The Smoky Valley / Reproductions of a series of Lithographs of the Smoky Valley in Kansas

The Smoky Valley
Birger Sandzen
Reproductions of a Series of Lithographs of the Smoky Valley in Kansas By Birger Sandzen An Introduction by Minna K. Powell CARL J. SMALLEY Kansas City, Missouri 1922 Copyright, 1922, by Carl J. Smalley Kansas City, Mo. Published December, 1922 Printed by the Republican Press, at McPherson, Kansas, in the United States of America
When Birger Sandzen looks into the seamed face of a pioneer farmer of Kansas, he sees the conquest of a spirit. When he looks upon the face of the Kansas prairie, he sees the conquest of the Wilderness and he makes the World feel the courage of the Kansas spirit and the power of Kansas sinews.
An artist who penetrates below the surface of his subject and sees the soul of it looking out, Birger Sandzen Was foreordained to celebrate in black and white and in color, the moods and the meaning of the Smoky Hill River, which winds so peacefully in and out among the farms of central Kansas.
The Smoky Hill River is not much wider than a creek, and the early homesteader valued it chiefly because it watered his land and his stock.
Then came Birger Sandzen, artist, who settled near the stream in the town of Lindsborg. Almost immediately a deep affection sprang up between the artist and the river. Accustomed to a land of many streams and lakes, the artist haunted the banks of the river that seemed to speak to him of home. He served the friendly stream by celebrating its moods and sudden turnings, and the stream taught the artist by gentle gradations its own affinity for the prairie.
It was so that Birger Sandzen learned to love the Kansas landscape. But first he sought the shadowed banks of the Smoky. By sunlight and moonlight he studied it. Following its graceful windings, he caught the poetry of Kansas,—the tired droop of cattle as they came to drink at dusk, the grouping of horses in hillside pastures, huddled cottonwoods like shy children along the clean banks of the stream.
Finally the river taught him to see the masterpieces of art in the strong and rugged faces of the pioneer farmers whose land stretched along the river’s bank.