The Smoky Valley

                    [Illustration: Birger Sandzen]




                           THE SMOKY VALLEY

Reproductions of a Series of Lithographs of the Smoky Valley in Kansas

                           By Birger Sandzen

                  An Introduction by Minna K. Powell

              CARL J. SMALLEY Kansas City, Missouri 1922


Copyright, 1922, by Carl J. Smalley Kansas City, Mo. Published December,
                                 1922


 Printed by the Republican Press, at McPherson, Kansas, in the United
                           States of America




                  Sandzen and His Friend, the Smoky.


When Birger Sandzen looks into the seamed face of a pioneer farmer of
Kansas, he sees the conquest of a spirit. When he looks upon the face of
the Kansas prairie, he sees the conquest of the Wilderness and he makes
the World feel the courage of the Kansas spirit and the power of Kansas
sinews.

An artist who penetrates below the surface of his subject and sees the
soul of it looking out, Birger Sandzen Was foreordained to celebrate in
black and white and in color, the moods and the meaning of the Smoky
Hill River, which winds so peacefully in and out among the farms of
central Kansas.

The Smoky Hill River is not much wider than a creek, and the early
homesteader valued it chiefly because it watered his land and his stock.

Then came Birger Sandzen, artist, who settled near the stream in the
town of Lindsborg. Almost immediately a deep affection sprang up between
the artist and the river. Accustomed to a land of many streams and
lakes, the artist haunted the banks of the river that seemed to speak to
him of home. He served the friendly stream by celebrating its moods and
sudden turnings, and the stream taught the artist by gentle gradations
its own affinity for the prairie.

It was so that Birger Sandzen learned to love the Kansas landscape. But
first he sought the shadowed banks of the Smoky. By sunlight and
moonlight he studied it. Following its graceful windings, he caught the
poetry of Kansas,--the tired droop of cattle as they came to drink at
dusk, the grouping of horses in hillside pastures, huddled cottonwoods
like shy children along the clean banks of the stream.

Finally the river taught him to see the masterpieces of art in the
strong and rugged faces of the pioneer farmers whose land stretched
along the river’s bank.

He saw faces in which courage had drawn with a true hand lines of
self-conquest. He saw the beauty of fingers knotted and bent with much
serving and the glory of dimmed eyes. The pioneer men and women of
Kansas were crowned by Sandzen with the splendor of their deeds.

But always he returned to the quiet river, grateful for the woods that
hugged its banks and were mirrored in the water. His passion for the
Smoky grew and deepened. It became to him the heart of Kansas, and
Kansas, through the Smoky, became his friend.

And always, as he tramped up and down the river’s banks, he saw in
miniature the grandeur he was later on to find in the Rockies and the
mastery he was to sense in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

As he painted outcroppings of rock in the hilly pastures, he was
preparing unconsciously for his work of giving expression to the
gigantic cliffs and mountains of the great West. Tributaries of the
Smoky, overflowing their banks in the spring freshets, ran dry in summer
and provided the artist with beds deeply fissured like their titanic
model, the Grand Canyon.

The hills near Lindsborg, are small replicas of the Rockies. They slope
to the very bank of the Smoky and Birger Sandzen climbed from bank to
summit where he looked out over the wide prairie and saw how lovely it
was.

Since then he has never tired of painting the landscape that is the
heart of Kansas, vibrating with the heroic toil and patience of the past
and the hope of the future.

Thus it is that when Mr. Sandzen makes a study of the moon stealing up
behind the willows before the flush of afternoon is quite gone, he puts
into the picture not only the objects a stranger might see, but also the
deep love he bears the river and the land it has enriched.

As a lithographer Mr. Sandzen has no rivals in this country, perhaps
none anywhere. His love of the open is that of a poet, to whom the
out-of-doors tells something of the immanence of God.

Sometimes his landscapes express the poignant loneliness that broods
over the Kansas prairie. Oftener he sees the delightful homeliness of
the farmsteads, changing the Smoky River Valley from a wilderness to a
place of hearthstones and human happiness.

                                                       MINNA K. POWELL.

[Illustration: Summer]

[Illustration: Stony Pasture With Cottonwood Grove]

[Illustration: The Old Homestead]

[Illustration: Portrait Study]

[Illustration: Twilight]

[Illustration: In The Meadow]]

[Illustration: Home of A Pioneer]

[Illustration: Smoky River]

[Illustration: Hilltop]

[Illustration: Willow]

[Illustration: Horses in a Hilly Pasture]

[Illustration: River Motif]

[Illustration: Abandoned Farmhouse]

[Illustration: Trees and Hills]

[Illustration: Willows by The Smoky River]

[Illustration: Olof Olson’s Homestead]

[Illustration: Pond With Cottonwood Trees]

[Illustration: Hilly Pasture With Cows]

[Illustration: In The Park]

[Illustration: Riverbank]

Copies of the lithographs reproduced in this volume, limited to fifty
proofs each, may be obtained from the publisher. Prices from six to
fifty dollars each.

CARL J. SMALLEY.
Kansas City. Mo.