The Big Sandy Mountaineer -

This is Charlie Russell’s birthday week. You can always tell that because it is Western Art week in Great Falls, Montana. Charlie Russell was born on March 19, 1864. That would make this his 153rd birthday.

Charlie Russell was a boyhood hero for me and my friends growing up in Havre. I was given many Russell books for birthdays and Christmas and still cherish them to this day.

Whenever my family went to Great Falls, I spent hours wandering around his Great Falls home and studio. I saw that he stacked his teepee poles on brackets on the front porch of the studio. I did the same whenever I could at whatever Clear Creek cabin I was staying at. I could never figure out why that other building was hooked on to the old log studio. It wasn’t until years later that I found out that in the year of Charlie’s death, 1926, Nancy wanted a show room for his paintings so they added that show room on to the west end of the studio. That same year they started an adobe Pueblo style house in Pasadena, California called “Trails End”. Charlie never saw either completed but Nancy lived in Trail’s End for several years.

I had a good friend, Claude Dowen, who actually owned an original Charlie Russell watercolor. He kept in locked in a safe in his basement. I admonished him frequently to hang his beautiful painting on the wall where he could enjoy it but he was afraid someone would steal it. I never could figure out why Claude had that painting if he was going to hide it from the world!

Years later when Con Lundgren owned Charlie Russell’s Bulls Head Lodge at Lake McDonald it was one of the high points of my life when Mrs. Lundgren and Ace Powell took me on a tour of that house and the studio nearby. To this day when I am at Lake McDonald I often look at Russell’s cabin and get a thrill seeing it again. I never tire of seeing that wonderful cabin in the cedar forest.

Happy 153rd Charlie. How I wish I would have known you!