On the Trail

 Baltimore's Clifton Park is home to several oddities, but none more potentially racially insensitive than On the Trail, a seven-foot-four-inch statue of a native American peering off into the distance. Sculpted by Edward Berge, it was purchased for the City of Baltimore by the Peabody Institute and placed in the park in 1916. Baltimore isn't known for having a large indigenous population, the area's Susquehannock having been wiped out in the 1700s by smallpox and unfriendly colonials, so why this was the particular piece chosen to place in the park is a mystery, and somehow I doubt that if a statue was being chosen today that a native fella' clad only in a loincloth would make the cut. Modern sensibilities, you know.