Indian Jim - Ogden, Utah
Posted by: 
HeyRob4449
N 41° 14.140 W 111° 55.758
12T E 422123 N 4565335
Indian Jim greets patrons to the Rainbow Gardens and Greenery Restaurant at the mouth of the Ogden Canyon in Ogden, Utah
Waymark Code: WM2E75
Location: Utah, United States
Date Posted: 10/18/2007
Views: 112
The plaque at his feet reads as follows...
Indian Jim
This antique wooden Indian, circa 1830, stood in a cigar store in New York City, NY, after he was carved from a single tree to serve as a tobacconist's advertisement. In the 1940's, Harmon W. Peery, Ogden’s Cowboy Mayor, purchased him for his Riverside Gardens basement cabaret. Representative of the hospitality shown by the Native Americans to early European settlers in America, Jim greeted guests to The Indian Room, where Jazz band music and ballroom dancing flourished during the postwar period.
While his twin stands on display at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., Indian Jim has held his station at the Rainbow for over a half a century now. Although rare today, this carving is typical of the popular genre of deciduous statuary that were mass-produced by the tobacco industry in the early 1800's and scattered about the country.
Native Americans were, of course, the first to use the therapeutic waters of Rainbow's natural hot springs at the mouth of Ogden Canyon. Here they stopped to take the waters on their biannual migrations over the Indian Trail from the south end of the Great Salt Lake to their summer hunting grounds in the beautiful Ogden Valley.
Trapper Peter Skeen Ogden and the Hudson Bay Fur Company camped in the Ogden Valley in 1822-23 with Shoshone, Utes, and several other Indian peoples. In his expeditionary journal, Ogden described the lifestyle of these native Utahns and the river that cuts through the splendid, then impassable canyon, which would one day bear his name.
Physical Address:
1875 Valley Drive
Ogden , UT USA
84401
Web Site: [Web Link]
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Visit Instructions:
Take a picture of you (or an assistant) holding your GPS with the statue. No "car window" shots -- please take the two seconds it takes to walk up to the statue.