John T. McCutcheon’s Most Famous Drawing

John T. McCutcheon’s most famous drawing is “Injun Summer.”  The cartoon first appeared on Sept. 30, 1907, on page 1, of the Chicago Tribune. McCutcheon, inspired by a string of beautiful, warm autumn days and remembering his youth in Indiana, conjured up the illustration that became one of the most popular features in Tribune history.

The Tribune reprinted it, on page 4, in 1910, in response to readers’ requests, and then annually each Fall from 1912 to 1992.  Its first reprint in color in the Grafic Magazine was on Sunday, Oct. 15, 1933.

This copy of ‘Injun Summer’ printed on October 23, 1938, hangs in the Delta Delta Library, with the inscription “To Delta Delta Chapter EX, John T. McCutcheon, ∆Δ ‘89”.

McCutcheon Draws Inspiration from Boyhood

McCutcheon in his Tribune Tower studio a year before his death in 1949. He was born on May 6, 1870, in Tippecanoe County, IN.

The inspiration came to McCutcheon on Sept. 29, 1907, in his studio on the 10th floor of the Fine Arts building in Chicago. It was a perfect day in early autumn and McCutcheon was seeking inspiration for his next story/drawing.

Memories of his Indiana boyhood flooded his imagination. McCutcheon has described the background of the small, awestruck boy in this cartoon, and the countryside he is staring at, in his book of memoirs, “Drawn from Memory.”

Speaking of the view from the farmhouse in which he was born he says:

“I looked out over field after field of corn, all within the intimate, friendly bounds of the Wea Plaine, named for the Indian tribe formerly occupying the region. A Shawnee mound was nearby. Eight or ten miles away was the site of Ouiatenon, one of the larger villages on the Old Tecumseh trail. Northward a few miles, near the Wabash River, lay the battlefield of Tippecanoe.

The grownups around me were continually discussing Indian campaigns still being waged thruout the west. There was, in fact, little on my young horizon in the middle ’70s beyond corn and Indian traditions. Thirty years later, while groping in the early fall for an idea, it required only a small effort of the imagination to see spears and tossing fethers in the tassled stalks, tepees thru the smoky haze; and I evolved ‘Injun Summer.”

Anger and Nostalgia

Over time the cartoon came to evoke anger as well as nostalgia. As early as 1970, readers wrote letters complaining that the Tribune was running an ethnically insensitive feature that misrepresented the brutal reality of Native American history in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In the 1990s, Tribune editors decided to end the annual tradition. Douglas Kneeland, the Tribune’s public editor at the time, said:

“Injun Summer is out of joint with its times. It is literally a museum piece, a relic of another age. The farther we get from 1907, the less meaning it has for the current generation.”

For generations of readers, “Injun Summer,” despite its flaws, became synonymous with the magic and peacefulness of those last warm days of the season.