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.
He saw faces in which courage had drawn with a true hand lines of self-conquest. He saw the beauty of fingers knotted and bent with much serving and the glory of dimmed eyes. The pioneer men and women of Kansas were crowned by Sandzen with the splendor of their deeds.
But always he returned to the quiet river, grateful for the woods that hugged its banks and were mirrored in the water. His passion for the Smoky grew and deepened. It became to him the heart of Kansas, and Kansas, through the Smoky, became his friend.
And always, as he tramped up and down the river’s banks, he saw in miniature the grandeur he was later on to find in the Rockies and the mastery he was to sense in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.
As he painted outcroppings of rock in the hilly pastures, he was preparing unconsciously for his work of giving expression to the gigantic cliffs and mountains of the great West. Tributaries of the Smoky, overflowing their banks in the spring freshets, ran dry in summer and provided the artist with beds deeply fissured like their titanic model, the Grand Canyon.
The hills near Lindsborg, are small replicas of the Rockies. They slope to the very bank of the Smoky and Birger Sandzen climbed from bank to summit where he looked out over the wide prairie and saw how lovely it was.
Since then he has never tired of painting the landscape that is the heart of Kansas, vibrating with the heroic toil and patience of the past and the hope of the future.
Thus it is that when Mr. Sandzen makes a study of the moon stealing up behind the willows before the flush of afternoon is quite gone, he puts into the picture not only the objects a stranger might see, but also the deep love he bears the river and the land it has enriched.