(From private collection, Harvard, IL)
Eldridge (sic) Ayer Burbank

Aug (sic) 10, 1858 March 21, 1949

From

The Pony Express News

Placerville, CA

April 1949

No MAN IN the history of the West painted more Indian Chiefs from life, or held their friendship in confidence more than did E. A. Burbank, America's famous artist who passed away at San Francisco at the age of 90. In the middle 1870s Burbank, as a youth in his teens, made a trip to St. Paul looking for Indians to draw, or paint, where he later made arrangements to work for the Northern Pacific Railroad drawing sketches of new settlements along the route of the new railroad into the northwest. In the 1880s he went to Munich where he became a student under San Francisco's great Toby Rosenthal who had been sent to the Bavarian capital in 1873 by his sponsor Tiburcio Parrott. In the middle 1890s Burbank penetrated the Cherokee country of Oklahoma, and Indian Territory, where he eventually gained the friendship of Geronimo, famous Apache Chief in captivity. All other paintings of Geronimo, or Chief Joseph by other artists, were done from photographs, as they would not allow any other painter but Burbank to make their portrait, an honor beyond mere mention. In the late 1890s the famous Indian painter made his appearance again in the Sioux country where at Pine Ridge, and Standing Rock agencies his brush moved daily throughout the years on portraits of all living Chiefs who had participated in the Custer battle at the Little Big Horn. In the late 1890s Burbank spent much time with the Nez Perces Indians, where he made a bosom Pal out of Chief Joseph, whose military genius he greatly admired, often comparing it with General MacArthur's, which prompted him to make a drawing of America's leading General in 1947. During the present century Burbank spent much time in California, Arizona, and New Mexico, drawing and painting -Digger, Navajo, Zuni, Moqui, Apache, and Hopi Indians. The towns of Burbank and Remington, Oklahoma, were named after the two contemporaries who were painting in that region at the same time.