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98 9. Wild ’n’ Woolly American Mythology A Ramblin’ Rundown in Search of Authentic Cowboyin’ in Strips Figure 9.1. Charlie Russell’s self-portrait with some of his friends, one of whom, your author interloping at the left, never even knew Charlie but reveres him anyhow. (The little spectacled rabbit is, of course, Harvey.) In the Hall of Statues just off t e Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington , D.C., each state is permitted to place statues of two of its native sons whose lives or works were somehow worthy of enshrining. These bronzed personages on pedestals include presidents, statesmen, and generals— Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Robert E. Lee, and so on. Exactly the kind of roll call you’d expect. Until you get to Montana. One of Montana’s two statues is of Charles M. Russell (1864–1926), known as Charlie to Montanans and renowned throughout the state as the self-taught “cowboy artist” whose depictions of the old West in watercolor, oil, pen-and-ink, and in clay and bronze sculptures are highly regarded for their authenticity. And for their sense of humor. Before he became famous as an artist, Charlie hunted and trapped, herded cows, and broke broncs. One winter, he lived with the Blood Indians in Canada. They gave him the name “Ah-wah-cous,” or antelope, possibly because the pattern of his riding breeches in the back reminded them of the south end of an antelope running north. Charlie always spoke of Indians as the only “real Americans,” and he was an early conservationist and environmentalist (before there were such terms). Russell’s is the only statue of an artist in the Capitol. Fittingly, the only artist monumentalized in the Capitol is a cowboy artist: the West, after all, is the most distinctive aspect of American cultural history, and the history of the country’s expansion into the West—and the cowboy legends and lore associated with that expansion—is the nation’s mythology, “the Western.” But even in mythological make-believe, I opt for authenticity. Russell over, say, Remington. Admirers of Western artists usually pit Remington against Russell, and, while I admire Remington, I love Russell. Frederic Remington (1861–1 909), like Russell, was born in the East—Canton, New York, though, not St. Louis—but unlike Russell, Remington never lived in the West. He just visited there. And while visiting, he took copious notes in the form of sketches of the indigenous population which he subsequently turned into a visual record of the West, a remarkably accurate and detailed portrait, albeit focused mostly on the occupation forces (U.S. cavalry), tribal costume, and fur trapping. Not many cowboys. And Remington had never pushed cows through a frozen winter as Russell had done. According to one of the numerous tales of Russell’s youth, he would acclimate himself to the descending temperatures in the fall of the year by putting on another shirt. Every time it got a little colder, he’d add yet another Wild ’N’ Woolly American Mythology 99 shirt to the layer on his back. Then in the spring as temperatures rose, he’d start removing the shirts, one at a time, pacing the removal to the increasing warmth. When he got down to bare skin, he took his annual bath and bought a new shirt and started all over again. That’s cowboyin’. Remington undoubtedly changed his clothes regularly whether he was back home in the East or making sketches out West. In the art of the West, I always opt for Russell over Remington. And on the funnies page, Red Ryder over Hopalong Cassidy. In the comic strip he did from 1950 until 1955, D an Spiegle achieved an almost photographic realism in rendering the adventures of actor William Boyd as Hoppy, using Craftint Doubletone, a chemically treated illustration board capable of yielding light and dark gray tones in addition to the usual black. But almost photographic drawing technique was not enough to purge the strip of Hollywood. Fred Harman’s Red Ryder is the more authentic. Harman, who grew up on a ranch in Colorado, gave his Western locales a scruffy reality that I recognized from my own rambles through the rocks on Colorado mountainsides. Red wears chaps (not always but often) and looks decidedly bow-legged, and Harman’s characteristic juicy brush treatment of everything wooden imparted a knotty reality to the environs—fence posts tilt askew in the parched earth; the planks of...

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