The Pioneer Woman: Confidence Cast in Bronze

Standing near Ponca City is a seventeen-foot bronze woman in a sunbonnet, her right hand gripping the fingers of a small child beside her, her posture carrying the word that won her sculptor a national competition: confidence.

The statue came out of an unlikely confluence of oil wealth and democratic spectacle. In the mid-nineteen twenties, E.W. Marland, the Ponca City oil baron, decided that the women who had settled the American plains deserved a major monument, and he set about creating one in the manner befitting a man who once controlled a tenth of the world's petroleum reserves. He organized a national competition.

In nineteen twenty-six and nineteen twenty-seven, Marland invited twelve prominent American sculptors to submit scale models. The models toured to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, and Oklahoma City. More than seven hundred fifty thousand people viewed the models, and more than one hundred twenty thousand votes were cast by the American public. The winner was the English-born sculptor Bryant Baker, whose entry he had titled Confidence, a striding woman leading a child into the unknown, the motion forward and unhesitating.

Baker's commission came with a one-hundred-thousand-dollar prize. Construction of the full-scale bronze took until nineteen thirty. The dedication ceremony on April twenty-second, nineteen thirty, drew forty thousand visitors to Ponca City. Will Rogers, himself Oklahoma-born and nationally famous as a humorist and commentator, paid tribute to the pioneer women of the plains. President Herbert Hoover and Secretary of War Patrick Hurley addressed the crowd via radio broadcast from Washington.

The total cost of the project reached roughly three hundred fifty thousand dollars. The statue stands today on the same site where it was dedicated, one of the few American monuments created through a genuinely mass public vote. A museum alongside it holds the twelve original competition models, which is to say the twelve paths the Pioneer Woman almost took.