The Bronco Buster

Frederic Remington’s paintings, prints, and sculptures embodied a settler colonial imagination of the “Wild West.” In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Remington worked, the U.S. government had declared victory in its brutal attempts to colonize Western lands and the Indigenous peoples who steward them. Remington’s works championed the white supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny, which held that the North American landmass was the rightful dominion of white settlers. This ideology justified genocide against Native peoples. In this modestly sized table sculpture, a white cowboy “breaks” a wild horse. On a formal level, the sculpture is a study in dynamic motion. On an ideological level, Remington’s work equates nature with the land, animals, and Indigenous human stewards of the American West. In portraying a white cowhand’s dominance of nature, Remington also attempts to justify white settlers’ genocide of Native peoples.