|
Provenance: The Estate of Dick Flood, Joe De Yong, Daro Flood, through descent. Comes with a photo copy of a letter of documentation from Dick Flood's Wife.
The letter reads:
This is Joe De Yong's Pattern for Cradle Board and Baby Face. I have the Cradleboard Joe made for C.M. Russell, bought from Russell Estate, designs painted not beaded.
Also have Cradleboard made by CMR for Joe, bought from Joe
Thought you would like the cradleboard makings.
Love Mother.
Joe gave me this box but I never got around to completing, so busy with other projects especially for your father. Not a complaint we were just so busy doing other things traveling fishing artifact hunting etc.
Joe (Joseph) Franklin De Yong (1894 - 1975) was active/lived in California, Montana, Missouri. Joe De Yong is known for Western painting and sculpture, illustration, etching.
The following is from Ray Castello, American Art Collection, Taos, New Mexico. He credits the Donald C. & Elizabeth M. Dickinson Research Center Archives at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.
Joe De Yong was a protegee of Charles M. Russell, and was a western artist, illustrator, bronze caster, cinematic technical director, scenario research consultant and cartoonist. In some ways his cartoon character Kid Currycomb reflects the desires of his creator. Beyond the fact that De Yong's pseudonym as editor of the Eatons' Dude Ranch newsletter, Wranglin' Notes, was Kid Currycomb, De Yong always desired to be a cowboy.
This desire was revealed in a conversation with Will James, cowboy writer and artist, at Eatons' Ranch probably in 1927. A 33-year old De Yong said he envied James for what he had seen and could do in terms of being a cowboy. He wrote: "I'm laying all my cards down even tho I am ashamed to since none of this shows my natural gait - you see I got nipped in the bud at 18 and hadn't the chance to keep going at what I liked."
Cerebro-meningitis, which left him totally and irreparably deaf, was the disease that nipped De Yong's pursuit of a cherished lifestyle in January of 1913. Reflecting about this time in his life, De Yong considered the event as a "definite trick of fate" which pushed him toward painting and modeling, "just to kill time!"
He wrote, "While I could always draw well enough as a kid to take the ability for granted. I had no particular idea of ever becoming an artist. In fact, handling young horses and range cattle were my main interests in life, and I wasn't looking for anything better!"
In the subsequent sixty years, De Yong spent a lot of time painting, modeling, and sculpting. Along the way he befriended a number of famous personalities including Tom Mix, William "Bill" Gollings, Charles M. Russell, Ed Borein, Maynard Dixon, Will James, Will Rogers, William S. Hart, and Cecille B. DeMille. This list reads like the Who's Who of Western Art and Entertainment of the period.
Joseph Franklin De Yong was born in Webster Grove, Missouri on March 12, 1894. He was the only child of Mary Ellen Burkett of Iowa and Adrian De Yong, Jr. of Missouri. Mary (1873-1973) was the daughter of Elizabeth Matlock and Neander Keller Burkett. Adrian (1872-1923) was the son of Eleanor McGowan and Adrian De Yong, Sr. Joe A. Bartles, last hereditary chief of the Turtle clan of the Delawares, became De Yong's godfather and namesake. Adrian befriended Bartles in a St. Louis military school and shared hunting trips into Indian Territory. It was Bartles who successfully encouraged Adrian to move his family to Dewey in Indian Territory in 1899.
In 1895, Adrian had opened a general merchandise store in Dewey. "Uncle Joe," according to De Yong, was the first cowpuncher he had ever seen.
While Adrian established a home at Dewey, De Yong attended public schools in Webster Groves through 1905. Between 1907 and 1912, he attended public schools in Dewey and Bartlesville. When not in school, De Yong learned to ride and draw horses at the Bartles Bar B Ranch. While not in school, he in 1907 at the tender age of 13 began working for Sherman Moore of Moore & Todd at the Horseshoe L Ranch. This seasonal employment continued until 1913.
De Yong writes: "So it turned out that I did my first real cow work for him- a real cowman." This apparent, almost defensive obsession with real cowboys took root early. And, like Currycomb, De Yong wanted always to be counted among them. As a boy, the men De Yong emulated were top notch working-cow hands including Joe Knight, Jim Rider, Henry Grammar, Slickey Little, and Earl Woodard. De Yong characterized these men in this way: "...some were better hands than others, some were better men, but anybody can read that list forward and back or right down the big middle, and it still means the same thing, they were all real ones."
In 1910, Tom Mix (1880-1940), former livestock foreman for the Miller 101 Ranch at Bliss, Oklahoma and husband to Dewey native, Olive Stokes, came to Dewey with Col. William Selig's Motion Picture Company of Chicago to make the movie, Ranch Life in the Great Southwest. De Yong had a bit part in this movie which was filmed partly on the Moore's Horseshoe L Ranch where he handled the cattle. Upon seeing the film, the impressionable De Yong yearned to be a cowboy actor. In January 1913 he joined Mix, as part of a supporting cast of real cow hands, and the Selig Company in Prescott, Arizona. During the filming of The Law and the Outlaw, he contracted meningitis, which in his words left him "totally deaf, cross-eyed, and without any sense of balance."
"Outside of that" he explained in a typically understated manner, "I was all right." With his vision returned and his walking ability slightly regained, De Yong, accompanied by Earl Woodard, who was instrumental in his recovery, left Prescott in July and returned to Dewey by way of Colorado, Wyoming, and finally Webster Groves, Missouri by the end of that fateful year. Sherman Moore offered him a job riding line, but De Yong turned him down reasoning that he did not like the idea of playing "second fiddle" to either the horses or the riders with whom he had worked. He was nineteen years old.
Options limited, De Yong renewed his interest in his innate ability to draw. He had been influenced during his precocious childhood by the works of Frederic Remington's western subjects published in Collier's Weekly and by a billboard advertisement using Charles M. Russell's A Bad Hoss at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. But, it was not until mid-August of 1913 when his passion was rekindled. On their way back to Dewey, he and Woodard attended the Cheyenne Frontier Days where De Yong saw a display of western art by Russell. Consequently, he bought a folio of Russell's prints and the yearning to meet and be taught by Russell began.
By December 1913, De Yong began his quest to contact Russell. Between complaining of chest pains and breathlessness (perhaps early undiagnosed symptoms of asthma) and urging his father to obtain every Russell item he could, De Yong sent Russell a set of sketches and a photograph of his first model. In return he received words of encouragement from Russell, which reinforced his resolve to go to Montana.
In July 1914, De Yong visited Russell's studio in Great Falls, Montana for the first time. By year's close, the De Yong family had moved to Big Timber and then finally to Choteau, Montana to accommodate their gifted son. This accommodation was indicative of the closeness witnessed in the De Yong family, particularly the long supportive relationship between Joe and his mother, Mary. As De Yong's father, Adrian, died from pernicious anemia in 1923, it is fair to say that Mary remained Joe's closest friend and confidant right up until her death in 1973 at the age of 100.
On January 3, 1916 De Yong began to work in Russell's studio. Thus began a
teacher-student relationship, which would last through the next ten years until Russell's death in October of 1926. Russell was 51 years old. Nancy, his wife, was 38 years old. De Yong was nearly 22 years old.
During this period, De Yong developed and refined his ability to communicate through sign language, "hand talking." In this regard he learned a great deal from Russell, who was himself an accomplished hand talker. Additionally, while De Yong could speak and not hear, much of the communication between the two was affected by handwritten conversation notes. Regarding the origin of the numerous conversation notes written by Russell, De Yong explained that since he was totally deaf and because Russell "habitually spoke deep in his chest, and with little lip movement," it was necessary to either use Indian sign language or write. Many of these notes are included in the De Yong's personal papers and provide an insight into this unique teacher-student relationship.
Russell also attempted to instill in the youthful De Yong a critical eye for authenticity and detail in art. To this end De Yong accompanied Russell into the mountains of Montana and Wyoming, and to the Indian reservations of the Blackfeet, Gros Ventres, and Crow. This eye for detail, especially regarding Indian materials, coupled with voluminous sketches and notes, would serve him well in future years.
During this Russell decade, De Yong met several contemporary western artists including Ed Borein, Will James, and Olaf Seltzer. While in 1913 De Yong had illustrated a little book entitled Oklahoma Tales & Jingles, it was during this time he undertook illustration work in a major way. One of De Yong's early promoters was Nancy Russell. In a letter to R. E. Leppert, Art Manager for Funk & Wagnalls Company, she wrote, "There is a young fellow working in the studio with Mr. Russell these days, and he was just about finished an oil color of a Bucking Broncho which Chas. thinks is good. It is a shape and size you can use for a cover on the Digest, if you care for anything as wild."
Within a month after Nancy's promotion, De Yong had sold his first magazine cover for $100. However, the illustration was not used on a Literary Digest cover until March 28, 1925 issue. In 1916, De Yong created the poster and program art promoting the Dewey Roundup for his godfather, Joe Bartles. In the early 1920s he did the illustrations for Frank B. Linderman's books, Bunch-Grass and Blue-Joint and Lige Mounts, Free Trapper.
Concurrently, he had enrolled in a correspondence art education course through the Federal School of Illustrating and Cartooning. Printed in the Federal School's publication, The Federal Illustrator in 1925, De Yong's story of adversity caused by a handicap served as both an inspiration for other would-be artists and as a promotional vehicle for the school.
By 1919, De Yong had met Howard Eaton, the founder of Eatons' Dude Ranch in Wolf, Wyoming. Having become dude wrangler and semi-official artist at Eatons', De Yong made a trip through Glacier National Park in Montana with one of the Eaton parties. That trip opened a fruitful market for his talents in sketching, modeling, and painting. Throughout the 1920s, he continued to reap the benefits of this market through the guests at the ranch, where in addition he entertained them in his tipi with rope tricks. Between 1923 and 1929, De Yong under the pseudonym of "Kid Currycomb" served as editor of Wranglin' Notes, a newsletter produced at the ranch.
For whatever reasons De Yong never married, although he had a number of romances with females.
In September 1926, De Yong moved to Santa Barbara, California ostensibly to learn bronze casting from Ed Borein. On October 14, Russell died, and Joe would thereafter live in California. While in California, he renewed his friendships with Will Rogers and Tom Mix. Earlier he also met and befriended the western actor, William S. Hart.
But for several years following Russell's death, De Yong's career had its ups and downs. He continued illustration work for covers and magazine articles. He even designed and illustrated personalized Christmas cards. The mid-1930s provided another variation on an art career theme for De Yong. In 1934, he joined the annual ride of the Rancheros Visitadores, which included southern California businessmen, ranchers, stage, screen, radio, and political celebrities. Each May the group covered 100 miles on horseback or stagecoach bunking at ranches along the way.
In 1936, through the Visitadores, De Yong met John Fisher, the business manager of Cecil B. DeMille, the motion picture director. A seeker of realism and authenticity, DeMille had been looking for a technical advisor for his new motion picture, The Plainsman, starring Gary Cooper. DeMille's search ended with De Yong, who was hired as costume designer and frontiersman/ Indian expert. Thus, he embarked on a second career in the motion picture industry, that of scenario research consultant, which would continue through 1967.
De Yong's filmography includes Wells Fargo (1937), Union Pacific (1939), North West Mounted Police (1940), Tall in the Saddle (1944), Buffalo Bill (1944), The
Virginian (1946), The Big Sky (1952), and El Dorado (1967).
While his film-making career gave him considerable influence in terms of what the general public saw and how it perceived cowboys, it also provided an outlet for his compulsion for authenticity. This compulsion might have been fueled by his repeated attempts between 1935 and 1938 to launch a comic strip called Kid Currycomb's Diary. Kid Currycomb, as mentioned earlier, was a humorously, pitiful character who wanted to be a cowboy. De Yong saw the strip as a highly marketable and lucrative concern in terms of book, novelty and toy rights. Yet, his primary goal for the character was to have it animated. De Yong wrote, "There has never been a Western character in the animated field."
Shortly before his death, Will Rogers volunteered to show some of the comic strip materials to Walt Disney. Later, turning to Irvin S. Cobb for assistance in this matter, De Yong obtained an appointment with the Disney Company. But, all was not well with a potential collaboration between him and Disney. De Yong characterized the situation in the following: "...I found I had to sign a release which not only freed Disney of any future responsibility concerning this material, but also freed any one in his employ! Well, everybody knows he pays most of his staff low wages and due to this I'd picked up a rumor that a group from all departments in his organization
were planning to resign and set up their own plant. So on learning this I felt it would be poor business for me to submit anything and risk having some one go away from Disney's and make use of some part of my idea."
The saga continued. In 1936 De Yong successfully attempted to obtain the support of Bob Burns of the Paramount Studio. In 1938, Tex Austin asked De Yong to do the illustrations for his book on the authentic history of the cattle industry. Aware of De Yong's preoccupation with Kid Currycomb and desirous of getting him to work for him, Austin offered to have Cyrus McCormick, a publisher of a weekly New Mexico paper with state-wide circulation, look at the strip. Moreover, Austin suggested that McCormick's cousin, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, might be interested in these materials, but admonished De Yong saying that if he took the illustrating job he would have to have a more positive attitude going forward. Yet, in spite of strong recommendations from Will Rogers, Ed Borein, and Will James, Kid Currycomb's Diary was never realized. Kid Currycomb remained a part of De Yong only.
When World War II and gas rationing began, De Yong moved to Hollywood permanently. He worked with John Wayne in Tall in the Saddle; with Bob Hope in The Paleface; and for George Stevens in Shane in 1951. One of the final movies to which De Yong lent his expertise was Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, which was released in the beginning of 1959.
During the fifties and sixties, De Yong devoted much of his time to writing memoirs, articles, and short stories.
William Gardner Bell, Will James' biographer, in summing up De Yong's career writes, "he was an accomplished painter, sketcher, sculptor, and etcher, but not a writer.
As he grew older, De Yong began to reflect and write about his life. In one instance he perfectly summed up his life: "...due to a certain childish ability at drawing and painting - coupled with an inherited Irish imagination - if my daydreams were at any time hampered. I was unaware of it. Always old for my years, and spending most of my time among grown people, from choice - I now realize that I was not only a born observer but - a tireless student as well as ruthless critic concerning any subject or activity that interested me."
The creator of Kid Currycomb was one of the "real ones. "He was as William Gardner Bell writes one of a "handful of genuine cowboy artists from an authentic cowboy era."
Joseph Franklin De Yong died in April 1975 in a hospital in Los Angeles, California at the age of 81. His remains were returned to Montana for burial at Choteau beside his parents. With his passing an era in western art ended.
|
