Object Details
Object Essay
The terrible winter of 1886–1887 is legendary in the Northern Plains states. The loss of livestock was devastating in the Dakotas and Montana. The Pioneer Cattle Company, for example, lost 66 percent of its herd, and its manager, Granville Stuart, said, “I never wanted to own again an animal that I could not feed and shelter.”1Russell, 12. The weather finished Theodore Roosevelt’s venture as a cattle rancher, and it put a lasting mark on the character of young Charlie Russell, cowboy and budding artist. In 1886, he made a watercolor sketch of a rawboned cow in the snow, with wolves awaiting the end. It embodied that winter for many who experienced it.2Illus. in ibid., 22; and in Hassrick 1989, 26.
Russell’s emotional response to the plight of starving cattle extended to that of the once numberless race of bison, always called buffalo in North America. He had already begun to use the device of a buffalo skull, usually a simple outline drawing, as a regular adjunct to his signature and, from the winter of 1886–1887 onward, it became almost a talisman. He called the buffalo “nature’s cattle,” and when, in 1908, he had the unusual opportunity of taking part in the roundup of a privately owned wild herd that had been sold to the Canadian government, he recorded the experience in vivid if unschooled prose:
. . . if it had not been for this animal the west would have been the land of starvation for over a hundred years he fed an made beds for our frounteer an it shure looks like we could feed an protect a fiew hundred of them but it seemes there aint maney thinks lik us the first day they got 300 in the whings but they broke back an all the riders on earth couldnt hold them they onely got in with about 120 I wish you could have seen them take the river they hit the water on a ded run we all went to bed that night sadisfide with a 120 in the trap but woke up with one cow the rest had climed the cliff an got away3Russell, 68, illus. on p. 69. Spaces in quoted material reflect original.
It is this deep-seated empathy with the buffalo that gives concentrated power and resonance to Buffalo Herd at Bay, an exceptionally taut composition. Backed against a bluff and dropped in ominous shadow, the buffalo are cornered but still a potentially explosive force. Russell precisely conveys the quick, wary movements of the wolves.
Russell, unlike Frederic Remington (Acc. No. 79.86), habitually played down his artistic talents, yet his unself-conscious ability to convey the fundamental poignancy, heroism, or humor of animals and men, and his understanding of the natural order of things (as in this watercolor), often raised his work above illustration. He rarely postured for the public, and he has earned a large and devoted one.
William Kloss
Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.