← The American West
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- [00:00]
Amazon Health AI
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- [01:47]
Dan Flores
Famed cowboy artist Charlie Russell and fellow Montana photographer La Huffman had a message for the future. But what was it? I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West. What were Charlie Russell and L A
- [02:22]
Narrator/Researcher
Huffman trying to tell us?
- [02:25]
Dan Flores
In 1908, three years after the freshly minted state of Montana had passed a law requiring its veterinarians to infect any captured wolves that came their way with sarcoptic mange and then released 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 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 title suggested, there are some universals in our mythological stories. The hero is a person of action, usually arrayed against 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. Charles Marion Russell would have never thought of himself as a hero, although in Joseph Campbell's terms, that sort of self abnegnation 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 Dippie, a splendid Russell biography by John Tollefer, who has written about everyone from Edgar Rice Burroughs to George Bird Grinnell, and even a recent catalog raisonne of all of Russell's works by by historian Byron Price. Russell's cowboying friend C.J. ellis summed up Charlie's endearing qualities as a friend or around a campfire this 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 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 Bighorn 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, 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. 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 sorts of summer months in 1888. And he may have had an Indian girlfriend while there. The writer George Bird Grinnell lived with Western Indians. So did his ecologist cousin, Joseph Grinnell. The Yale photographer Walter McClintock lived with Indians, in his case, with the Blackfeet. 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 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 portrayer and active imagineer of action, if in fact he had more in common with a Hollywood star like Bret Hart than with a 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 Schreibogel, 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. But maybe the most important thing about Russell's time in the west was the change he he witnessed.
- [09:07]
Narrator/Researcher
That is what gave him his special insight.
- [09:16]
Dan Flores
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, 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. Parse 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. 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, 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 novelists Owen Wister 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 except 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. 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 pictures, pen and brush are 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. Sixties nostalgia has pretty much evaporated by now, and even Old west frontier nostalgia 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. In Owen Wister's case, the author of the Virginian literally was in flight from his mother when he went west. Zane Gray, who may have understood the implications of Darwinism more than the rest, recognized what was at stake more clearly than any of them. Gray 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. 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 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. Russell was one of those on the scene who saw this and captured it. But he was not the only one. Another was a contemporary. Yet another Midwesterner come to Montana named La Huffman, the flinty Texas historian of the old school, J evitz Haley, for whom sentiment was something to be named, 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 evitz Haley is nothing to be sniffed at. Many Westerners, regardless, Haley's biography of Charles Goodnight, the real life inspiration for Captain Call in Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, as the best biography anyone has written of a frontier rancher. When J Evatts 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 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. Famous Indians, famous pioneers, buffaloes 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 descended on Montana during the Boer War and World War I. Huffman even left us shots of the plows and the wheat that
- [18:01]
Narrator/Researcher
seemed to bring the Old west to an end.
- [18:03]
Dan Flores
As early as 1883, Huffman had 83,000 prints in his inventory. He was also fully capable. Jaye Haley no doubt nodded in approval of a photo like his a good Indian, a picture of some unfair, unfortunate native soul who acquired his admirable qualities by becoming deceased.
- [18:29]
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- [20:35]
Dan Flores
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 Bighorn 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, to like the setting 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 chase landed an unsalaried position as post photographer at Fort Keough, 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. 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, Plenty Coup Joseph of the Nez Perce, the Salish Sam, Resurrection, Curly Bear of the Blackfeet and a gallery's worth of others. 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 over much 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. 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 Grinnell, William Hornaday. Between 1898 and 1905, though, Huffman did a very interesting thing. Brought west on the railroad 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 exulted in the possibilities of new subjects, in Huffman's eyes, history had ratcheted to that inevitable and far less intriguing stage.
- [24:22]
Narrator/Researcher
No more frontier.
- [24:25]
Dan Flores
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 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 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 unpinned of wire and unspoiled. I made photographs with crude homemade cameras from saddle and in log shack I saved something. One looked about and said, this. 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. 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 grey 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.
- [26:50]
Narrator/Researcher
Good in its way, but not for me.
- [26:53]
Dan Flores
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. 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 when the yellow green carpet of spring had come to see it all teeming with life again. What Charlie Russell felt about the Great Change led him in a different direction. But Russell's premise was strikingly similar to Huffman's. 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 Dreamtime 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. 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. 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. 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. As the perceptive western writer J. Frank Dobie said of him, Russell probably was not inclined to be a hardcore 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 almost as if it were accidental too. Look, for example at his painting Cowboy 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 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 furbearers by mountain man 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. 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 butte 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. 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. We ought to understand every time we fly at 20,000ft over the Great Plains that the flyover country of our own time derives much of its forgettability from being a slate wiped almost clean of its original figure 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 furbearers, killing all the big animals, 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'd 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, was that it's a far better thing to have a West where native cultures are healthy and Indians are respected, 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. 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 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 La 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 reason rewilding 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 seemed pretty clear to me in those lines. To Frank, sleeping relic of the past, if I but had my way, I'd be 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.
- [37:58]
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- [39:17]
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- [40:29]
Interviewer
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 a 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 like when the Land Belongs to God is kind of the centerpiece.
- [41:09]
Narrator/Researcher
Yeah.
- [41:12]
Interviewer
But 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 of the napkin kind of sketches. And it really made me appreciate, as you get to in this piece, it really made me appreciate how prolific he was on so many different scales as an artist.
- [41:42]
Narrator/Researcher
Yeah, he, you know, and 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 in. 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 sketch of sort of a rotting, collapsed buffalo carcass with a wolf standing in the background standing over it. And as I said, because he knew that Frank Bird Linderman's own passions and thoughts were similar to his, he pinned 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.
- [43:00]
Dan Flores
I think probably it was the discovery
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Narrator/Researcher
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.
- [43:20]
Dan Flores
He's everywhere.
- [43:21]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [43:22]
Dan Flores
Everything inside is named for him.
- [43:25]
Narrator/Researcher
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 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.
- [43:53]
Dan Flores
If anything.
- [43:54]
Narrator/Researcher
And I think he was trying to get something.
- [43:56]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [43:57]
Narrator/Researcher
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 Louisiana Huffman in Miles City, who was going through the same thing and having a lot of the same kind of pangs of regret about what he had actually seen and what now 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?
- [44:46]
Interviewer
Yeah, and I want to get into that. I do think for those who think to themselves who might be listening to this, and they think, I don't really know who Charlie Russell is. I don't know if I've seen a Russell painting. 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.
- [45:24]
Shady Rays Spokesperson
And
- [45:27]
Interviewer
I was trying to come up with a good analog and I'm not really sure what it would be. It's like Michelangelo and in Italy, although they have more than a few artists to choose from.
- [45:36]
Dan Flores
Right.
- [45:37]
Narrator/Researcher
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. The Southwest, particularly New Mexico, with Georgia o', Keeffe, 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 Stieglitz, who was sort of a prime mover and shaker in the early 20th century of American art. And she, O', Keeffe moved to New Mexico, bought a little seven acre 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 Georgia o' Keeffe 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 Shirley Russell are the only two 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 surely if people don't know who Charlie Russell is, my guess is they've probably seen his paintings actually a lot.
- [47:24]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [47:25]
Narrator/Researcher
And I sort of feel that way. And I think I said as much about La Huffman. You may not know who La 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. Right.
- [47:41]
Interviewer
And I think with Huffman, 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, 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. 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 photography sort of very auspiciously arrived on the ground when it did in a way that made this fleeting moment sort of become the dominant, I don't know, touch point culturally for people when they think of the West.
- [48:50]
Narrator/Researcher
Yeah, some people 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, about 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
- [49:33]
Dan Flores
captures that absolutely sort of dominated the rest of his life.
- [49:40]
Narrator/Researcher
I mean, he, by the time he was got to 1905 and Montana was
- [49:44]
Dan Flores
being settled and there were railroads and
- [49:47]
Narrator/Researcher
mining companies and homesteaders and all that, he basically kind of stopped shooting photographs
- [49:53]
Dan Flores
and just printed up the things that
- [49:55]
Narrator/Researcher
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.
- [50:18]
Dan Flores
Frederick Remington tried to do that.
- [50:19]
Narrator/Researcher
Owen Worcester tried to do that with the Virginian. And as I mentioned, Zane Gray probably provided the best
- [50:29]
Dan Flores
written description of what
- [50:31]
Narrator/Researcher
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 sensatory 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 Dreamtime, 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 on either side as that herd mounts over the crest of. Of 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 kind of past and into a more modern world. And so 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.
- [52:41]
Interviewer
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 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. That really stuck with me. I don't know if that's something you've seen elsewhere or 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 of his imagery versus sort of the maybe harder to sell sort of bitter undertone to a lot of it,
- [53:38]
Narrator/Researcher
what he actually thought versus what was sellable, what Nancy could turn a profit on, and she's able to sell things like the romance makers about the fur trade. And for $10,000.
- [53:57]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [53:58]
Narrator/Researcher
I mean, which was an enormous sum of money.
- [54:00]
Interviewer
And she's the business, and she's the business behind all of it.
- [54:03]
Narrator/Researcher
And she's the one who is telling
- [54:05]
Dan Flores
him, this is what you have to
- [54:06]
Narrator/Researcher
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
- [54:31]
Dan Flores
off all the grass and puts up barbed wire everywhere.
- [54:34]
Narrator/Researcher
And by God, I wish the west was just like I found it when
- [54:39]
Dan Flores
I arrived here and all you people were gone.
- [54:41]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [54:42]
Narrator/Researcher
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 meet and clothe your corpus, your corpse and meat and hide and
- [55:13]
Dan Flores
wake you up today. That kind of thing is sort of
- [55:17]
Narrator/Researcher
what I think human contradiction in lives are really all about. 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. And I think, at least I hope in some instances we are.
- [55:51]
Interviewer
Thanks, Dan. Appreciate it.
- [55:52]
Narrator/Researcher
You bet. Randall.
- [56:06]
Dan Flores
Foreign.
- [56:11]
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