Lewis and Clark with Sacajawea at the Great Falls of Missouri
Seltzer’s small oil shows the Corps of Discovery party at the Great Falls of the Missouri, with Sacagawea included in the foreground group. The composition places the human figures on a rocky promontory or bank in the middle distance while the cascading falls dominate the right and background of the picture. Seltzer worked in a tight, illustrative manner here, with crisp drawing and a controlled palette of earth tones, blue-greens in the river, and the white of churning water. At eleven by roughly sixteen inches, the painting is an easel-scale work rather than a mural, and its detail rewards close viewing in the manner of Seltzer’s miniature historical scenes.
The scene depicts the late June 1805 phase of the expedition, when Meriwether Lewis first encountered the Great Falls on June 13 and the party then undertook the arduous portage around the series of five cascades over roughly the next month. The journals describe the falls in detail and record that Sacagawea, recovering from severe illness, was with the party as they reconnoitered the terrain. By placing her prominently in the composition, Seltzer reflected the early twentieth-century reframing of Sacagawea as a central expedition figure, a popular cultural shift driven by Eva Emery Dye’s 1902 novel and by suffrage-era monuments and pageants.
Olaf Carl Seltzer (1877–1957) was a Danish-born painter who emigrated to Great Falls, Montana, in 1892 and became a close friend and studio associate of Charles M. Russell. After Russell’s death in 1926, Seltzer increasingly took on historical commissions, and in the late 1920s he began a long association with Tulsa oilman Thomas Gilcrease, for whom he eventually produced a large series of small historical paintings documenting events of the American West. This 1927 canvas dates from the start of that productive late phase. The painting is held in the Gilcrease Museum collection in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Seltzer’s expedition and frontier subjects form one of the strongest concentrations of his work. Among Lewis and Clark imagery, Seltzer’s contributions are valued for their geographic accuracy, owing to his long residence in Great Falls within sight of the very landscape depicted.
