More Than Meets the Eye with Omaha's 'Pioneer Courage' Monument
By Chadd Scott on
Monuments matter. They are America’s most contentious artform. They are so because they are public, and broadcast values to the public. They speak for the cities erecting them, even if many of those citizens don’t agree.
Monuments tell stories. They shape history. They’re propaganda.
Monuments were essential to establishing the Lost Cause narrative across the South, transforming the Confederate side of the Civil War into a gallant struggle for state’s rights against a massive, federal oppressor. Monuments turned insurrectionist slave holders into plucky rebels fighting for their homes. Monuments across the South turned inhumanity into sympathy, nobility.
Monuments like Pioneer Courage in Omaha.
The contention over monuments here, across the Great Plains and the West, center on settler colonialism and Manifest Destiny, not systemic racism and the Civil War.
Settler colonialism refers to a colonial power like the United States – a wealthy country with a powerful army that has captured territory by force or otherwise – deepening its hold over that territory by populating it with settlers, typically by dispossessing the people who have lived there previously, often through violence. Possession being nine-tenths of the law. Manifest Destiney is the American belief that white Christians with European ancestry were ordained by god to own, populate, and use what is currently the Western United States for their own ends and benefits to the exclusion of all others.
'Pioneer Courage' monument in Omaha, detail. 2
Pioneer Courage is a monument to settler colonialism and Manifest Destiny. It is a massive piece of public propaganda on private land in downtown Omaha where thousands of people see it every day, as I did on a visit to the city in September 2024. Pioneer Courage was commissioned by Bruce R. Lauritzen, Chairman, First National Bank of Omaha. The monument, erected between 2005 and 2009, occupies land owned by the bank. That fact is important when considering the monument and its message.
First National Bank formed in the late 1800s, an offshoot of a business interest “trading primarily in gold dust and buffalo hides,” a plaque at the monument reads. Gold mining and market buffalo killing were two nasty frontier enterprises. The wholesale slaughter of buffalo was undertaken, in part, as a wider American genocide against the Indigenous people of the Great Plains. Kill all the bison upon which Native people in the region rely on for nearly every aspect of their way of lives and you’ll drive those who survive onto government-controlled reservations. Gold mining – all mining – requires a terrible toll on the environment to achieve.
First National Bank is a business with violence, genocide, and extraction in its DNA. Taking without giving. Using and abusing the land for personal profit. Those are the values Lauritzen and First National Bank consider “pioneer courage,” and those are the values the monument’s artists, Blair Buswell and Edward Fraughton, have baked into it.
Lauritzen’s great, great grandfather Tom Davis helped found Omaha in 1854. Plaques at the monument refer to him as a “pioneer.” That term itself is a euphemism – propaganda – for a settler colonial. Like calling conquerors and conquistadors “discoverers.” Takers. Users. Abusers.
Pioneer Courage depicts a wagon train leaving Omaha for land further west. All white people, of course. Settler colonials. They bring with them the cattle that will replace the bison. They bring with them the plow that will tear up the prairie, resulting 60 or so years later in the Dust Bowl. They bring with them the rifles that will kill hundreds of millions of birds and animals and thousands of Native people. They bring with them the pick that will burrow into the earth, taking out its silver and gold and copper.
One of the figures carries a large book, it is untitled, but it’s reasonably assumed to be a Bible. The book justifying Manifest Destiney.
'Pioneer Courage' monument in Omaha, detail. 3
“What I like about the story of the great wagon train migration across America is the daring, the tenacity, and the innovativeness of the pioneer spirit that opened the west,” Lauritzen is quoted on a plaque at the monument site. “It is the same spirit of daring, tenacity, and innovativeness that drives (First National Bank) forward today.”
Daring? Tenacity? Innovativeness?
History as told by the winners.
A monument erected on this site memorializing America’s westward expansion commissioned by the people indigenous to what is now Omaha, the people steamrolled by settler colonials and Manifest Destiny, created from their point of view, would replace those words with words like “murderous.”
“The opening and settling of the American West is a record of heroism and human sacrifice that speaks to the heart of the world,” Buswell is quoted on a plaque at the monument.
That’s one way to look at it.
A record of violence and genocide that speaks to the darkness of humanity and its willingness to abuse other people and the land for personal gain would be another.
You say potato, I say I potato.
'Pioneer Courage' monument in Omaha, detail.
“Pioneer Courage memorializes the countless thousands who forged their way westward to define the great American dream,” Buswell continued on the plaque.
Or the countless thousands who invaded land already occupied by Indigenous people, murdering them and destroying their way of life, replacing their dreams with the “great American dream.”
Another plaque at the monument quotes late 19th and early 20th century writer Willa Cather as saying, “There was nothing but land: Not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”
A disconnection from the truth so complete only the warped mind of settler colonial could concoct it. There was a great deal more than land “out West.” There were people. Native people. Millions of them. Cather and the “pioneers” never took them into account, didn’t even consider them people. Not people like white people, anyway.
There were animals, too. Their place on the land, of course, was never considered, let alone valued.
There were countries, also. Scores of Native nations.
But to Cather, the settler colonials, and the founders of First National Bank, the West was wide open. Up for grabs. There for the taking.
So they took it. And their descendants have scrubbed the invasion clean of the murder, theft, and abuse by creating monuments like Pioneer Courage.
This is how history is shaped, how perspectives are manipulated, how abuses are justified. Who tells the story, what stories are told, and from what perspective? Bankers, industrialists, and settler colonials, or the people they trampled when setting up their empires?
This is why monuments matter.
