The Alarm, Lincoln Park. Photo courtesy of Chicago Park District.
Over the last year or so, growing awareness of the long history of racial injustice in America has brought new attention to the symbolism of public monuments. After demonstrations and defacement led Mayor Lori Lightfoot to remove Chicago’s three Christopher Columbus statues last summer, she organized an advisory committee to assess monuments and memorials throughout the city. The committee recently posted the Chicago Monuments Project website identifying 41 artworks and plaques that warrant public discussion and potential future actions that may, in some cases, include removal. The project seeks “to address the hard truths about Chicago’s racial history, confront the ways in which that history has and has not been memorialized, and develop a framework for marking public space that elevates new ways to memorialize Chicago’s history.”
Left: Columbus Monument in Grant Park, ca. 1940. Chicago Park District Records: Special Collections, Chicago Public Library, Photographs. Right: Base of the monument after the bronze figure of Columbus was removed on July 24, 2020. Courtesy of James Conkis, Wikicommons.
More than a quarter of the 41 artworks and plaques identified by the Chicago Monuments Project relate to the lives and treatment of Native Americans. Some are overtly racist, such as a 1937 Chicago’s Charter Jubilee plaque that commemorates the 1816 Indian Boundary Lines that forced the removal of Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi tribes from a large swath of what is now Chicago and adjacent suburbs. But other historical monuments were at least intended as respectful tributes to Native Americans. I would like to bring attention to one that falls into the second category—The Alarm.
View of The Alarm, with Ryerson’s inscription on the base. Photo by Julia Bachrach, 2010.
One of the oldest outdoor public artworks in Chicago, the Alarm was erected in Lincoln Park in 1884. It was the gift of early Chicagoan Martin Ryerson who achieved great wealth, in part due to his friendships with Ottawa Indians in Michigan in the 1830s and 1840s. The monument depicts an Ottawa family. The male figure stands, looking out towards the horizon, scanning for signs of danger. On one side, his wife is crouched and holding their baby on a cradleboard, and on the other, the family’s dog takes an alert and protective stance. The inscription on the sculpture’s base reads "To the Ottawa Nation of Indians, my early friends."
D. Martin Ryerson. Photo courtesy of Muskegon County, Michigan MIGenWeb Project.
Advertisement for Ryerson, Hills & Co. From Muskegon and its Resources, 1884.
Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Martin Ryerson (1818-1887) was an ambitious young man with few educational opportunities. At the age of 16, he left home and went to Detroit where he became a clerk for a fur trading firm. Learning the Chippewa and Ottawa languages, Ryerson formed close friendships with Indians and was soon trading on his own. According to a Chicago Tribune obituary entitled “Pioneer Passes Away,” Ryerson “began to tramp the State of Michigan from one end to the other.” This article suggests that his “extensive knowledge of the geography of Michigan made him the best known among the Indians of any white man in the state, and fixed indelibly upon his mind the ultimate value of the pine lands.”
In 1839, Ryerson went to Muskegon and found work at a saw mill. Within a few years, he bought the firm and began “to manufacture lumber on his own account.” He married a Native American woman, and in 1843, the couple had a daughter, Mary Ryerson Butts. Martin Ryerson’s first wife apparently died sometime before 1850, when he married Louisa Duvernay. (She died several years later, most likely during childbirth.)
Mary Ann Campua Ryerson, University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-07378.
Ryerson’s third wife, Mary Ann Campua of Grand Rapids, was from a prominent Michigan fur trading family. In 1856, while in Muskegon, Mary Ann Ryerson gave birth to a son, Martin Antoine Ryerson. By then Ryerson’s lumber operation was headquartered in Chicago, so he moved the family there. Their wealth continued to grow, especially after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Not only did Ryerson sell vast amounts of lumber used to rebuild the city, but he also made extensive investments in downtown real estate during that time. By the mid-1870s, the family lived in the fashionable Grand Pacific Hotel at the corner of Jackson Boulevard and Clark Street.
Grand Pacific Hotel, 1912. Courtesy of Wikicommons.
John J. Boyle. Courtesy of Wikimedia.
When Ryerson was in his early fifties, he decided to commission a monument to the Ottawa Indians with whom he had been close as a young man. An article that appeared in the Inter Ocean in 1892 explains that twelve years earlier, while visiting Paris, Ryerson met with John J. Boyle (1851-1917), a Philadelphia artist who was completing his studies at the École des Beaux Arts. The article states that Ryerson told Boyle that he owned land in Muskegon where the bodies of “Indians among whom he had spent his boyhood and his early manhood” had been buried, and, that he wanted this to become a small park would have a sculptural group of Indians as its centerpiece.
This illustration of the Alarm appeared in the Inter Ocean on December 22, 1889.
According to the Inter Ocean, Ryerson had previously met with other artists who did not understand what he was looking for. Apparently, he felt that these sculptors had misconceptions about Indians, thus producing “sketches [that] looked as if their subjects were sneaking to get a shot at a man.” In contrast to those proposals, Ryerson was very pleased with the drawings and clay models that Boyle presented to him, and so the Chicagoan soon hired the young sculptor for what would be his first major commission. (John J. Boyle went on to have an impressive career that included installations at the Library of Congress and University of Pennsylvania.)
Boyle soon returned to America. The Inter Ocean reported that he then “resolved to truly understand what he was doing” and so “he went immediately to the northwestern part of Minnesota where there were many of the Ottawas, they being the people Mr. Ryerson wished most to represent.” In addition to the bronze figures, Boyle would create four bronze bas relief panels, one for each side of the monument’s base, depicting various scenes of Ottawa life.
View of The Alarm with its original bas relief plaques, ca. 1925. Chicago Park District Records: Special Collections, Chicago Public Library, Photographs.
Ryerson was so enthralled by Boyle’s conception that he decided he wanted to install the monument in a Chicago park. In 1883, the Lincoln Park Commissioners agreed to accept Ryerson’s gift. They selected a prominent location for the statue in the middle of Ridge Drive, just east of South Pond. (By this time, only one other monument, the Drexel Fountain, had been erected on parkland in Chicago.)
“The Indian Group for Lincoln Park, Chicago,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, December 22, 1883.
John J. Boyle’s Stone Age in America, Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. Photo courtesy of Wikicommons.
The Alarm was cast in Philadelphia, and prior to having it shipped to Chicago, Boyle displayed the artwork in his studio. After seeing the bronze figures, members of the Fairmount Park Art Association commissioned Boyle to create a Native American sculptural group for their park. Called Stone Age in America, the monument was installed in Fairmount Park in 1888.
Chicago’s sculpture was dedicated in Lincoln Park on May 5, 1884. In presenting the monument, Martin Ryerson stated that the statue commemorates the “Ottawa race of Indians, with whom I spent several years of my early manhood. While with them, I saw much that was good and noble, and I looked upon them as my friends…. I present this monument to the citizens of Chicago, trusting that the Commissioners of Lincoln Park and their successors will keep it in good condition, so it may afford those who are to come after a memento of a noble race.”
View of The Alarm after it was moved in 1974. (By this time, the missing bronze plaques had been replaced with granite ones and a bronze peace pipe, originally held by the standing figure, had been stolen.) Chicago Park District Records: Special Collections, Chicago Public Library, Photographs.
The Alarm stood at its original site until 1974, when the Chicago Park District moved it to make way for a Lincoln Park Zoo expansion project. Park District officials chose a new location near Lake Shore Drive just north of A Signal of Peace, another historic monument dedicated to Native Americans. A couple of years earlier, vandals had stolen all four bas relief plaques from the base of the Alarm. The Chicago Park District hired an artist to create granite panels that interpreted Boyle’s original bronze ones.
Top: One of John J. Boyle’s original four bas relief plaques that embellished its base, this one was entitled “The Peace Pipe.” Photograph by Percy H. Sloan, Courtesy of Newberry Library. Bottom: Recreated “The Peace Pipe” plaque. Photo courtesy of Chicago Park District.
The Chicago Monuments Project is actively seeking participation and public feedback, so please consider becoming involved. As the advisory committee begins to make recommendations to take action, I’d like to point to what could be an excellent model for future interpretive efforts in Chicago. The Association for Public Art has developed a program to interpret artworks in Philadelphia including Fairmount Park’s Stone Age in America. If you have a few moments, please listen to the Museum Without Walls audio recording that is posted on the monument’s webpage.