When Charles Russell was sixteen years old, his parents gave in to his yearning for the West and sent him to Montana to work on a sheep ranch. They hoped that the experience would convince Russell to return to school, but it had the opposite effect. He loved the West immediately and remained there for the rest of his life, steeped in the elements that would appear in his artworks, particularly cowboy and Indian life.

As a child growing up in St. Louis, Russell had often modeled small figures from beeswax, which he carried to school in his pockets and lunch pail. Throughout his life, his hands were seldom idle. He continued to model beeswax as he spoke with friends or told stories, usually creating little bears, wolves, mountain sheep, or buffalo. When he had trouble with two-dimensional compositions, he sometimes solved his problem by modeling the figure he was attempting to draw or paint, then copying it.

Russell had been a poor—or disinterested—student, often staying away from school for weeks at a time, riding his pony around town, raising dust and a ruckus. Clearly, his calling was art, not scholarship. His parents were disappointed by his lackluster academic performance, but were proud of his artistic accomplishments. When he was twelve years old, his father entered one of his small sculptures in the annual exhibition of the St. Louis County Fair, where it was awarded a blue ribbon.

Russell’s interest in art was an integral part of his western adventure. It was said that he had “no sooner stepped off the stagecoach in Helena than he was testing his skill at recording the scene.” He drew and modeled not to sell or exhibit his art, but as a way of telling his stories and recording his impressions.

Russell disliked everything to do with sheep and left the sheep ranch to live with the trapper and hunter Jake Hoover who lived in a rustic cabin in Pig-Eye Basin. Helping to skin and butcher the game that Hoover caught or shot was more than a job for the young artist; it was a practical course in animal anatomy, which enriched his talent as a sculptor.

After about two years, Russell left Hoover to become a cowboy. His first job, as a night herder, or nighthawk, as night herders were called, was to watch the cowboys’ mounts during the night. It was an ideal job, as it left him free during the day to explore and make art. He lived the life of a cowboy for more than a decade until a chance occurrence set his course as a working artist. Confined in a bunkhouse during the harsh Montana winter of 1886-87, Russell painted a small watercolor of a starving, emaciated cow. His employer showed it to other ranchers who had lost entire herds in the devastating blizzards that winter. The poignant scene was passed around town and soon was published in newspapers, and Russell became a local celebrity.

He began painting in oils, and his work was so popular that it was reproduced as prints. In 1888, Harper’s Weekly published his illustrations. Nevertheless, except for an interlude with the Blood Indians in Canada during the winter of 1888, Russell continued to work as a ranch hand until 1892, when he decided to dedicate himself to making art and moved to Great Falls, Montana. In 1895, he married Nancy Cooper, a “headstrong” seventeen-year-old who became his business manager and promoter. Her influence on Russell and effectiveness as his dealer gave him the visibility that attracted patrons and commissions, providing a steady income and the incentive to continue to make art full time. Russell fondly called Nancy “the best booster and pardner a man ever had. . . . I done my best work for her.”

In 1904, the Russells went to New York to show and sell his art. Although Russell did not like the city, which he called “The Big Wigwam,” the art he saw there influenced him. The brighter colors of the impressionists appeared in his paintings, and he began to take his sculpture more seriously, casting pieces in bronze. As he became more skillful, the “primitive exuberance” of his early paintings was replaced by sophisticated compositions and palette, an accomplishment that one historian has declared was “nothing short of remarkable.” When asked to name his best painting, he typically replied that he had yet to paint his best painting, saying, “I feel that I am improving right along.”

In Montana, Russell was acclaimed as the state’s “native son,” and was also known as the West’s Cowboy Artist. Some critics continued to have reservations about his technical ability, but the cowboys, trappers, and ranchers who knew him thought he was the “greatest painter that ever lived.” His popularity was due in part to his gift as a storyteller—he wrote and told stories as well as depicting them in his art. Dressed in a Stetson hat, a bright red sash wrapped around his waist, and cowboy boots—his interpretation of cowboy fashion—he was a colorful character. The famed storyteller Will Rogers once claimed that Russell “could tell a story better than any man that ever lived.”

Like so many other artists of his era, Russell lived to see the West he loved become a thing of the past, an era lost to him except for fragments captured in his paintings and sculpture. Considered by some the West’s “most eloquent mourner,” his cowboys and Indians were symbols of the fleeting past. In 1917, he wrote a short poem: “The West is dead my friend. / But writers hold the seed. / And what they saw will live and grow again / to those who read.” The same can be said of Russell. His stories in paint and bronze live today just as they did when cowboys and Indians rode across the vast, magnificent landscape of Montana, staking a claim to his heart and soul.