Joseph Elmer Yoakum was a visual fabulist, and, in the tradition of the best storytellers, it is often not possible to distinguish between truth and invention. His colorful life needed no embellishment, though Yoakum seemed to delight in confounding facts, variously claiming that he was born in 1888 or 1889 rather than 1890; on Navajo land near Window Rock, Arizona, rather than Ash Grove, Missouri; and that his mixed African American heritage included Navajo blood rather than Cherokee. His biography comprised grand American themes that later informed his drawings: wanderlust, adventure, war, and independence.

Yoakum ran away from home at the tender age of nine or ten to work and travel with the Great Wallace Circus, which was to give rise to such storied entertainers as Emmett Kelly, followed by stints with Ringling Brothers and Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. He traveled with these outfits throughout the United States and Europe, rising from horse handler to billposter, part of a large advance marketing team that traveled to each site to stir up anticipation for the entertainment to follow. In 1908, Yoakum returned to Ash Grove where he married, started a family, and worked as a superintendent on the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad. After the company failed, he moved his family to Kansas where he worked in the coal mines. When World War I broke out, Yoakum was drafted and stationed in France repairing roads and railroads. Upon his return, he divorced his wife and wandered the world for the next two decades, finding jobs on the railroads, at sea, and with circuses. But by the 1920s, Yoakum ceased his peregrinations, settled in Chicago, and remarried. It was not until 1962 that he devoted his time to visual confabulations that drew upon his rich reserves of memory and experience.

Yoakum’s landscapes constitute a new sublime, acknowledging the insignificance of man against the awe-inspiring power of nature, but also noting the particularity of experience. He evokes the legacy of geological illustrations that used undulating and geometric line engravings with delicate handwashes of transparent color to distinguish types of strata and their various formations. In this work, Yoakum captures the grandeur of the ranges that lie east of Boise, Idaho. One path from the trailhead at Rainbow Basin leads to Trinity Mountain, one of the highest peaks in the Boise Mountains at 9,451 feet. The scene shows the series of cirques, or glacial slopes, that characterize the north side of the mountain and the lakes below.

Stacy C. Hollander, "Mt. Trinity of Clear Water Range Near Boise Idaho.," exhibition copy for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection. Stacy C. Hollander, curator. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020.