Arsenic and Old Hides: Plunder, Preservation, and Edward Kemeys’ Last Buffalo

Over six thousand pounds of “the finest bronze” were used to create American animal sculptor Edward Kemeys’ 1887 buffalo head, then the largest casting ever attempted in the United States. Installed on a Union Pacific railway bridge, the head greeted west-bound passengers crossing the Missouri River. Resembling a taxidermic trophy, Kemeys’ bronze declared American industry’s mastery over the West and victory over the exigencies of life itself. However, like the bison it ostensibly memorialized, this confident monument to permanence would disappear from the plains in the coming years, transmuted into munitions for the Great War.

This paper approaches Kemeys’ head as the confluence of two extractive enterprises: the mining of the American west and the plunder of the American bison. In its materiality, the sculpture was a product of the American copper industry. Overlooking the city of Omaha, the head gazed at an urban landscape shaped by the unequally distributed and still lasting ecological impact of copper smelting. Likewise, in its form, the head recalls the frenzy to preserve the endangered buffalo by forcefully bringing it, dead or alive, into the protective custody of white America. In monopolizing the artistic resource the bison body represented, the so-called preservation of this species destroyed Indigenous material-political worlds and naturalized a distinctly Western, literally toxic approach to animal art. Like the arsenic-unleashing practices of taxidermy, metallurgy, and art conservation, Kemeys’ head embodied the poisonous entanglements of American nature and American art.