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Remington, The Old Dragoons of 1850

Met curator Thayer Tolles on history and myth in Frederic Remington’s The Old Dragoons of 1850, 1905, cast 1907.

Remington’s ambitious group includes five horses and four riders: two American cavalrymen, from the United States Regiment of Dragoons, and two Plains Indians. The Dragoons, who patrolled the land west of the Mississippi River, have closed in on the fleeing Indians, and the men are locked in hand-to-hand combat. While the soldiers’ uniforms, rifles, and accoutrements are historically correct for 1850, Remington’s Indians are closer in type to those he had known in the West in the 1880s and 1890s.

View this work on metmuseum.org.

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Video transcript

This is Frederick Remington’s Old Dragoons of 1850. The dragoons were the lawmen on the plains, beginning in the 1830s, as settlers began to move west. Here is a group of five horses and four riders. It’s a frenzy of activity. The horse that’s leading the group is riderless. We have to presume, because it is bridled and saddled, that it has been stolen by the Indians. So the dragoons are trying to recapture the horse. The dragoons seem to have the upper hand. The Indians’ horses are emaciated. The Indian with the buffalo skin only has this shield to defend himself. And the other is fending off this saber. There’s a synesthetic quality to this piece where you hear the clattering of the hooves, the horses bellowing, the clashing of the sabers and the tomahawks, the shouts. Of the five horses, only seven of the twenty hooves actually touch the ground, like a freeze-frame, cinematic quality. Because he was not trained as a sculptor, he was constantly pushing the envelope. This is the most ambitious of all his sculptures. He really pulled out all the stops: the sabers, the rifles, the saddles, the bedrolls, the canteens, and the little packs, and the buffalo skins. This particular cast came into the Museum’s collections in 1907, just two years after Remington modeled it. And it really was cutting-edge, contemporary sculpture at the moment. We don’t know how the drama will unfold. Viewers could finish the story for themselves. It was almost an early form of entertainment. These works were being created for an east coast, upper class, principally male, urban market. They fed into stereotypes of what the old West was, should be, should have been. Remington’s mythic vision has become our vision. It’s really been canonized. This piece has such an immediacy and freshness and dynamism to it, but is it the real West? What is the real West?