Welcome to Red Desert Saddlery!

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The Buffalo Calf Road Project, 2009

June 27, 2009.
Here's what I have:

You're looking at a Marx Toys "Flame" and "Princess Wildflower" from their classic "Johnny West" 1/6 scale Western toy series. I've always thought Flame was by far the coolest of the Marx horses; I got this guy in a vintage toy shop in NYC. --The Princess, as you can see, has seen better days; her facial paint is pretty thrashed, and she was relieved of her goofy little braids by some former owner. She also used to have a vest and skirt over this odd-looking outfit, and a ton of accessories, all long gone, which is why I was able to acquire her for nickels-and-dimes on eBay.
The reason I didn't care about all that was this:

Here's what I want.

(painting by Martin Pegler; from "To Live and Die in the West: The American Indian Wars" by Jason Hook.)

==Please to meet the Cheyenne warrior, Buffalo Calf Road Woman, who we'll call "Calf" from now on. I made her acquaintance when I was researching the Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield. Pretty Shield mentioned a woman who had fought at the battle of the Little Bighorn, and her name ting'ed a little bell in my head: didn't I have a picture of her someplace? I went into the books and found this painting.

I instantly fell in love with the idea of doing a portrait doll of her, but my courage failed me at the thought of trying to transfer all this detail into a Mego-size figure. If only there were a way to work bigger... and then I remembered there had been an Indian woman in the Johnny West set.
Which brings us to here.

What I'll be doing is documenting the work this takes, since I'm hoping to get it done over the course of this year.

Now, you can see by comparing the painting to the original source drawing at the top of the page (which was done by Calf's contemporary and tribesman, Spotted Wolf) that Mr. Pegler is a careful scholar as well as a good artist. He's preserved all the details that can be determined from the original image--Calf's long braids, elk-tooth dress, dentalium-shell earrings, bone hairpipe collar, and her horse's silver-mounted Mexican bridle; and what can't be clearly determined (a lot of her is obscured by her brother's impressive war bonnet) he's filled in with sound research, like the fringed pommel of her frame saddle, and her black-and-white beaded boots, which are probably based on this pair in a museum collection.

So I have no qualms about taking his lead; I intend to recreate this painting as closely as I can. This is going to mean a lot of beadwork (those boots!), AND a lot of handwork: