Charles Russell's Contradictions: The Painter and the World He Helped Erase

Charles Russell arrived in Montana in eighteen eighty at sixteen years old, having told his parents he was going to make his fortune in the West. For eleven years he worked as a night wrangler on open-range cattle operations, sleeping in line camps and spending his days watching the country he would spend the rest of his life painting. He saw the last of the great bison hunts. He watched the final confinement of the Plains tribes to reservations. He was present at the end of something, and he knew it.

What he recorded across more than a thousand paintings is now considered an invaluable visual document. His Blackfeet figures, his Crow hunters, his horses and grizzlies and weather are painted with a specificity and anatomical accuracy that historians rely on as primary evidence. The Charles M. Russell Museum in Great Falls holds the largest collection of his work, including his log cabin studio, which is a National Historic Landmark.

He also participated in the cowboy culture that depended on Indigenous dispossession. The open-range cattle operations where he learned his craft were operating on land cleared of its previous inhabitants within his own lifetime. Russell maintained personal relationships with Blackfeet and Crow individuals throughout his life, and his letters document a genuine grief at what was happening to the people he painted. He expressed anger at the reservation system. He never left the industry that benefited from it.

Whether his paintings are celebration or elegy is a question the museum takes seriously. Whether the same image can be both at once is a question Russell never resolved before he died in Great Falls in nineteen twenty-six. The paintings he left behind do not resolve it either, which is part of why they are still worth looking at.