Protest of the Sioux

Protest of the Sioux, also known as The Protest, is a 1904 equestrian statue by Cyrus Dallin. It was the third of four important statues of indigenous people on horseback commonly known as The Epic of the Indian, which also includes A Signal of Peace (1890), The Medicine Man (1899), and Appeal to the Great Spirit (1908).

The statue depicts a mounted Sioux warrior wearing a war bonnet defiantly shaking his right fist. According to Rell G. Francis, it depicts "a Sioux chief vigorously protesting the confiscation of his lands and buffalo by the white man".^[1]

A monumental version made of staff was exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904, where it won a gold medal. The temporary statue was retained after the exhibition, but rapidly deteriorated. Unlike the three other statues in the series, Protest of the Sioux was never cast as a full-size bronze, so it survives only in statuette form. Bronzes 20 in (51 cm) high were cast by Gorham Manufacturing Company in the early 1900s, and a similar bronze is at the Springville Museum of Art in Springville, Utah.^[2][3] It was cast in 1986 from a bronze version made by Dallin in 1903 which is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.^[4] An example of the 20 in (51 cm) bronze statuette was sold at Christie's in 2006 for US$36,000.^[1]

• 
  1912 illustration from The New England Magazine^[5]
• 
  Album page with inscription

• 
  Signal of Peace (1890)
• 
  The Medicine Man (1899)
• 
  Appeal to the Great Spirit (1908)

References