The Mooney Grove End of Trail: A Monument to Conquest

James Earle Fraser's sculpture End of the Trail depicts a Native American warrior slumped over an exhausted horse, both figures bent under a weight they can no longer carry. Fraser created the work in nineteen fifteen for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. It became one of the most reproduced images in American art, popular far in excess of most sculpture from the same period, because it told a story that its audience wanted told: the story of Indigenous defeat as inevitable, natural, and complete.

A full-scale cast of the sculpture stands in Mooney Grove Park in Visalia, in Tulare County. Mooney Grove is a shaded valley oak park established in nineteen oh nine, and the Tulare County Museum is on the grounds. The placement of End of the Trail in this specific park, in this specific county, gives the image a context that Fraser presumably did not intend and that the park's interpretive materials, according to the available research, do not address.

The Tachi-Yokut Tribe maintains an active federal tribal government at the Santa Rosa Rancheria roughly thirty miles to the west. They have not disappeared. The narrative that End of the Trail illustrates, that the story of Native peoples in the American West is a story with a completed ending, is contradicted by the fact of their continued, present existence.

What the sculpture actually documents is the imagination of nineteen fifteen, not the reality of Tulare County. A monument to a fiction of completion standing forty miles from a living tribal government is not an irony the park has chosen to interpret, but it is an irony the landscape makes available to anyone driving through it with their eyes open.