Born in St. Louis Missouri in 1864, Charles Marion Russell longed to be a cowboy As a boy, Charles listened to the stories told about his uncles, Charles and William Bent who were early western traders. William had set up the trading post on the Santa Fe Trail, known as Bent’s Fort. Charles was the first governor of New Mexico Territory.
Charles’ mind rarely remained in the classroom…it was usually wandering west. He constantly sketched the scenes or created miniature wax figures his mind had captured from his western daydreams.
The Russells lived near the waterfront in Missouri, and there young Charles would spend many an hour watching explorers, fur traders and soldiers. The details he observed were filed in his mind, where they could easily be retrieved and put on paper or carved into beeswax or clay another day.
When Charles turned 16, his father allowed him to travel west with a family friend to see the reality of the west. The effect was the opposite of what Mr. Russell had anticipated. Charles loved it out in Montana where his dreams were brought to life. He decided to stay!
Charles Russell learned a lot about wilderness survival skills from Jake Hoover, a prospector, hunter and cowboy. Hoover also introduced Russell to local Indian tribes.
While working on ranches, Charles Russell always carved out time to sketch or shape a ball of beeswax he kept in his pocket into something based on his surroundings. This habit, as you can imagine didn’t make him the best “cowboy”.
He did find work on a ranch that earned him enough to get by. Winters could be extremely harsh, and one such winter, cattle owner L.E. Kaufman, asked range manager Jesse Phelps about the condition of the cattle. Phelps was a friend of Charles Russell and when he mentioned the letter he had to write, Charles offered to sketch something Phelps could include along with the update.
The especially hard winter of 1886-87 had caused the loss of thousands of cattle. Charles painted with a set of cheap watercolors on a pasteboard from a collar box, the image of a skin and bones cow, surrounded by wolves. When Phelps saw it, he said no letter was needed. That picture tells the whole story.
When Kaufman saw the picture, Charles had called “Waiting for a Chinook” he showed it to Ben Roberts, a friend of Charles, who owned the harness shop across the street. Roberts asked if he could have the picture which Kaufman gave him about a year later. Roberts displayed it in his shop. That was the beginning of Charles Russell’s local recognition as an artist.
In 1892, Charles Russell attempted to make his living as a full-time artist. But, it wasn’t until he married Nancy Cooper, who had faced hardships during her eighteen years of life, that his career as an artist began to gain success. Nancy, it turned out, had a head for business, and figured out ways to market her husband’s talent. The pairing worked well. Nancy arranged art exhibits for the art Charles created. The longtime friend of Charles M. Russell, humorist Will Rogers, put it like this, “Nancy took an “o” out of saloon and made it read salon.”
The Russels built a log studio in Great Falls, Montana where Charles created paintings, miniature wax animals and more formal sculptures that were cast in bronze. By 1926, when Charles died he had left behind more than 4,000 artworks. Today, Charles M. Russell is the subject of a sculpture that represents Montana as one of the two statues for the state in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U. S. Capitol.
Diana Erbio is a freelance writer and author of “Coming to America: A Girl Struggles to Find her Way in a New World”. Read more in her series Statues: The People They Salute visit The Table of Contents and the Facebook Page. (I’ll be adding to the Substack Table of Contents as I transfer the Blog Posts. Please subscribe to this Substack 😊🇺🇸🤓)