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Charles
Russell Biography
Charles Marion Russell
was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on March 19, 1864, a member of a
prosperous family whose manufacturing business promised a secure financial
future. But from early boyhood, young Charles showed a streak of nonconformity,
preferring to mold figures out ot clay, draw pictures, and wander
down to the waterfront of St. Louis to dream and talk with the adventurers
who had been to the western frontier. By the time he was thirteen
years old, Russell had his dream firmly in mind; he even ran away
to spend days at the river and return home to plead with his despairing
parents to let him go west. Hoping to dissuade him, and discipline
him, the Russell's enrolled him in a New Jersey military academy.
When that failed, the boy's parents finally agreed to let him go to
Montana Territory by railroad and stage in the company of Pike Miller,
a family friend. It was the earnest hope of the parents that a few
weeks of rugged life in still frontier Montana would effect a permanent
cure for Charles's wanderlust. It was in March, 1880, just short of
his sixteenth birthday, that the boy and his older companion rolled
into Helena, the roaring gold town on Last Chance Gulch. Memories
of Indian wars were still acute -- it had been only four years since
George Custer's command was wiped out on the Little big Horn -- and
there was still a wide-open roughness up and down the dusty streets
of every settlement. But instead of scaring him, the scenes which
met his eyes only solidified the boy's wish to stay in the territory
which still had a population of less than 40,000 people. Charles went
to work on Pike Miller's sheep ranch in the Judith Basin near present-day
Lewistown. By his own account, it was not a happy association, and
he soon quit. "I do not think my employer missed me much, as I was
considered pretty ornery," Russell later recalled. Soon after, the
youngster cast his lot with Jake Hoover, a hunter and trapper who
was wise in the ways of the West. This time the association was both
happy and edifying. For the next two years, Russell learned much about
the country from the colorful Hoover, and when money came from his
parents for his fare to St. Louis, he returned it. When he had saved
enough out ot his own earnings, Russell visited his home in 1882,
but could not stand "civilization" for only four months. He rarely
left his adopted state again except for infrequent visits to St. Louis,
New York, and other cities in America and abroad--and, towards the
end of his life, portions of cold winter months in California. After
he left Jake Hoover, Charlie began working on the open range. He was
an affable, congenial hand who was called "Kid" Russell by more experience
men. Hired as a night wrangler at Billings, he joined an outfit which
trailed 1,000 cattle into the Judith Basin. Although he never claimed
to be a top cowboy, his responsibilities were real enough, and he
obviously did his work, combining with it a talent for telling stories,
drawing pictures on every available surface, and modeling little clay
figures for the amusement of his bunkmates. In the winter of 1886-87
he painted his famous postcard-size "Waiting for a Chinook," informing
Stadler and Kaufman that the tragic hard winter which marked the decline
of open-range ranching, had nearly wiped out their herd of 5,000 Bar-R
cattle in the Judith Basin of Central Montana. In 1888, the young
wrangler rode north into Canada with a friend and decided to spend
the winter among the Blood Indians. Although he never planned it that
way, this sojourn among his "red brothers" had a profound effect on
him and his later artistic output. When he returned to the Judith
Basin in 1889, he found the range filling with homesteaders, towns
and the inevitable confinements of growth and "civilization." Vainly
looking for open range, Russell moved to the Milk River area just
south of Canada, then spent the next two years as an itinerant. He
came to Great Falls in the fall of 1892 to live thereafter as an artist,
although it was tough going for several years in spite of growing
numbers of admirers and more and more mention in the press. In 1896,
when he was 32 years old, Charlie Russell married an attractive 18-year-old
girl named Nancy Cooper. She became his business manager, a role he
gladly let her play. While many of his cronies resented the strictures
she placed on his casual drinking and visiting habits, she was credited
by her husband, and all authorities today, with bringing him success.
Nancy Russell thoroughly believed in her husband's talent, and sensed
that he was depicting the western scene better than anyone ever had.
His enormous gifts were combined with his own experiences and his
own philosophies to produce a body of art unsurpassed to this day
for its authenticity and beauty. He came to the scene just at the
right time, and he had the perception to recognize that what he first
saw was not to last. He recorded it. In 1900, after a number of lean
years, the Russells bought a home in Great Falls in a respectable
neighborhood, and three years later, Charlie built his log studio
adjacent to it. While her husband was at his easel perfecting his
artistry, Nancy was planning trips to larger centers of population
to expose it to collectors beyond the borders of Montana. The first
trip came late in 1903, and led to the showing of one of his paintings
at the World's Fair in St. Louis early in 1904. After that acceptance,
and a visit with Russell's father, they continued on to New York,
where the artist got his first look at what he called the "Big Camp."
It was not to be his last. Although the New York trips eventually
brought success -- including what he called "dead man's prices" --
Charlie Russell always longed to get back to Montana as soon as possible.
"The bartenders won't drink with you even," he wrote after a visit
in 1908. "Now I like to have the bartender drink with me occasionally,
out ot the same bottle, just to be sure I ain't gettin' poison." As
reported earlier in this publications, the 1911 trip to New York,
where his work was shown at the prestigious Folsom Galleries, is believed
to be the one during which he met Malcom S. Mackay of Wall Street
and New Jersey, which led to their warm friendship and Mackay's remarkable
collection. But of course there were many other contacts, and in 1912,
after a showing at the famed Calgary Stampede in Canada, his fame
spread northward and eventually to London. The Cowboy Artist had arrived.
After 1919, Charlie and Nancy began spending some winter months in
California, and again this led to new friends and collectors, this
time in the movie world. Such people as William S. Hart, Douglas Fairbanks,
Harry Carey and Noah Berry were attracted to both him and his art,
some of them introduced by Will Rogers, whom he had encountered earlier
in New York when the great humorist was struggling to sell his rope-twirling
talents on Broadway. Russell enjoyed all these associations, but the
tug back to Montana never left him. In 1923, when he was nearly 60
years of age, Russell suffered a severe attack of sciatic rheumatism,
and his letters to friends began to show a faint touch of nostalgia,
as did his paintings. Along with the pain of his rheumatism, he began
being bothered by a goiter, which was finally removed at Rochester,
Minnesota, in June, 1926. Although the operation was successful, Russell
was suffering from a weakened heart, and his doctors told him he had
only months to live. Just before midnight on October 24, 1926, Charlie
Russell died at his home in Great Falls. People from all walks of
life, including his beloved old cowboy and Indian friends, wept on
the streets of Great Falls as his funeral cortege, unmechanized, passed
down the street. The death of the Cowboy Artist was noted in newspapers
and publication throughout the country, and the measures of man and
artist was universally reported. this writer found a unique account
about him in the New York Herald Tribune, dated Sunday, December 5,
1926. Headed THE END OF THE TRAIL, the text is by Gutzon Borglum,
the restless genius who created the Presidential monuments at Mount
Rushmore in the Black Hills. It reads, in part: "Charles Marion Russell,
who has just passed, was of the self-reliant race of lone explorers,
a pioneer, a student, a painter of life. I've read the rubbish about
him, how he drank, lived with the Indians, trapped, punched cows,
which has filled columns with cheap newspaper gossip. "Of course he
drank, and I'll wager he could drink in competition with the fabled
Danes, dry up the swollen streams to let his lady pass. Gamble? Certainly!
He gambled his life to record the sob of a lone trapper...Swear? I
hope he swore -- and as picturesquely as Shakespeare, as meaningfully
as Washington..." Borglum ended his article with a remarkably perceptive
analysis of Russell's work in comparison to that of the great Frederic
Remington. It is a subject which has been discussed by experts and
partisans of one artist or the other for many years. Borglum, who
had his own critics and partisans throughout his mercurial career,
is worth listening to on this intriguing point: "Russell has often
been compared to Remington. We know hs disliked this. I did not know
Russell personally and I cannot say what he thought of Remington.
But let us say this: No two men can be compared or paired...Remington
had his place; it is unique, but deals with the drama of a phase of
life. His art has a strong reportorial character, which seems to me
to leave the creator as little responsible for the result or the character
as the onlooker. Remington, I'm trying to say, seems...curiously detached
from his own art and I believe in the lack it wants the vitality I
feel all great work must possess... "Russell cut deeper. Russell,
for instance, would not paint a picture of a couple of cowboys branding
a calf with the calf buried under chaps and a man or two taking the
iron. If the subject were used, ten chances to one, he would select
a situation where the calf was having a least a fifty-fifty chance
of beating the cowboys. "The incident of branding would not be enough
for Russell. The hazard, the chance and the possible tragedy would
alone engage his whole interest. Russell had not only the wit to see
the dual situation attached to any great moment, but he had...the
power to draw animals, horses, cattleman, in the mixed-up, tangled-up
situation daily occurring in the wild unfenced West -- situation no
other artist has ever attempted. "Remington has, on the other hand,
painted lonely figures on great vast spaces with a charm all their
own, inimitable. Let us be grateful that we have them both, each in
his span, giving us their separate record of a life that practically
has gone with them."
