Hi, I’m Pamela Harr. Welcome to the Glendive Talking Trail. In 1981, I was inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas, for my bronze portrayals of pioneer women. If there’s any one piece I would like to be remembered for, it is this sculpture before you of Narcissa Whitman, which I called The Price.

She and her husband Dr. Marcus Whitman, established admission along the Oregon Trail near Walla Walla, Washington. These are the bare facts, but some people ask why did you create such a sad portrayal of Narcissa? I tell them about reading the letter she wrote in 1839 to her family in New York describing the loss of her only child. Two-year-old Alice went to the river to get two cups of water, fell in, and drowned. I could visualize so clearly when she wrote of the cups floating in the water, and she held her daughter for two days while she cried, “Thy will be done, not mine.”

That scene stuck in my mind as the only way that she should be portrayed as a symbol of the great sacrifice so many pioneer women gave. As I worked, I poured my feelings of grief into the clay for the loss of my own husband killed in Vietnam. This is a result of my expression of loss for a loved one. It is now nearly 50 years since I created the model for this piece, and it is still my favorite.

The original version was ten inches high, created in clay. From that, I made a mold and reproduced it in a small edition of 24. Most of the castings are in private collections, with one exception, which is the prestigious Mary Hill Museum on the Columbia River Gorge, not all that far from the Whitman mission. My dream was to eventually create The Price larger than life sized to express the preciousness of life.

After the death of my husband, sculptor Harvey Rattey, I turned my art career to creating larger than life size statues so that I could leave a legacy of our work in Glendive. This was one of the first. Except for Harvey’s The Heart of the Lion in the Event Center, nine others created by me can be seen around town and on the bridge, depicting the innocence, joy, and follies of children. One more of mine called, To The Color of a Bugler, stands at the entrance to our Eastern Montana Veterans Home as a tribute to our military. I hope I can inspire other artists to capture ideas in a moment in time and draw people into an unique way of seeing the world and all that God has created. For more information about our work, I hope you visit our website bridgerbronze.com, where the pavement ends and the west begins.