BNSF News

BNSF Works of Art: The Santa Fe Trail, c. 1918

2007-11-29

The quintessential cowboy among the Taos Society of Artists, "Buck" Dunton was born on a farm in Maine where he developed an early and lifelong interest in hunting, animals and the outdoors. Quitting school at age 16, Dunton worked to earn money for his westward travels. In two years, he realized his dream by journeying to Montana, where he worked hunting bears and cow punching. 

Within two years, Dunton came back east and settled in Boston where he studied at the Cowles Art School. Rapid success as an illustrator propelled him to New York where he produced true-to-life western illustrations for magazines like Harper’s Monthly and Scribner’s and for novels.

In New York, Dunton studied briefly with E. L. Blumenschein at the Art Students League and received encouragement to travel to Taos to paint the essence of the West versus the fictionalized version. After a couple of summers in Taos, Dunton moved there in 1914 and was a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists in 1915. There he left illustration behind and took up easel painting.

In The Old Santa Fe Trail, c. 1918, Dunton presents a romanticized version of the 1820s to the 1870s era along the Santa Fe Trail, which ran from western Missouri to Santa Fe, N.M. Prior to the completion of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway’s route to Santa Fe in 1880, ox- or mule-drawn Conestoga wagons transported commercial and military shipments over this rugged trail. Dunton paints two realistic cowboy scouts riding well ahead of the wagons, relaxed but vigilant in their saddles. This painting is installed in the first floor corridor of the Fort Worth headquarters’ Marketing Office Building.

Also evident is Dunton’s love for the power and beauty of the land and sky. He wrote that painters settled in Taos not because of the humble village but because of the "swells of the sage brush valley….the skies of marvelous blue….regiments of stately clouds: the majesty of mountains." This painting’s pink-and-blue palette and a slightly impressionistic style in a classic western scene indicates the influence upon Dunton by the other Taos Society of Artists who had studied in Paris.

Selected with other TSA artists to paint murals for the Missouri State Capital in 1924, Dunton’s lunette (moon-shaped panel) featured an early steam train at a frontier depot. In 1934, Dunton’s Fall in the Foothills was selected to hang in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s office. Today it is part of the Smithsonian’s Collection of the National Museum of American Art.

BNSF Headquarters

For more information on the company and its transportation solutions, visit the BNSF Web site at www.bnsf.com