Charles Russell

Cowboy Artist Charles M. Russell Lived What He Painted

Sue Hancock Jones

Because of Charles Russell, the world will always have a visual image of the American Indian and the last buffalo herds before newcomers and new inventions.

Charles Marion Russell was barely four when he wandered away from his Missouri home to follow a man with a trained bear on a chain. After his family found him and before he went to bed that night, Charlie used the mud from the bottom of his shoes to model a small figure of the bear.

According to the Russell family, that was the earliest example of a talent that would make Charles Russell so famous that one day his statue would be placed in the U.S. Capitol and his massive mural of Lewis and Clark meeting the Flathead Indians would hang in the House Chambers of the Montana State Capitol.

Today people say his name almost in the same breath with Western artist Frederick Remington, but one significant difference separates the two artists. Charlie lived what he painted. He lived a life in the saddle.

Russell’s road to fame would have seemed unlikely to anyone watching his lack of interest in school and his family’s frustration over his bad grades. The Russell family was prominent in business and public affairs in St. Louis. Charlie’s father had attended Yale University and his grandfather had been an editor, a member of the Missouri Legislature and a judge. His great-grandfather had been chief surveyor of the Louisiana Territory and chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Missouri Territory.

The problem was never that Charles Russell could not keep up with his peers. Instead, he simply had other interests that made school seem dull and pointless. He had, after all, declared at age 10 that he would be a cowboy.

Disappointed with their son’s indifference to school, Charlie’s parents allowed him to take a summer trip to Montana with a family friend. Perhaps this would cure him of his wanderlust for the West, and he could return home and settle down to schoolwork.

Charlie arrived in Helena, Mont., in 1880 four days shy of his sixteenth birthday. Instead of returning to St. Louis in the fall, he stayed for 46 years and adopted the state of Montana as his home.

When Charlie first arrived in Montana Territory, he found a thousand miles of prairie, big skies and a dozen tribes of wild Indians only a generation or two from the Stone Age. He traveled by rail, stage and horseback before finally reaching Judith Basin near the center of the state. Describing his arrival in the West, Charlie later in life said that “baring the Indians and a few scattered whites, the country belonged to God, but now the real estate man and nester have got most of it grass side down…. Thank God I was here first.”

If Charles Russell had stayed in school and followed in the family footsteps, he would have missed the American wilderness before—as he put it—“the granger plowed the trails under.”
He arrived two years before the last great Indian buffalo hunt of 1882. Buffalo were still abundant on the prairie and Indians were still considered dangerous even though Chief Joseph and his tribe of fighting Nez Perce had been captured three years earlier.

Russell worked as a cowboy for more than a decade during the open-range days before the turn of the century. Charlie’s first Montana job was herding sheep. “I did not stay long as the sheep and I did not get along well,” he told a reporter for the Fergus County Democrat in 1904. Truth be told, he was fired (“I’d lose the damn things as fast as they would put them on the ranch”).

In spite of his reputation with sheep ranchers, Russell was hired in 1882 as a night wrangler after no experienced replacement could be found for a Judith Basin spring roundup. The wrangler was low man on the cowboy pecking order, but the position allowed him to spend some of his daytime hours observing other cowboys at work. For all but one of 11 years, “Kid” Russell was the night herder who sung to the horses and cattle.

During his time as a wrangler, Charlie lived with a hunter and trapper named Jake Hoover, a mountain man who was Charlie’s first friend and mentor. Jake was also a friend of the Indians, and his attitude toward Indians likely influenced a young teenage boy who admired the relationship Indians had with the land.

Russell sought out the Indians more than all the cast of characters he encountered in the last days of the frontier. He learned to talk with them in sign language and stayed overnight in their camps. In 1888 he spent six months living with the Blood Indians, a branch of the Blackfeet nation. He gained intimate knowledge of Native American culture during this period and was still riding the range when Sitting Bull was shot to death and the last Indian resistance was crushed.

Since Russell could not stop the tidal wave of change in Montana, he did the next best thing. He painted the Indians as they had been, even detailing the headwork design that identified Indian tribes. He painted every possible variation of an Indian buffalo hunt, and historians rely on his paintings to learn how the Indian looked and dressed before the Industrial Revolution changed the face of the frontier.

Charlie was painting and sketching at every possible moment when he wasn’t night wrangling. In the winter of 1885, he completed what was at the time his largest oil painting on canvas. Breaking Camp was a lively scene of a Utica, Mont., roundup crew. Without mentioning it to anyone, he sent the painting to be shown at the St. Louis Art Exposition of 1886. This would become Russell’s first painting to be exhibited outside the state of Montana.

In 1886, Charlie was working for the OH Ranch when winter set in with a vengeance. The ranch hands were keeping an eye on the cattle of neighboring ranchers Louis Kaufman and Louis Stadler, Helena investors who were enjoying the prosperity of the open range cattle boom. Kaufman lived in a new mansion in Helena and began to worry about his cattle as weather conditions worsened. He managed to get a letter to his foreman asking about the condition of the herd.

The foreman was struggling with a response to Kaufman when Charlie took up a piece of cardboard 3 inches by 4.5 inches and dashed off the most famous painting of his career—a gaunt, pathetic cow drooping in the snow while two gray wolves lurked nearby. He wrote “Waiting for a Chinook” on the bottom of the cardboard. When Kaufman received the sketch in February 1887, he got the message. He began passing the drawing around Helena, and soon nearly everyone in Helena had seen it and knew who drew it.

The Helena Weekly Herald declared that “the fame of an amateur devotee of brush and pencil has arisen in Montana, and nurtured by pure genius within the confines of a cattle ranch, has burst its bounds and spread abroad over the Territory.” The sketch gained lasting fame with the name of Waiting for a Chinook and is now owned by the Montana Stockgrowers Association and exhibited in the Mackay Gallery of the Montana Historical Society in Helena.

Despite the encouragement of this publicity and much more to follow, the cowboy way of life was over for Russell by 1893. The cattle industry had brought the railroad, and the railroad had brought the settler. Now the range was too crowded for Charlie, and he never sang to the horses and cattle again.

Charlie decided to spend the winter in Cascade, a small town up the Missouri River from Helena and a few miles south of Great Falls. He set up his studio in an unused courtroom and proceeded to get to work on a commissioned painting that had resulted from a brief trip to visit his parents in St. Louis.

A prominent and wealthy St. Louis hardware merchant with ranching interests in Montana had commissioned several paintings that undoubtedly led to Charlie giving up his life as a cowboy and beginning to believe he could make a living as an artist. The price of each painting was unspecified and the subject matter was entirely Charlie’s choice. Over time he painted more than 15 paintings for the same St. Louis family and nine of those paintings now hang in the Amon G. Carter Collection in Fort Worth.

During the next two years, Charlie relocated to Great Falls, painted steadily and completed more than 40 watercolors and 20 oils. He was ready for a vacation by the fall of 1895 and decided to visit his old saddle maker friend Ben Roberts in Cascade. The Roberts family had taken in a pretty young girl from a broken home in Kentucky. When her mother died in 1894, Nancy Cooper moved to Cascade to work for the Roberts family. She was 17 years old and Charlie was 31.
Despite the difference in ages, they quickly became close friends, married in the Roberts home a year later and lived in a small shack in the rear of the Roberts’ property before moving to Great Falls. When they were introduced in 1895, Russell had already lived half his life. He was 31 when they met and would be 62 when he died 31 years later.

Nancy described her life with Russell in a letter to a childhood acquaintance a few months before his death: “I, as you know, married the only Charles Russell in the world and my life has been very full of romance, which they like to make moving pictures out of, only mine happens to be real.”

Nancy had no more schooling than Charlie did, but she had a driving ambition to help him achieve success. Under her prompting, Charlie got in the habit of getting up early and spending his mornings at his easel. After lunch he usually saddled his horse and rode to town to put in a few hours with his rowdy cowboy friends, but her insistence on regular hours increased his output.

For years she was the driving force behind Russell. Most of his work was commissions Nancy had arranged. She was a fighter who bargained mercilessly with galleries and dealers in pursuit of the fame she felt her husband deserved. She lost few opportunities to show Charlie’s paintings and sculptures.

“The lady I trotted in double harness with was the best ‘rooster’ and ‘pardner’ a man ever had,” Russell once remarked. “If she hadn’t prodded me, I wouldn’t have done the work I did.”

Before Nancy became his business manager, Russell gave away so many of his paintings that it’s hard to calculate the extent of his work. In a career that spanned 30 years from the end of the old frontier to the middle of the Roaring Twenties, Russell completed between 3,000 to 4,000 works of art. In addition, he corresponded with literally hundreds of friends and illustrated almost all his letters with either a pen drawing or a beautifully executed small watercolor painting.

Russell had a personality so magnetic that it’s hard to say whether it was the paintings or the artist himself who attracted the most attention. Charlie’s cowboy boots, wide-brimmed hat, red half-breed sash knotted at his waist, and a steady gaze under a hank of unruly hair made him popular with everyone he met.

The constantly increasing prices of his work ended their financial worries. After 1919 they spent a part of each winter in California to get away from the Montana cold. The move may have been more of a strategic plan by Nancy to market her husband’s work among members of the movie colony. William S. Hart, Douglas Fairbanks, Noah Beery, Harry Carey and Charlie’s old friend Will Rogers were among those who purchased some of his major paintings and bronzes.

In 1923 Charlie was back in Great Falls when he suffered a severe attack of sciatic rheumatism that disabled him for nearly six months. “I am better but am still using four legs,” he wrote to a friend. “The front ones are wooden.” Numerous medical problems persisted until finally a heart attack ended his life while he was at home in Great Falls on Oct. 24, 1926.

On the day of his funeral, the children in Great Falls were released from school to watch the funeral procession as four black horses pulled a glass-sided coach carrying Russell’s coffin. Nancy did not die until 1940 after having done her best to honor the value of her husband’s artwork during the stock market crash of the Great Depression and the difficult days of the 1930s.

Charlie Russell moved to Montana to be a cowboy. He lived the life he loved in a place he loved and will always be known as “Charles Russell, Cowboy Artist.” Even more important, the world will always have a visual image of the American Indian and the last buffalo herds before newcomers and new inventions turned the grass upside down.