ON FRANK DOLPHIN,"RED" COWBOY: BRIEF REFLECTIONS AND A VERY RARE PHOT0

There's an excellent oil painting that we always carry with us wherever we live:  a portrait of myself at age 18 done at my home town of Flagstaff, sitting, in Levi jacket, looking a little somber.  Now and then, I look at it on our living room wall (next to a 57 year old Stetson of mine) and I ask, "Well, kid, if you knew then what lay ahead of you on Life's Trail, would you have plunged ahead -- or just gone deeper down into Sycamore Canyon?"  My  answer to myself, of course, is obvious as things turned out, and, presently at 78 years, there's still another several miles to go.

If you haven't already seen the photo, here it is as "Young Red:"  http://www.hunterbear.org/this_oil_painting_of_me_was_done.htm

The painting was done by "cowboy artist," Frank Dolphin, a man of many fascinating places and many rich experiences.  He did the painting and did it very well.  But he also nurtured some potentially radical social justice seeds that were developing in me and he planted more than a few of his own.  He could do that far more effectively than a "proper" Left intellectual ever could since, as a rural Westerner, he held certain values unique to our region, many of which I carry as well.  Those seeds all produced a fine radical garden in me a few years later, about the time I got out of the U.S. Army.  Attached is a rare photo of Frank as a working cowpuncher, before he and I joined forces.  The formal attachment is a little small but, at the very bottom of this message, the photo is a good deal larger with more obvious detail.

Frank is one of several people -- now sadly gone -- to whom I owe a considerable personal debt.  In a very nicely done and full essay on myself, Professor Roy Wortman, History, Kenyon College, has this in the initial portion.  (The essay was published in the Journal of Indigenous Thought, Saskatchewan Indian Federated College (now First Nations University), Winter, 2001.)

"I Consider Myself a Real Red:" 
The Social Thought of American Civil Rights Organizer John R. (Salter) Hunter Gray

Beyond family, Hunter Gray is quick to single out others who helped shape his social concerns: Ned A. Hatathali (Navajo), his father's art student and close family friend at then Arizona State College (now Northern Arizona University), founder and first president of the Navajo Community College (now Dine College); Frank Dolphin, left-wing farm worker organizer in the 1930s, volunteer in the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War, and also an artist who was a student of his father; C.E. Payne, on of the founders of the IWW in 1905, an editor and organizer who mentored Hunter Gray in the Pacific Northwest in the mid - 1950s, and a person who asserted that traditional Native tribalism offered industrial and urban civilization a "trail to utopian development." Finally, another IWW, Fred Thompson, a Canadian of Scots and Micmac heritage originally from St. John, New Brunswick, also influenced Salter. Thompson, a socialist in Canada, settled in the United States and became an editor and organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World based in Chicago, but active throughout the United States. He was instrumental in assisting in organizing the Metal and Machinery Workers Industrial Union 440 in Cleveland, Ohio after World War Two (Wortman: 1985). Thompson, editor of the IWW Industrial Worker, gave Hunter Gray in his "hot-eyed kid" days this advice: "You have to accurately describe the massive injustice all around you and sensibly discuss basic curative approaches and solutions." Hunter Gray followed that advice all his professional life.

A short biographical sketch of Frank Dolphin, from a much longer piece of mine:

COMING OF AGE INTO THE RED:  A SYCAMORE MEMOIR (HUNTER GRAY)


His old Stetson pulled hard down just above the eyes in his weather-lined
face, Frank took a stick and drew three circles in the sandy soil on the
edge of our greasewood campfire -- its low, dancing flames keeping at bay
the chilly winter cold of that semi-desert Arizona night.

"Lenin saw it this way," he told me.  "These are the things that strangle
the people.  Capitalism. Government.  Church."  And he then drew a complex
of intricate, interactive lines between and around the Circles.

And, just a few yards to the west of us, we could hear in its little gorge
the rushing water of the Verde River, just joined by Sycamore Creek which
came down from the north out of that massive, splendid and vasty wilderness
area called Sycamore Canyon -- my own great traditional hunting region.

And only a few miles to our west loomed Mingus Mountain on which blinked the
lights of the old copper camp of Jerome. Now -- with the ore just played
out -- it was headed toward ghost and artist town status. But it was once
the hell-blasting scene of legendary Wobbly and then other class war
struggles -- some of which went well into my own Teen years.

I was a young Native -- 18 -- when that campfire burned on the Verde that winter night.  And I got a very thorough lesson in class struggle ideology -- not from a college
prof-type in a suit -- but from a Levi-clad cowpuncher turned artist because
of a back broken from a horse throw.

He was, of course, a great deal more than that.  Born in 1914 in upstate New
York, his father a construction engineer who later did contract work in the
developing USSR, Frank Dolphin had briefly attended Syracuse University and
then went with his parents to live in a small town in Southern Arizona.
While his father worked abroad in the Red East, Frank drifted into
California, labored in the "Factories in the Fields,"  became a militant and
Left farm workers' organizer during the great waves of  Red strikes in the
Imperial Valley and the San Joaquin.  Framed up on a murder charge, he left
California, went into the Teton Basin country of Wyoming, established a
small ranch, married and had a couple of kids -- boys.

Sometimes things -- even things in as beautiful a setting as the Tetons --
just don't work out.  The War was coming on fast. Pearl Harbor was still to
occur but  Canada was now fully embroiled. Frank joined the RCAF, rose to the
rank of First Lieutenant, serving in the New Hebrides.  After the War, he
drifted back into Arizona, working for various cow outfits in the northern
part of the state.

And then he was thrown by a spooky horse.  And he broke his back.

He never rode again.  For awhile he worked as a cow camp cook -- a major and
very important vocation.  But even that was tough.  Horses and wagon, rough
country, long hours, heavy weather.

In time, he came to my home town of Flagstaff.  There he became an  art
student of my father -- who was the first Native hired as a professor at
Arizona State College.  And Frank was, even then, a damn good artist.

That's when we joined forces.

For my part, I was entering a Critical Transition.  I was very much -- as a
friendly and complimentary reference on my behalf later given the Army by a
top U.S. Forest Service official said -- "a nature boy."  I spent a lot of
time in the woods -- as much as I could -- and had ever since I could button
my Levis and pull on my engineer's boots.  My parents were permissive but
grade school and high school were, to me, prisons -- and some teachers and
all administrators seemed to see me  as one of the guys for whom God had
especially designed punishment.

My best high school memories were not classes.  They were our match-winning,
champion rifle club  -- of which I served as president -- and our very
wide-ranging hiking club. In each case, the faculty sponsor was an effective
teacher -- and eminently kind -- and a friend.

In the woods -- and as the years passed I went into ever more rugged and
remote areas -- I could be my own person.  I was always hunting, sometimes
trapping.  Claiming to be the legal Federal work age of 18, even as I was
actually some years younger, I worked very capably indeed over several
consecutive seasons  for the Coconino National Forest as a firefighter and
as a  remote fire lookout/radio man.



Frank died in early 1973 of a long standing respiratory disease, probably something like COPD, since he was a very heavy smoker.  At that time, he was living in Dolan Springs, Arizona, in the far northwest corner of the state -- a tiny town on the lonesome road to Nevada.

Hunter Bear [Hunter Gray]

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ 
and Ohkwari' 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

A Piece of the Scrapbook: 
(Three web pages with Jackson Movement stuff):
http://hunterbear.org/a_piece_of__the_scrapbook.htm

And see the Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded and with more photos in June, 2012.)
 
For the new, just out (11/2011) and expanded/updated
edition of my "Organizer's Book," JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- 
with a new and substantial introduction by me.  We are now at 
the 50th Anniversary of the massive Jackson Movement of
1962-63. (This page expanded 9/12):  http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm

Witch Hunt: SCEF, FBI stuff, etc (with links):
http://www.hunterbear.org/witch_hunt_continuesthe_southern.htm