Bob Scriver; Sculptor of Bronzes on the Old West

Bob Scriver, sculptor reared on Montana’s Blackfeet Indian reservation and whose more than 1,000 bronzes chronicled tribal and other western history, has died. He was 84.

Scriver, also a musician and a taxidermist, died Friday of heart problems at his studio in the reservation town of Browning, Mont.

The sculptor donated his “Explorers at Giant Springs,” a statue of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, Mont., when it opened last year. He had previously created a bronze of the early 19th century explorers with their Indian guide Sacajawea for the town of Fort Benton, Mont.

“I’ve been a student of Lewis and Clark since I was knee-high,” said Scriver last spring, after he hauled the newer bronze from Browning to Great Falls in his pickup truck.

Scriver also sculpted the portrait statue of the western artist Charles Russell for the Charlie Russell Museum in Great Falls. An award at the annual Russell auction was named in Scriver’s honor.

Two of his other well-known historic statues are those of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody in Cody, Wy., and of all-around rodeo cowboy champion Bill Linderman at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.

In 1959, the chairman of the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council asked Scriver to create 12 statues illustrating tribal culture. The challenge prompted the sculptor over the next 20 years to fashion 53 statues in bronze, plaster or fiberglass depicting 1,200 years of Blackfeet history. The statues recall such events as the introduction of the horse, which the Blackfeet called “elk-dogs,” as well as scenes of religious ceremonies and daily life.

Scriver named the series “No More Buffalo,” taking the name from a single work--an elderly Blackfeet Indian clutching a spear and gazing futilely across empty plains. Scriver used an elderly member of the tribe, Ed Big Beaver, as his model.

Scriver was born in Browning, where his father operated Browning Mercantile, the first non-Indian business allowed on the reservation. The artist aroused Blackfeet ire in 1990 when he sold to the Alberta Provincial Museum about 1,500 tribal artifacts traded or given to father and son over the years.

As a child, Scriver molded small animal figures. But rather than art, he studied music, earning a bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Dickinson State University in Bismarck, N.D. The university awarded him its highest honor, the Blue Feather Award, in 1995.

Scriver remained in music professionally for 17 years, teaching and playing cornet.

Because of his early familiarity with the anatomy of animals, he also taught himself taxidermy.

At age 42 in 1956, he returned to art, and for the remainder of his life concentrated on sculpting. That same year, he established his unusual Bob Scriver Wildlife Museum and Hall of Bronze in Browning.

Outside the museum stands one of Scriver’s large bronze statues of a bucking horse and rider. Inside, the ground floor is jampacked with stuffed grizzly bears, elk, moose and smaller animals. And every nook and cranny of the basement is filled with his bronzes of wildlife and Blackfeet Indians.

Scriver is survived by his wife, Lorraine.