Protest of the Sioux

Protest of the Sioux (1904), at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair

Protest of the Sioux, also known as The Protest, is a 1904 equestrian statue by Cyrus Dallin. It was the third of four important statues of indigenous people on horseback commonly known as The Epic of the Indian, which also includes A Signal of Peace (1890), The Medicine Man (1899), and Appeal to the Great Spirit (1908).

The statue depicts a mounted Sioux warrior wearing a war bonnet defiantly shaking his right fist. According to Rell G. Francis, it depicts "a Sioux chief vigorously protesting the confiscation of his lands and buffalo by the white man".[1]

A monumental version made of staff was exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904, where it won a gold medal. The temporary statue was retained after the exhibition, but rapidly deteriorated. Unlike the three other statues in the series, Protest of the Sioux was never cast as a full-size bronze, so it survives only in statuette form. Bronzes 20 in (51 cm) high were cast by Gorham Manufacturing Company in the early 1900s, and a similar bronze is at the Springville Museum of Art in Springville, Utah.[2][3] It was cast in 1986 from a bronze version made by Dallin in 1903 which is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.[4] An example of the 20 in (51 cm) bronze statuette was sold at Christie's in 2006 for US$36,000.[1]

  1. ^ a b Quoted at Cyrus Edwin Dallin (1861-1944), The Protest, Christie's, 2 March 2006
  2. ^ The Protest, from SIRIS.
  3. ^ Protest, 1904, Cyrus Edwin Dallin, Springville Museum of Art
  4. ^ The Protest, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  5. ^ "Protest of the Sioux.", Missouri History Society