“THE CALL OF THE FLUTE,” by E. Irving Couse, an idyl of Indian life, is the subject of one of the intaglio-gravure pictures illustrating “Painters of Western Life.”
E. IRVING COUSE
Monograph Number Four in The Mentor Reading Course
Scattered here and there throughout the Southwest in unfrequented valleys along the Rio Grande and on almost inaccessible mesa (may´-sah) tops, buried in the sandy and waterless Painted Desert, are found the villages and fields of a people whom the early Spaniards called Pueblos (pooeb´-lo), to distinguish them from their roving neighbors, the plains Indians, who had neither fields nor fixed abode of any kind. These peaceful, home-loving people lived in great houses which they occupied in common—terraced pyramids of sun-dried bricks—and which were both fortress and dwelling.
It is among this interesting tribe of Indians that E. Irving Couse has spent much of his life. He is not a native of the Far West. He was born at Saginaw, Michigan, September 3, 1866, and went to New York for art study in the National Academy of Design. From there he went to Paris, and took a course in art in the Julian Academy and the School of Fine Arts, where his masters were the great French painter Bouguereau, T. Robert Fleury, Ferrier, and others. He returned to America and established his studio in New York City, where he soon made himself known. In the years from 1900 to 1902 he was elected to the American Water Color Society, the New York Water Color Club, and the National Academy of Design.
About this time Mr. Couse’s interest became directed toward the life of the Great Southwest, and he made a trip there which so fascinated him that he continued for years to visit and study the race of the Pueblos. These were most interesting and impressionable years. He found a life new and full of fascination among the Pueblos of Taos (tah´-ose).
Taos is the northernmost of the Pueblos, and consequently became the “buffer state” between the fierce Apaches and the no less warlike plains tribes. Warrior bands from either side, returning from a raid into the other’s country, were sure to fall upon the inoffensive Pueblos of Taos, either to remove the sting of defeat or to increase the glory of victory. As a result the Indians of Taos became the most warlike of the Pueblo tribes, and when the Mokis (mo´-ki) of northern Arizona, long before the coming of the Spaniards under Coronado in 1640, found even their rocky mesa tops to be insufficient protection against the marauding Navajos (nav´-a-ho) and Apaches, it was to Taos they sent for aid. Taos planted a colony on a mesa top near them and called it Tewa (tay´-wah). This colony exists today, and speaks the Taos language, not that of its Moki neighbors.
But for all that the barbaric chant of the happy worker in the cornfields, or at evening the low flute note of the love call springs more easily to his lips than the harsh war cry; for the Taos Indian’s heart is in his fields and his home tucked away in a canyon of the Sangre de Christo (sahn´-gray day kris´-to) Mountains not far from the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico.
Mr. Couse has followed the Indians in their hunts through the mountains they loved so well. He has listened to the call of the flute in some mountain glade or the player’s prayer to the god of the waters beside some rushing stream. He has learned the Pueblos’ ways of thought and action, and has recorded much of it on canvas. Living in such close touch with the Pueblos, gaining and holding their faith and confidence, watching with deep understanding the growth of his models from boyhood to manhood, he has come as close to the spirit of the Indian as white man ever can.