The Smoky Valley
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Birger Sandzen
THE SMOKY VALLEY
Reproductions of a Series of Lithographs of the Smoky Valley
in Kansas
By
Birger Sandzen
An Introduction by Minna K. Powell
CARL J. SMALLEY
Kansas City, Missouri
1922
Copyright, 1922, by Carl J. Smalley
Kansas City, Mo.
Published December, 1922
Printed by the Republican Press,
at McPherson, Kansas,
in the UnitedStates of America
Sandzen and His Friend, the Smoky.
When Birger Sandzen looks into the seamed face of a pioneer farmer ofKansas, he sees the conquest of a spirit. When he looks upon the face ofthe Kansas prairie, he sees the conquest of the Wilderness and he makesthe World feel the courage of the Kansas spirit and the power of Kansassinews.
An artist who penetrates below the surface of his subject and sees thesoul of it looking out, Birger Sandzen Was foreordained to celebrate inblack and white and in color, the moods and the meaning of the SmokyHill River, which winds so peacefully in and out among the farms ofcentral Kansas.
The Smoky Hill River is not much wider than a creek, and the earlyhomesteader valued it chiefly because it watered his land and his stock.
Then came Birger Sandzen, artist, who settled near the stream in thetown of Lindsborg. Almost immediately a deep affection sprang up betweenthe artist and the river. Accustomed to a land of many streams andlakes, the artist haunted the banks of the river that seemed to speak tohim of home. He served the friendly stream by celebrating its moods andsudden turnings, and the stream taught the artist by gentle gradationsits own affinity for the prairie.
It was so that Birger Sandzen learned to love the Kansas landscape. Butfirst he sought the shadowed banks of the Smoky. By sunlight andmoonlight he studied it. Following its graceful windings, he caught thepoetry of Kansas,—the tired droop of cattle as they came to drink atdusk, the grouping of horses in hillside pastures, huddled cottonwoodslike shy children along the clean banks of the stream.
Finally the river taught him to see the masterpieces of art in thestrong and rugged faces of the pioneer farmers whose land stretchedalong the river’s bank.
He saw faces in which courage had drawn with a true hand lines ofself-conquest. He saw the beauty of fingers knotted and bent with muchserving and the glory of dimmed eyes. The pioneer men and women ofKansas were crowned by Sandzen with the splendor of their deeds.
But always he returned to the quiet river, grateful for the woods thathugged its banks and were mirrored in the water. His passion for theSmoky grew and deepened. It became to him the heart of Kansas, andKansas, through the Smoky, became his friend.
And always, as he tramped up and down the river’s banks, he saw inminiature the grandeur he was later on to find in the Rockies and themastery he was to sense in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.
As he painted outcroppings of rock in the hilly pastures, he waspreparing unconsciously for his work of giving expression to thegigantic cliffs and mountains of the g