About a month ago, a proud Navajo and good friend of mine, Tom Lovell, staged a protest of sorts on the grounds of the newly renovated Utah Capitol.
Near a patch of dirt where the refurbished statue of Massasoit, the Indian chief renowned for making peace and eating turkey with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, is to be returned within the next few weeks, Lovell said the statue should instead be replaced by one that honors Utah Indians.
"It isn't appropriate," Lovell said as he pointed out that Massasoit didn't belong to a tribe indigenous to the West. "Will the Utah Legislature ever honor any Utah tribes and apologize for the treatment that was forced on them?"
His point prompted the obvious question: Exactly why has a Wampanoag Indian, and not a Ute, Paiute, Goshute, Navajo or Shoshone, been standing in front of the state Capitol since 1921?
Researching the history of how the statue arrived in Utah in the first place produced one very satisfying answer to Lovell's concern, as well as an astonishing revelation (at least it was to me).
First, history's answer to Lovell: The statue of Massasoit not only honors all Indians, including Utah's tribes, but it honors a legendary Utah sculptor who made it part of his life's work to make sure Native Americans were presented with dignity and respect.
The sculptor's name is Cyrus Dallin. He was born in Springville in 1861 and raised in a farmhouse with adobe walls. He spent his childhood playing with Ute Indian friends along the banks of the streams, where he first molded clay into recognizable objects.
People took note of the boy's rudimentary sculptings when they were displayed at the local fair, and soon he was off to Boston to learn to be a sculptor, his passage paid by local benefactors.
He studied in Boston and Paris, settled in Massachusetts, and over the next 60 years, until his death in Arlington, Mass., in 1944, produced some 260 acclaimed objects of art. His Paul Revere statue stands outside the Old North Church in Boston. His Isaac Newton sits in the Library of Congress in Washington. In the 1880s he was commissioned by LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff to produce the Angel Moroni for the top of the Salt Lake Temple. (Dallin's family left the LDS Church when he was young and he later became a Unitarian; but of the 12 1/2-foot angel that became the model for all LDS temples, he said, "My angel Moroni brought me nearer to God than anything I ever did.")
Of all his sculptures, none reflected greater care and affection than those of Native Americans.
In a sketch about Dallin's life, Wayne Craven of the University of Delaware wrote, "When Dallin was a boy, American Indians were often depicted as brutal savages. Dallin was among the first to see a more transcendent character. He became the sculptor who, more than any other, captured the grave dignity and nobility of the American Indian."
Dignified Indians can be seen in Dallin's "Medicine Man" statue in Philadelphia, in "Signal of Peace" in Chicago and "The Appeal to the Great Spirit" in Boston.
Most noble of all is Massasoit, the Wampanoag chief whose kind treatment of the Pilgrims created the tradition of Thanksgiving and, not incidentally, saved the white race from early extinction in America.
It was overlooking Plymouth Rock that the original Massasoit sculpture was positioned in 1921 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the peace treaty Massasoit negotiated there.
Dallin made three copies of the statue. One went to Kansas City. One went to Brigham Young University, where it stands southwest of the library. And one went to the Capitol in the state he never forgot.
"I have received two college degrees, besides medals galore, but my greatest honor of all is that I came from Utah," Dallin said on his last visit to Utah in 1942.
The statue of Massasoit, then, honors both Utah's finest sculptor and the American Indians he grew up with and loved.
Who could have a problem with that?
As for the stunning revelation, it is this: Cyrus Dallin won a bronze medal in the team archery event at the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis.
He won his medal eight years before Alma Richards won gold in the high jump in Stockholm in 1912 — long believed to be the first medal won by a native-born Utahn.
In years of Olympic writing and research, I had never come across that fact — until I read the fine print in the biography of Utah's famous artist.
It's amazing what you can find out while you're trying to find out something else.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.