The Revolutionary War

This year, 2015, is a year of anniversaries by tens: the 200th anniversary of the end of the War of 1812, the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, and the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. It is also the 240th anniversary of the beginning of the Revolutionary War. That beginning took place on April 19, 1775, at Lexington and Concord when British forces engaged and were forced into retreat by the Minutemen of Massachusetts. The war carried on for eight more years, with the last British troops leaving New York City on today's date--November 25--in 1783. In 1776, we declared our independence. In 1777, we won the battles that turned the tide. And in 1778-1781, we secured our freedom by defeating the British in the West and in the South, with a culminating victory at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. Artists, writers, historians, thinkers, and the American people at large have celebrated those events ever since. Illustrators and cartoonists from Indiana are of course among them.

Lucy Fitch Perkins (1865-1937) of Maples, Indiana, was renowned for her Twins series of books. Here is the cover of The American Twins of the Revolution, published in 1926, presumably to celebrate the sesquicentennial of Independence. The Revolutionary War is unique in our history. Fought on our own soil and in every part of our young nation, it touched and influenced the lives of every American as no war has in the time since. Those lives included the lives of children. I would hazard that there have been more children's books about children participating in the Revolutionary War than about any other American war. Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes (1943) leaps to mind.

Roy Frederic Heinrich (1881-1943) was born in Goshen, Indiana, but lived much of his life in the East. Late in his career, he executed a series of historical drawings for the National Life Insurance Company of Montpelier, Vermont. Here is his depiction of the Battle of Hubbardton, July 7, 1777, in what is now Vermont. The British and their Hessian mercenaries won the battle but at great cost.

Frederick Coffay Yohn (1875-1933) of Indianapolis was a wunderkind artist, recognized by age twenty-five as one of the nation's top historical illustrators. He specialized in paintings of the American Revolution, many of which were published in Scribner's. Shown here is a scene from the Battle of Oriskany, August 6, 1777, in which the American General Nicholas Herkimer was mortally wounded in a loss to Loyalists or Tories and their Indian allies.

Yohn's painting was used as a design for a postage stamp in observance of the American Bicentennial.

Ten days after Oriskany, on August 16, 1777, American forces won a decisive victory at the Battle of Bennington. F.C. Yohn was the artist.

The caption here tells the story. The drawing is by Roy F. Heinrich. Again, the war was one in which all Americans might have taken part, including a housemaid wearing a dress as striped as her flag.

On October 17, 1777, British General John Burgoyne surrendered his forces to General Horatio Gates, thus bringing an end to the Saratoga campaign and helping to assure foreign recognition of the American cause. The artist was once again Yohn.

"The Interrupted Christmas Dinner--A Revolutionary Incident" by T. Dart Walker (1868-1914) of Goshen, Indiana. This image was published by Leslie's in 1900 and illustrates a story with which I am unfamiliar. The fineness and bravery of American women (and children) is evident here, as the American man in uniform hides under the table. 

Despite its victories, the Continental Army under George Washington suffered through a hard winter in 1777-1778 at Valley Forge. F.C. Yohn painted this monochromatic picture.

In 1777, the British opened a new theater in the war, the war in the West. From September 7 to September 18, 1778, Shawnee warriors, allied with the British, laid siege to Fort Boonesborough in what is now Kentucky. (The date on the picture frame is 1777.) The siege failed and only two died on the American side, including a slave named London. Daniel Boone and his brother Squire were at the siege. Squire Boone now lies buried in a cave in southern Indiana. The picture here was painted by Gayle Porter Hoskins (1887-1962) of Brazil, Indiana.

In February 1779, George Rogers Clark, with his small force of men, moved against Vincennes in what is now southwestern Indiana, crossing the flooded Wabash River bottoms from the Illinois country to the west. The children of Indiana learn of Clark's feat in fourth-grade history class and remember it forever after, if only for the story of men wading for miles through freezing floodwaters on their approach to the settlement. Frederick Coffay Yohn painted this picture in 1929. . . 

Only a few years after having painted this picture of the surrender of Fort Sackville at Vincennes, which took place on February 25, 1779. Henry Hamilton, the leader of the British forces, is on the right. George Rogers Clark, older brother of William Clark of Lewis and Clark fame, is on the left. Note the drummer boy on the far left and the girl in the blue dress on the far right. Indiana author Maurice Thompson's bestselling Alice of Old Vincennes (1900), illustrated by Yohn, is set against the backdrop of the Vincennes campaign.  

Yohn's painting was used as a design for a postage stamp commemorating the sesquicentennial of the surrender in 1929. 

For the British, the Southern theater of operations was far more active but only slightly more successful than the war in the West. Among the American heroes of the South was Francis Marion, the famed "Swamp Fox," who gave his name to Marion County, home of the capital city of Indiana. The drawing here is by Carl Kidwell (1910-2003) of Washington, Indiana. It adorns the dust jacket of The Swamp Fox by Marion Marsh Brown (1950). Note the unintentional double pun in the author's name.

In 1775, a newspaper comic strip called The Sons of Liberty went into syndication in anticipation of the American Bicentennial. The creator of the strip was Richard Jo Lynn (1937-2010) of Lagro, Indiana. Here is a piece of promotional art reprinted in Cartoonist Profiles magazine No. 36 (Dec. 1977). 

The Sons of Liberty culminated on the day of the Bicentennial, July 4, 1976, with a Sunday page, the only Sunday during the run of the strip. I believe this is the ending strip, but I can't say for sure, as the magazine article does not identify it as such. In any case, Happy Birthday to the Revolution that began in earnest 240 years ago!

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

T. Dart Walker (1868-1914)

Thomas Dart Walker was born in Middlebury, Indiana, on December 11, 1868, son of Civil War veteran Charles W. Walker and his wife, Jennie M. Cooley. Walker attended schools in Goshen, Indiana, until age seventeen. In his youth he set off for Europe to study art. Once in Paris, he became a favorite pupil of William Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905), probably at the Académie Julian, where Bouguereau taught from 1875 onward. Walker's hawk nose and underslung chin allowed him to pose as Dante for his fellow students. After completing his studies, Walker "strolled over Europe" as young artists were wont to do. A promising career as a painter and illustrator had begun.

The facts on Walker's early life are otherwise scarce, but on April 11, 1893, he married Elisabeth Schioler, a Danish musician, in Allen County, Indiana, probably in Fort Wayne. Elisabeth and her sister Thyra--herself a composer--were active in Fort Wayne society at the time. Elisabeth (or Elizabeth) had also studied in Paris. Perhaps that's where she and her husband met. The couple had two daughters, Ruth and Eleanor, born two years apart in the late 1890s.

A second big event in Walker's life in 1893 was his assignment to cover the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His illustrations of happenings in the unforgettable "White City" appeared in a Chicago magazine, The Graphic. Walker also worked for the publishing house of Harper and Brothers, creating illustrations for Harper's Monthly, Harper's Weekly, and Harper's Young People. In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, Walker landed a plum job covering General Nelson A. Miles' campaign in Puerto Rico for Harper's Weekly. He was said to have placed himself in personal danger for the sake of a good sketch. In his two years attached to the U.S. Navy as an official artist, Walker witnessed other hazards, including the explosion of a gun turret on the U.S.S. Massachusetts. Thereafter, Walker was known as a marine painter. Perhaps his most famous picture appeared on the cover of Leslie's Weekly Illustrated on September 21, 1901. It depicted the assassination of President William McKinley two weeks earlier at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Walker had known McKinley personally and was working on a portrait of him when the president died.

T. Dart Walker lived the life of the artist. He resided in New Rochelle, New York, home of artists and writers, for some time. In the early 1900s, he helped establish the Artists' Association in New York City. The association, which included William Glackens, Victor Gillam, Arthur C. Goode, Ernest Fuhr, and R. Weir Crouch, was an attempt to create an art colony in the heart of the city with studios at 131 East Thirty-Fourth Street. At the time, Walker was the art editor for Leslie's Weekly Illustrated. He also contributed illustrations to Collier's, The Illustrated London News, and Puck. In 1906 and 1908, Walker acted as artist for the University of Notre Dame yearbook, The Dome. The class of 1906 made him an honorary member and described his room as "a meeting place for all that is Bohemian and Irish at Notre Dame." The class of 1908 called him "genial, big-hearted, friend-winning T. Dart."

The writer of his obituary was not so kind, though to be fair, he or she was simply reporting the facts. In 1910, Walker was in Philadelphia sharing rooms with two cooks and a newspaper reporter. His wife had left him by then, taking their two children with her. "She divorced him because of his drinking habits," that anonymous author of obituaries wrote. The artist who had been at the top of his field in his mid-thirties had fallen far. Four years later, on July 21, 1914, Thomas Dart Walker, "penniless and homeless," died at New York's Bellevue Hospital of acute gastritis, a disease often associated with heavy alcohol consumption.

T. Dart Walker was among the most accomplished of early Indiana illustrators. His depictions of life in America during the 1890s and early 1900s--in government, in the military, in society--have become invaluable references of that long-ago time. Some are almost iconic. His daughters were another triumph. In 1920, after living in Denmark with her mother for several years, Eleanor Walker returned to the United States to take up the post of secretary of the Danish Legation in Washington, D.C. Little else is known about the women who survived T. Dart Walker except that Elisabeth Schioler Walker lived into her nineties and died nearly half a century after her ex-husband.

General J.R. Brooke receives word at Guayama, Puerto Rico, that the United States has made peace with Spain, in a detail from T. Dart Walker's documentary illustration. The drawing is dated August 20, 1898, a month before the birth of Walker's younger daughter, Eleanor. From Harper's Weekly.

"Wall Street When the Bankers Shut Up Shop for the Day," an illustration from Harper's Weekly, 1897.

The assassination of William McKinley by T. Dart Walker, the defining image of the event. A little-known part of the story is that a bystander, James Parker (left), knocked the gun from the assassin's bandaged hand and helped subdue him.

"Spending Uncle Sam's Money," an illustration from the cover of Leslie's Weekly Illustrated and fitting for the debate this summer, more than a century after Walker's drawing was first published.

Note: T. Dart Walker (1868-1914) should not be confused with the illustrator and cartoonist Harry Grant Dart (1869-1938).

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley