Ep. 29: What Were Charlie Russell and L.A. Huffman Trying to Tell Us? | The American West

Charlie Russell and L. A. Huffman became famous for their nostalgic art about the Frontier world they experienced in the West. But with a fascination with what Russell called “Dreamtime Montana,” exactly what were they trying to tell us about the West’s future? Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:31Speaker 02

  Famed cowboy artist Charlie Russell and fellow Montana photographer L.A. Huffman had a message for the future. But what was it? I'm Dan Flores, and this is The American West.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  What were Charlie Russell and L.A. Huffman trying to tell us? In 1908, three years after the freshly amended state of Montana had passed a law requiring its veterinarians to infect any captured wolves that came their way with sarcotic mange, and then release them to spread the disease into the wild population. In Great Falls, the cowboy artist Charlie Russell sat down to scribble a letter to his friend, the writer Frank Bird Linderman. As Russell reflexively did when he wrote Almost Anyone, he appended a quick and wonderful little watercolor sketch to the top of the page. Knowing that Linderman's own sympathies were similar to his, Russell drew a simple little

• 2:48Speaker 02

  ecological set piece about the West, featuring a buffalo carcass with a wolf standing over it. Then he added a bit of doggerel. "You sleeping relic of the past, if I but had my way, I'd clothe your frame with meat and hide and wake you up today." In his classic work of mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell once laid out a template for how human myths tend to describe their heroes. Minor details vary, but as Campbell's titles suggested, there are some universals. In our mythological stories, the hero is a person of action, usually a raid against

• 3:33Speaker 02

  some development the culture sees as threatening. The hero is kind, tolerant, generous to a fault, therefore, a defender of the underdog. The hero ultimately becomes an emblem, a kind of personification of how the culture imagines itself. As the threat unfolds, the hero often embarks on a journey, sometimes literal, sometimes mystical, sometimes psychic, to some distant and dangerous place. The hero then returns with special knowledge and makes it widely available. At that point, the hero becomes a visionary of the future, and the vision becomes synonymous with the wider culture.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Charles Marion Russell would have never thought of himself as a hero, although in Joseph Campbell's terms, that sort of self-abignation would be one of the qualities a proper hero usually has. But that's hardly the most compelling evidence for Russell's candidacy. More than a century after his death, Charlie Russell continues to come across as almost saintly, and that despite a spate of fairly recent works on him. A steady output from the Russell scholar, historian Brian Dippy, a splendid Russell biography by John Tolliver, who has written about everyone from Edgar Rice Burroughs, think Tarzan,

• 5:03Speaker 02

  to George Bird Grinnell, and even a recent catalog resume of all of Russell's works by historian Byron Price. Russell's cowboy friend, C.J. Ellis, summed up Charlie's endearing qualities as a friend or around a campfire this way: "Straight as a string. Don't think he ever did a man a dirty trick in his life, and if he ever had an enemy, I never met him." As to heroic action, Russell may have been a little less of an authentic frontiersman than we or he like to think, but he got in close anyway. His hero's journey to a distant and dangerous place, in his case, Montana Territory in the closing decades of the frontier,

• 5:46Speaker 02

  wasn't exactly Odysseus-like. His trip was a three-day train ride from St. Louis to Helena. And despite Frank Linderman's argument that "there had been but little change on the plains when Russell came," as Linderman said, in fact, when Charlie got up the Missouri in 1880, the Little Big Horn Battle was four years in the past. Buffalo and all the grand wildlife of the American Serengeti were still there, but literally as Russell watched, they became straggling remnants. Russell never once saw his favorite scene, the Indian buffalo hunt in the flesh. He did live with a genuine mountain man, Jake Hoover, for a while,

• 6:29Speaker 02

  but he was never one himself. And despite his lifelong love for portraying wolves, Russell, early on, does seem to have poisoned a few of them for ranchers.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  That name history has given him, the cowboy artist? Well, Charlie was something less than a trail boss. Actually, he was for a time, a horse wrangler, a job usually left to boys. And as we now know, Charlie never really spent that winter living with the Indians. Although he did live in a cabin in Canadian blackfoot country with a buddy, a couple of summer months in 1888, and he may have had an Indian girlfriend while there. The writer George Bird Grenell lived with Western Indians. So did his ecologist cousin, Joseph Brunel. The Yale photographer Walter McClintock lived with Indians, in his case with the Blackfeet.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Charlie Russell's ancestors, the Bents of Colorado, spent most of their careers residing among Indians, and married women in the tribes. Russell did most certainly visit and like native people all his life, and he even had a yen for dressing up as an Indian from time to time, but to say he actually spent much time living with the Indians is about like saying, "A couple of trips to Yellowstone qualifies you as a grizzly bear biologist." If Russell was not so much a man of action as a portraer and active imaginer of action, if in fact, he had more in common with a Hollywood star like Bret Hart than with a

• 8:01Speaker 02

  genuine frontier rancher like Granville Stewart, he was at least where the action was. Charlie Russell saw the West with all its bark on. That was unlike his dandified competition in painting the West, The New Yorker Frederick Remington, and the Hoboken, New Jersey painter Charles Schrivogel. Russell was on the scene in the West for 46 years. True enough, with several winters back home in St. Louis at the start, and a bit of wintering in Southern California thrown in at the end. And Montana, at least by the standards of the rest of the world, has always been synonymous enough with remoteness and the menace of the wild, to serve as a dangerous land at the end of a long journey.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  But maybe the most important thing about Russell's time in the West was the change he witnessed. That is what gave him his special insight.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  As to Charlie Russell's status as a Western cultural hero, no one could argue with that. The Northern Rockies and Northern Plains, from Wyoming to Alberta, in some respects continues to see itself through Russell's eyes. Everything imaginable in this part of the West is named for him, including most significantly the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge on the Missouri River. The buffalo skull design he added to his signature on all his paintings after 1887, and then patented with the US Patent Office in 1907, adorns every standard-issue automotive license plate in Montana to this day.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  150 years after his arrival, Charlie Russell is the patron saint of the Northern West. The only other part of the West that takes an artist as its patron figure is the Southwest, where Georgia O'Keeffe holds that honor with a very different vision of the world. Pars the 21st-century West into South and North, in fact. The strange allure of the mystical desert versus a man's world of big sky and animals, that's an imagining that still works, for which we largely have Georgia O'Keeffe and Charlie Russell to thank. Was Charlie Russell a hero in the Joseph Campbell definition, then? I think he was.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  His marks are high in all the categories, but especially so, I've come to believe, in the most important one of all: the vision. Russell left more than 4,000 paintings and sculptures, and many thousands more illustrations and sketches, since he appended sketches to every letter he sent to friends. And there's personal explanation to accompany the art: letters, verse, plus the stories in the part-fictional books he wrote, like Trails Plowed Under. Almost everyone who has more than a passing acquaintance with Russell, especially the biographers who've worked so hard on him, believes there was a central theme in his art and in his life. So in the end...

• 11:07Speaker 02

  What is it that Charlie Russell was trying to tell us? And equally important, are we still willing to pay attention? Or do we just metaphorically pat him finally on the head and then turn away? The art history of the West has long lumped Russell in with other painters like Frederick Remington and famed novelist Owen Worcester and Zane Gray to make up what's known as the nostalgic West School. Every one of them, along with another figure I want to introduce shortly, experienced the immediate aftermath of the frontier or the Old West and subsequently reacted as if they ought to hold a lifetime grudge against their parents for waiting too long to give them birth.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  All of them seemed to think they had gotten to graze the real, true thing, only to see it snatched from their grasp. Most of them devoted the rest of their lives to swatting at fading ghosts with pen and brush, or begging the Hollywood movie makers to capture the real, true thing in film before even the memory of it evaporated. In the 1970s and 1980s, I knew many people who were nostalgic like this for the 60s, for the political engagement, the environmental awakening, the Woodstock-like music scenes, the sense of liberation in that era. 60s nostalgia is pretty much evaporated by now, and even Old West frontier nostalgia

• 12:37Speaker 02

  occupies a narrow niche these days. But it's still there, and it might be useful to know why and to understand how someone like Charlie Russell fits. If you take the 20,000-foot view of the story of the American West, what seems to be true is that nostalgic painters and writers and Hollywood directors made the frontier West and its pre-20th-century landscape sacred because they feared it was one final reach for humanity's life in nature. They were afraid that coming civilization- in fact was going to be feminizing.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  In Owen Wister's case, the author of The Virginian literally was in flight from his mother when he went west. Zane Grey, who may have understood the implications of Darwinism more than the rest, recognized what was at stake more clearly than any of them. Grey wrote that he believed his Western journeys and the reverie he experienced while alone in the Western landscape were, as he wrote, fleeting trances that belonged to the savage past. "I was a savage. I could bring back for a brief instant the sensatory state of the progenitors of the human race."

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Nostalgia for the loss of a place like the West and a phase of history like the frontier, thus, was a shocked recognition of an existence that was falling behind us in the passage of time, our ancient connection to our life and nature. No wonder there was cultural anxiety about that. The West had offered the world one last chance to live as natural men and women, responding to the rhythms of nature more than the strictures of society. Then 20th century America had rudely withdrawn the offer. The anxiety of that is a primary reason why half the movies Hollywood made in the first

• 14:43Speaker 02

  65 years of the 20th century were Westerns, why early television was carried by Westerns, why even modern art largely emerged when Paul Gauguin turned Pablo Picasso onto the possibilities of so-called primitive art. All these purveyors of knowledge and change were close enough to the time to sense the profound psychological shock of eradicating in a few decades a world it had taken evolution and unwritten human history, millions of years and millennia, to create. Then exit that timeless phase and enter a phase of cities, automobiles, radios, airplanes, and advertising.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Russell was one of those on the scene who saw this and captured it. But he was not the only one.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Another was a contemporary, yet another Midwesterner come to Montana, named L.A. Huffman. The flinty Texas historian of the old school, J. Evans Haley, for whom sentiment was something to be nailed irritably between the eyes with a sidelong squirt from that reservoir between cheek and gum, once observed of L.A. Huffman that for sheer versatility of significant and historic subject matter close to the range of grass, Huffman's photography surpasses them all. An endorsement by J. Evans Haley is nothing to be sniffed at. Many Westerners regard Haley's biography of Charles Goodnight, the real-life inspiration

• 16:21Speaker 02

  for Captain Call in Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, as the best biography anyone has written of a frontier rancher. When J. Evans Haley waxed effusive about L.A. Huffman being authentic, the sensible thing is to pay attention. Anyone interested in the Old West has been paying attention to Leighton Alton Huffman's photographic work all along, actually. His images of the Montana plains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are among the most widely reproduced photographs of the frontier anyone made. The range of Huffman's photographs was remarkable.

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  Famous Indians, famous pioneers, buffalo still wild on the plains, and buffalo hunters and skinners elbow-deep in the grisly business of eradicating them. Ranch houses in every conceivable picturesque Montana setting, the coming of sheep to the badlands, cattle overspreading the former buffalo plains. And since Miles City was his headquarters and the location of several of his studios, Huffman also turned his cameras on the roundups of wild horses and their hasty breakings, which went on in frenzied fashion as military buyers descended on Montana during the Boer War and World War I. Huffman even left a shot of the plows and the wheat that seemed to bring the Old

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  West to an end. As early as 1883 Huffman had 83,000 prints in his inventory. He was also fully capable, Javits Haley no doubt nodded in approval, of a photo like his "A Good Indian," a picture of some unfortunate native soul who acquired his admirable qualities by becoming deceased.

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• 20:51Speaker 02

  Born in Iowa in 1854, and growing up the son of an Ohio photographer, Huffman seems to have arrived in Montana Territory in 1878, two years after the Little Big Horn and two years before Charlie Russell. Huffman was 24 and landed in the West with an idea of how it all worked already programmed into his brain. To Huffman, the West was not a particular geographic place, but it was the frontier, the place, any place in America, where settlers were encountering wild nature, Indians, and all the country's original animals. This kind of West had the uncanny ability to recede across the continent like the setting

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  of the sun, taken down to its final glint of light by a successful ending to it. By the 1870s, a Midwesterner like Huffman was going to have to chase it down out where the frontier still existed, the Yellowstone flowed, and the buffalo roamed. So Huffman chased, landed an unsalARYed position as post photographer at Fort Kew, just outside present day Miles City. And with a certain urgency, took out after the frontier before it did its inevitable vanishing act. His first photographs appropriately were of bison still ranging across what Huffman gave the name, which we still use, the Big Open.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  He then went along as photographer on various military explorations of the surrounding country, photographing the Black Canyon of the Bighorn in 1879, and what in youthful optimism, the frontier at last, he called his first grizzly. Anxious to photograph some of the Indian leaders made household names by the Plains Wars, Huffman commenced with rain in the face and spotted eagle, and eventually proceeded to record some of the great classics of Western portraiture with stunning shots of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Plenicooh, Joseph of the Nez Perce, the Salish Sam Resurrection, Curly Bear of the Blackfeet, and a gallery's worth of others.

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  By 1880, Huffman opened the first of a series of studios in Miles City. He had the common sense of the self-made man, and apparently never worried overmuch about being a part of Montana's first service economy. He advertised his establishment with ads for so-called Indian portraits, Northern Pacific views, Badlands, Yellowstone, and Bighorn scenery. From time to time, he would pack up his prints and head for the already civilized West, Portland and Seattle, to cater to taste for the vanished frontier. But Huffman always returned to Miles City. Indeed, he died in Montana in 1931.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  He hobnobbed with the history makers and photographed everybody who was anybody, including Conrad Coors, Granville Stewart, and Calamity Jane, among his pioneer portrait classics. And he corresponded with many other famous souls: Hamlin Garland, George Grenell, William Hornaday. Between 1898 and 1905, though, Huffman did a very interesting thing.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Northwest on the railroads by cheap and liberal federal homesteads, farmers with their plows, fences, wives, and small children were arriving on the scene in hordes. And at that pregnant moment, when you'd think a photographer would have exalted in the possibilities of new subjects, in Huffman's eyes, history had ratcheted to that inevitable and far less intriguing stage, "No More Frontier." So, starting in 1898, he began to offer only views of the past for sale. He stopped shooting new work, and instead, he spent all his time printing his old negatives

• 24:53Speaker 02

  and selling to the new arrivals his photos of Montana and Wyoming from the 1870s and 1880s, when, in his mind, the real West still existed. Huffman, the photographer of the frontier, found himself now stranded, presumably back in the Midwest where he had started and which he had left in disgust. So, he devoted the rest of his life to reprising through his images that magic time when the West truly had been alive. Both Huffman's work and his ideas about what he had witnessed as Frontier Montana gave way to a state dominated by railroads and mining companies were similar to the

• 25:37Speaker 02

  motives that drove Charlie Russell. Their ideas, in fact, strike at the heart of something very critical about the West, not just then, but now. Huffman and Russell were unfortunate enough to experience the Great Change, the West disconnection from the frontier. As he looked back on it, here is how Huffman described that experience. "Kind fate had it that I should be post-photographer with the Army during the Indian campaigns close following the annihilation of Custer's Command. This Yellowstone-bighorn country was then unpend of wire and unspoiled.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  I made photographs with crude homemade cameras from saddle and in log shack. I saved something. One looked about and said, 'This is the last West.'" It was not so. There was no more West after that. It was a dream and a forgetting, a chapter forever closed.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  What did this mean to him? Here is how he described that. Everywhere I go now, in the Yellowstone country, my travels tell me this, that soon, if I am to gallop the little gray mare, it must be in a lane. That makes me sad. I would that there were yet a few waste places left untouched by the settler and his cursed wire fence. Good in its way, but not for me. Huffman remained in Montana into the early 1930s, when he passed away, still convinced he had seen America with the bark on it, still depressed by what the West was turning into in the 20th century.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  But eventually, he did hold tight to an idea he had that made him optimistic about the Great Change. Two of Huffman's biographers, Mark Brown and W.R. Felton, write that Huffman came up with "a scheme to make a great pasture of the flatiron country between the Yellowstone and Missouri, to fence it with a great woven wire to banish forever the skin hunters, maybe even enlist them in an army of wardens." He fantasized how and where the great park gates would be guarded, how tame the bison, antelope, and elk inside would get, and how splendid twould be, as he wrote,

• 28:07Speaker 02

  "when the yellow-green carpet of spring had come to see it all teeming with life again."

• 28:20Speaker 02

  What Charlie Russell felt about the Great Change led him in a different direction. But Russell's premise was strikingly similar to Huffman's.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Despite being typecast as a cowboy artist, Russell spent most of his career a champion of the wilderness west, a place in his life he referred to as "Dream Time Montana." If Russell was merely trying to tell us that "I saw the end of what you can never imagine," his message for the future isn't very useful for subsequent generations. A more imposed reading of Russell's message is perhaps what we could call Charlie Russell Commodified. In other words, cowboy hats and boots, bandanas and Wrangler jeans, saddles and bridles and Hackamores, Colts and Winchesters, all the Russell gear he painted and celebrated. All of that is still marketable.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Maybe Russell would have winked at this and at interstate tourist snake pits and wall drug billboards, but I like to think not. Neither of these interpretations of Russell would likely make him very happy. As for cashing in on the west, during his late years, he did hobnob amongst the new Hollywood celebrities in California, loved meeting and dining with the new movie idols, but Russell had an agenda, and it wasn't cash. After he and Nancy met Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, he wrote Fairbanks, "Doug, don't forget our old west. You and others have done the west and showed it well, but there's lots of it left from Mexico to the Great Slave Lakes."

• 29:56Speaker 02

  I think he was earnest about keeping the idea alive of the natural world he'd seen in the west in 1880. Russell left us a lot to sift through to figure out his message, and like every life, his was full of contradictions. But I think he was dead serious all his life about the motivation that seems to track through every piece of his art. Russell once wrote a patron, "I am glad, Mr. Kilmer, I knew the west before nature's enemy, the white man, invaded and marred its beauty." Which must have been a precursor to one of the most famous Charlie Russell quotes of all, delivered as a banquet speaker late in his life. I have been called a pioneer.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  In my book, a pioneer is a man who comes to a virgin country, traps off all the fur, kills off all the wild meat, cuts down all the trees, grazes off all the grass, and strings 10 million miles of barbed wire. A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization. I wish to God that this country was just like it was when I first saw it and none of you folks were here at all.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  As the perceptive Western writer J. Frank Dobie said of him, "Russell probably was not inclined to be a hard thinker, but evaluated life out of instinctive predilections." To instinct, we can add his hero-sized generosity of spirit. As Nancy wrote about their first meeting, "In time, I came to know that he could not see wrong in anybody. He never believed anyone did a bad act intentionally. It was always an accident." Despite Russell's occasional rant at "the pioneer", by which, like L.A. Huffman, he may have primarily meant farmers, Russell's art treats the heartbreaking environmental history of the West

• 31:51Speaker 02

  almost as if it were accidental, too. Look, for example, at his painting Cowboy Sport: Roping a Wolf, done in 1890. Russell's paintings are full of wolves. They're in foregrounds, backgrounds, even provide the narrative of the little piece that made him famous, Waiting for a Chinook. Wolves were an essential part of the Old West that he loved, and he used them as symbols for it. Yet in this painting, Cowboy Sport: Roping a Wolf, the cowboys and ranchers at whose instigation wolves are being entirely erased from the West during Russell's time are not actually engaged in obliterating every last vestige

• 32:33Speaker 02

  of the diverse ecology that had once made the West so exciting. In Russell's painting, they're just having a little fun. Some good-natured cowboy hijinks, even if it does look suspiciously like the precursor of the modern so-called sport in the West of running down coyotes with snowmobiles. Similarly accidental, maybe, but by Russell's own admission certainly malevolent in its effects, was the ransacking of the West's fur bearers by mountain men trappers. Yet at the height of his powers and maturity, Russell still portrayed mountain men as regional heroes, the romance makers, he called them in a 1918 oil.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  And look at his painting Salute of the Robe Trade, done in 1920, for which Nancy Russell wrangled the stupendous sum of $10,000 in 1921. It's a masterful painting with all the elements of light, action, and Missouri River square beaut scenery that Russell patrons and Western realism aficionados could ever want. But no hint or even irony that the market hunt for buffalo robes was a death knell for the same West that Russell found so sacred. Nothing devastated Dreamtime Montana as much as the arrival of the global market for wildlife.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  We had our reasons, of course, along with our excuses and our bravado about how we were doing it all for civilization, but for the wild animals of the Old West, the march of civilization was a meat grinder. Plenty of Americans noticed what was happening, knew it was the destruction of one of the ecological wonders of the world, yet on the American plains, the nation allowed it to proceed in a time when the colonial powers did not permit such a thing to happen in Africa.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  We ought to understand, every time we fly at 20,000 feet over the Great Plains, that the flyover country of our own time derives much of its forgettability from being a slate white, almost clean of its original figures. Maybe the kinds of scenes I've been telling about in these American West podcasts all fall into the Charlie Russell explanation of good people doing bad things accidentally. Maybe such paintings sold well to Russell's white male patrons, who tended towards the corporate conqueror type anyway. Or maybe Russell really did believe, and many people do believe this, that trapping off all the fur bearers, killing all the big animals,

• 35:19Speaker 02

  cutting down all the trees, grazing off all the grass, I'm using his phrases here, obviously, really was a heroic, romantic enterprise. That's hard to square with what he wrote about pioneers, but then Charlie was generous. It's possible, maybe not probable, but possible, that he could mourn the loss of all the natural splendor of a West that had been 10,000 years in the making, yet at the same time admire and celebrate all the colorful characters who perpetuated the destruction and had been his friends. What I think Charlie Russell was trying to tell us, however tolerantly forgiving, or maybe just muddled, he might have been about cause and effect,

• 36:02Speaker 02

  was that it's a far better thing to have a West where native cultures are healthy and Indians are respected and admired for who they are, than one where racism and acculturation threaten them. And to me, Russell's voice was a loud and clear amen for a West populated with his beloved buffalo, wolves, grizzlies, even wild horses, whose rights on the prairies he defended vigorously just before he died. In my opinion, his most spectacular painting, 1914's When the Land Belonged to God, leaves no doubt about the version Russell considered the best of all Wests.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  So what I've been preparing to say is that I believe Charlie Russell spoke for rewilding in our time. True enough, along with resisting blaming his frontier friends for what had happened, he wasn't a hard thinker about history, and when he thought about a grander West, he mostly looked backward. Huffman obviously had in mind a future Montana that looked something like today's American Prairie. But both Charlie Russell and L.A. Huffman tried mightily to tell us that the West they saw in the 1880s was the real thing, and a version at least as admirable as anything that came after. I infer then that rewilding

• 37:26Speaker 02

  pieces of the West to a close facsimile of what they, along with Zane Gray and others, saw ought not to be merely something we look back on with nostalgia or regret, but a vision for our future. Charlie Russell's own Western rewilding sentiments seem pretty clear to me in those lines to Frank Linderman, "You sleeping relic of the past, if I but had my way, I'd clothe your frame with meat and hide and wake you up today." Our truth from that message is this: Something like the West that L.A. Huffman and Charlie Russell saw and then dreamed about for the rest of their lives, we could live.

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• 40:51Speaker 03

  All right, Dan, I want to begin this one as you do in the script with Russell, who's, it would be easy to sum up Russell as a sort of epic Western painter. But as you point out in here, he's really hard to put into a box. We were just up last weekend at the new Montana Historical Society Museum in Helena, and they have a huge gallery of Russell and his work. And they have some of the most iconic paintings on like, When the Land Belongs to God is kind of the centerpiece.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  But there's, there's, there are all these notes and doodles and little pencil sketches. And it was like, he just couldn't stop trying to put the West on paper in whatever form he could. It was like back at the napkin kind of sketches. And it really made me appreciate, as you, as you get to in this piece, it really made me appreciate how prolific he was in, on so many different scales as an artist.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, you know, I began this script with, with one of those little doodles that he did. He was writing a letter to his friend, the writer Frank Bird Linderman. And Russell could not help himself. I mean, he did this, and there is actually a volume that's devoted to these little pieces. And he couldn't help himself. Anytime he wrote one of his friends, he would doodle and, I mean, he would do a self-portrait of himself dressed as an Indian or something in his cabin on the shores of Lake McDonald. Or he would, you know, he would do something like this particular one, where he does this

• 42:45Speaker 02

  sketch of a sort of a rotting, collapsed buffalo carcass with a wolf standing in the background, standing over it. And And as I said, because he knew that Frank Bird Linderman's own passions and thoughts were similar to his, he penned this little piece of doggerel to go with it, where he says, you know, "If I but had my way, you know, I'd clothe your hide in flesh and bones and wake you up today." And, I mean, that was this kind of, I think probably it was

• 43:24Speaker 02

  the discovery of that that set me on to tracking down this idea, where I was trying to figure out, okay, here is a guy who is clearly of heroic stature in the northern west. I mean, in places like Wyoming and Montana and Alberta and Saskatchewan, I mean, Charlie Russell, he's everywhere. Everything inside is named for him. And, you know, as I was walking through the parking lot, coming over to the studio today, I was glancing at the regular issue state license plates, which still carry the buffalo skull that he patented in 1907 on the Montana license plates. And so, the question that came to

• 44:05Speaker 02

  me when I was working on this was, what was Russell trying to get to us as a message to the, to the future? I mean, if, if anything, and I think he was trying to get something. And so, that's what this was an effort to come to terms with, is what was Charlie Russell trying to tell us about this world that he experienced and the great change that he also lived through? And that seemed to be well buttressed by his contemporary, the photographer L.A. Huffman, in Miles City, who was going through the same thing and having a lot of

• 44:45Speaker 02

  the same kind of pangs of regret about what he had actually seen and what now was, was happening in the west. And so, looking at those two men and what they imagined for a future of the west is sort of what my, my motivation was in trying to answer this question. What were they trying to tell us?

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I want to get into that. I do think, for those who think to themselves, who might be listening to this, and they think, "Oh, I don't really know who Charlie Russell is. I don't know if I've seen a Russell painting."

• 45:22Speaker 03

  If you've seen any sort of Western art, it's Russell or it's derivative of Russell. You point out the license plates. I mean, in Missoula, there's the Russell Elementary School, right? There's the Russell Museum. There's the CMR, the National Wildlife Refuge out east. I mean, he's sort of a, he's an ever-present figure in Montana's culture. And I was trying to come up with a good analog, and I'm not really sure what it would be. Unless it's like Michelangelo in Italy, although they have more than a few artists to choose from, right?

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have more choices. That's right. And this part of the world has fewer choices, and Russell stands above, head and shoulders above everybody else. As I mentioned, the only other part of the West that has an artist as its patron saint is the Southwest, particularly New Mexico with Giorgio O'Keefe, who, you know, for listeners who may not know who she is, she's an Eastern artist, married to a very famous photographer in New York named Alfred Stiglitz, who was sort of a prime mover and shaker in the early 20th century of American art. And she, O'Keefe, moved to New Mexico, bought a little seven-acre

• 46:42Speaker 02

  piece at the foot of a set of cliffs about 70 miles northwest of Santa Fe called Ghost Ranch, and lived there for more than 50 years and basically painted the world around her. And she, too, in that part of the world, occupies a similar kind of, kind of place where schools are named after. There's a famous Giorgio O'Keefe museum in downtown Santa Fe. There's, I mean, people do epic trips out to Ghost Ranch to, you know, to see where her house was and where she painted. And so she and Charlie Russell are the only two

• 47:23Speaker 02

  sort of painters of the West that I know about who stand in this kind of rarefied space as emblems of their particular parts of Western America. And I think Charlie, if people don't know who Charlie Russell is, my guess is they've probably seen his paintings actually a lot. And I sort of feel that way, and I think I said as much about L.A. Huffman. You may not know who L.A. Huffman is, but I'll bet you've seen his photographs because nobody shot as many photographs of famous Westerners, Calamity Jane and people like that, for example, as he did.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  Right, and I think with Huffman,

• 48:09Speaker 03

  it's interesting that photography arrived on the scene in the West when it did in the form of Huffman and Evelyn Cameron and other folks.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Because photography sort of fixes things visually as if they're almost eternal, right? There's a sort of sense of timelessness to photography, but the world that they're capturing is very transitory, and it's this moment of extreme change. Uh, if you think about, you know, photography in the 1870s, 1880s, and you think about what Montana was like in 1860 versus 1900, right? They're very different places, but, but photography sort of very auspiciously arrived on the ground when it did.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  In a way that made this fleeting moment sort of become the dominant,

• 49:07Speaker 03

  I don't know, touch point culturally for, for people when they think of the West.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, you know, some people who, who write about photography, think hard about photography, say that what photography basically is, is the attempt to catch the ephemeral moment and freeze it in time. And Huffman very definitely froze this ephemeral moment because, as I mentioned in this script, even by the early 1880s, by 1884, he shot 80,000 photographs. And so, I mean, he is out there just firing away at everything that he sees, and that preserves a kind of an imagery of a time period, and it's the last couple of decades of the so-called frontier that he captures, that-

• 49:58Speaker 02

  Absolutely sort of dominated the rest of his life. I mean, he, by the time he was, got to 1905 and Montana was being settled and there were railroads and mining companies and homesteaders and all that. He basically kind of stopped shooting photographs and just printed up the things that he had shot of this moment in time. And it was that moment in time, that ephemeral moment, that I think both Huffman and Charlie Russell and a whole host, really, of sort of the nostalgic school writers and painters about the West and in the West, tried to, tried to freeze in time. Frederick Remington tried to do that.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  Owen Worcester tried to do that with the Virginian. And as I mentioned, Zane Gray probably provided the best written description of what they were, what they were thinking. And what Zane Gray basically said was that they realized that that moment, that ephemeral moment, was the last time, probably on earth for most people, that humans were going to get to live in a state of nature, that everything was going to be changed after that. And for Zane Gray, I mean, and he put it very well, he said it was this, this fleeting

• 51:26Speaker 02

  sensory moment where he could sort of recreate in his mind what it was like to be one of the progenitors of humanity extending back through time and now knew that that was going to be lost to the future. And I think that's why they were so moved by it. That's why Charlie Russell referred to this period for the rest of his life as dream time Montana and would do a painting like that, When the Land Belonged to God, where, I mean, there are in fact no, no humans in it. It's just a buffalo herd coming up out of the Missouri breaks, flanked by gray wolves

• 52:08Speaker 02

  on either side as that herd mounts over the crests of, of the, the valley of the Missouri River. And It moved them in a way that nothing else they ever experienced did. And I think it moved a lot of people. And it's probably one of the reasons why so much filmmaking and movies and television shows in America up through the 1970s or so were actually about the West. I mean, we were still trying to grapple with this moment where we had stepped out of that

• 52:50Speaker 02

  kind of past and into a more modern world. And so, you know, that's part of how I think these guys came up with a vision, at least as I see it, as I infer what their vision was for us.

• 53:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are two observations that you make in this that really stuck with me. One is, I'm not sure I've encountered this before, but the parallels between the 1960s and this period of Western history.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  Where there's a sort of hope that the people in the moment can do something new. And then history sort of falls into its same old patterns and there's a sense of a lost opportunity.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  That really stuck with me. I don't know if that's something you've seen elsewhere, if that's something that struck you, but the other is, and this gets to your broader point, Charlie Russell is an anti-pioneer. And the tension between sort of the marketability.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  Of his imagery versus sort of the maybe harder to sell, sort of bitter undertone.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  To a lot of it.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  What he actually thought versus what was, what was sellable.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  What Nancy could turn a profit on, you know, and she's able to, she's able to sell, you know, things like the romance makers about the fur trade and for $10,000.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  I mean, which was an enormous sum of money.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  And she's the business.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  And she's the business.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  Mind behind all of it.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  And she's the one who is telling him, this is what you have to paint because this is what the patrons and your buyers want from you. And meanwhile, Charlie is being invited to be a banquet speaker and saying, you know, people call me a pioneer, that ain't what I am. Pioneer, as far as I'm concerned, is somebody who comes to a virgin country and kills off all the meat and cuts down all the trees and grazes off all the grass and puts up barbed wire everywhere. And by God, I wish the West was just like I found it when I arrived here and all you people were gone.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  And I mean, that's what he really thought about it. And so, you know, sort of taking this complex person and the complexity of his life and his ability and his wife's ability to market his work and set that in opposition to what he would reveal with things like, if I but had my way, I'd clothe your hide and meat and clothe your corpse, your corpse in meat and hide and wake you up today. That kind of thing is sort of what I think human contradiction in lives are really all about.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  But for me, it becomes, I think, the vision that he and Huffman both had for us was this vision of, at least in some parts of the West, we still have the opportunity to live what those guys saw if we can recreate it and if we're willing to do that.

• 56:07Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  And I think, at least I hope, in some instances, we are.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  Thanks, Dan. Appreciate it.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  You bet, Randall.

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