In the Remington Moment

3. Looking at Fire: On The Hunters' Supper (c. 1909)

look ing at Fir e On The Hunters’ Supper (c. 1909) 3 The appetite of the eye that must be fed produces the hypnotic value of painting. | Jacques Lacan 1. Into the West, September 1908 Dear Kid Got here at last—and am cool for once. I have nearly died of the heat. Beck met me and has insisted that I go out on a regular hunting trip with him and as it is the last time I will have so a chance I’m going. He has everything, horses, tents and pots, saddles etc. and they are hard to pay for out here. . . . Of course if I do this I will come right home when I get through and it will be a month without doubt. We going to Jacksons Lake and are to carry a collapsible boat and go into Yellowstone Lake in the Park. Moose bear. elk—geese—fish. | Frederic Remington to Eva Remington, Cody, Wyoming, 15 September 1908 . . . we had a good talk by a big campfire—real thing—smoke blowing in your face and sparks flying. | Frederic Remington to Eva Remington, 18 September 1908 On the morning of 8 September 1908, a little less than two months before that year’s presidential race between William Howard Taft and William Jennings Bryan will be decided, Frederic Remington leaves his house in New Rochelle, New York, and begins what will be a weeklong journey by rail to Cody, Wyoming. Though he will make this long trip on his own, his plan upon arriving at Cody is simple: meet up there with one John W. Beck, a lawyer friend from Philadelphia with whom he had negotiated the various details for the production and the installation, the preceding June, of Remington’s “Cowboy” sculpture in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. For his part, Beck has assembled several friends and associates for a hunting and fishing expedition deep into the Absaroka Mountain range west of Cody. Beck and his hunting party are after anything wild that moves on the ground or in the Looking at Fire 122 air and over water: moose, bear, elk, deer, pronghorn, geese, ducks. Cutthroat trout. By contrast, Remington—so he writes his wife Eva on the outbound portion of the trip west—defines the mission of what will turn out to be his last western journey as “an artist in search of the beautiful.” For a nearly forty-seven-year-old man plagued by gout in his right foot and by persistent stomach and gall bladder problems, such extended travel and then camping in the Wyoming high country represents, Remington also acknowledges, “quite an undertaking for a one legged man.” Still, as he writes Eva on 15 September, “I’m in for it” and, “without doubt” Beck’s planned hunting and fishing expedition will be gone for at least a month. Looking out the soot-stained windows of his Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroad car as he crossed the prairie and high plains west of Chicago, Remington “without doubt” gazed at the seemingly endless fields of alfalfa, or corn, or wheat—some of them in some of the counties along his westward route perhaps being harvested. Gazed at the cracked earth of the dried-up sloughs below the railroad embankments , at the cumulus clouds forming and then scudding across the sky each day, stacking up in layers all the way to the high plains’ horizon . Certainly the unseasonably hot weather that met him during the outbound portion of this trip registered itself mightily upon both his mind and body. From Sheridan, Wyoming, where he takes a room at the Sheridan Inn upon reaching it on 13 September, five days after leaving New Rochelle, he writes Eva that if he had known in advance what a hellish streak of weather was in the offing he simply wouldn’t have made the trip in the first place. Is this my fate, he wonders, to experience a “grilling” whenever I set foot off Ingleneuk, the island retreat in the St. Lawrence River that he had, perhaps rashly, put up for sale just that summer? Still, he adds, at least in Sheridan there is some solace to be had from the West’s oppressive heat. For toward evening, a cooling breeze comes down from the Big Horn Mountains fifteen or so miles west of Sheridan, portending a change in the weather, and he hears predictions from the locals...