He has been in a major motion picture and on television, and thousands walk by him every day without giving him a thought. Who is he? OK, it’s not a he, it’s the Pioneer, the statue of a grizzled mountain man that stands across 13th Avenue from Johnson Hall.
Featured in the opening credits of the movie “Animal House” and, according to legend and the University tour manual, the inspiration for the statue of Jebediah Springfield in the cartoon show “The Simpsons,” the Pioneer is one of the most famous objects on campus. Sophomore tour guide Zach Mull said he gets a good reaction when he tells students on his tours that Jebediah Springfield was modeled after the statue.
Sculpted by noted artist A. Phimister Proctor, the statue was donated to the University by Portland lawyer Joseph Teal and dedicated in 1919.
Though the Pioneer now wears the traditional clothes of the period, this was not always so. According to a 1980 University planning office report by Stephen W. Long, Proctor used a mountain man from Burns, Ore., as the model for his statue, and he posed in the nude. The clothes were added to the statue later.
The base of the statue also comes from an older Oregon: Former University archivist Keith Richard said the statue sits on a rock from the bottom of the McKenzie River. The stone was dredged and brought to campus, and only one-third of it is above ground, he said.

Shortly after the Pioneer was erected, Teal complained about its positioning, Richard said. Teal thought the Pioneer ought to face west, instead of south as it had been placed. Teal also worried about all the trees surrounding the statue, fearing a storm might fell a tree and damage the Pioneer.
Richard said the University assured Teal the placement was only temporary, and the statue would soon be moved to a more prominent location on campus — it never was. As Richard noted, the statue has been “just temporarily there since 1919.”
A short walk from the Pioneer statue, between Hendricks Hall and Susan Campbell Hall, sits the Pioneer Mother. Also sculpted by Proctor, it was donated by University Vice President Burt Brown Barker and dedicated in 1932.
According to Barker, the statue was commissioned in honor of his mother and “her life after the hardships … and the sorrows of pioneering were past.” He saw her as representative not of the battles pioneer women fought in their travels west, but of their rest and reflection following those battles.
The Pioneer Mother also has its share of legends. According to Richard, one story says that “the Pioneer Mother would stand up when a virgin walks by.”
Another legend surrounding the statues is that the doors in Johnson Hall are glass so the statues can see each other, said Cora Bennett, the interim director of student orientation.
The University’s tour manual states that “the two statues and glass doors are said to symbolize early thought that men and women should ‘look, but not touch,’” but Bennett emphasized that the University has no idea how true that may be.
The story continues, saying that at one point students staged a sit-in to keep the glass doors when the University considered replacing them.
During the 1970s, the Prometheus statue near the University’s Museum of Art joined the lore surrounding the Pioneer statues when a prankster hung a sign on it reading “Pioneer Son,” Richard said. The idea behind the sign, he said, was that a child of the Pioneer and Pioneer Mother statues would have to be conceived through the glass of Johnson Hall, making it extremely misshapen.