Book Review: "Bronze Inside and Out. A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver,"
by Mary Strachan Scriver

Calgary University Press, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. 2007. $44.95.

Review by Martin Murie

This is a book that had to be written, because if it hadn't we would be left with an important gap in art history. Gaps are hard to fill with the real stuff: authenticity. This book is a work of authenticity. Two talented people, Bob Scriver and Mary Strachan met and married and for more than ten years worked together in and at the making of art from the ground up.

Bob, musician and band leader as a youth in Browning, had that feel for art; he could grasp the architecture of animal and human bodies from his life as hunter, horseman, taxidermist and western hands-on worker.

It was hard physical and mental work, casting bronze. The book is organized around precarious stages, from the first plastilene model to the final patina of that wonderful changeful metal, bronze. Each stage leading to the pour of hot, molten metal to the subtle working of the cooled bronze to bring out color and patina, form the armature of the book, but there are other themes too that move back and forth in time, small town daily life; the lives of white settlers on Blackfeet land; lives of Blackfeet men and women, the eastern world intruding.

I got lost in the genealogy sections. I always get lost in those places, but I picked up key relationships along the way and Mary's comment on the small western town, my early habitat, got me into gear.

"Culture, especially in a small town, can be a hard mold, forcing compliance with local custom. But always there are fault lines, boundaries, visible and invisible, where the local norms are susceptible to being broken open."

Mary, "still trying to be a writer," had a column in the "Glacier Reporter" called the Merry Scribbler. When she exposed the mayor of Browning's illegal extension of city water to his motel outside town limits, the mayor called Bob in, gave him an ultimatum. Make his wife quit writing or be fired from the magistrate's job. "Get that woman under control." Bob quit the magistrate job, but Mary quit her column too.

"I attended my first town meeting though Bob didn't allow me to participate. He spoke himself, but as City Magistrate and Justice of the Peace it was his obligation. Of course, his idea was maintenance of the status quo."

The book's cast is large, men and women living in intensely local as well as western focus, art fashions and social changes coming and going, history in the making. Mary's writing maintains this context, even when commenting on individuals, personalities, landscapes, animals wild and half-wild. The writing is direct, sensuous.


Buffalo drive.

"The day of the drive a cloud came down to the ground and everything was shrouded in fog. We could only tell where the buffalo were because of their feet swishing the balsamroot. It was like a ghost roundup. We hardly dared separate more than a few feet from each other because we lost sight of each other."

A death in Browning.

"Sullivan had a new baby but she caught pneumonia and died. He and the mother, who was quite a bit younger, were heartbroken. We took money and food up to their little shack on Moccasin Flats just as the rosary ended, and then went with the crowd out to the cemetery where the priest blessed the small soul and sent it on its way. It was the first time I had faced the precariousness of life for people on the reservation, how easy it was for part of a family to slip away.

"It was the first time I heard the old-time wailing, like Irish women mourning sons lost at sea."


Mary doesn't hold back from the differences between herself and her husband, their clashes and resentments as well as the tenderness that persisted after the divorce, after Bob's re-marriage. Years of struggle together builds a comradeship that doesn't go away.

"Essentially, Bob was a conformist, and he was a little naive--at least I read about things in books. Yet his local reputation was potent. He was considered a major womanizer, insatiable. . . The locals would never understand that his secret was tenderness. He seduced women by treating them as a loving mother would treat a child, caressing and praising. Since he didn't consciously realize what he was doing, he didn't know when he stopped and turned away."

The book' builds the complex context in which Mary and Bob worked and played. When they went into the mountains on a deer hunt with two horses in a half ton pickup and came close to death. When they helped round up buffalo from open rangelands and Mary was caught in the lunging path of a buffalo herd. When ... in fact each event, little or big, is told in a spirit of adventure interlaced by rebel thoughts, humor, exasperation, gratitude. Sometimes I could hardly wait to finish digging vehicles out of the latest snowfall to get back to the book.

As a boy Bob admired Charlie Russell. Later there were friendships or acquaintances with painters, wood carvers, sculptors. Bronze casting work, sometimes at a crucial stage, was subject to interruption by tourists visiting the Museum of Montana Wildlife where Bob's taxidermy mounts were on display. These included a snarling grizzly rearing on its hind legs and a superbly-mounted moose gazing calmly into the eyes of curious tourists.

Fame came. Reputation in New York City led to major art centers offering contracts. Bob and Mary spent time in Cody at the Buffalo Bill Museum that is now a major place of western display. Mary's account of their hobnobbing with artists and moneyed people is hilarious and serious by turns. Later, in New York, they met Malvina Hoffman, the woman who made the great series of portraits of the world's peoples.

Bob's life work includes religious bronzes, portraits of Blackfeet, especially the remarkable piece entitled "No More Buffalo," and historical figures such as the Lewis and Clark work. As Mary insists, his work cannot be confined to the category, Cowboy Art.

Among the illistrations in the book, my favorites include the sheepherder and his dog, and the horse looking curiously down at a cowboy slumped on the ground, the horse's musculature modelled superbly, but not obtrusively. These bronzes have "mood".

"Bob Scriver never studied anthropology, never had a humanities background, and was not well-read. He knew music, art and his home ground."

. . .

"The event I remember most personally and deeply was very simple. One Indian Days we had put up our lodge and slept out at the campgrounds. It was the summer I served everyone orange juice with 7-Up in it. which Molly Kicking Woman said 'Made it taste all different ways,' because of the carbonation. The grocery store sold real buffalo meat, which we roasted on sticks and folded into bread instead of using plates. Bob had rounded up Indian paraphernalia for us and I had made the girls red flannel dresses with 'silver' thimbles and brass grommets for decoration. (Bob) wore his buckskins originally made for him when he conducted the Tribal Band.

"It was one of the last Indian Days to have a real bonfire in the middle. Indian Days was simpler then. It was darker and there were fewer people. When the dancing was getting close to the end, we dressed up and went to the circle. An Owl Dance, the equivalent of 'Good Night, Irene,' was just forming. Everyone made a big circle with their arms around the person on either side of them and everyone stepped sidewise to the beat of the drums. Nancy Tailfeathers held out her arm to invite us into the circle and we danced as equals with everyone else. It was exactly the community Bob sought."

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"Bronze Inside And Out" is available now in bookstores. Lee Booksellers in Lincoln, Nebraska pays shipping charges and the phone is not plagued with "press this, press that." Toll free number: 1-888-665-0999 (See Links page).