6/10/2005:
Tomorrow is the birthday of Frank Bennett Fiske, born in southern Dakota Territory in 1883. Frank was just a baby when his father, George, left the military and tried his hand at ranching. The drought of 1888 brought that line of work to an end, and the following spring, George and Louise Fiske moved their family to Fort Yates, where George got a job as a civilian wagon master for the Army.
Frank was seven and a half when Sitting Bull was killed. He remembered standing in front of the Agency store when a wagon procession, escorted by cavalrymen, arrived with the body of the Sioux medicine man. He watched as Sitting Bull was carried into the “dead house,” and watched as the coffin bearing his body was loaded onto a wagon and taken to the military cemetery.
Fiske herded cows for local ranchers as a boy. He also collected beer bottles to sell across the river in the thriving “sin city” of Winona. Among his customers was a legendary saloon-keeper named Mustache Maude. As he got a bit older, Frank signed on as a cabin boy for Missouri River steamers.
From the beginning, Fiske’s surroundings had an indelible impact on his life: the river, the plains, the people. The Lakota/Dakota children with whom he attended school became lifelong friends who would influence a great portion of Fiske’s later work.
Fiske found his true passion while working for a photographer named Stephen Fansler. When Fansler failed to return from one of his travels in 1900, seventeen-year-old Frank convinced the commanding officer to let him set up his own studio. It was just the beginning; over his lifetime, Fiske produced nearly 8,000 photos, mostly of Native Americans. Ultimately, he created the most outstanding collection of Sioux photographs in existence.
No matter how good he was, however, photography didn’t pay the bills. So, Fiske continued working on river steamers during the spring and fall when shipping was at its zenith. During the five years he did this, he documented these seasons with his camera.
Fiske married Angela Cournoyer, great-granddaughter of Forked Horn, a Yanktonaii Sioux chief. The two had met a number of years earlier, but neither was yet ready for marriage – Angela was studying voice and piano at the University in SD, and Frank was getting extra training in a Bismarck photo studio. After WWI, they found each other and were married on his 36th birthday.
Fiske’s 1917 book, The Taming of the Sioux, demonstrates several of his other passions: history, the Wild West and his kinship with the Lakota people. For ten years, he also published the Pioneer Arrow, a Ft. Yates newspaper, in which he often wrote about his friends, including Turkey Track Bill. Fiske’s second book, Life and Death of Sitting Bull, was published in 1933. His last and most ambitious work, History of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, was finished shortly before Fiske's death, but it has not yet been published.
While he never got rich from his photography, Fiske was recognized for his Indian portraits by the American Artists Professional League, which added him to its Honor Roll in 1950. Among his most noted Indian subjects were Rain-in-the-Face, John Grass, One Bull, White Bull and Mary Crawler, a young woman who took part in the charge against Major Reno in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Fiske’s most recognizable portrait, however, can be seen on North Dakota highway signs – a profile portrait of Red Tomahawk, the policeman who shot and killed Sitting Bull . . .when Frank was seven and a half years old.
Sources: Rolfsrud, Erling Nicolai, Extraordinary North Dakotans, Alexandria, Minnesota: Lantern Books, 1954; “Frank Bennett Fiske,” North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame, May 6, 2004, http://www.northdakotacowboy.com; “Fiske, Frank Bennett,” North Dakota Visual Artist Archive, http://www.state.nd.us/arts/artist_archive/F/Fiske_FrankBennett.htm.
Dakota Datebook written by Merry Helm