March is Charles M. Russell month here in Montana and by Charlie’s friends all over the world.
Charles Russell was born in St. Louis, Missouri on March 19, 1864. This year we are celebrating his one hundred and fifty second birthday.
For those of us born and raised in Montana, as often as not, he became a childhood hero and idol. It was even more obvious, the spot he held in the mystic of Montana when his statue was the first Montana choice for a statue on Statuary Hall in the Capitol Building in Washington.
Early biographies of CMR were glowing in their accounts of his accomplishments in documenting the early west both in paint and in words. That was to be expected for most were written when Russell’s wife Nancy was still alive and she worked very hard to keep his life a “Western Camelot”. She was successful.
Later biographers were not so kind. They tried to portray the “real” Charlie and Nancy, wrinkles and all, feet of clay like the rest of us. What comes about in those biographies is a more real Russell than those early biographers but probably not as well loved as the first Russell.
So, who was right? Have modern biographers like John Taliaferro gone too far?
Probably the real Charlie and Nancy are to be found somewhere in the middle.
However, new biographies do answer puzzles that have never been answered before.
A case in point.
Russell fiends have long puzzled in just how Nancy could have had such a strong hold on her husband Charlie. What was that grasp that led him to paint when he did not want to paint, be sober when he did not want to be sober and be as driven a personality as he appeared in later years?
Along with that was a second puzzle. Why did the Russell’s have no children? They did adopt a child late in life but none were theirs by blood.
One biographer claims that Russell had caught a particular strong strain of a venereal disease and passed it on to Nancy, causing her not to be able to conceive. That would explain why he let her have so much power in their lives. Guilt, pure and simple. No one is around to refute that story, but many are not buying into it either as it does not go along with Russell as the pure and noble Montana pioneer.
There are many controversies. Well known is the fact that Russell hated most all automobiles and never learned to drive one. He referred to them as “Skunk wagons”. Yet Russell was very wealthy while he was alive, causing him to be chauffeured around in Cadillac’s and Pierce Arrow touring cars for fully a third of his life.
Montana author B. M. Bower reported in the Russell’s motoring one hot day into Los Vegas with Nancy and the chauffeur in the front seat and Russell crowded in the back with the luggage. Any wonder modern biographers suggest very close ties between Nancy and the chauffeur.
When Charles Russell reached Montana for the first time in 1880, he was sixteen years old. After that first trip, he fell in love with Territory that had not yet become a state. Seemingly, with his parent’s blessing, he stayed in the west to become a cowboy and make his name in the world.
Kid Russell he was called. A strange cowboy with fancy shirts, long blond hair and a penchant for wearing bright colored Metis sashes around his waist.
Yet, he was liked even though by his own words, he was a bad cowboy and an even worse night wrangler.
The prairie and mountains surrounding the Judith Basin country must have inspired him with their vivid colors each season of the year and encouraged him to take brush in hand and paint.
A lone starving cow almost being attacked by a wolf captured in watercolors suggesting the worst of the terrible winter of 1886 gave him his first fame.
After that, it was paint whenever he could, usually for grub and more often for whiskey for him and his friends.
Stories are legend about his winter in Chinook with some friends. He was so nice to Mrs. Lohman, yet stole freely from the Lohman store’s larder in the basement.
When Charlie married Nancy they lived for a time in Cascade while he tried to make a living as an artist. Soon Nancy realized they would have to move to Great Falls where there were a few more people to sell to so off they went.
Later after Russell’s mother died, he got enough inheritance to have a two story cottage built on Fourth Avenue North in Great Falls. Later he wanted a long studio and had one built out of telephone poles next door to the house.
Nothing elaborate about either structure, nothing that would suggest the wealth that was to come their way after Russell became known and his paintings sought after.
After CMR died in 1926, Nancy Russell confessed to a friend that she had driven him too hard in his painting because of her fear of a time when he would no longer be able to paint and they would become destitute.
And paint Russell did, right up to the last day he lived.
In 1926 Nancy and Charlie started adding a show room onto the studio and started a winter home in Pasadena, California called Trails End,
Russell was never to see Trails End completed, however Nancy made it her main home for another decade until her death.
One place that both of them loved more than any other was their cedar cabin on the shore of Lake McDonald. Called Bull Head Lodge in honor of Russell’s famous signature bull head on all his paintings, they spent each summer there from the time they bought the land and had a cabin constructed in 1906. Later many additions were added to the cabin making it ramble all over the mountainside. As the Russell fortunes mounted, a large studio and even an Italian flower and rock garden were added to the grounds.
There are a couple of great Russell stories about living at Lake McDonald that have been told by Glacier guides for years and years.
A couple of park wranglers were riding home on their horses when they ran smack into a mad moose, the horses reared, dumped the wranglers on the ground and headed out of there quickly. One wrangler climbed in a tree while the other found a hole in the ground and quickly crawled into it.
The moose attacked the tree with the wrangler in it again and again. Frequently the wrangler in the hole would ask if the moose was still there? It always was,
Finally after asking about a dozen times as to the whereabouts of the moose, the wrangler in the tree got angry and hollered to the wrangler in the hole to stop bothering him. The moose would go when he was good and ready.
“All well and good,” said the wrangler in the hole, “problem is I am right in front of a grizzly bear in this hole!”
The Russell’s decided to have a new fireplace built at their Lake McDonald cabin one summer. A worker built it out of cement and left a wood framework in the chimney which he told Russell would burn out with the first fire they had.
The cement cured and Russell along with his artist friend Phillip Goodwin built their first fire, lit it and all of a sudden had a blast furnace coming out of the new chimney as the framework burned so hot it threatened the entire forest.
Water on the fire would not stop the fire in the chimney so Russell screamed to Goodwin to douse Nancy’s new living room Oriental hearth rug with water, they would each take a side, hold it over the fire opening, snuff all the oxygen out of the chimney putting out the fire. They did just that but a huge wind drew the rug into the fire, Russell and Goodwin could not hold on to it, it was sucked into the chimney, rose up out of the top into the air forty feet above the house, and landed on the top of a huge cedar tree.
About that time the fire went out on its own. Nancy took the first train back to Great Falls she was so angry and the fireplace was permanently cracked from such a hot first fire.
Russell stories abound across the width and breadth of this great state.
New biographers come and go. Their stories get more torrid as our times themselves become more torrid. Yet, no matter what new biographers decide could have happened, there will never be a more beloved Montanan than our own Charlie Russell!
Happy 152nd!
