it was also, in microcosm, a fitting introduction to Frederic Remington’s Wild West.

Frederic Sackrider Remington was born on October 4, 1861, in the small town of Canton in upper New York State. The Civil War was not yet six months old, and it would be over before Remington was four. Nevertheless it seems to have left a definite impression on him, for his father, a Republican journalist who owned the local newspaper, was a major in the 11 th New York Cavalry and came back from the war with a wealth of stories to tell about fighting in Virginia and Louisiana. From an early age Remington was steeped in the lore of combat and had formed an interest that he would never relinquish. In 1897, long after he was established as the artist-historian of the Indian-fighting army, he was still chasing the smell of battle. “We are getting old,” he wrote a friend, “and one cannot get old without having seen a war.”

Two other lifelong interests were shaped by Remington’s boyhood. With a father who was not only an ex-cavalryman but a harness-racing enthusiast as well, Remington grew up around horses. As an adult he confessed that he “always likefd] to dwell on … [the] subject of riding” and had “an admiration for a really good rider which is altogether beyond his deserts in the light of philosophy.” His work reflected that fact, as did his oft-repeated choice for an epitaph: “He knew the horse.” Remington’s upstate New York boyhood was also an education in the outdoors. Fishing, hunting, swimming, canoeing, hiking, and camping were the normal recreations of a boy from his region. The Adirondacks, his beloved Cranberry Lake, and the rivers and streams that interlaced the area became part of Remington’s mental landscape, and he cherished an abiding passion for the north woods that found fulfillment when, near the end of the century, he acquired an island of his own, Ingleneuk, in Chippewa Bay on the St. Lawrence River. There for a decade he passed many of his happiest hours, painting, relaxing, and enjoying a “summer” break from the city that some years stretched from March to October. The north country, where he grew up and is buried, rather than the West, with which he is so intimately identified, remained home in Remington’s heart. It bred in him those tastes that eventually drew him westward. “A real sportsman, of the nature-loving type,” he wrote, “must go tramping or paddling or riding about over the waste places of the earth, with his dinner in his pocket.”

A fascination with the military, horses, and the outdoors was thus a hallmark of Remington’s career until he died. They represent a constancy that is revealing about him, both as man and as artist, and help explain why one army officer in 1890 described him as “a big, good-natured, overgrown boy.” For by the time Remington entered the Highland Military Academy at Worcester, Massachusetts, in the fall

of 1876, the rough outlines of his future were already taking shape. The boy had never much enjoyed classroom studies, but he had developed an interest in art and some facility at sketching. Examples of his youthful work show a romantic preoccupation with Indian fighting on the far frontier. “Your favorite subject is soldiers,” he wrote another budding artist at this time. “So is mine. …” Custer’s last stand (which had just occurred) and other less celebrated incidents of the plains Indian wars were doubtless on Remington’s mind, and the West itself had begun to exert a strong pull on him. But his parents were socially and economically prominent enough to want a proper education and a respectable career for their son. Thus in the fall of 1878, after toying with the notion of studying journalism at Cornell, Remington entered Yale as a student in the School of Fine Arts.

He was by this time already a husky, thickset young man, sandy-haired, smooth-faced, and blue-eyed. His features, dominated by a prominent nose and a rather sullen mouth, were not especially attractive; but he was physically prepossessing, with the neck of a heavyweight boxer and the muscular build of a natural athlete. In an amusing selfassessment, written with his characteristic verve when he was only fifteen, Remington took stock as follows: I don’t amount to anything in particular. I can spoil an immense amount of good grub at any time in the day. … I go a good man on muscle. My hair is short and stiff, and I am about five feet eight inches and weigh one hundred and eighty pounds. There is nothing poetical about me.

The reference to spoiling good grub was prophetic. Over the years Remington’s weight swelled alarmingly, and he waged a ceaseless, futile war against corpulence until at last the proud athlete was encased in a prison of flesh. But in 1878 he was every inch a young man in his physical prime.

Remington’s year and a half at Yale exposed him to formal instruction in the principles and elements of art and to studio courses in drawing and perspective. The consensus is that he profited little from the experience and seemed to enjoy Yale in direct proportion to the number of hours he spent on the football field instead of in the classroom. He was a first-string forward, or rusher, on the 1879 team that included among its halfbacks Walter C. Camp, the legendary “Father of Football.” Perhaps football became Remington’s substitute for soldiering. It was Stephen Crane who in 1900 would write about his classic novel of men at war, The Red Radge of Courage , that he had “never smelled even the powder of a sham battle” but had got his “sense of the rage of conflict on the football field.” Football in Remington’s time was a brutally physical contest played with only minimal padding and protection, and he gloried in its bloodier aspects. Years

later, when critics attacked football for precisely these qualities and spoke of banning it from the universities, Remington snorted contemptuously: “I do not believe in all this namby-pamby talk and I hope the game will not be emasculated and robbed of its heroic qualities, which is its charm. …” Remington’s brief football career, usually seen merely as an assertion of his preference for robust physical activity over training in art, may in fact have served his art generously. It remained until 1898 his only battlefield experience.

Remington’s studies terminated abruptly upon the death of his father in February, 1880. He chose to drop out of Yale, and after dabbling with a clerkship or two in Albany, fighting off boredom by boxing and horseback riding, and probably squandering a small advance on his patrimony, he at last resolved to satisfy an old ambition by going west. He left for Montana in August, 1881, “to make a trial of life on a ranche,” the local paper reported, though biographers have speculated that his real motive may have been disappointment in love. Two years earlier Remington had met and begun courting the one girl, Eva Caten, who in all his life could distract him from his exclusively masculine pursuits. He got as far as asking her father’s permission for her hand in marriage, but his suit was spurned for the excellent reason that he had no prospects and no particular ambition in life. Whatever his motives were in going to Montana, Remington did not stay long, perhaps two and a half months at the outside. But he had got his taste of the West, sketched some of what he had seen, and even enjoyed a small but real triumph as an artist when Harper’s Weekly for February 25, 1882, published a redrawn version of one of his efforts under the title “Cow-boys of Arizona.”

At this juncture in his life, however, Remington was less concerned with establishing himself as an artist than freeing himself from his desk in Albany and getting back west again. The opportunity came in the fall of 1882, when, upon turning twenty-one, he received the bulk of his inheritance, some nine thousand dollars, which he at once proceeded to spend with a free hand. Then in late February, 1883, acting upon the advice of a former Yale classmate, he plunged what was left into a quarter-section sheep ranch about ten miles south of Peabody, Kansas. It was not cattle ranching, and it was certainly not the frontier; but it was a chance to live in the West and become in fact a Westerner.

Remington stuck with sheep ranching for about a year, doubling his spread and passing his time with a set of like-minded young bachelors who appear to have been most adept at fun. One caper, however, ended unamusingly. It took place on Christmas

Eve in the tiny settlement of Plum Grove, where a crowd was on hand at the schoolhouse to celebrate the festivities. Remington and his friends managed to make themselves obnoxious and were asked to leave. This called for retaliation and so, with the inspiration of high spirits both youthful and distilled, they piled straw outside one window, lit it, then screamed “Fire! Fire!” The aftermath was a two-day trial during which Remington suffered the embarrassment of being referred to by one of the attorneys as “Billy the Kid.” No more serious consequences resulted, and the culprits were let off upon payment of costs. But the episode was humiliating and perhaps lessened the charms of sheep ranching. Remington moved to Kansas City early in 1884, disposing of his ranch that May before departing on an excursion through the Southwest and into Mexico.

The precise effects of the sheep venture on Remington’s artistic development are difficult to assess. Throughout the year he had continued drawing, and if he learned little about the workaday realities of running a sheep ranch and less about financial responsibility, he had profited in other ways. The year on the ranch was to be his longest continuous residence in the rural West, and while the area around Peabody could hardly be called wild, vestiges of its frontier past remained in the early i88o’s. The country had impressed Remington, and his imagination was active enough to provide the missing element of hair-raising adventure. Shortly after arriving in sedate Peabody he scribbled the following to a friend in Canton: “Papers came all right—are the cheese—man just shot down the street—must go.” That the Peabody newspapers of the period record no shooting incident is not surprising. The West had won Remington over, and he had begun the process of making it conform to his impression of what it should be like. If Kansas had failed to live up to his expectations, it had still offered him room to be young and feel a glorious sense of freedom galloping across the prairie at dawn, his mare’s stride “steel springs under me as she swept along, brushing the dew from the grass of the range. …”

Such carefree times must end for all, but Remington did better than most at resisting the inevitable. His move to Kansas City was followed by a trip east, and on September 3o, 1884, he married Eva Caten. Just what in his activities over the past four years had convinced Mr. Caten that Remington would now make an acceptable son-in-law remains a mystery. The new bride and groom left at once for Kansas City to set up house. The details of this period of their life are sparse, perhaps because Eva, after only a few months away from friends and family, decided that the West—even the urban West—was not for her and returned home. Evidently there were other considerations, too. What Remington had made from the sale of his sheep ranch he had invested in

a saloon. He was himself a heavy drinker throughout his life, perpetually climbing on and tumbling off the water wagon, as he was frank to admit in his letters. While Eva suffered from isolation and loneliness, her husband, who avoided mixed social gatherings whenever possible, whiled away the hours working on his art, selling an occasional painting, and doing pretty much what he wanted to do. He boxed, went riding, and, according to one of the bartenders who worked there, spent “a good deal of time” in the saloon he jointly owned. When this enterprise failed, Remington lost the last of his patrimony and suddenly found himself strapped for funds. This may have precipitated Eva’s decision to return to New York.

With Eva’s departure Remington was on his own again, and he spent the next few months wandering across the desert Southwest, sketching what he saw and filling his portfolio. At the end of summer he rejoined Eva in New York and thereafter accepted the fact that they would never live out west again. Instead he would periodically return on his own, often on assignment once he had become an established illustrator. His trips were far-ranging and included visits to the Canadian plains and Mexico. Some lasted for a month or more. But it was an arrangement that the Remingtons were able to accommodate themselves to throughout their marriage.

The winter of 1885-86 was a lean and trying one for the young couple. They had moved into a small apartment in Brooklyn in order to be nearer the market for magazine illustrations. Two of Remington’s sketches had been redrawn and published in Harper’s Weekly , but it was not until January 9, 1886, that he finally appeared on the cover under his own name. Appropriately, the subject was “Indian Scouts on Geronimo’s Trail” and featured a soldier on horseback, his head turned away scanning the distance for signs of hostiles. He is accompanied by four Indians jogging along at his side and what appears to be a Mexican scout trailing behind. The officer cuts a dashing figure with his hat set at a rakish angle, framing the strong lines of his pro- file. The Indian scouts, in comparison, are small, rather scrawny men, wild-looking but unimpressive. The picture exhibits all the faults of Remington’s early work—the composition cluttered and lacking focus, the figures weakly drawn and somewhat out of proportion, and the perspective unsure. Some of these difficulties could be attributed to the engraver, but on the whole they typified Remington’s paintings at this time. He had an arresting subject, and it bore an air of authenticity. But he yet had much to learn about his craft. Bowing to necessity, he enrolled in the Art Students League and began attending classes in March, 1886. But his impatience with formal instruction won out, and by June he was off to follow in Geronimo’s tracks once again and acquaint himself further with the

desert Southwest.

The year and a half at Yale and the few months at the Art Students League comprised all the formal training Remington ever got, though the astonishing growth in his technical competence over the next few years, and indeed throughout his whole career, indicates that he was always willing to learn and improve. By the end of 1886 his work had already gained considerable sophistication and was beginning to appear with some frequency not only in Harper’s Weekly but in other magazines as well. Remington’s breakthrough into regular illustrating came late in that year when Poultney Bigelow, owner and editor of Outing magazine, bought his portfolio of western sketches and thereafter kept him busy with a slew of commissions. Recalling his introduction to Remington’s art, Bigelow remembered himself bent over his desk one day, tired from overwork and in no mood to be disturbed. Suddenly a portfolio of drawings was shoved into his hand, and without looking up he gave them a quick glance. It was, he wrote, like receiving an “electric shock.” Instantly perceiving in these rough drawings a vitality and mastery of the subject matter that technical deficiencies could not conceal, Bigelow now for the first time looked up at the artist and recognized his former Yale classmate, Fred Remington. It is a fine tale, though perhaps a touch apocryphal; one suspects in it more the workings of the “old-boy” system than pure coincidence. At any rate, Outing marked a turning point in Remington’s career. The demand for his work was beginning to equal his ability to produce, and commissions were streaming in from some of the most prestigious magazines of the day. Besides Harper’s Weekly and Outing, St. Nicholas, Youth’s Companion, Century, Scribner’s, and Harper’s Monthly all carried his work by 1890.

Remington had arrived. Thereafter his career as an illustrator constitutes an unbroken tale of popularity and rising income, of moves into increasingly elaborate quarters at more impressive addresses, of a social set that included the rich and powerful—in short, of dramatic, overwhelming success. It is a tale, moreover, that cannot be understood without reference to the times in which Remington was working.

Americans by the iSgo’s had become uncomfortably aware of the magnitude of change that had overtaken the country since the Civil War. The social consequences of industrial growth and urban sprawl were being felt in the midst of a depression. For all the complacency and confidence that a firm faith in progress bred, unrest had manifested itself in an agrarian protest movement that promised to exert a decided impact on the national political scene, in labor agitation in the cities, and in a mounting fear of the so-called new immigration from southern Europe, which threatened to swamp the American melting pot with “undesirable” elements. In conjunction with these worries Americans were also becoming aware of the fact

that their frontier, that vacant land that had stretched out on the border of the nation’s consciousness as a symbol and a promise since the formation of the Republic, was no more. The Wild West had disappeared, and while there was much to applaud in that fact, there was something sad and regrettable, too. Poets and writers had already taken to lamenting its demise, and romantic historians were speculating on the implications of the frontier’s absence for the American character. The nation’s youth was over, but fortunately Frederic Remington and a handful of others had been there to see the last few years of its exuberant existence and leave behind an imperishable record of a phase of the American experience that would never be repeated.

Pre-eminent among those recognized as authorities on the West in the iSgo’s were, besides Remington, two writers—Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister. Together they formed a trio of Easterners of good background who had journeyed to the territories for different personal reasons and had been on hand to witness, as Remington remarked, “the living, breathing end of three American centuries of smoke and dust and sweat.” Acquainted with one another privately, they exchanged letters, encouragement, and compliments; publicly they formed an exclusive mutual-admiration society given to endorsing one another’s western products. Nor did they do anything to discourage the popular impression that they not only knew the “real West” but were among its few legitimate interpreters. They acknowledged Francis Parkman as a mentor of sorts but otherwise kept the ranks tightly closed. Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, it would seem, harbored the sum total of the nation’s expertise on things western.

Remington first came into contact with Roosevelt as illustrator for a series of somewhat sentimentalized articles on ranch life in the Dakota Territory that ran in Century magazine in 1888. It was an important commission for Remington at the time, establishing his reputation as the delineator of the cowboy, and he and Roosevelt subsequently kept in touch. “It seems to me that you in your line, and Wister in his, are doing the best work in America today,” Roosevelt observed in a letter in 1895; and two years later he added: “You know you are one of the men who tend to keep alive my hope in America.”

It was also as illustrator that Remington originally became acquainted with Owen Wister. The two met for the first time in Yellowstone Park in September, 1893. and formed an attachment based on mutual interests, mutual prejudices, and the shared conviction Jiat the country in 1893 was going to the dogs and needed a strong infusion of oldfashioned patriotism if it was to be saved. They also saw the possibility of rewarding collaboration, writer and artist, and so quickly did their friendship develop that a year later Eva could tell Wister that he was “one of the few men” her husband “loved” and could not “see too much of.” Though Remington and Wister did

maintain a reasonably close relationship for about a decade, it was not always as warm as some have assumed. Both men, after all, were working over the same ground professionally, and Remington tended to be very conscious of his territorial rights. Thus his letters to Wister are a mixture of barbs and bons mots, and he did not hesitate to make his correspondent the butt of his occasionally cutting humor. Yet the two did profit from the association. In his collection of Wister-Remington correspondence Ben Vorpahl has suggested that Wister followed Remington’s guidance in shaping his most famous character, the Virginian, into the ideal western type; and he reciprocated by providing adulatory introductions to three collections of Remington drawings. “Remington,” Wister asserted at the end of one celebrated tribute, “is not merelv an artist; he is a national treasure.”

Remington even had the high satisfaction of receiving an accolade from the old master himself, Francis Parkman, when he was commissioned at Parkman’s request as one who “knew the prairies and the mountains before irresistible commonplace had subdued them” to illustrate the 1892 commemorative edition of The Oregon Trail . It was a gratifying commission, equivalent to a laying on of hands. The next year Parkman was dead, and Remington along with Roosevelt and Wister stood unrivalled among contemporary interpreters of the vanished West. Julian Ralph, writing in Harper’s Weekly in 1895, expressed a common opinion when he observed: We almost forget that we did not always know the little army of rough riders of the plains, the sturdy lumbermen of the forests, the half-breed canoeman, the dare-devil scouts, the be-fringed and be-feathered red man; and all the rest of Remingtoniana that must be collected some day to feast the eye, as Parkman and Roosevelt and Wister satisfy the mind.

The West belonged to these men; it was, for the vast American public, what they said it was or in Remington’s case what he showed it to be. “It is a fact that admits of no question,” one astute critic commented in 1892, “that Eastern people have formed their conceptions of what the FarWestern life is like, more from what they have seen in Mr. Remington’s pictures than from any other source, and if they went to the West or to Mexico they would expect to see men and places looking exactly as Mr. Remington has drawn them.”

Remington’s vision of the West as a man’s domain, providing at once challenge and fulfillment, is perfectly consonant with his lifestyle and his personal philosophy. He was not profound or subtle, but given to a code of values right out of Roosevelt’s “strenuous-life” ethic—politically conservative, frequently racist, always superpatriotic, and convinced that, as Roosevelt said, “it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.”

Critic Harold McCracken has argued for a depth and complexity to Remington inherent

in the fact that he lived a double life. On the one hand he was the urbane Manhattanite, mingling with an impressive array of important men, lunching at the Players Club or some other cigar-andbrandy haven, dining at the Roosevelt White House, and living in considerable comfort, with a taste for expensive clothes and palatial residences; on the other he was the artist-correspondent in the field, enduring the extremes of weather, the hardships of long days in the saddle, and the risk of an enemy bullet, living on a minimal, even primitive level while absorbing those impressions that would feed his artistry for months to come back in his New York studio.

But these opposite lifestyles did not betoken some internal contradiction warring within Remington. Rather they were perfectly consistent with the values shared by a number of upper-class Easterners in this same period who, almost as if taking their cue from Roosevelt, sought out personal challenges, whether on western ranches, hunting and camping trips in the north woods ("to suffer like an anchorite is always a part of the sportsman’s programme,” Remington observed), the football fields of Yale and Harvard, or the battlefields of Cuba. This cult of “stress seeking” affirmed the need for a man to constantly test himself, pushing himself to the limits of courage and endurance and in so doing preserving intact those vital pioneering traits that had made America great but were now in danger of withering away before the sheer ease of modern life. “I believe that a man should for one month of the year live on the roots of the grass, in order to understand for the eleven following that so-called necessities are luxuries in reality,” Remington declared in 1894, in reference to his own experiences in the Sierra Madrés. Among the stress seekers there was an obsession with the pitfalls of wealth and worldly success, for they led directly to what might be an irreversible softening of the national fiber. Roosevelt railed at the “moneyed and semi-cultivated classes, especially of the Northeast” for producing a “flabby, timid type of character which eats away the great fighting qualities of our race.” The martial virtues were essential to the country’s well-being, and they must not be permitted to atrophy. Noblesse oblige dictated that the upper classes, who were most culpable anyway, should provide leadership in the campaign to preserve the best in the American character.

At times the stress-seeking philosophy degenerated into chest thumping and saber rattling. Its adherents suspiciously surveyed the world from the embattled perspective of “survival of the fittest” and tended to a deeply pessimistic view of current events. For Remington it added up to an agreeable intellectual milieu. He was not a subtle man. Direct statement was his style in the iSgo’s, and he was a walking catalogue of the prejudices of his time and class. He despised labor protesters and strikers as un-American “rats” and fretted over the inconvenience he might be caused by a

shutdown of the Pennsylvania coalfields. He saw the urban “mobs” as tainted products of Europe’s decadence and feared the pollution of the American character through “mongrelization.” “Jews, Injuns, Chinamen, Italians, Huns—the rubbish of the Earth I hate,” he declared in one remarkable outburst in 1893. “I’ve got some Winchesters and when the massacring begins, I can get my share of ‘em, and what’s more, I will.” Though Remington came from staunch Protestant stock, it was not religion that concerned him. “I don’t care a d——n how a man gets to Heaven. … But I do care how he votes and lives and fights.” In 1898 Remington rejoiced at the prospect of war in Cuba. It was a chance to “lick the Dagoes,” though he mourned that “it does seem tough that so many Americans have had to be and have still got to be killed to free a lot of d——n niggers who are better off under the yoke.” Unlike the Civil War, however, “this time … we will kill a few Spaniards instead of Anglo Saxons, which will be proper and nice.” Remington’s America, in short, was a white man’s country—indeed, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republican country if things were as they should be. And to his mind the West was the purest portion of all, a bastion of unadulterated Americanism, a last great arena for testing a man’s mettle and building character.

As an immensely popular illustrator driven “crazy with work” Remington had to keep a strict regimen. He was usually up by six each morning and, after an ample breakfast, at his easel by eight. He painted until mid-afternoon, then relaxed by walking, riding, cycling, or paddling, depending on the circumstances. Prolific and busy as he was, Remington treasured all the more his respites from “the sad effeminacy of the studio"—respites spent among the “hard-sided” cavalrymen and the other frontier types he admired. He wholeheartedly identified with the men he met out west, yet largely avoided the self-conscious need to emulate them in dress and manner. He was outgoing and accessible—”a good natured smooth faced fat blonde original good fellow,” according to one officer who met him in 1890. Remington was, one hunting partner recalled, “an admirable companion, with an inexhaustible fund of adventure and anecdote.” It was as a companion—a man with whom one drank and pleasantly passed the leisure hours—rather than as a friend that he was ordinarily remembered.

Some biographers have wanted to make of Remington a veritable Odysseus, wandering the West from point to point, crisscrossing its vast expanse, soaking up its every detail until at last he knew it, knew it all, and knew it intimately. He knew (they say) the cowboy, the miner, the army officer, the enlisted man, the Indian scout, the homesteader, the sheepherder, the mountain man—everyone, apparently, but the schoolmarm and the honky-tonk girl. He knew the wild Indian, too—each and every tribe—as well as the Mexican vaquero and the Northwest Mounted Policeman. He knew

them all, the story goes, and he gave them to us as a series of distinct, instantly recognizable types. “The depth and accuracy of his knowledge and his unbiased understanding of Indian nature, as well as of the life of the Western white man, marked him out as an authority,” one of his biographers has written. The “Indian nature” and the “Western white man …"—these are improbably broad categories, commensurate in improbability with the claims made for Remington’s “deep and accurate” knowledge of all phases of western life.

There seems to be a desire at work here to make the irtist’s life as exciting as the scenes he painted by implying that he personally witnessed most of what he subsequently depicted. The truth was something else. Perhaps the difficulty lies in assessing the limits of Remington’s actual experiences. In his own writing—and he was a frequent contributor of essays based on firsthand observations, as well as a short-story writer and a two-time novelist —Remington was scrupulously honest about what he saw and did as distinguished from what he had heard about. When his reports on his personal doings out west are stripped of their embellishments and reduced to a skeleton record of what actually happened to him, much of the romantic moonshine is dispelled at once. The cavalry patrols he rode with, for example, rarely saw, let alone exchanged fire with, hostile Indians. Instead they spent gruelling days traversing country that was often exhausting for men and horses, abiding climatic conditions as varied as the bone-chilling cold of a Dakota winter (”cold enough to satisfy a walrus,” Remington wrote) and the blazing heat of an Arizona summer with the thermometer stuck at 125 degrees. His experiences were on the whole perfectly ordinary. He soaked in his own sweat, choked on the dust, suffered the stiffness of breaking into the saddle again, and wondered what on earth he was doing exposing himself to such discomfort. Of course he loved it all, particularly the discomfort, and he reported accurately on what he had experienced.

But Remington was an illustrator for others as well, and he was, moreover, an artist. His personal experiences were steppingstones to imaginative re-creations; what mattered was not whether he had lived a particular episode, but how it fitted into his conception of the Wild West. It was Remington’s peculiar genius to be able to encounter reality, respond to it on a direct, reportorial level, and yet not be overwhelmed by it. Beneath the gritty surface of the western life that he pictured, Remington detected some magic impulse at work, and he cut through the monotony and boredom, the loneliness and isolation, the grinding dreariness of changeless days, to reveal a great, ongoing adventure, awesome in its sweeping power, the fulfillment of his every boyhood dream and, as his dramatic rise to popularity would indicate, the dreams of countless other Americans as well. The Wild West was Remington’s forte. He knew instinctively what would

grip his audience and hold it fast.

Remington’s West is not a landscape artist’s paradise. His major oils, viewed with detachment, are remarkably unspecific and unspectacular in terms of setting. For him the West has been reduced to twin bands of powder blue sky and yellow ocher land, a timeless backdrop against which he played out his fantasies of pounding action. He loved the theme of pursuit and flight, of men charging head-on at the viewer while whooping Indians follow on their heels. In The Flight a solitary cowboy is shown in what seems a hopeless race for life. Though his situation is grim and his chances for survival slight, he stares straight ahead, determined to make the best of it. He is, by Remington’s standards, the model of masculine Americanism, a heroic ideal in a land where “life is reduced to its elemental conditions” (as Roosevelt wrote), a struggle for survival. The flight was prelude to another favorite Remington theme, the desperate stand. It could be cowboys, soldiers, or free trappers, it mattered little: they were united in a common cause, a life-or-death defense against superior numbers. Remington preferred to leave the attackers, usually Indians, to the viewer’s imagination. His concern was with the men at bay and the cool, efficient manner in which they comported themselves despite the grave peril they faced. One of his most striking variations on this theme was a splendid oil done in 1905 showing a Crow warrior “ridden down” by a band of Sioux. He stands high on a bluff, war club in hand, a figure of perfect stoicism, prepared to meet death without fear or complaint. No chance of escape remains to him, for his pony is exhausted, glistening with sweat, and the pursuing Sioux are closing in for the kill. The land is pitiless, stripped bare of even a trace of vegetation that could provide some shelter or a place to hide. It is not really the country of the Sioux or the Crow, of course; it is simply Frederic Remington’s favorite arena for violent action, the Wild West.

Recently Remington has received attention chiefly for his contribution to the romantic myth of the American cowboy. He, along with his friends Roosevelt and Wister, helped transform the working cowboy into a cultural hero, “as hardy and self-reliant as any man who ever breathed,” according to Roosevelt, “a slim young giant, more beautiful than pictures,” to borrow Wister’s description of that hero of a million daydreams, the Virginian. Remington’s illustrative work for both authors constituted his most direct contribution to the same heroic image. His very first appearance in Harper’s Weekly involved a cowboy subject, and his popular first bronze, done in 1895, was called The Bronco Buster . Cowboys were to him, Remington acknowledged, what “gems and porcelains are to others.” But it was not as the depictor of the cowboy that Remington stands supreme; his contemporary Charles M. Russell

would far surpass him in that regard. Rather it was as the artist-historian of the Indian-fighting army that he had no peers. As Wister himself observed: ”… Remington with his piercing and yet imaginative eye has taken the likeness of the modern American soldier and stamped it upon our minds with a blow as clean-cut as is the impression of the American Eagle upon our coins in the Mint.”

Remington rarely harked back in his work to some earlier, idvllic time “when the land was God’s,” as Charlie Russell would say, and the world was full of a gentle wonder and mystery. His West was ever the setting for clash and confrontation, and the struggle for mastery between red men and white was its most compelling theme. As a boy his head was full of fantasies of Indian fighting, and as a young man he had followed the trail of Geronimo and the Sioux Ghost Dancers. He never did see a real battle between Indians and soldiers, but he knew intuitively what it was all about. It was savagery and civilization pitted in a death struggle whose final outcome was a certainty but whose little skirmishes were the stuff of epic: miniatures of that larger testing that had molded a pioneering race of men. His vision of the Indian wars was compressed into one mammoth oil entitled, with purposeful vagueness, A Cavah-y Scrap. Completed in 1909, Remington’s last year of life, it is a full-blown summation of his theme, as cavalrymen and Indians galore charge across a Hat ocher plain under a sky of solid blue. It is also an oddly disconcerting painting. It is rigidly separated into three bands: the sky, the tangled mass of horses and men, and the ground. Onlyone fallen cavalryman in the left foreground, and one rearing horse and rider in the exact center, break this pattern. For such a stirring scene, full of figures in frenzied motion, the canvas is strangely placid to the eye. This impression is not merely a matter of composition and coloring, either. Remington seems to have intended a highly stylized effect: a master narrator in paint, he has left his story line here quite indeterminate. Are the troopers charging through a band of Indians? Are they pursuing Indians? Or are they being pursued? Since the troopers and the Indians appear to be galloping in two parallel lines across the canvas, from right to left, it is unclear what precisely is going on and, for that matter, who is winning. Remington apparently wanted it that way; his painting deals not with history but with myth. It is as structured and timeless as the ritual drama it depicts, the winning of the Wild West.

Remington recorded both sides in the clash between red and white, and some have praised him for his sensitive understanding of the American Indian. But Remington understood the Indian onlv in a strictly limited sense, as a curious visitor

in search of quaint specimens. “I came to do the wild tribes and I do it,” he informed his wife in 1888 during a two-month tour of the southwestern Indian reservations. When he wrote up his experiences for Century the following year, he expressed the belief that “no white man can ever penetrate the mystery of… [the Indians'] mind or explain the reason of their acts.” For “the red man is a mass of glaring incongruities. He loves and hates in such Strange fashions, and is constant and inconstant at such unusual times, that I often think he has no mental process, but is the creature of impulse.” It was, even in 1889, an anachronistic judgment, and it brought a mild rebuke in the same journal that published it: “The Indian character is as varied as the character of the white man who sits in judgment upon him. … No one who has any real knowledge of the matter ever thinks of the Indian to-day as controlled by any single passion or as represented by any single type of character.” Remington, however, frequently did just that, and the illustrator of The Oregon Trail shared Parkman’s opinion that the Indian and the white man were permanently separated by “an impassable gulf.”

Try as he might to bridge it, this gulf remained for Remington. With the exception of a few of his later oils his Indian paintings always exhibited an emotional distance. He was an unlikely choice, therefore, when he was commissioned to illustrate a sumptuous new edition of Longfellow’s Hiawatha in 1889. Though the paintings and pen and inks he executed were popular in their time, Remington was not in entire sympathy with his subject. His literal, realistic approach did little to enhance the rich, mystical

aura of Longfellow’s poem. Anyway, Remington never pretended to be able to draw women, and this put him at a decided disadvantage when it came to rendering that ephemeral vision of poetic loveliness, Minnehaha. Remington’s version was hard-faced, angular, shapeless, and forgettable. He was better when the subject at hand was an Indian warrior. His short article (1898) about Massai, a renegade Apache who “manifested himself like the dust storm or the morning mist—a shiver in the air, and gone,” was widely acclaimed. Theodore Roosevelt, for one, greatly admired it. “The whole account of that bronco Indian, atavistic down to his fire stick; a revival, in his stealthy, inconceivably lonely and bloodthirsty life, of a past so remote that the human being as we know him, was but partially differentiated from the brute, seems to me to deserve characterization by that excellent but much abused adjective, “ weird ,” he enthusiastically wrote Remington.

“Weird” was the right word, and such heady praise may have persuaded Remington to attempt a more elaborate treatment of the Indian mind. He did so

in a novel entitled The Way of an Indian . First serialized in Cosmopolitan , it was published in book form in 1906 and was once described as “the best novel by a white man about Indian life.” The reader is presented with a fictional biography of Fire Eater, a Cheyenne warrior who wallows in blood on a daily basis. War is his only passion, hatred his only emotion: “He wanted a river of blood—he wanted to break the bones of the whites with stone hatchets—he wanted to torture with fire.” He is as much animal as man: “One of those moods had come upon the savage child-mind when the surging blood made his eyes gleam vacantly like the great cats.” He is utterly without remorse: “Too often had the hunter-warrior stood over his fallen quarry to feel pity; he knew no more of this than a bird of prey, and he sank his three-pronged battle-ax into the soldier’s skull and wiped it on his pony’s shoulder saying: ‘Another dog’s head. He is, finally, a superstitious primitive, constantly looking for signs and guidance in the phenomena of the natural world: bats, spiders, and wolves are all consulted as powerful medicine when important decisions have to be made. Remington’s novel, in short, has the unique distinction of being about a protagonist who is at the same time an antagonist—a “hero” viewed down the barrel of a soldier’s rifle. As such it perfectly mirrors Remington’s artistic understanding of the red man and his “peculiar method of thought.” He is the necessary savage foe with whom the white American matches wits and brawn and demonstrates those heroic qualities that were the essence of the Wild West.

It was Remington who gave us the “boys in blue"—those straight, lean, square-jawed, clear-eyed, mustachioed soldiers, professionally going about their business, the nation’s business, of “Winning the West” without a flicker of fear or a moment of self-doubt. Bullets kicking up dirt in their faces cannot make them flinch. They know the meaning of stern duty. Mortally wounded and in the agonies of death, they have no second thoughts about the sacrifice they have made for cause and country. Captured and led off by implacable foes to tortures unimaginable in their fiendishness, they register not a trace of emotion. They are soldiers in Uncle Sam’s army, and for Remington that answered all. He idolized them. They were, he wrote (of the officers, of course), “a homogeneous class. … They have small waists, and their clothes fit them; they are punctilious; they respect forms, and always do the dignified and proper thing at the particular instant, and never display their individuality except on two occasions: one is the field of battle and the other is before breakfast.” They are the purest embodiments of a heroic ideal, one that Remington quite literally bestowed on the nation in the form of a vivid mental picture of the Indian-fighting army.