Charles M. Russell's Portrait of the American West

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Born in Oak Hill, Missouri, near St. Louis, a year before the end of the American Civil War, Charles M. Russell became an early devotee of the American West, working first as a shepherd and then as a cowboy on Montana ranches. After marrying Nancy Cooper, in 1896, Russell began his career as a full-time artist, “painting and sculpting” inside his “log cabin studio next to their home” in Great Falls, where he died in 1926, leaving a legacy of work chronicling and commemorating the time and place he'd loved all the days of his life.

In over two thousand paintings, Russell captures the spirit and adventure of the Wild West. His work depicts roundups, bronco busting, the fording of rivers, cowboys' encounters with wild animals, buffalo hunts, camping, gambling, scouting, gold mining, hunting, and much more.

Many of his paintings are also devoted to the nomadic life of Native Americans, as they hunt buffalo, fight cavalry soldiers, attack frontiersmen, travel from campsite to campsite, grieve fallen warriors, greet the famous explorers Lewis and Clark, encounter other tribes, worship, communicate by smoke signals, and perform other tasks of daily life.

Several tribes are portrayed, including the Piegan, Crow, Sioux, Blackfoot, Chinook, Navajo, Shoshone, Cree, Mandan, and Kootenai. By today's standards, Russell's portraits of Native Americans are, at times, politically incorrect. In his art, which depicts its subjects' encounters with both other tribes than their own and with white men, whom they see variously as traders, fighters, settlers, and invaders, battles, bloodletting, and death are likely to follow.

More than a few of the paintings are dedicated to displays of Native Americans at war, both with each other and with whites. as the works' titles suggest: Scouting the Enemy, On the Warpath, The Battle Between the Blackfeet and the Piegans, War Council, The Making of a Warrior, Planning the Attack, The Attack, Indian War Party, Sun River War Party, Battle of Belly River, Mandan Warrior, Return of the Warriors, Cree War Party, The War Party, and WAR.

When Native Americans are not waging war, they are often engaged in other hostile acts, against other tribes or against white men, as they are in such paintings as Sioux Torturing a Blackfoot Brave, Planning the Attack on the Wagon Train, The Horse Thieves, Blackfeet Burning Crow Buffalo Range, and Crow Sheep Stealer.

Not all of Russell's paintings depict Native Americans as uncivilized, battle-driven killers, thieves, and arsonists, of course. A couple show individuals as “noble” and “romantic” figures. In a number of works, Russell's Native American subjects are even portrayed in a seemingly lighthearted or humorous fashion (A Piegan Flirtation, Indian Beauty Parlor, Waiting and Mad), a reverent manner (Invocation to the Sun, Sun Worship in Montana), or a diplomatic pose (Lewis and Clark Meeting Indians at Ross' Hole, Lewis and Clark Reach Shoshone Camp Led by Sacajawea the Bird Woman, Indians Discovering Lewis and Clark, Lewis and Clark Meeting the Mandan Indians).

One can't help but to notice, however, that in the diplomatic series involving the meetings between Lewis and Clark and various tribes, the white explorers receive top billing in the titles, and it is usually they, not the Native Americans, who are assigned the active role; it is they who meet; even when Sacajawea leads, her name appears after theirs, and they are assigned the primary active role: they “reach” the Shoshone's camp. It is almost as an afterthought that their guide's action, in leading them, is mentioned. Clearly, in Russell's view of the American West, whites are the protagonists. His Native Americans are the villains or supporting characters or, in some cases, even window dressing.

Russell's work tends to show Native Americans as treacherous and militant or, in the comparatively rare moments in which they are not burning a field, torturing an enemy, plotting battles, or waging war, as comical, paganistic (animistic), or helpful to the active, purposeful white men they serve. There is only one other major category of Native American on display in the artist's gallery of “Indians”: the stereotypical representative, usually in portraiture, of Indian Brave, Indian Buck, Indian Squaw, and [Portrait of an] Indian.

Although Russell is largely positive in his portrayal of white men as the heroic tamers of the Wild West, he also lampoons them on occasion and shows them in a bad light at times. In one painting, a cowboy tries to “bargain” with a Native Indian “for an Indian girl.”

In another work, Whooping It Up, a band of cowboys, apparently drunk, gallop down the main street, past a saloon, shooting their revolvers at the sky and frightening a Chinese pedestrian, who drops a basket of laundry, scattering chickens, while a dog runs in the opposite direction and, across the street, men look on from the boardwalk in front of a saloon, while Asian women in front of Hop Lee's Laundry stare in fear. The white men's behavior is reckless and dangerous, but no one seems ready to intercept or challenge them.

In the ironically titled Peaceful Valley Saloon, gamblers are about to duel at their table, possibly to settle a charge of cheating at cards; one hold his extended weapon, while his adversary begins to draw his own six-shooter from his holster. None of the other patrons of the saloon, including the bartender, appears concerned, suggesting they have seen such behavior before. Adding to the irony is the Native American who looks on, rifle in hand, a stoic expression on his face, since, often, in Russell's' work, Native Americans are depicted as hostile and violent.

In The Tenderfoot, a cowboy makes a new arrival to the West, who is still dressed in the fashion of the East, “dance” by shooting his pistol at the dude's feet, much to the amusement of the other frontiersmen gathered outside the saloon before which the spectacle takes place and to the consternation of a fleeing dog. Even the token Indian in the group looks amused by the potentially dangerous shenanigans.

Outlaws, as such, are fairly rarely represented in Russell's work. However, a pair of highway robbers appears in Fleecing the Priest, and, as the painting's title indicates, their victim is a man of the cloth. As one of the robbers holds a gun on the clergyman, who stands between the two outlaws, his hands overhead, looking frightened, the other reaches deep into the left pocket of the unfortunate soul's trousers. The lining protruding from the other pocket suggests that it has already been searched. Four lines of partially rhyming verse explain the villains' attitude toward the man they are robbing:

If coin is the root of all evil

Your reverence is going to weed;

It's the work of a saint, not a sinner,

To shake your clothes out for seed.

When Russell's depictions of the Wild West depart from the heroic white Westerner to the criminal element, the deviation is also one from the sublime to the ridiculous, for the painter almost always depicts the cowboy or the sheriff or the soldier as an exalted hero, while he portrays the outlaw as an absurd buffoon. The True West, he implies, is about the men who tamed the wilderness and civilized the frontier; it is not about those who, like robbers, attempted to subvert law and order, nor is it about those who, like Native Americans, fought against or stood in the way of progress.

Russell's paintings show rugged Western terrain, its plains and mountains, canyons and gorges, deserts and snowy highlands, rivers and lakes, pines and cacti. The landscapes also depict the wildlife of the West: buffalo, mustangs, wolves, bears, big horn sheep, elk, and deer. Such paintings reflect the reality, in the untamed West, of the need to “kill or be killed.” The frontier is a land “red in tooth and claw,” in which “only the strong survive” in a constant contest in which “the survival of the fittest” is enacted every day, whether among plants, animals, or men.

Signs of stable, established civilization—white civilization, that is—are few and far between in Russell's oeuvre: an occasional cabin, a trading post, a saloon, a fort, storefronts along a boardwalk adjacent to false-fronted buildings built mostly of wood. Only rarely is there a brick or stone edifice suggesting commitment and permanence. Most of the signs of white civilization, the foil of which, in Russell's art, is the nomadic culture of the Native American, as represented by temporary camps of tepees and clothing of blankets, loincloths, beads, moccasins, robes, and headdresses, buckskin dresses or skirts, and coarse blouses, are transient: chuck wagons, buckboards, stagecoaches, trains.

Russell's vision of the West is flawed. Stereotypical at best, it borders upon racism at times in its depiction of white men as the rowdy, uncouth bringers of civilization to the untamed West and of Native Americans as typically (that is, stereotypically) savage and militant, uncivilized and hostile, wild and brutal. White men have come to tame the West, and that includes the savage, uncivilized Native Americans who attack the newcomers' camps, settlers' cabins, wagon trains, and railroad cars. For the West to be tamed, the Native American must be defeated, killed, banished, and otherwise controlled. These ideas are implicit in Russell's art. It is politically incorrect.

There is, however, truth in his depictions of Native Americans as well as implicit falsehoods or misrepresentations. The cowboy, the farmer, the rancher, the sheriff, the railroad worker, the miner, the soldier, and the other white figures of the West did bring civilization—their civilization—to the West. They built towns. Schools. Churches. Telegraph lines. Railroads. Stockyards. Gold and silver mines.

Russell's heroes built cabins and houses and towns on plains. They laid rails so that trains could travel over mountains, bridge canyons and gorges, and cross miles of desert wasteland. Their boats journeyed up and down rivers and across lakes. They built houses from oaks and pines and quenched their thirst on the juices of cacti. They hunted buffalo, elk, and deer. They captured and domesticated mustangs. They killed dangerous wolves and bears. They made the West habitable and safe—or safer, at least, than it had ever been.

Eventually, they, or their children, also built newspaper offices, libraries, museums, art galleries, department stores, and a host of other pedagogical, religious, commercial, technological, journalistic, and artistic institutions; they spread Western culture throughout the New World. In that sense, the Western heroes Russell's art depicts were heroic, indeed; they were larger than life; they were knights in Stetsons and gun belts and boots.

Despite Russell's lopsided and oversimplified view of Nature and Civilization and their respective human masters, the Native American and the mostly white Westerner, the painter constructed a vast, panoramic vision of this conquest of the Wild West that continues to have a powerful effect on the imagination and the emotions. It is a vision which, although in need of correction and further development, is one that can still be considered inspirational to a significant degree.