When Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show came to Paris to perform, Utah sculptor Cyrus Edwin Dallin had several Indians pose for him as models. In 1889, he began working on a sculpture depicting an Indian chief on horseback holding a staff with a feather on it, symbolizing peaceful intentions. Dallin named the artwork “A Signal of Peace” and displayed it at the Salon of 1890 in Paris. In 1893, Dallin’s sculpture was exhibited in Chicago at the World’s Columbian Exposition. The following year, Judge Lambert Tree purchased the monument for placement in Lincoln Park. Judge Tree wrote that Indians had been “oppressed and robbed by government agents, deprived of their lands… shot down by soldiery in wars fomented for the purpose of plundering and destroying their race, and finally drowned by the ever westward tide of population.”
Monday’s Monument: Signal of Peace, Chicago, Illinois
