It’s a style of art known as American Regionalism and was very popular from post-World War I to the 1950s. It remains popular today.
The artist Thomas Hart Benton is perhaps the most well-known, with his flowing vistas of stylized farmers, horses, barns, and haystacks. He had a series of paintings and murals on the horrors of World War II in his later years.
Benton’s American Regionalism style remains in one of the most visited buildings in Fremont County, the United States Post Office on Main Street in Riverton.
In 1942, an icon of downtown Riverton was created by artist George Vander Sluis. It still adorns the upper section of the west wall of the Riverton Post Office.
“Lambing Time” or “Farm Scene,” depending on your source, was painted by Sluis from observing the sheep operation on the Pitts-Madden Ranch a few years before.
Sluis took a pair of black-and-white photographs from the ranch of John Robert Pitts and painted the iconic image that celebrated its 83rd season earlier this year.
The photographs featured John and his youngest brother, Bill, setting a post on the ranch in one image, with a view of the sheep in the corral as the background. The fertile mind of the artist and his skilled hand did the rest.
George Vander Sluis was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 18, 1915. His parents were Dutch immigrants.
He graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1938, after suffering through the Great Depression by teaching art classes. Like many artists in the 1930s, he was without work. In 1940, he took a position at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and began painting murals for the Federal Art Project (FAP) part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)
He painted dozens of murals on post offices and other federal buildings, but only two survive. The mural at the Riverton Post Office and another at the Rifle, Colorado post office titled “Colorado Landscape.”
Sluis was paid $850 for “Lambing Time,” equivalent to about $14,000 today. It is claimed that the clothes the workers wear in the mural inspired the costumes worn by the actors in the Wyoming-set movie Brokeback Mountain.
Sheep ranching was in decline in Fremont County by the start of World War II, after being the dominant style of agriculture from territorial days, from Lost Cabin, to Dubois, along the Sweetwater and Popo Agie, and in the far northeast corner of the county below Ten Sleep at Nowood.
Empires were built on lamb and wool by men like Jacob Delfelder, Eugene Amoreti, Worden S. Noble and Charles H. King, but there were many other sheep ranches, hundreds of them across the arid sagebrush of 19th century Fremont County and all along the Wind River, Spring Creek, Badwater Creek, Nowood Creek, Sweetwater River and the branches of the Popo Agie in Lander.
The name of the mural, “Farm Scene” or “Lambing Time,” is up for debate, but the exploits of a “War Artist” as Sluis became known is a tale worth telling. One that ties the often harsh, challenging conditions of raising sheep in a land of extreme heat, sudden storms, drought, blizzards, and filled with coyotes, wolves, bears, and cougars. It took a stout heart and a determined will to raise sheep in central Wyoming.
At one time, there were 4,000,000 sheep shipped from the tiny railhead of Arminto each year, and hundreds of thousands dipped, sorted, and shipped from the ghost town of Moneta. Many from the upper country were trailed to Hudson or Arapahoe and loaded onto Chicago North Western Railroad stock cars for eastern markets.
George Vander Sluis’s mural captured the image of the vanishing pioneer sheep industry, but his mural was more than art; it was a turning point. Soon after painting it, Sluis traded his brushes for camouflage, becoming part of one of the most unusual and secret units of World War II.
Sluis entered the U.S. Army and worked in creating the “Ghost Army,” a decoy unit made of inflatable tanks, trucks, aircraft, and buildings designed to fool German aerial reconnaissance. His artistic skills successfully fooled the Germans about the location of the D-Day Invasion.
Transferring artistic skills from stylized images of western life to decoying the Nazi high command requires an entirely different skill set.
Sluis enlisted in the United States Army in 1942. He was assigned to the 4th Platoon, B Company of the Camouflage Battalion of the 603rd Engineers. He, along with artists, clothing designers, sound engineers, and Hollywood set designers, was organized into a special unit comprised of soldiers from various units, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops.
Sluis was only 26 years old when he enlisted, but had already built an impressive collection of 40 oil, watercolor, and oil mixed with sand paintings. He also produced lithographs and pencil drawings.
While in basic training, he won the T.J. Strickler prize at the Midwestern Artists’ Exhibition. He continued winning prizes while training. He took second place in the Baltimore Evening Sun sketch contest in 1943, while serving as a Corporal at Fort Meade. In 1943, he had several drawings and watercolors displayed at the Columbia Art and Architectural School.
Sluis was one of 1,100 men assigned to the 23rd Headquarters group.
Their work was top secret and remained so until records were made public in 1996.
The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops had a unique, clandestine mission. They were initially assigned to create a “Ghost Army” of inflatable tanks, supply dumps, buildings, and movement that German reconnaissance aircraft could see. They were staged to create the impression that the 1944 invasion of France would take place at Calais, rather than Normandy.
Sluis and the other artists painted insignia on inflatable tanks, guns, and trucks, marked them with false insignia, and in the process created the impression that an army of 30,000 men was staging for Calais.
Working with them were costume and fashion designers who recreated uniforms and insignia for hundreds of mannequins, which were moved every few minutes to mimic troop movements.
They rolled out rubber tanks, painted shadows on canvas trucks, and broadcast the roar of engines through massive speakers. From the air, it looked real. To the Germans, it was an army.
The ruse was perfect.
Activated on January 20, 1944. Sluis arrived soon after in May.
Before the war ended a year later, the Ghost Army deceived the Nazis in 20 separate operations. They became a mobile, traveling show that fooled the Wehrmacht into moving troops to fight the fallacious threat of a rubber army.
In later action, they went ashore at Normandy two weeks after D-Day and built a phony Mulberry Harbor at night, with lights illuminating the project and drawing fire from German artillery. A Mulberry Harbor was a large floating, concreted dock.
Later, they fooled the Germans defending Brest by creating the illusion that a larger Allied force had circled their position.
The 23rd headquarters was moved to Luxembourg. From that base, they set up phony units along the Ruhr River, the old Maginot Line, and in the terrific battle of the Hürtgen Forest. Their final act was to stage a crossing of the Rhine River into Germany that drew Nazi troops from the actual Allied forces farther away.
In its brief history, the 23rd served with distinction with U.S. Army officers Ralph Ingersoll and Billy Harris and under the command of Colonel Harry L. Reeder.
The English came up with the idea first, fooling Gen. Erwin Rommel with inflatable decoys during the battle of El Alamein in North Africa in 1942.
The 23rd began training at Camp Forrest, Tennessee, and was formalized at Camp Pine, New York, before sailing for England.
Many men were recruited from New York and Philadelphia art schools. Many future artists who experienced great success in the post-war years served in the 23rd.
President Joe Biden signed the Ghost Army Congressional Gold Medal Act in 2022. On March 21, 2024, a Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony was held at Emancipation Hall in Washington, D.C.
Attending the ceremony were three of the seven surviving Ghost Army soldiers: 100-year-old Bernard Bluestein of Hoffman Estates; 99-year-old John Christman of Leesburg, New Jersey; and 100-year-old Seymour Nussenbaum of Monroe Township, New Jersey.
After the war, Sluis became a professor at Syracuse University, teaching drawing and painting. He moved to New York. His first marriage ended in divorce, and he married Hildegarde Stein Bristol, a music major at Syracuse. The couple had three children, Sylvia, Pete,r and Jeff.
Sluis taught at Syracuse for 35 years.
He was a guest on To Tell the Truth, a popular TV show featuring a celebrity panel that questioned contestants to determine the actual person behind a story.
In 1971, he designed a pair of air mail stamps, a nine-cent and an 11-cent stamp.
He passed on March 2, 1984, in Camillus, New York.
He was proud of his illustrious career, but his work with the 23rd remained a high point in his life.
He was discharged as a sergeant.
From a struggling artist to a renowned professor and a man who used his unique skill set to defeat the greatest threat to humanity in world history, with a stop in Fremont County as a young man. George Vander Sluis left a legacy that few remember, but that no one should forget.
From Riverton to Normandy, George Vander Sluis proved that art can change the world, sometimes by inspiring, sometimes by deceiving, but always by shaping history.