Red Chief and I paused to eat lunch here on the steps of the Sun Singer statue at Allerton Park this past Sunday. We were in Allerton for the second time in a week, the trails still muddy from the rains of our earlier visit. We hiked for almost three hours, and Ethan did not complain once. After our hike we passed by a buffalo farm, but none of the 20 or so giants could be seen; all we saw were enormous, sturdy fences and the lush fields of grass that the buffalo crave.
Ethan at my favorite statue at Allerton Park, The Death of the Last Centaur.This is said to be the most expensive of the more than 100 statues at the park because in the bronze are flecks of gold. The sculptor, Frenchman Emile Antoine Bourdelle , called by many the greatest sculptor of his generation, considered the Centaur "the summit of my achievements." The park's namesake, wealthy Robert Allerton, gave more than 6,000 acres of land, including a stately mansion and manicured gardens, to the University of Illinois in 1946. This would become Allerton Park. Allerton visited the sculptor's studio in France and bought the statue directly from Bourdelle shortly before the artist's death in 1929. Red Chief's assessment of the huge sculpture? "Awesome."
Aficionado of the American buffalo and proud member of the Buffalo Warriors, a herd of beer-swilling trail runners and some of the finest humans and criminals on the planet.
"If you were looking for the definitive symbol of the conflict between the cultures that had existed in the American West for at least ten thousand years, and maybe longer, and the culture that was just a building East of the Mississippi River, this culture of technology, of commerce, of grasping after tomorrow before it arrives, you couldn't come up with two more powerful symbols than the Railroad, and the Buffalo, because when the Railroad met the Buffalo, the Iron Age met the Stone Age, the machine arrived in the garden, and the West was changed for ever." - T.H. Watkins
Red Chief and I paused to eat lunch here on the steps of the Sun Singer statue at Allerton Park this past Sunday. We were in Allerton for the second time in a week, the trails still muddy from the rains of our earlier visit. We hiked for almost three hours, and Ethan did not complain once. After our hike we passed by a buffalo farm, but none of the 20 or so giants could be seen; all we saw were enormous, sturdy fences and the lush fields of grass that the buffalo crave.
Ethan at my favorite statue at Allerton Park, The Death of the Last Centaur. This is said to be the most expensive of the more than 100 statues at the park because in the bronze are flecks of gold. The sculptor, Frenchman Emile Antoine Bourdelle , called by many the greatest sculptor of his generation, considered the Centaur "the summit of my achievements." The park's namesake, wealthy Robert Allerton, gave more than 6,000 acres of land, including a stately mansion and manicured gardens, to the University of Illinois in 1946. This would become Allerton Park. Allerton visited the sculptor's studio in France and bought the statue directly from Bourdelle shortly before the artist's death in 1929. Red Chief's assessment of the huge sculpture? "Awesome."
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