1963 Jerome Tiger "Trail of Tears" Paintings
GUEST: My wife and her mother and father, before she was my wife, in 1963, went to Gallup, New Mexico, to the Indian International Tribal Council show and bought that first picture from Jerome Tiger.
APPRAISER: This one?
GUEST: Directly from him at the show. It actually won first prize in the show that year. The second picture, over here, my wife's aunt bought it at the Philbrook in 1963. The history of Jerome Tiger's life and his career is meteoric. He died in '67 in a gunshot situation in Eufaula.
APPRAISER: Yeah, 26 years old.
GUEST: 26 years old, and a tremendous loss. His impact, uh, in the art world was fairly significant. The title of that picture next to you is called The Defeated Ones. He really brought that depth of feeling about what happened to Native Americans really to the forefront.
APPRAISER: Jerome Tiger was born in 1941 in Tahlequah, and I expect the reason he was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, is, that's where the big Indian hospital is. But he's Muscogee Creek, and Tahlequah's the Cherokee capital. Both of these paintings Jerome painted in 1963, which was very early in his career. This is a family that suffered a lot of pain. They've had a lot of tragedy. And the way Jerome got through this, as have his relatives and descendants, like his daughter, is by creating great beauty, and the beauty depicts the pain of their history, as well.
President Andrew Jackson, after a war with the Creek tribe, which involved Sam Houston and David Crockett, where the Creeks were brutally put down, signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 to clear out the Southeast. The first tribe was the Muscogee Creeks. The second the Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and then his supposed allies in the Creek war, the Cherokee, that Sam Houston was married into. They would ride into one of the towns and say, "We're moving you this week. Pack your things, we're done." The worst of it was in the middle of winter, and everyone suffered. About 3,000 to 5,000 Muscogee people died on the Trail of Tears going to Eastern Oklahoma, which at that time was Indian Territory. That's what these depict. I've never seen one this big with this many figures in it. These are military officers on horseback that are part of the removal team. More people dead in the snow. This did not just set the standard for Native American politics in the 1830s. It set the, the tone for Native American politics with the United States government till today. It just changed their world permanently. And it was a very painful change. They're painted on matboard and they're painted with temper paint and watercolors. He changed the approach to Native American painting, in my thinking. He didn't do just outlined color blocks, which was very popular at that time and before. You see more things in diagonal, as opposed to profile. You see things like this man laying face down in the snow. Do you know what these paintings cost?
GUEST: We have the receipt for the one next to you, for $65. On the back of this one, on the tag from the Philbrook, it's $85.
APPRAISER: They used to never come on the market. He was such an agent of change in the short time he was alive. These paintings, in a retail situation, would sell each $20,000 to $25,000. So $40,000 to $50,000 for the pair.
GUEST: Wow. They're wonderful paintings, and they certainly depict a huge tragedy in American history.
$40,000 - $50,000 Retail
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