Heading: (Photographs)
Author: Worden, Willard
Title: End of the Trail
Place Published: San Francisco
Publisher:Willard E. Worden
Date Published: c. 1915
Description:

Hand-colored gelatin silver print. Image: 48.5x34.2 cm (19¼x13½); in frame: 58.7x44.5 cm (23x17½").

Willard Worden was a Philadelphia artist and photographer associated with the circle of Robert Henri and John Sloan. Around the turn of the century he set up a photography studio in San Francisco, publishing a catalog of San Francisco views in 1904. Several of his most acclaimed photographs document the wreckage of the city after the fire and earthquake of 1906. Worden was an official photographer of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the present photograph being one of his celebrated night scenes from the 1915 fair. The End of the Trail is a sculpture by James Earle Fraser. Fraser first modeled the subject in 1894. A large plaster version of the work was displayed at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and was awarded a gold medal.

Fraser based The End of the Trail on his experience as a boy in the Dakota Territory. His memoirs state, "as a boy, I remembered an old Dakota trapper saying, 'The Indians will someday be pushed into the Pacific Ocean.'" Later he stated "the idea occurred to me of making an Indian which represented his race reaching the end of the trail, at the edge of the Pacific. "When the Exposition closed, bronze was not available for casting statues because of World War I and the plaster sculpture was thrown into a mud pit in Marina Park near the site of the Exhibition. The plaster version was rescued in 1919 and moved to Mooney Grove Park, near Visalia, California.

Some apparent edgewear, but unexamined out of frame; very good or better.