Charles Marion Russell, born outside St. Louis, in Oak Hill, Missouri, of a locally prominent family in 1864, came west to Montana Territory four days short of his sixteenth birthday. Charlie Russell, the “Cowboy Artist,” died there in Great Falls forty-six years later, in 1926. Those forty-six years spanned a period of enormous change in the West, and Russell’s artistic importance resides in his record of that change, or, more precisely, in his comprehension of what that change meant for Americans and his skill in translating that understanding into paint and clay.

Russell’s escape west in 1880 was right out of the dime novels that fired so many youthful imaginations in the period after the Civil War. Charlie Russell was the American boy who grew up dreaming of breathless adventure and impossible heroism on the far frontier. But if he was like many other boys of his day, a captive to the spell of the West, there was one significant difference: he was to realize his every fantasy.

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