West of The Imagination; 104; Roughcut; The Wild Riders; B Roll

You You You You

You You One of the most enduring characters of the old west is the cowboy

Man and horse together on the open range This is the story of two very different artists, Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell who portrayed the American cowboy in his own time and created a legend In bronze, in cobbler's illustrations and on canvas, Frederick Remington presented a world of frontier action and violence Populated by what he called men with the barcom. Remington's characters were tragic heroes, men who raced with death at high noon

Or drew the line and made their last stand on a parched and desolate ground Though he lived at the same time as Remington, Charlie Russell's view was quite different His people are a genuine friendly crowd. Their world was a small cow town saloon where good times and tall tales counted for more than high drama Russell himself lived in this world. He was a working cowhand for eleven years He could easily have fit right into some of the whimsical outrageous scenes he painted For just two decades, but Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell captured the life and times of the cowboy

He's exploits, real and imagined, and made him an epic figure in the saga of the west Remington was the only son of a well-to-do newspaper publisher in a small respectable town in upstate New York After several dismal boyhood years in a military academy, he disappointed his parents by insisting on enrolling in the Yale School of Fine Arts Of course, Yale was a respectable place, even in those days, and it did have a very respectable football team of which young Frederick became a valued member But his choice of studies could not possibly lead to a respectable profession Remington himself had his doubts, particularly after his first taste of tedious lectures on anatomy and drawing that went something like this You see it gentlemen, you see it

A line may break upon us with the angle of flesh of lightning, or it may create an impression of perfect unity, even before we are conscious of a single image Remington's only other classmate in first year drawing was the sophisticated, but irreverent, polteny bigelow Bigelow observed that these lectures seemed especially designed to dampen the art of any budding Michelangelo It would be easy to accumulate examples from many artists Their professor was a famous German classesist who insisted that his students could only learn by sketching plaster casts of Greek sculpture This was not entirely to Remington's taste, and he was known to indulge his own imagination when the professor wasn't looking The great painter Aunt believed the study of Lyme was so important that he often insisted that his students do nothing but draw Drawing, he said, is the probity of art, and that is what I expect you to recollect as you make your sketches

Remington actually learned much here that would prove useful, but he always dreamed of being and belonging someplace else Someplace else was a Kansas Prairie in the year 1883 Remington went west, shocked all pretensions of respectability, and together with a few comrades and arms tried his hand at sheep ranching There were also Jack rabbits In the three years that followed, young Fred squandered his inheritance and generally affected the role of a swashbuckling frontier character Remington was no cowboy, and this was not the romantic west of his dreams

But it was during these years in the 1880s that he began to develop his peculiar vision of the west, a vision that he would track with dogged perseverance for the rest of his life To Remington, these vast open spaces seemed like a stage waiting for action, a blank page waiting to be filled Remington's first credited illustration was called the Apache War, Indian Scouts on Geronimo's Trail It appeared in Harper's Magazine in January of 1886 Three months later, he was back in school at New York's celebrated art students' lake In painting, as in pistol shooting, the whole object is to pay attention to the object being aimed at Keep your finger gently on the trigger, making it close slowly, deliberately, imperceptibly

Like fate Some of the greatest artists of the day lectured at the league On the aim, there was a spirit of freedom and innovation here And Remington now had a clearer sense of what he lacked and needed to hone his talent as an artist Work simply, but get what you want, crisscross it, sit on it, pour an ink bottle over it, only get it The line is straight, make it so as nearly as possible at once Working simply and decisively was not only the key to painting, but to successful illustration Every line counted, and was an understanding of this, economy of line, Terce, Chris, and full of energy that enabled Remington to launch his early career as a popular magazine illustrator

He got his big break from Century Magazine, 64 pictures for the serialized story On the western adventures of Teddy Roosevelt, called Ranch Life in the Hunting Trail But something else that was taught at the league was to hone Remington for his entire career They palette and brush down and ask as if your life depended on it, what is the color Color Throughout his life, Remington wanted to paint in color, but he became known first as an illustrator in pen and ink In spite of this, he struggled and persevered with the painter's palette His first success in color came at age 26, when he submitted this painting to the prestigious national academy of design Return of a Blackfoot War party, received critical acclaim

The composition of interlocking figures was to evolve in the artist's work until, in dash for the timber, he felt he'd truly found his form A raid in a dynamic freeze, his riders and horses hurtling through space seemed to far cry from the awkward sketches he'd first drawn for Harper's The New York Herald proclaimed this, marked the advance of one of the strongest of our young artists By 1893, Frederick Remington had grown formidable, both in sheer bulk, he now weighed 263 pounds and is the foremost illustrator of the day Amid his forays in the west, he encountered in Yellowstone National Park, a talented young Philadelphia author named Owen Worcester Their meeting in this bizarre setting marked the beginning of one of the most remarkable collaborations of western literature and art

Remington still had his abrupt swashbuckling role to play, Worcester was a nervous young man, whose neurologist once prescribed annual visits to the west They made an unlikely pair, but out as it may seem, they needed each other The interest in traditional western stories was now showing signs of falling off, and with it the demand for Remington illustrations But if a gifted writer like Worcester could be persuaded to write glorious stories about cowboys, Remington would happily illustrate them The artist alternately flattered and badgered the writer for two years Finally, Harper's published the result of their efforts, with one illustrated essay, Remington and Worcester joined Buffalo Bill Cody in transforming the cowboy into a mythic American hero In illustrating the evolution of the cow plunger, Remington painted their hero first as the last Cavalier, a knight errant in Shaps, surrounded by a legion of ghosts, all brave mounted warriors who had gone down in history and legend before him

In another illustration called what an unbranded cow has caused, the cowboy is a tragic figure, making his last stand at the center of violence, death and devastation In the last of the series, the Barb wire fence, under a bleak winter sky, is not only the end of the trail for the weary cowhand, it's the end of the open range, over which he once was king In Remington's imaginary world, there were no small passions, no teacup tragedies, men were wrenched out of predictable everyday life and flung into vast and terrible dramas in the west Somewhere always there was a threat, a fateful doom in store, but nothing was more frightening to Remington than the end of the era of man and horse

As civilization encroached on the west, Remington obsessively documented the horse, he kept a scrapbook filled with photographs of horses from every angle He also paid close attention to the work of San Francisco photographer Edward Mybridge, who pioneered studies in animal locomotion But Remington was determined to outdo the camera, he told a friend, I can be the codec because codecs have no brains, no discrimination In his painting called the Stampede, we can see the influence of Mybridge's photograph But there's a compelling tension in the painting that the photos simply doesn't have, caught in a thunderstorm, horse and rider are transfixed by lightning, frozen in a split second of desperate drama

Mybridge was also studied closely by the celebrated artist Thomas Aikens, but one has only to compare his treatment of horses to appreciate the energy and dynamism of Remington's work In spite of his mastery of the horse, critics on the East Coast consistently derided Remington's work In New York's exclusive players club dedicated to the theater and the arts, Remington bragged loudly of his exploits in the west The distinguished members were amused, but not persuaded to hang his work on the walls, here in such bastions of sophisticated society, Remington felt like an outcast

An alternative, an opportunity to free himself from the bounds of his own limitations, came quite unexpectedly in the fall of 1894 A neighbor who observed Remington's work commented that he seemed to have a sculptor's vision, and on cannonability to see his subjects in the round Remington took to sculpting, or the mud business, as he affectionately called it, with all the zeal of a new convert He wrote to his old friend, Wister, that he had finally found a recipe for being great, and he labored for six months on the figure of a bronco buster The figure of the horse and rider, supported only by the horse's two hind legs, was a technical feat that even experienced sculptors said couldn't be done But he did it, the bronco buster, completed in 1895, was the first try for Remington at establishing a new career

Casting in bronze was a new world to Remington, it required a whole team of highly skilled craftsmen A lost wax technique of casting could reproduce the precariously balanced horsemen, but it was every bit as difficult as the creation of the original clay model Remington's last chance to affect the finished work was when the positive wax mold was presented to him for inspection and final correction After that, it passed out of his head It took days, sometimes even weeks, to prepare for the pouring of a single bronze First the model was encased in a forest of wax rods, called gates, these would provide channels for the poured molten metal Then the whole assembly had to be carefully covered with plaster, delicately thrown on by hand, and just the right consistency Meanwhile, all Remington could do was wait, not just for the bronze to be complete but for a vindication that would silence his critics

That year, the press was still describing him as the busiest illustrator in America, and he was sick of it He'd begun to doubt his talent as a painter, confiding in a friend that he felt he was going color blind His health was poor, due to his obsessive indulgence in food and whiskey His marriage was on the rocks, and as the Old West faded away, he felt he was losing his vital personal vision It seemed to Remington that everything depended on the success of the bronze, only this could establish him once and for all among America's masters What Remington waited for was greatness I am sculpting, and I find I do well

I've just finished two riders and bronze, and I'm going to rattle through all the ages Unless an artist invades the old mansion and knocks it off the shelf Other art forms are a triviality, bronze is a thing to think of when you're doing it, and even afterwards It doesn't decay, the moth doesn't break through and steal, the rust and the idiot cannot harm it With bronze, Remington did indeed achieve a triumph

They've stood the test of time and changing critical values In Remington's bronze, in three dimensions, the Old West seems to live forever And yet, one more time, Remington was tempted back to illustration He said he wanted to see firsthand what men did best and the thing that inspired so many of his paintings To Frederick Remington, what men did best was war In Texas, his old acquaintance Teddy Roosevelt recruited his rough riders and set off for Cuba The destruction of the battleship main had triggered American involvement in the Spanish-American war The flames of patriotic hysteria were fanned by an eager press

The invention of the motion picture camera enabled audiences to be thrilled by dramatic reconstructions of battles on land and its sea But this was a different kind of war from those Remington had studied in the West The troops came in by ship, journalists were everywhere The enemy lurked in the jungle and picked off the Americans from thick cover Much like the Vietnamese were to do 70 years later Try as he might Remington could never find the action, the classic set piece battles he had imagined Instead, he stumbled on a field hospital and for the first time in his life, he actually saw the gruesome reality of war But then he realized that what the American public wanted from him were not the appalling facts

But a mythic structure to interpret them The scream of Shrapnel is Remington's testament to heroism His record of men facing invisible death with determination When the facts didn't fit the myth, he altered them In the charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill, he painted Teddy Roosevelt proudly leading the Rough Riders to glory In fact, it's been suggested that Roosevelt had been half a mile away at the time Years later, as president of the United States, Roosevelt agreed to write a preface to an article on Remington in a popular magazine His gratitude may have something to do with the artist glorification of him at San Juan

But there is much in his words that is sincere and genuine I regard Frederick Remington as one of the Americans who has done real work for this country And we all owe him a debt of gratitude He is, of course, one of the most typical American artists we have ever had And he has portrayed a most characteristic and yet banishing type of American life The soldier, the cowboy, the Indian, the horses and the cattle of the plains will live in his work I barely believe for all time It is no small thing for the nation, it's such an artist and man of letters should arise to make permanent record of certain of the most interesting features of our national life Art is a she-devil of a mistress If at times during the earlier days she would not even stoop to my way of thinking

I have persevered and will so continue Remington returned from Cuba with a hatred, wounds and suffering that replaced his old love for war Gradually over his last few years his paintings became gentler, warmer, more impressionistic He no longer contained his figures with hard edges and his paintings lost the effect of illustration Instead he used heightened color and bolder, freer brushstrokes As a result Remington moved closer to nature and a quiet humanity emerges

My art, he said, requires me to go where the human beings are I was first in that grand silent country following my own inclinations when I was 19 Not there was a heavy field in the atmosphere I knew the railroad was coming, I saw men swarming into the land I knew the Derby hat, the smoking chimneys, the cord binder, the 30-day note were upon us with a restless surge I knew the wild riders and the vacant lands were about to vanish forever

The more I considered the subject the bigger the forever loomed Without knowing how to do it I tried to record some of the facts around me And the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded I saw the living breathing end Three American centuries of smoke and dust and sweat In the 1880s the northern plains, what is today part of Montana, Wyoming and the Dakota's, was wide open country

In those years before the barbed wire fence small empires were built on the Texas Longhorn And cowboys rode her on some of the biggest cattle roundups the world has seen A kid from St. Louis who began working for the big cattle outfits in 1882 Was to become the greatest competition to Frederick Remington in the field of western art His name was Charles Marion Russell Charlie or kid Russell, as he was known in those days, grew his vision as an artist from 11 years of life and work on the range Long before anyone took serious note of him as an artist the kid was well known around the saloons of Utica, Lewiston and Great Falls

He was a teller of tall tales and a general commentator on the life and times of the cowboy Here is what he said about the men he worked with Kalpunches put in their time at the stage station playing moddy or stud poker He was good around horses and most always was a gambler Back in the east there's not much known about cows and cow people I heard of an eastern girl that asks her mother, Ma says she, to cowboys eat grass No deer says the old lady, they're part human I don't know but the old gal had them sized up right If they are him and they're a separate species When Charlie wasn't entertaining with words he made quick sketches for friends in the back of the bar

It's not surprising that his first paintings also told stories In a series of watercolors he made for the walls of the silver dollar saloon He depicted the life of the range ham He called this a little sunshine and its companion a little rain On visits to town our hero might indulge in a little pleasure Although the life he lived was not without a little pay Some paintings were direct accounts of real people in places This one called a cowboy camp during roundup It includes all the cowboys that Charlie worked with in Nelson Cruz outfit in the summer of 1883 He even included recognizable portraits of each of their horses Russell sometimes wrote stories about cowboys like the ones he drew and painted One such character he invented was a long-winded but likable barfly by the name of raw hide Rollins

Rollins even had the nerve to reveal some embarrassing information about his own creator Good Russell tells me he wrote one summer for Ben Fifz Who owned a pea brain? A pea horses was no tortoise Kid gleamed he didn't take on no weight tall He could eat supper thinking the horse he had to fork the next morning And in her made no triad breakfast tall His hands as a shaky all that spring he has to get a friend to roll his cigarette Russell conceded that he was no Brockbuster But he also observed that the West was inhabited by an entire breed of fanciful liars They weren't vicious liars Russell said It was love of romance and the wish to be entertaining made them stretch the facts And Charlie's pictures even the bad guys were rendered with a certain affection

This is the notorious hold-up artist known as Big Knows George There's not been very careful about disguising his most prominent feature This isn't grand melodrama, it's a comic scene which says more about the passengers Robbed of their wallets and dignity than the villains Jake Hoover is another figure that appears in several of Russell's watercolors This Montana pioneer and mountain trapper adopted Charlie when the kid lost his first job with a sheep rancher Hoover became an important friend and teacher, strongly influencing the way Russell saw the world around him Russell lived and trapped with Hoover during the winters of 1882 and 83 And an isolated camp in Montana's Judith Basin

Of this time and place Russell wrote, nature has surely done her best here No king of the old times but claimed a more beautiful or bountiful domain Russell's education in this school of all outdoors is he once called it Enabled him to paint landscapes in the sculpt animal forms with a kind of native intimacy That's completely different from what Remington had ever achieved In spite of the charm life that Charlie briefly lived with Jake Hoover Montana was no garden of Eden In 1883 the Northern Pacific Railroad completed its tracks across the country And as Charlie put it, the trails of the mountain man and prospector were being rapidly ploughed under Some of the men Charlie worked for the big ranchers took the law into their own hands to deal with the growing problems of cattle rustling

But nothing was more devastating than the winter of 1887 It was the coldest winter in living memory Trains were stopped dead in their tracks by blizzards Food ran short in many towns and cowhands froze to death in the saddle trying to save the remnants of the great herds In the spring of that terrible year a cattleman named Lewis Kaufman waited in hell enough for a report on his losses Legend has it that his foreman hadn't the nerve of the heart to send a letter spelling out the extent of the damages So instead he sent a small sketch made by a hired man

The artist turned out to be none other than Charlie Russell Russell called his picture of a starving cow beset by coyotes waiting for a Chinook A warm wind that brought the end of winter Kaufman who was compelled to face total ruin had his own words for it He called it the last of the 5,000 It was just a rough little drawing something that Charlie made to pass the time at a lonesome line camp But passed around from hand to hand in the town of Helena It gripped those who saw it and became a symbol of their common laws Unexpected, this was the beginning of recognition for Charlie Russell, the cowboy artist

Waiting for a Chinook was reproduced and widely circulated in Montana Yeah, Charlie himself seemed unsatisfied He still patronized his old haunts, places where he claimed a rattlesnake would be ashamed of me his mother The garrilist spirit of Rohite Rollins lived on in his work and imagination Local newspapers noted the display of his paintings in the window of a general store A wealthy patron even offered to send him to art school in Philadelphia Just about the same time that Remington was studying in New York Yeah, Charlie seemed to be biting his time, waiting for something In the end he surprised everyone, in the fall of 1888 he simply walked away from his cowboy life, leaving all civilization behind He went north to Canada to visit one of the last remaining bands of black-feet Indians

That had not been starved and could jolt into living on a government reservation Few hard facts are known about the period that Russell lived with the Indians But the art that grew out of it reflects a sympathetic view of their everyday life Some portraits, especially of women, seem downright personal Other pictures tell stories like this one, called Lost in the Snowstorm, We Are Friends Taken as a whole, Russell's Indian paintings are like a visual pawn

An ode to man living in perfect harmony with nature Russell lived with his Indian friends for only six months, but he never forgot them Near the end of his life he was to write, The Red Man was the true American Their God was the son, their church, all outdoors, their only book was nature, and they knew all his pages About the time Russell reached 30, he quit the wild country and began to consider making a living as a full-time artist In the city of Great Falls in 1891 a saloonkeeper offered him a deal, but it wasn't exactly what he'd been looking for When I arrived in that burge, I was introduced to Charlie Green, who pulled a contract on me as long as a rope Everything I drew, modeled, or painted for a year was to be his

Then he had me working from six in the morning until six at night Well, I argued that there was some difference between painting and saw and wood So we split up and I went to work for myself I put in with a bunch of cow punchers and a prize fighter who was out at work We read it a two by four on the south side Feed was short at times, but we winnered I came to Cascade in 95, married Nancy Cooper in 96 She took me for better or worse, so I'll leave it to her what she got Nancy Cooper was a lovely, headstrong girl from Kentucky

Charlie courted her for a year. Word got out that he'd actually gone so far as to give her his favorite horse This clinched it as far as his friends were concerned And no one was surprised when the two were married Though Charlie was much older than his bride, Nancy possessed an iron will She was determined to see two at the Charlie Russell made something of himself as an artist Nancy's first step was to ration Charlie's whiskey and get him to settle down and paint something every day Her second step was to appoint herself his agent As a new couple trying to make ends meet, they needed more than the few dollars that Charlie charged for his paintings Russell was amazed that the woman he married seemed able to convince anyone that he was the greatest artist in the world Charlie wrote that he used to think that a man could take more punishment than a woman But after Nancy came into his life, he observed that a woman can go further on a lipstick than a man can with a Winchester on the side of Bacon

It wasn't long before his buyers and grade falls were referring to his wife as Nancy the robber The name stuck years later in New York when she drove tough bargains with gallery owners Charlie said, you just can't disappoint a person like that, so I did my best work for In 1911, an exhibition in New York brought Charlie Russell a claim as a chronicler of the American West At Nancy's bidding, he traveled east to meet the buyers and the critics On the road from the smoke of the tall teepees as he put it, he wrote a series of humorous illustrated letters to his friends

He noted that the street car is only ring their bell after passing over a human, but I think that's to call the wagon which calls you to the morgue The loose ways of New York outstripped even the body houses of the Old West, maybe you think this lady is stripped for a bath he wrote to his friend Bill Rance But you're wrong, she's a dinner He knew a story of an imaginary meeting with John D. Rockefeller would amuse the folks back home But the bartenders he complained won't even drink with you In 1914, the Russell sailed for England for an exhibition of Charlie's work in London's Bond Street Charlie faithfully sketched the steamship they sailed on and the memorable experience of losing his breakfast in a pitching state room In London, he observed that the royal guards are about as fancy a bunch of bulls as I ever saw, but he was feeling far from home He was taken to the Tate Gallery to see the new abstract art looks like a slice of spoiled summer sausage, he said

It represents the feeling of a bad stomach after a duck lunch When the bell hops in his hotel turned out to be better highwayman than Big Nose George, he knew he'd rather be home in Montana Grizzly bears were nothing compared to the rogues of the big wigwam in the east Nancy built her husband a log cabin studio out of telephone poles right in the middle of great falls Here Charlie lived increasingly in the past in a time part remembered and part imagined But Nancy never gave up on her ambitions for it with their young adopted son Jack she traveled to California bought a house in Pasadena and talked up the price of her husband's paintings

They played host to celebrities like Douglas Fairbanks, Will Rogers, the Prince of Wales But Charlie tried his best to remain unaffected by fame Talent is no credit to its owner What a man can't help he should get neither credit nor blame for it's not his fault I'm an illustrator there are lots better ones some worse But any man who can make a living doing what he likes is lucky and I am that So any time I cash in now I win Papers have always been kind to me many times more kind than true I've had many friends among cowmen and cow punches I had friends when I had nothing else

Some of my friends were not always with the law but then I haven't said how law biting I was myself Charlie died shortly after he wrote these words he was already a legend Russell is remembered first and foremost as the cowboy artist But he also became quite consciously a living representative of the West he portrayed

He was the native spokesman the poet laureate of the passing frontier In 1920 he wrote time only changes the outside of things It scars the rock and snarls the tree but the heart inside is the same The works of Charlie Russell and Frederick Remington tell stories about the West One shows violent drama the other gentle humor Together they created a gallery of heroes that live on in the American imagination today You

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