Charlie Russell: The Cowboy Who Painted What He Remembered

He arrived in Montana at sixteen, a kid from Saint Louis who wanted nothing more than to be a cowboy. Charles Marion Russell spent eleven years working cattle in the Judith Basin, sleeping under wagons, eating camp grub, watching the plains life he knew was already beginning to disappear even as he lived it. He was not painting yet, not professionally. He was just watching.

The winter of eighteen eighty-six into eighty-seven nearly wiped out the Montana cattle industry. Temperatures plummeted, blizzards stacked one on top of another, and cattle died by the hundreds of thousands across the territory. Russell was working on the O-H Ranch when a worried owner, writing from Helena, asked for a report on how the herd was faring. Russell sent back a small watercolor: a gaunt cow standing in snow, surrounded by circling wolves. He titled it Waiting for a Chinook. That postcard-sized painting hung in a Helena shop window and people stopped on the sidewalk to look at it. His career began in a winter's catastrophe.

Russell moved to Great Falls in eighteen ninety-seven with his wife Nancy, who was eighteen years old to his thirty-two. Nancy transformed his business. Russell was a generous man who would trade a painting for a good story and give work away to friends. Nancy set prices, arranged exhibitions across the United States, and eventually brought his work to London. She made him an internationally known artist while he was still thinking of himself as a cowboy who sketched.

In nineteen oh three he built a one-room log cabin studio on their Great Falls property from western red cedar telephone poles. He hung elk antlers from the porch, filled the interior with Native American gear, cowboy saddles, and rough-hewn furniture. He produced nearly four thousand works of art in his lifetime. He died in Great Falls on October twenty-fourth, nineteen twenty-six. The children of the city were released from school to attend the funeral.