The End of the Trail

The End of the Trail, James Earle Fraser’s best-known sculpture, has come to symbolize the genocide of Native American peoples amid relentless westward expansion. In 1894, the year after the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the 17-year-old Fraser, then a student at the School of the Art Institute, produced the first version of this bronze sculpture. (The Art Institute’s sculpture is a later model and cast.) Reenforcing the conception of the so-called vanishing Indian, the work portrays an exhausted Sioux drooping over his equally weary pony; both rider and horse have reached the end of the trail.