Wolf
Eagle
Lithograph 1913
by Joe Scheuerle |
Joe Scheuerle
(1873-1948)
Scheuerle's family migrated to the
United States from Vienna, Austria in
1882. He attended public schools in the
old German section of Cincinnati, took
lessons at the Cincinnati Art Academy,
and taught at Ohio Military Institute
and other regional schools, before he
took a steady commercial job at
Cincinnati's famous Strobridge
Lithographing Company, which printed
hundreds of full-color posters for
Barnum & Bailey, Adam Forepaugh, The
Ringling Brothers, and Buffalo Bill's
Wild West Show. Scheuerle put his
drawing talents to work on the colorful
animals and performers featured in these
traveling shows, doing sketches from
life for eventual printing. His work was
literally pasted throughout the United
States. Scheuerle met William F.
(Buffalo Bill) Cody in Chicago when he
went to work for another printing
company. He also made friends with other
performers in the Wild West Show -
especially Iron Tail of the Sioux. He
later traveled to the Pine Ridge
reservation in South Dakota to spend
time and paint him in his home country.
(Iron Tail later died on a train, while
working for Buffalo Bill.) Joe visited
with the Native Americans regularly with
his wife Carolyn and daughter Margaret
until he was sixty-five years old. He
sketched the outstanding Sioux general
Red Cloud, and many other survivors of
the Indian wars of the late Nineteenth
Century. When Glacier National Park was
chartered by Congress in 1910, Scheuerle
was visiting the Blackfeet, and met
Charles M. Russell. They struck up a
long friendship. Joe also worked for
Louis W. Hill, drawing the Mountain Goat
logo for the Great Northern Railway, and
producing some of the commercial art for
Hill's See America First campaign.
Joe Scheuerle's social circle
included artists J. H. Sharp and Joe
DeYong, William S. Hart, the movie
actor, and Will Rogers,
cowboy-turned-Broadway-star.
At his homes in Chicago or New Jersey,
he made all of his acquaintances
welcome. He hosted Many Coups of the
Crow Nation, and even took him to the
Lincoln Park Zoo. |