Kevin Pilley satisfies his desire to combine culture with the great outdoors by using the paintings of renowned artist Charles M. Russell as his guide.
“Wanted: healthy, robust men to explore the Missouri River. Must be willing to risk death. Salary $5 a month. Gentlemen’s sons need not apply.”
Despite the tempting offer, I did not apply to the advert on the wall in The Lewis and Clark Interpretative Centre in Great Falls, Montana.
Apart from anything else, I was nearly two centuries too late.
But in 1804, at the request of President Jefferson and led by lieutenants William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, the 30-strong Corps of Discovery set out from St Louis to map and open out north America’s Wild West.
In nearly two-and-half years and at the cost of only one life – although Lewis was shot in the leg by one of his own men when he was mistaken for an elk – the famous explorers travelled 8,000 miles by two pirogues and one keelboat, meeting wild animals, Native Americans, rapids and many adventures en route.
Their famous exhibition is commemorated on a large oil canvas in Montana’s State Capitol building in Helena.
Charlie Russell painted Lewis and Clark Meeting the Indians at Ross’ Hole in 1912.
Lewis and Clark discovered Montana in April 1805 but the artist is more famous.
Every car licence plate in the state bears a buffalo skull, which was Russell’s signature and trademark.
In front of the Davidson Building Plaza in his hometown of Great Falls, there is a statue of Russell with his horse, Monty.
Every March, America’s best-known cowboy artist and Montana’s biggest hero is honoured at two auctions in the town where he lived and had his studio.
At the 2009 C. M. Russell Auction of Original Western Art auction, eight highly sought-after Russell originals were sold including My Brother ($57,000) and Before The Trial ($100,000).
In 2008, at the Coeur D’Alene auction, Russell’s The Hold Up, which commemorates the last crime of the notorious outlaw Big Nose George, fetched $4.6 million, while in 2005 his 1918 oil on canvas Piegans sold for $5.6 million.
Nineteenth- and 20th-century Western art is big business for the likes of Jeff Legg, Larry Zabel, Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey and Missouri artist Andy Thomas, who specialises in presidential and civil war paintings in the Russell tradition, revisiting 19th-century themes in the 21st-century work.
Montana is the fourth largest state, behind Texas, California and Alaska, and following Charlie Russell is the way to see it
Russell’s immediate successors were Harold Dow Dugbee and bronco-buster, rodeo-rider, saddlemaker and due-wrangler Earl W. Bascom (1906-1995).
His near contemporaries included Frank Tenney Johnson, George Catlin, Eanger Irving Couse and early photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis.
The modern Russell is considered to be former movie poster illustrator Howard Terpning from Illinois.
“The big stuff fetches the prices of ranches now,” says Russell admirer Jerome Sprague, a former Great Falls art teacher now living in Sacramento.
He paid $16,000 for a tiny pen and ink sketch of an Indian crossing a swollen river. But he didn’t feel scalped.
“Russell’s work is a window into the past, to the Montana Lewis and Clark discovered, to the Wild West of the other pioneers. Like Lewis and Clark, Charley mapped out the ancient homes of the Sioux, Crow, Blackfeet, Nez Prece, Assiniboine and the Flatheads.
“He is our historian. Our poet. In his paintings you can see 11,000 years of American history.”
At the 2013 auction, which raised $3.1 million, Russell’s 1901 watercolour Indian Signaling sold for $200,000 and a small sketch of an antelope for $6,500.
High, Wide and Handsome, a 1919 watercolour gouache, fetched $550,000, while a letter from the artist sold for $300,000.
Charles Marion Russell was born into a rich family in St Louis in 1864, the same year as Last Chance Gulch was renamed as the city Helena.
Brought up on the ‘yalla jacket’ dime cowboy novels of Buntline and Reid, he moved to Montana in 1880 to live out his Wild West fantasies and ‘cinch his saddle to romance’.
The battle of the Little Big Horn was fought four years earlier, the first stagecoaches (called Concords because they were built in Concord, New Hampshire) had arrived a year before and Sitting Bull was still alive.
But, by 1882, the first cattle herds had arrived and, one year later, buffalo no longer roamed on the open range.
Within eight years of Russell’s arrival, Montana would be admitted into the union and the ‘Big Sky’ state would be – as he said himself – “civilized out of all knowing”.
In 46 years Russell produced more than 4,500 oil and watercolour paintings, sketches, sculptures and illustrated cards and letters (“paper talk”, as he called them) depicting an ancient life being replaced by a new one.
Working as a night wrangler, “a bum cowherder” and a fur trapper’s assistant, he carried his paints in his socks and a lump of beeswax in his saddlebag.
He painted the unploughed plains, the plainsmen and the plain folk, the bullwackers and cowpokes, the ropers, round-up riders, cattle rustlers, horse thieves and the wild people.
He drew the vast spaces of the buttes and the badlands. He was the first and last to paint the “wild, free life of the borderless range” and “the most beautiful and bountiful domain” when it was “shut off from the outside world”.
He was the first to paint all those who “broke the trail for the tenderfoots and boosters” and “the nesters who turned the earth grass side down”.
The 41st state is the fourth largest, behind Texas, California and Alaska, and following Charlie Russell is the way to see it.
It is the way most Montanans want you to see it.
The C. M. Russell Auto Tour along Highway 87 and along 200 and 239 takes in the backdrops, sites and inspirations of his paintings, taking you into the heart of the turn of the century.
It starts in the C. M. Russell museum in Great Falls, which is attached to the cabin made out of telephone poles where his wife and business manager, Nancy, made him paint.
“Mame” – who he had met in Cascade – also made him give up the “joy juice” and, as one of Charlie’s many cronies put it, “took the ‘o’ out of saloon to make salon”.
It’s tamer these days. They don’t shoot the bottles off the shelves, or the bartender. But we like to preserve a few traditions
His cabin is full of Indian paraphernalia including the Metis (mixed breed) sash he wore all the time.
Russell respected native Indian rights. He learned Indian sign language and, as in America’s First Printer (1926), recorded their rock artwork.
He painted Indians in Montana before their land was fenced and before there were reservations.
“He chronicles the closing of the last frontier,” said Ray Blank, who I met in the Pump Room bar in Stanford.
“You can get a sense of the real Montana still. The rest you get from Charlie. He takes you to some pretty wild places and shows you some pretty wild times.”
With that, there was a clatter of hooves. A horse whinnied. I looked around and saw a cowboy on a horse enter the bar.
The cowboy said “howdy” and ordered a Moose Drool beer. I was drinking Pig’s Ass.
The landlady said that the men in Montana either smelled of drool or pigs. She smiled around at her locals.
“It’s tamer these days. They don’t shoot the bottles off the shelves, or the bartender. But we like to preserve a few traditions.”
In 1909, Russell painted In Without Knocking in Stanford. It was commissioned as a calendar and depicts a cowboy riding his horse into a saloon on the eve of a drive.
Over the road from The Pump in the one-street town’s old courthouse, there is a white wolf in a glass case. It is a local celebrity.
Russell filled his work with wolves. His Roping A Wolf (1904) depicts a time when there was $1 bounty on the head of every wolf.