REMINGTON AND THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST
The painters of the Great West, however, were yet to come. Men were to arrive who would catch something of the spirit of the life there, who were to record the romance of the savage, the soldier, the cowboy; the latter in particular,—a picturesque group of men the outcome of peculiar conditions, men who rounded up the cattle, and were apparently a race apart, of prodigious recklessness, hardihood, and bravery, who lived in the saddle almost continuously, save when occasionally they strayed into the frontier town to squander their pay. These were, as the late Frederic Remington quaintly phrased it, “Men with the bark on.” Remington (1861-1909) was himself to be the first of the modern group to treat the West with artistic sympathy, and his name rises instantly when any mention is made of the plains. First of all, the man himself was a genuine lover of the open, of nature in its wildest aspects. For him the horse, the prairie, the blue sky! He should have been an army officer. He was, almost; for he accompanied the troops on many of their campaigns and was as well known to the captains as he was to the troopers and many of the Indians.
Photo by Davis & Sanford
FREDERIC REMINGTON
Somewhere about the middle ’80’s he began to send illustrations to the various periodicals; crude affairs, as he admitted later and himself characterized as “half-baked.” But they had that vital, convincing touch to them that meant subsequent success. Somehow, even in his tentative efforts, he had a vim and go that held the spectator. The man knew his Indian, soldier, cowboy, hunter, from the ground up. They had in them plenty of red blood, even though the first drawings were crude. There was that about them which disclosed astonishing feeling, clear insight into character, distinct sympathy. The public was profoundly interested, and saw great promise. Nor was there any disappointment; for the man made rapid progress. His Indian fairly reeked of savagery; his soldier was an epitome of the hard-working, modest, simple, splendid man of action; his cowboy was a picturesque and vital character.
It is almost pathetic to realize that so commonplace and commercial an invention as a wire fence was the means of doing away with the cowboy. This introduction of a cheap and effective means of coralling the animals at one fell swoop put the cowboy out of business, destroyed forever the usefulness of this race of picturesque, hard-riding, reckless youth of the plains. Mr. Cowboy rides on his raids but seldom now.
Remington knew these cowboys well. He had mingled with them, ridden after the herds, joined in their boisterous revels, and there came from his brush and pencil a picturesque lot of out-of-door characters, to the very life. Remington had camped in the open, had ridden hard and long, had been with the United States cavalry in its expeditions, was the intimate of the officers and men of the then little army of this nation, and he saw history made. In all this crowd there was no more picturesque figure, whether cowboy, Indian, or soldier, than Remington himself. He wrote as entertainingly as he painted, and before his death (he was stricken untimely) was to follow his beloved comrades in the army as war correspondent to Cuba, in the Spanish War. It is nowise to the disparagement of the men who followed Remington to say that they were all under an everlasting debt of gratitude to him for his initial insight into the breezy outlook on life in the Far West, and for his way of presenting his facts.
Remington was an indefatigable worker, constantly filling his sketch-book with notes, and making mental memoranda of the happenings about him. And he showed steady progress in the technic of his art, each succeeding picture disclosing genuine advance. Nor was he content simply with painting and drawing. He sought artistic expression in sculpture too, modeling much during the later years of his life with great success. Personally, the man was a delight to a host of friends, with his inimitable stories, his genial manner, and his thorough naturalness. One of the best known of his sculptural works is “The Broncho Buster,” which has long been a public favorite, and been reproduced in bronze.