Finding the landscapes of Charlie Russell

As much as the hospitality of its people and its vibrant western and Native American cultures, it is the postcard beauty of Montana’s wide-open spaces that leaves the deepest impression on visitors to our state.

That was as true in Charlie Russell’s time as it is today.

Russell first arrived in Montana in 1880, just a few weeks shy of his 16th birthday. His parents had orchestrated the journey in the vain hope that the discomforts of life in Montana territory would cure Charlie’s dime-novel fantasies about the American frontier.

It didn’t.

Russell remained a resident of Montana until his death in 1926. He spent 11 years as a working cowhand, tending herds from the Rocky Mountain Front to Miles City before turning his attention full time to art in 1891. It seems as though Montana was always on Charlie Russell’s mind.

“Montana … meant something to Charles Marion Russell,” Gutzon Borglum, famed sculptor of Mount Rushmore, wrote following Russell’s death. “And my own thought is that Montana meant the heart, the source of the source of the great drama.”

Seventy years before the phrase “Big Sky Country” was coined as a catchphrase for Montana, Russell was regularly incorporating the state’s sweeping vistas in his artwork. Many of those landscapes can still be viewed today, little changed from the era in which Russell lived and worked. Some of them are clearly identifiable in his paintings.

“Most Russell scholars believe that the vantage point depicted in “When the Land Belonged to God” is just downstream from Fort Benton, where Shonkin Creek flows into the Missouri,” wrote Kirby Lambert, an exhibition adviser for the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Okla.

Lambert notes that Russell floated the Missouri River in 1913 with Montana politician, writer and friend, Frank Bird Linderman, and that “When the Land Belonged to God” was painted just one year later.

“The topography of the entire area would have been fresh in his mind,” Lambert wrote. “Russell moved Frenchman’s Ridge farther to the east to reveal Square Butte and Round Butte. According to Lepley (Jack Lepley, chairman of the River and Plains Society) there are spots farther downriver – for example, the mouth of Arrow Creek – where these features are visible from the bluffs along the river.”

Indeed, the distinctive features of Square Butte and Round Butte (known in the late 1800s by the more prosaic titles Steamboat Butte and Haystack Butte) appear in numerous Russell paintings. Shown in “The Medicine Man,” painted in 1908, Square and Round buttes are shown from a southerly perspective, viewed from the region near Geyser. In “Salute to the Robe Trade,” painted a dozen years later, the topography is reversed, showing a southerly facing topography with the Highwood Mountains in the distance.

The works are bookends, reveling Russell’s renowned dedication to accuracy. However, Russell was never a slave to geography. Images resembling these distinctive buttes, plus segments of the Missouri River and representations of the Rocky Mountain Front appear again and again; often divorced from the context of a precise geographic location.

“It’s just a recognizable piece of Montana geology,” said Jim Combs, an active collector of Russell art and memorabilia. “He put something in just to make it more interesting.”

While Russell routinely sketched subjects during his travels across Montana, he was never a “plein air” artist who painted his works in the field. Instead, Russell relied on his encyclopedic memory to faithfully re-create the detail found in the paintings he completed in his studio.

“Salute to the Robe Trade” is an interesting example of Russell’s blending of on-site observations and historical remembrances. In this painting, Russell portrays a group of Blackfeet firing their guns as they descend a ravine toward a palisaded trading post on the north bank of the Missouri River.

The identity of this post is not established in Russell’s title. In describing the work, the director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art, Joan Carpenter Troccoli, refers to the post as Fort McKenzie “forty miles above the Great Falls of the Missouri.”

Troccoli’s reference is confusing because old Fort McKenzie, which was burned to the ground by the Blackfeet in 1844, was actually located at the confluence of the Missouri and Marias rivers – more than 50 miles downstream of the Great Falls of the Missouri.

Combs believes it is more likely that what Russell was painting was a depiction of old Fort Benton, and supports this claim by suggesting the view shown in “Salute to the Robe Trade” was captured from a bluff to the east of town, now occupied by the Signal Point Golf Club.

Whether it be from above or below the Great Falls, Fort McKenzie or Fort Benton many never be fully resolved, but the fact that two art historians can debate a precise location testifies to Russell’s faithful re-creation of a scene even if the exact details may be somewhat askew.

This attention to detail goes beyond landscapes to include individual buildings, and even the attire, regalia and horses of cowboys and Native Americans Russell had known and worked with.

Early in his career as an artist, Russell painted “Cowboy Camp During the Roundup,” a precise depiction of life as an O-H Ranch cowboy during the spring round-up of 1886. The painting is crude in comparison to Russell’s later works; yet so precise that decades later observers familiar with the scene could identify individual cowboys based upon Russell’s depiction of their clothing and horses.

Everything, down to western plains vegetation and the nuances of early morning light are faithfully replicated; though not always in an exact identifiable location.

“… The whole thing vibrates with meaning to anyone who has ridden the range,” patron Malcom Mackay wrote to Nancy Russell in 1915 after receiving “When Horses Talk War There’s Slim Chance for Truce.”

“The painting also showcases his skills as a landscapist,” Troccoli wrote in describing the same painting in 2009. “We feel the foreboding discomforts of this wet dawn on the range in that sliver of sunrise, reflected in streaks and splotches of yellow on the surface of brackish puddles …”

One of Russell’s most repeated motifs was the buffalo hunt on horseback. He painted and sculpted dozens of these scenes during his career, but it is unlikely that he ever personally witnessed such an event.

“One of Charlie’s biggest regrets in life was that he had never seen an Indian buffalo hunt,” John Taliaferro wrote in his 1996 biography of Russell. “The remnant bunches of buffalo he had come across in the Judith Basin in the early 1880s served mostly as depressing reminders of better days.”

By the end of Russell’s life there was even growing concern that elk and pronghorn antelope would be extinguished from Montana’s landscape.

Anne Morand, curator of art at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, suggests Russell was deeply influenced by earlier western artists, such as George Catlin, Karl Bodmer and Seth Eastman in his many depictions of buffalo hunts, as well as traditional Native American ceremonies that had largely disappeared prior to Russell’s arrival in the West.

“Both Catlin and Bodmer visited the Mandan Indians and depicted scenes of them,” Morand wrote. “Although Russell painted several historical Mandan subjects, he could not have seen traditional Mandan village life firsthand because the smallpox epidemic of 1837-1838 decimated the population.”

One of Russell’s most celebrated hunting paintings is “The Buffalo Hunt (No. 29),” which he completed in 1900. Once again there is a blending of the real and imagined, with an onrush of animals and hunters framed against a landscape that closely resembles the Rocky Mountain Front near Cascade.

Russell’s life and work spanned an era of sudden and profound change in the Rocky Mountain west. In little more than a single lifetime the centuries old Indian buffalo culture was wiped out and replaced by early 20th century industrialism.

It’s likely that as the frontier west he loved slipped away before his eyes, Russell came to see his art as a medium through which he could preserve its memory.

“He understood it was an era coming to an end,” Combs said of Russell’s attachment to Montana’s frontier culture. “I can just sense it was like a piece of his heart was disappearing.”

Three years after his death in 1926, Russell’s widow, Nancy, published a collection of Charlie’s illustrated letters titled “Good Medicine.” The book opens with a quote from Russell; “The West is dead! You may lose a sweetheart, but you won’t forget her.”

Not withstanding Russell’s pessimism, some portion of the Old West still remains. The elk and antelope have returned – if not the buffalo – and Montana’s Indian and cowboy cultures persist and are celebrated.

The landscapes that inspired Charlie Russell are still out there. Today they beckon a new generation of adventurers, much like they did to the teenage “Kid Russell” more than 135 years ago.