A collection of essays by various authors that explore the work, influence, and legacy of American cowboy artist and writer Charles M. Russell.

This first comprehensive biography of Charles M. Russell examines the colorful life and times of Montana’s famed Cowboy Artist. Born to an affluent St. Louis family in 1864, young Russell read thrilling tales of the West and filled sketchbooks with imagined frontier scenes. At sixteen he left home and headed west to become a cowboy. In Montana Territory he consorted with cowpunchers, Indians, preachers, saloon keepers, and prostitutes, while celebrating the waning American frontier’s glory days in some 4,000 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculptures. Before his death in 1926, Russell saw the world change dramatically, and the West he loved passed into legend. By then he was revered as one of the country’s ranking Western artist with works displayed in the finest galleries, his romantic vision of the Old West forever shaping our own. Taliaferro reveals the man behind the myth in his multifaceted complexity: extraordinarily gifted, self-effacing, charming, mischievous, and playful, a friend to rough frontier denizens and Hollywood stars alike. The author also explores Russell’s controversial partnership with his fiery young wife, Nancy, whose ambition and business savvy helped establish Russell as one of America’s most popular artists.

This first ever in-depth, cross-border study of the cattle ranching frontiers on the northern Great Plains of North America argues that though they lived on different sides of the fortyninth parallel, the first cattlemen on the western Canadian prairies and in the state of Montana shared a common history.

Well known for his sketches, paintings, and sculptures of the Old West, Charles M. Russell (1864-1926) was also an accomplished author in the humorous genre known as "local color." Raphael Cristy sorts Russell's writings into four general categories: serious Indian stories, men encountering wildlife, cattle range characters, and nineteenth-century westerners facing twentieth-century challenges. Russell's art is often misinterpreted as mere longing for a fading open-range west, but his writings tell a different story. Cristy shows how Russell amused his peers with stories that also delivered sharp observations of Euro-American suppression of Indians and humorous treatment of wilderness and range issues plus the emergence of women and urbanization as bewildering agents of change in the modern West. "A welcome departure from the usual biographies and coffee table volumes on Russell and his art. . . . [Cristy] deals with an important, yet relatively unexplored, aspect of the career of one of the most influential interpreters of the American West."--Byron Price, Director, C. M. Russell Center for the Study of Art

Charles M. Russell cowboy, painter, sculptor, writer was an advocate of the people, animals, landscapes, and ideals of the West. Perhaps most importantly, he was an archivist. Through his detailed and honest paintings, sculptures, line drawings, and prose, he memorialized the Western way of life as it was at the turn of the twentieth century. Far from romanticizing the West, Russell's art captured the harsh and beautiful reality of the everyday world he lived in. Russell was one of those rare artists who was famous during his lifetime. Most books about Russell focus on his masterpieces, but Charles M. Russell: Printed Rarities from Private Collections examines the lesser-known but ubiquitous commercial works that made him a household name. These magazine covers, postcards, calendars, cigar boxes, ink blotters, letterheads, and artifacts are today some of the most highly sought after Russell memorabilia.

From reviews of the first edition: "Richly illustrated . . . this handsome volume presents the rugged beauty and rowdy spirit of life on the frontier, as captured by two master painters." —Art Gallery International ". . . large color plates beautifully reproduce dashing, romantic scenes of frontier life created by two of the West's foremost portrayers." —American West "The many devotees of Remington and Russell and of Western art in general will want to add this handsome volume to their collection." —Arizona Highways "... the University of Texas Press, as one would expect, has produced a beautiful book ...." —Montana Since its original publication in 1982, Remington and Russell has become an essential introduction to the work of these artists, and this revision substantially enhances the book's strengths. Every painting in the Sid Richardson Collection has been rephotographed for this edition, including one Russell and five Remington paintings not included previously. Numerous black-and-white illustrations have also been added to give insight into the evolution of the paintings. Brian Dippie has considerably amplified his commentaries on each painting with new information. His revised introduction places Remington and Russell in the historical and cultural contexts of their time and draws intriguing comparisons between the two artists.

In the decades bracketing the turn of the twentieth century, Charles M. Russell depicted the American West in a fresh, personal, and deeply moving way. This handsome book--a companion volume to the acclaimed Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonné, edited by B. Byron Price--showcases many of the artist's best-known works and chronicles the sources and evolution of his style.

Representations of first contact—the first meetings of European explorers and Native Americans—have always had a central place in our nation’s historical and visual record. They have also had a key role in shaping and interpreting that record. In Framing First Contact author Kate Elliott looks at paintings by artists from George Catlin to Charles M. Russell and explores what first contact images tell us about the process of constructing national myths—and how those myths acquired different meanings at different points in our nation’s history. First contact images, with their focus on beginnings rather than conclusive action or determined outcomes, might depict historical events in a variety of ways. Elliott argues that nineteenth-century artists, responding to the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the subject, used the visualized space between cultures meeting for the first time to address critical contemporary questions and anxieties. Taking works from the 1840s through the 1910s as case studies—paintings by Robert W. Weir, Thomas Moran, and Albert Bierstadt, along with Catlin and Russell—Elliott shows how many first contact representations, especially those commissioned and conceived as official history, speak blatantly of conquest, racial superiority, and imperialism. Yet others communicate more nuanced messages that might surprise contemporary viewers. Elliott suggests it was the very openness of the subject of first contact that allowed artists, consciously or not, to speak of contemporary issues beyond imperialism and conquest. Uncovering those issues, Framing First Contact forces us to think about why we tell the stories we do, and why those stories matter.

Presents scholarly views on the comparison of the Canadian and American Wests and the various methodologies involved.

E. C. Abbott was a cowboy in the great days of the 1870's and 1880's. He came up the trail to Montana from Texas with the long-horned herds which were to stock the northern ranges; he punched cows in Montana when there wasn't a fence in the territory; and he married a daughter of Granville Stuart, the famous early-day stockman and Montana pioneer. For more than fifty years he was known to cowmen from Texas to Alberta as "Teddy Blue." This is his story, as told to Helena Huntington Smith, who says that the book is "all Teddy Blue. My part was to keep out of the way and not mess it up by being literary.... Because the cowboy flourished in the middle of the Victorian age, which is certainly a funny paradox, no realistic picture of him was ever drawn in his own day. Here is a self-portrait by a cowboy which is full and honest." And Teddy Blue himself says, "Other old-timers have told all about stampedes and swimming rivers and what a terrible time we had, but they never put in any of the fun, and fun was at least half of it." So here it is—the cowboy classic, with the "terrible" times and the "fun" which have entertained readers everywhere. First published in 1939, We Pointed Them North has been brought back into print by the University of Oklahoma Press in completely new format, with drawings by Nick Eggenhofer, and with the full, original text.