Instructor

Visit Arizona's pioneer-themed monuments, erected from 1928 to 2013.

In the late 1920s, the Daughters of the American Revolution
(DAR) commissioned twelve identical Pioneer Mother monuments in the late 1920s for
a dozen states stretching from Maryland to California. In part because there
were so many of them spread across the nation, Leimbach’s statues would become
arguably the best-known American pioneer mother monuments ever erected.

In 1911 the National Society, Daughters of the American
Revolution (DAR) set out to mark the “Old Trails Road” stretching from Maryland
to California. DAR women worked with the National Old Trails Road Association to mark
the old Santa Fe Trail and other western migration routes. In keeping with gender
norms of that period, the men of the National Old Trails Road Association “handle[d]
the basic and practical side of the question,” while the DAR’s national
committee “handle[d] the historic and sentimental side.”<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="Link: null">1</a>&nbsp;In 1927, Association president (and future U.S. President) Harry S. Truman and
President Coolidge received congressional approval for the creation of a
national memorial highway stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 

Initial plans called for painted mileage markers throughout
the route. Inspired by Alice Cooper’s 1905 Sacajawea
statue for Portland, Oregon, DAR women abandoned mileage markers in favor of 10-foot-tall
pioneer mother statues. Twelve identical statues would be placed in the 12
states through which the “Old Trails Road” passed. 

National DAR Commission chairperson Arlene B. Nichols Moss and
her artist son worked with architectural sculptor August Leimbach to design the
DAR statues. Sculptor August Leimbach envisioned a scene in which she is
looking for her husband whom she believes to be in danger.

Each Madonna of the
Trail strides purposely westward, dressed in a simple homespun prairie-style
gown and wide-brimmed sunbonnet. Like other Pioneer Mother statues erected
during the late 1920s, the 12 DAR statues balanced strong, active roles for
women with softer maternal symbolism.

The statues were cast from algonite (a form of cast stone
produced from a mixture of crushed marble, Missouri granite, stone, cement and
lead ore) at the cost of $1,000 per statue.&nbsp;
The statues were placed along key white migration routes, such as the
early-19th-century National Road (later U.S. Route 40) and Santa Fe Trail (later
the infamous Route 66). But the precise location of the monument within each
state was selected based on both the site’s historical significance and the
influence of local DAR and National Old Trails Association chapters.

Truman wrote to his wife, Bess, that it was difficult to
decide where to place Arizona’s Madonna
of the Trail. Dozens of Arizona towns wanted to receive a statue. Williams,
a once rowdy ranching and logging town that reinvented itself as the gateway to
the Grand Canyon, made a strong case for its history. The man from Williams
undermined arguments from a female committee member in favor of Kingman. The
statue ultimately went to Springerville.&nbsp;
Springerville did not fit the established site selection criteria,
because the nearest DAR chapter was 150 miles away in Flagstaff. But
Springerville was home to J. W. Becker, national vice president of the National
Old Trails organization. Some believe that the Arizona statue was “stolen” from
Kingman, which met the selection criteria.&nbsp;


Springerville’s Madonna
of the Trail was dedicated September 29, 1928. The statue was installed
facing north on Main Street near the intersection of US 60 and Arizona Highways
180 and 191. Today, it stands on a small island squeezed between a shopping
center parking lot and a McDonald’s fast food restaurant.

&nbsp;

One of 12 identical statues depicting white pioneer women migrating along 19th-century western trails. Commissioned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), they were dedicated in 1928-29 in 12 states stretching from Maryland to California.

Photo by Einar Einarsson Kvaran, aka Carptrash 23:45, 23 May 2006 (UTC) the en:Madonna of the Trail in Springerville, AZ. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/MadonnaOfArizona72.jpg

Madonna of the Trail (Springerville, AZ)

While
on a walk in Mesa, Arizona’s Pioneer Park in the mid-1980s, Claude Pomeroy overhead
someone say that the name of the park should be changed to celebrate its
popular rose garden.&nbsp;Pomeroy’s grandfather
was one of the early white Mesa settlers that the park’s official title
commemorates.&nbsp;The younger Pomeroy grew determined
to reinforce the park’s connection to those settlers.&nbsp;His solution was to sculpt a public monument
to those settlers for installation in the park.&nbsp;The work was his first life-sized bronze. It was dedicated in February 1988.

Pomeroy’s
statue honors the four leaders of the First Mesa Company of 1878: Charles I.
Robson, George W. Sirrine, Charles Crismon, and Francis Martin Pomeroy, the
sculptor’s grandfather.&nbsp;They hold the
tools they used to establish the town: a shovel, a level, a townsite map, and a
gun.&nbsp;Behind them, an anonymous mother
tends to her young son. The basket sitting beside her evokes the female
settlers’ efforts feeding and tending to their children and to the male
settlers.

Plaques
on the side of the monument list the “founding pioneers” of Mesa.&nbsp;All of them were Mormon men sent by the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) to establish communities that would support
the church’s expansion into Mexico.&nbsp;The
First Mesa Company celebrated by this statue was actually the second LDS group
to settle the area. The First Utah company settled at Lehi (now the northern
edge of Mesa) in 1877.&nbsp;When the First
Mesa Company arrived the following year, they chose to settle atop the mesa
that gives the modern city its name.&nbsp;Claude
Pomeroy’s bronze grouping of First Mesa Company leaders now stands on a large
concrete base facing the Mesa LDS Temple.

A
plaque on the monument’s base indicates it is dedicated “to the founding men,
women and children of Mesa whose efforts, with others of all races, religions
and cultures, changed a harsh desert land into this vibrant city of today.”&nbsp;It then explains that when those settlers
arrived in 1877-78, they found the remains of an irrigation system that was
created by an ancient indigenous people, the Hohokam (“those who are gone”).&nbsp;The Mormon settlers restored the 1,000-year-old
canals to provide water for agriculture and later urban growth.

Behind
the bonze monument stands a “mural in stone” symbolizing the work of early
white settlers.&nbsp;An accompanying plaque
celebrates those who “conquered” the “desert wilderness…by their covered
wagons.”&nbsp;An interpretive sign describes “Arizona’s
Honeymoon Trail,” the challenging 400-mile wagon journey to St. George, Utah,
that a number of early Mormon settlers made to be married in the nearest LDS
temple.&nbsp;Those honeymoon journeys ended
with the dedication of Mesa’s temple in 1927.

Claude
Pomeroy’s statue is one of two Arizona pioneer monuments that were erected by
Mormons.&nbsp;Charles B. Martin’s copper
tribute to Arizona’s Pioneer Women was commissioned by the Daughters of Utah
Pioneers, an LDS women’s group.&nbsp;It was
installed in Wesley Bolin Plaza, adjacent to the Arizona state capitol, in 1968.

1988 monument honoring early white Mormon settlers in Mesa, Arizona. It was sculpted by Claude Pomeroy, grandson of one of the First Mesa Company leaders depicted in the bronze grouping.

Mesa's Mormon founding fathers are prominently featured.  Photograph by Cynthia Prescott.

Mesa Pioneer Monument

This hammered copper deep
relief of a pioneer mother and child stands on a cast stone base in Wesley
Bolin Plaza. Charles B. Martin, an illustrator in the City Planning Department and
amateur sculptor, created the sculpture. The local Squaw Peak Camp of the
Daughters of Utah Pioneers (DUP), a Mormon women’s group, commissioned the
statue.

In the early 1960s, DUP
headquarters in Utah asked the Squaw Peak Camp to erect a marker on a
historical spot in the Phoenix area. They considered marking the site of Phoenix’s
first school building, its first flour mill, or its earliest daily newspaper.
But they ultimately chose instead to put of a statue honoring Arizona female
settlers at the state capitol.

The Squaw Peak Camp women
wanted the statue to honor all pioneer women. The DUP headquarters and the National
Markers Association, of which the DUP was a member, wanted the interpretive
plaque to include specific names. But local coordinators “were afraid, in
naming women who pioneered in Arizona, that we might leave someone out.”1&nbsp;They selected general wording that
highlights a few prominent women’s contributions but credits “all those
intrepid women who helped push Arizona into statehood.”2&nbsp;The plaque text
honors “hundreds of heroic women [who] came to Arizona from the east and south.
From this group came Arizona’s first schoolteachers and the publisher of the
first newspaper.” 

DUP member Neoma Brinhall’s
speech at the statue’s dedication emphasized the hardships faced by white
settler women and their role in nurturing a supposedly more civilized society:

<blockquote>The pioneer women of
Arizona whom we are honoring today with this lovely monument were [constantly] in
fear of their lives and the lives of their husbands and children because of
these two foes, the [Apache] Indians and the renegades [who were] ... looking for a
place without government or justice.</blockquote>

The local DUP women who
commissioned the statue also masked the monument’s Mormon roots. Two-thirds of
the interpretive plaque text celebrates the bravery of women who arrived from
the north and helped transform the desert into a “green oasis,” without
identifying those women as Mormons. At the statue’s dedication, Neoma Brinhall
similarly declared that “Arizona was settled by God fearing people,
Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and last but not least the Mormons.” 

Nearby Mesa’s 1988
monument honoring <a></a>Mesa Pioneers makes
a similar move, highlighting the role of Mormons in establishing white
settlements in the area without directly invoking their membership in the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

State officials joined DUP
members in dedicating the monument in Legislative Government Mall, adjacent to the
Arizona state capitol. Governor Jack Williams selected the location for the
monument. Mrs. Grady Gammage, chair of the Goveronor’s Commission on the Status
of Women, spoke at its 1968 dedication.

Today, it is one of 30 memorials
located in Wesley Bolin Plaza.

&nbsp;

1968 hammered bronze monument to Arizona’s white female settlers. It was erected by the local chapter of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers. The monument’s interpretive plaque masks its Mormon roots.

Arizona's Pioneer Women. Photo by Cynthia Prescott

Arizona's Pioneer Women Statue

This 1985 larger-than-life bronze grouping in Prescott,
Arizona, depicts early white settlers to the region. It includes four iconic
figures of the mythic Old West: a cowboy, a mule skinner (or freight wagon
driver), a gold miner, and a sunbonneted woman. 

The central figure is a cowboy clad in a cowboy hat, fringed
trousers, cowboy boots and spurs. He carries a rope for roping cattle. This
cowboy evokes both western ranching culture and Prescott’s premier public
event, the “World’s Oldest Rodeo.” Its sponsor, Prescott Frontier Days, Inc., says
that Prescott’s professional rodeo has occurred annually since 1888.

According to Marguerite Madison Aronowitz, author of Art Treasures and Museums In and Around
Prescott, Arizona, the sculptor originally planned to include a Fort
Whipple soldier as the fourth figure, but his wife and father persuaded him
instead to honor the women who settled the Southwest. Like the famous Pioneer Woman in Ponca City, Oklahoma,
and a number of other monuments to pioneer women erected throughout the United
States since the 1920s, the female settler wears a sunbonnet and holds a Bible.
That Bible symbolizes her role carrying supposedly more civilized white American
culture to the West. Rather than striding westward, however, this Prescott
pioneer woman stands in her adopted home, shading her eyes against the bright
Arizona sun.

Early Settlers was
sculpted by Bill Nebeker, a longtime Prescott resident and member of the
prestigious Cowboy Artists of America. Nebeker,
whose father once worked as a cowboy in the Prescott area, has dedicated his
artistic career to “keeping the story of the West alive.”<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="Link: null">1&nbsp;</a>Since the 1960s, he has sculpted cowboys and ranch life, Native Americans, outlaws
and lawmen, military heroes, and western wildlife.

Prescott, Arizona, has been a center of cowboy and western
art for decades. But an interpretive
plaque accompanying the statue declares that it was the first public art work
erected in Prescott since the dedication of the city’s Rough Rider monument in
1907.

&nbsp;

Sculpted by local artist Bill Nebeker, this monument honors early white settlers of Prescott, Arizona. It features four iconic figures: a cowboy, a mule skinner, a gold miner, and a pioneer woman.

Early Settlers

This life-sized bronze sculpture commemorates
both Native American and settler women’s struggles to nurture their families in
nineteenth-century Arizona. A Native woman and a white settler woman stand
proudly with their children in front of a Prescott shopping center constructed
on Yavapai tribal lands.

This monument was erected in 1990
as Americans debated how United States’ past should be remembered. Scholars and
activists challenged traditional narratives celebrating westward expansion and
the supposed disappearance of Indigenous peoples. In contrast to Bill Nebeker’s
Early Settlers statue installed five
years earlier in downtown Prescott, Pat Mathiesen’s bronze pair of mothers honors
both the region’s Native and settler heritage.

Mathiesen’s Spirit of the Frontier depicts both women as relatively strong
maternal figures, but promises different futures for their communities. The
white pioneer wears a long, tailored prairie-style dress and her hair in a
chignon. She gazes confidently into the future, her hands resting proudly on
the shoulders of her school-aged son. The books clasped in his arm and proud
expression on his face assure the viewer that he is preparing to lead his
community and the nation. 

In contrast, the Indigenous
mother wears a looser fitting blouse and long skirt that combine Euro-American
and Native American styles. She wears her hair in the traditional Yavapai
style, with bangs and long hair hanging loose. She gazes downward at her infant
tied tightly to a cradle board. This pose suggests that both woman and infant
were constrained by their cultural persistence. The mother holds her child
proudly. But that Yavapai infant will not grow into a strapping scholar
prepared to lead its people, let alone the white-dominated nation. The wagon
wheel that stands behind the settler and Native figures visually promises
progress toward a more white and civilized future.

Frontier Village shopping center
was built on tribal lands in 1991 with permission of the Yavapai-Prescott
Indian Tribe. The tribe became the sole owner and manager of the shopping
center in 2012. The statue and dedication plaque were&nbsp;removed about 3 years later.

Erected in 1990, this life-sized bronze sculpture commemorated both Native American and settler women’s struggles to nurture their families in nineteenth-century Arizona. A Native woman and a white settler woman stand proudly with their children in front of a Prescott shopping center constructed on Yavapai tribal lands. It was removed after the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe acquired the shopping center in 2012.

Spirit of the Frontier as of March 2014.  Photo by Cynthia Prescott.

Spirit of the Frontier Statue

Throughout the twentieth
century, American communities put up monuments to pioneer women that depicted
them as gentle tamers of the Wild West. Most showed either young women carrying
their children and Christian civilization westward. Others showed seated elderly
women resting from their labors. At the turn of the 21st century, however,
a few cities put up statues of feisty pioneer women.&nbsp; Although monuments like this one in Prescott
Valley, Arizona, depict women in more active roles, they ultimately still cast
women settlers as civilizers.

Prescott Valley
councilwoman Lora Lee Nye commissioned artist and executive editor of True West Magazine Bob Boze Bell to
paint a watercolor to raffle off at the town’s Centennial Gala in 2012. Bell offered
a somewhat updated version of the nearly century-old pioneer mother imagery in
a painting to honor Prescott Valley's centennial. Bell said that<blockquote>Whether they
were wrangling ornery kids or dispatching hogs, chickens, scorpions and
rattlesnakes, the women who lived in the Arizona Territory had to be tough.<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="Link: null">1</a></blockquote>He remembered his
grandmothers slaughtering chickens and killing rattlesnakes with a hoe.

Bell’s painting showed a
frontier woman standing in her garden dressed in her finest clothing. She has killed one of those rattlesnakes with
a shovel. As he explained in his True West Magazine blog, Bell embraced
the traditional image of those women as civilizers.&nbsp;<blockquote>That was the point of the
whole deal, to honor the brave and tenacious women of Arizona who tamed the
West AND the men.<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="Link: null">2</a></blockquote>The title and image directly
challenged early-twentieth-century depictions of western women as passive
nurturers. Its creator was gently challenging the “gentle” label, but not the
bigger message that women did indeed “tame” the West and its supposedly wild
men.

So eagerly did Prescott
Valley residents embrace Bell's image that they commissioned a bronze monument based
on it to mark the centennial. Sculptor Deb Gessner created a 22-inch statue
based on the painting. Under Bell’s supervision she digitally enlarged that
piece to create a 10-foot-tall bronze monument. The resulting monumental bronze
was placed in front of the Prescott Valley Civic Center to honor their white
foremothers’ grit.<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="Link: null">3</a>&nbsp;It provides a historical counterpoint
to the modern buildings around it. Bob Boze Bell unveiled the statue on July
27, 2013. 

Deb Gessner’s Not-So-Gentle Tamer “pays tribute to the
brave pioneer women who helped tame and settle the west.”<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="Link: null">4</a>&nbsp;This pioneer woman holds a rattlesnake whose
head she has just removed with a shovel. She presents a more active female role
than had been typical of pioneer woman monuments erected a century earlier. Vicky O'Hara, president of the local League of
Women Voters, said that American women <blockquote>have fought for equal rights and women’s
issues throughout our history. The statue exemplifies this spirit … The women
who built the West were fighting for a better life for their families and equal
rights and an equal voice.<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="Link: null">5</a></blockquote>Some Arizonans have
complained about the Not-So-Gentle Tamer’s
attack on local wildlife. But most appear to embrace Bell and Gessner’s
depiction of the white pioneer women’s tenacity. 

<div><div> 

</div>

</div>

This monument was created to celebrate Arizona's centennial. It honors white female settlers’ grit. It depicts pioneer women as feisty characters who tamed the American West and western men.

Deb Gessner after Bob Boze Bell, Not-So-Gentle Tamer. Photograph by Cynthia Prescott.

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Arizona's Pioneer Monuments

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