriptions: Signed and inscribed recto, right, on base, cast: "© FRASER 1918". Inscribed verso, left, on base, cast: "G [figure of a shewolf] C / GORHAM CO. FOUNDERS".
Dimensions: H.: 111.8 cm (44 in.)
Credit Line: Bequest of Arthur Rubloff Trust
Reference Number: 1991.325

Judith A. Barter, Window on the West: Chicago and the Art of the New Frontier, 1890–1940, exh. cat. (The Art Institute of Chicago; New York and Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2003), 14, 16, cat. 32, fig. 6 (ill.)

Art Institute of Chicago, Window on the West: Chicago and the Art of the New Frontier, 1890–1940, June 28–Oct. 13, 2003, cat.

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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