“The Last Buffalo” by Joan Murray

The Last Buffalo has as its subtitle, “The Story of Frederick Arthur Verner, Painter of the Canadian West.” “Story” becomes a complex pun in this book. Joan Murray has assembled the life and artistic story of an Ontario painter who was born in 1836 and whose career ended only with death 91 years later. But the compelling story for Verner, all his long life, was that of the buffalo of the Canadian West.

The audience of the 19th century, both cultivated and popular, was fascinated by the story of the great buffalo herds of the North American interior and the Indian cultures that flourished and declined with those herds. Charles M. Russell, George Catlin, Albert Bierstadt, and the Canadians Paul Kane and Frederick Verner, were preeminent among the painters of that story. It was a kind of epic, beginning with the introduction of horse and gun, ending with the iron horse and the murderous effect of the repeating rifle.

Frederick Verner painted literally hundreds of pictures of that buffalo story, often imitating other painters, copying his own work, updating his own paintings. But his particular fascination, his obsession, always, from his first discovery of the subject on, was the story’s end. For him, the guns of slaughter are seldom in evidence. Rather, he gives us portrait after portrait of the heroic, defeated animals. And as they wait for extinction their world becomes a pastoral world of prairie, mountain, forest, river, snow. Even the few Indians are only necessary as observers of a world in which the buffalo was all.

Ironically, there is no evidence that Verner ever saw a buffalo in the wild. Joan Murray questions the old assumption that Verner made numerous trips into the West. The hard evidence indicates that he made his first and major trip in 1873, when he visited Fort Garry. By that date, the nearest surviving herd was 300 miles distant. He did not go farther west to see it.

Verner found his details by looking at captive buffalo, at buffalo in zoos or, later, at the buffalo in Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, when he saw it in London, England. Verner could surely observe exactly, as his sketches indicate. He kept a group of 57 sketches to which he returned for details, and around those detailed recordings he painted his dream of the West as a garden world.

For the truth is, his great journeys west were journeys of the mind. What fascinates us, finally, is Verner’s obsessive imagining of the buffalo. They became the means by which he could explore and record his vision. Reading The Last Buffalo, I found myself contrasting Verner with Joe Fafard and his obsession with cows. Fafard, living now on the buffalo plains of Saskatchewan, seems to see his cows from the exact inside; he knows every bone, every muscle. Verner saw his buffalo from a far and obligatory distance.

Verner was an artist of and for the 19th century. He made his living, for much of his life, as a photographer. But when he took up his brush there came into his vision a transcendental distance that erased the immediate. At first glance his seems the world before the fall. In his West the canoe is about to enter the rapids, the ducks are about to take off, the mist is about to lift. He seems to capture the moment before.

But Verner knew he was the artist of after. The buffalo were finished and with them the great Indian cultures they had allowed. He, the 19th-century Canadian painter who in 1880 moved to England and painted buffalo until 1928—he was himself, as Joan Murray indicates, his own last buffalo.

He at once reinforced the Ontario view of the West and unwittingly portrayed that view’s failure. For Verner, there was no violence in the destruction of the buffalo and the dependent Indian cultures. He pictures the Indians as domesticated people, and in his pictures they are strangely without horses. It is not his concern to recognize the Prairie Indians’ traditions of religion and art and warfare and the hunt. In that very failure he underlines the failure of imagination that was the tragedy of Ontario and its imperialist and self-immolating culture in the lifetime of Frederick Verner.

Joan Murray’s The Last Buffalo is a beautifully designed book. The paintings in it are well reproduced and sufficient to establish the narrative of Verner’s life. That narrative in turn, becomes an exploration of the greatness and the failure of the collective imagination that we now call Canada. Verner listened to his audience instead of having it listen to him. ♦

Robert Kroetsch’s last novel, Alibi, was reviewed in Volume 3, number 1 of Arts Manitoba.