- [Narrator] It was a once upon a time time, an imaginary time but also a real time.

And yes it was once upon a time in the West, the so-called Wild West, and by the time it ended it was re-imagined into the Hollywood West.

For an old-time Montana cowboy and his Oklahoma protege, watching silent Westerns might have been like watching their own Old Testament.

The protege was Death, and they spoke in their mutually private voice, Indian sign language.

40 years earlier the older cowboy had arrived in the Montana territory as a 16-year old, soon after the great cattle drives of Texas Longhorns had arrived, and just four years after Custer and the 7th Cavalry had been annihilated at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

The Indians had all but been defeated, the great bison herds nearly wiped out, and the Transcontinental Railroad had just been completed.

By the end of the decade, the frontier would be declared closed, but for a brief last window of time, from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande there still were no fences or wire.

Sitting Bull had slipped into Canada.

Geronimo remained on the loose, as were Jesse James and Billy the Kid.

From Texas to Montana teenage boys and young men lived as if they were high plains gangs.

They herded cattle, told stories, laughed, fought and slept under the stars, and got paid for it.

As jobs went, Cowboying had plenty of risk, in plenty of forms, and plenty succumbed to the danger.

When the fellas headed to town to blow off steam, everyone wore a belt and a gun, maybe two.

Town might be a former gold mining camp.

The street scene as the boys would describe it was lively, sporting ladies who migrated seasonally up and down the Missouri, were game.

And every fourth or fifth door opened to a saloon.

For the older cowboy the scenes he had witnessed, the scenes he imagined, made up a series of endless stories, stories he would begin to tell when he traded in his six-gun for paint and canvas.

It was said that with his art and his stories, he showed Montanans what they remembered, or wanted to remember, about the land and the history they shared.

Stories that in the way he drew, painted, sculpted, wrote and told them would eventually make him world famous, the cowboy artist.

Now sitting in a darkened theater decades after he had arrived in the territory, he could watch a new medium tell the stories.

Russel come of age at a particular time in America, and although he and time marched on, in many ways he also decided to stay where he had been, a man out of time.

As he would often say, "I'm glad I lived when I did."

- [Announcer] C. M. Russell and the American West is made possible with production support from Ossie Abrams, and David Orecr, Joseph Sample, Tom Petrie and Trevor Rees-Jones, and by the following.

Also from... And by the University of Montana.

And from viewers like you, who are friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.

(relaxing vintage music) - [Charlie] As you know, I'm an old horse wrangler, one of the has-been.

In this day of canned music, I would trade it all to hear the bells of the saddle band.

Like most men of my age, my heart goes back on the trails that have been plowed under by the nester.

Most of the men I knew and worked with on the open range have crossed to the Tall Range.

Good or bad it seems to me now when my memory drifts back, that they were all good enough.

So when it comes to my cash-in, I want to go to their wagon, and if the Injun is right when he says horses go too, I want my same string.

- [Narrator] Seven months later, Charles Marion Russell crossed to the Tall Range.

At the time of his death in 1926, he was not only the so-called chronicler of the West that has passed, but the highest paid artist in America, known in art circles around the world, his work collected by presidents, royalty, and art patrons.

More important to Charlie Russell, his work also appeared on calendars and cigar boxes, in saloons and ranch bunk houses, and with his legions of cherished friends.

During his life he had produced some 4000 works of art, with a few almost mysteriously still turning up in attic trunks and in remote cabins, like old west petroglyphs.

It has been said that the character of Charlie Russell was shaped by Montana, and he in turn helped shape the territory and state.

By the time Charlie Russell left the world, the relationship was sealed.

He had effectively become the patron saint of the Big Sky State, leaving behind a mixed tribe of friends and acquaintances to mourn.

At his funeral, tributes poured in from around the nation.

Will Rogers, probably the biggest celebrity in America, and at times an awe-struck admirer of Russell, sent a flower arrangement in the shape of a saddle.

The city of Great Falls shut down.

Thousands lined the streets to watch the glass-windowed hearse carrying Russell's body.

They were followed by Russell's first trail boss, the man perhaps most responsible for turning Russell into a cowboy, and a riderless horse named Dexter, with Russell's six-shooters and holsters strapped to the saddle.

As the procession wound through Great Falls, something strange and remarkable happened, especially since it was nearly Halloween in north central Montana.

A rainbow appeared.

By the time they reached Highland Cemetery, the funeral cortege stretched two miles behind them.

Funerals are for burying the dead, and for resurrecting stories.

And every person on the Great Falls' streets, at the cemetery, and probably across most of Montana if not the West that day, had a Charlie Russell story to tell.

Almost a century later, many still do.

- Perhaps the best measure of the love and affection that Montana held for Charlie Russell is in the census of the people who claim they knew Charlie Russell, and had ridden with him on the range, or had visited him in his studio, and had a drink with him in various saloons in Great Falls and elsewhere.

I think if you added up that list of people who all had their stories of having been with Charlie Russell or their father having been with Charlie Russell, or... It exceeds the number of people who ever lived in Montana, for the entire time of Charlie Russell's life.

(wagon clattering) - [Austin] At the top of the rise, the stage stopped to blow the horses, and the passengers got down to stretch their legs.

And there, there back from the road and under a clump of bunch grass, Charlie found his first buffalo skull.

- [Narrator] Essentially Charlie was retracing a former historic trail, following the metaphoric American compass, going west, and growing up with the country.

- Charlie loved stories.

He loved stories about journeys.

And the Lewis and Clark adventure is the great American odyssey.

It is in many ways our first national road story.

And in some ways we've been telling that road story over and over again.

If you get it right about Lewis and Clark you can get it right about Route 66, or about some other road story.

- Well I think of Charlie Russell as a sort of getting to ride on the same raft with Mark Twain, because they were both very intelligent, observant characters, but they told the story of the home-spun American youth having the great adventure on the frontier.

This is the story that goes back to the beginning of America, the great, the wandering westward, of... Charlie Russell told it through cowboys, Mark Twain told it through the Mississippi River.

- At the end of Huckleberry Finn, Huckleberry Finn says "I'm gonna light out "for the territories" and by that by the way he means Indian territory.

Well Charlie Russell says the same sort of thing.

To find myself, to find the true self, I'm gonna light out for the territories.

- [Narrator] When Russell crossed the border into Montana Territory he entered a still raw frontier, (thunder crackling) where the blood was barely dry from the recent slaughter of some say as many as (hooves pounding) 30 million American bison.

It was rugged and suddenly historic ground, and Charles Marion Russell began his great American Road trip to reach it.

His passage into the west, the past, and into legend, from the same place Lewis and Clark began, St.

Louis.

(lazy piano music) When as a boy Charlie Russell might have climbed to the upstairs roof of his family's home in the Oak Hills section of St.

Louis, the unhindered view was west.

St.

Louis was something of a hub for an expanding nation, the center of two of the most important spokes to the western territories, the Santa Fe Trail, the main thoroughfare of the Southwest, and the Missouri River, passageway to the northwest.

And Charlie already had pioneering bloodlines in both directions.

Charlie may have been born of a well-to-do urban family, but he came from pioneer western stock.

On his mother's side a pair of grand uncles and distant cousins had intermarried with Mexicans and Cheyenne.

One uncle would eventually become the first governor of the New Mexico territories, before he would be killed in an insurrection, his body mutilated and his scalp nailed to a plank.

Two of Charlie's other grand uncles joined the Cheyenne, and one, Charles Bent, became one of the most wanted outlaws in the west, before he was wounded by Pawnee and later died of illness.

Undoubtedly, Charlie grew up hearing all about them, imagining them, and connecting the historical dots by reading pulp magazines and western adventure books.

His world was a mix of story, myth, romance, adventure and family history, and in the manner of a Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Charlie grew up part instigator, part ring master, and all rascal.

Teachers tried to corral him, whipped him and made him sit in the corner, probably partly for misbehavior and partly too for his struggles with reading and writing.

- [Austin] Ha, why bother learning long division and parts of sentence when he intended to go out west and fight Indians?

- [Narrator] Actually throughout his life Russell loved and didn't seem to have a problem reading but writing was another matter.

- Language pathologists would observe that he probably had a learning disability, and I think it was one of the things that drove him to expressing himself through art, which he obviously could do very well.

When he was asked to write a letter, he wrote an illustrated letter, let the picture tell the story.

- [Charlie] You won't have to go far in this letter to find out that writing is no pastime, with me it's work.

Hand me these tools, and I'm deaf and dumb.

- [Joe] Grasping the pen almost like a weapon, Charlie would sit, staring, and then as the first beads of sweat appeared on his forehead, he would suddenly commence to write a single sentence, slowly, carefully, shaping every word.

It might take him an hour to write half a page.

- [Narrator] It probably was dysgraphia, a disorder that impairs handwriting, spelling, grammar and syntax.

While his struggles writing shaped everything about Russell, later in life it could also be used as an affectation, a way of roping himself to his old cowboy pals, forever a step out of the modern world.

Bad grammar and spelling, deliberate or not, were especially evident in his illustrated letters.

- Charlie Russell's letters are essential to how people understand the man today.

They sort of breath life into a figure who's now long gone.

And when people read his letters they get a real feeling for the character, the personality, the viewpoint of the man behind the art.

- [Narrator] On the almost literal other hand, Russell seemed to have absolutely no trouble drawing.

From when he first learned to walk, he doodled, scribbled and modeled constantly.

- [Woman] He always carried a chunk of wax in his pocket, and modeled almost incessantly, attracting much attention from grownups, as well as children.

- [Narrator] It was a skill that he practiced his entire life, entertaining everyone from toddlers to the tuxedoed.

Aware of his artistic gifts, his parents encouraged him and exposed him to some of the work of the great artists of that era, particularly those that came through St.

Louis, and especially the Carl Wiemar collection.

- [Austin] They were really good work and Charlie admired the art intensely, especially Weimar's, though he remarked that the excessively wooly buffaloes had no necks, and couldn't graze unless they got down flat, like an alligator.

- [Narrator] Russell probably also viewed, or at least glimpsed, a stellar register of western artists.

Audubon, Bingham, Catlin, Alfred Jacob Miller, John McStanley.

But it seems St.

Louis artist Weimar struck a greater lifelong chord with Russell.

In a note to his protege, Jodie Young, he once wrote, I wish I could paint like he did.

If Russell could not quite paint at Weimar's level, at least early in his career, it might have been his own doing.

He never seriously took art lessons, barely surviving three days at the St.

Louis Art School where he was instructed to draw squares, cubes, and still lifes, but basically refused.

- Russell never attended an art school, but, he watched others work, and watched obviously with great success, so the boy who had not loved school, never went to school to be an artist, but life itself and experience and observation figured dramatically (mumbles) into his artwork.

- [Narrator] Art he was good at, exceptionally good, at least his own version of it.

But in terms of general education young Charlie's response was truancy.

(anxious rustic music) Instead of going to school he would hide his books and head down to the river front, or to the levies, or to the mule markets.

- [Harold] The waterfront was crowded with adventurers, some were old timers with well-worn buckskins and weathered countenances.

The rough characters there liked the lad, and took time to answer his questions, and tell him bits about the life far out where the river boats and wagon trains were destined to go.

- [Narrator] The boy attended candle-lit magic lantern shows, viewed the wonders of the west, heard stories about cowboys, Indians and outlaws, and reveled in everything.

Charlie couldn't wait to go west.

He tried to stow away on a boat, then ran away from home attempting once to set out for Montana hitching rides on farm wagons.

He survived for weeks by his wits, but finally gave up and returned home.

After years of witnessing his struggles with formal education, Charlie's parents made one last stab at getting their son schooled.

They sent him to a military academy in New Jersey, with a friend.

- [Archie] Charlie's father told him, that if he would go east with me to school for six months, that at the end of this time, he'd let him go west.

- [Narrator] Charlie lasted only three months.

He swapped drawings of western scenes for other boys homework, which managed to get him reprimanded and tethered to seemingly endless sessions of guard duty.

By winter he was back home in St.

Louis, and by spring, just five days before his 16th birthday, and at last with his parent's begrudging permission, and just like Huckleberry Finn, he was lighting out for the territory.

- Charlie was extremely wet behind the ears when he arrived in Montana.

Fortunately he had a series of guardian angels to watch out for him, beginning with Pike Miller.

(energetic harmonica music) - Charlie's traveling companion was Willis Pike Miller, who had a ranch in Montana and who was an acquaintance of the St.

Louis Russell family.

Miller had promised Charlie work on his Montana sheep ranch, and the two took the recently completed Transcontinental Railroad to Utah, much of it riding along the route of the old Oregon Trail.

- Charlie arrived in Montana as a 16-year old boy with really no skills, no practical skills, at anything, much less as a horseman, as a cowboy.

(sheep bleating) The first job he could get that anybody would hire him to do was guarding sheep, which is a, really something that no self-respecting cowboy would ever take on, but that was what he could get.

- [Narrator] When Miller and Russell entered Helena it still looked like what it had been called, Last Chance Gulch.

(saloon piano music) Gold fever had struck Montana, with a major strike in Helena in 1864.

The town seemingly blew up overnight, with the requisite saloons, brothels and opium dens right alongside businesses that provisioned the boomtown.

- [Harold] Half a dozen or more times a day stagecoaches came rattling into town or out.

The big wagon trains, pack trains, and groups of itinerant hombres on saddle horses were constantly coming and going.

- [Charlie] When I got to Helena, the town was brimful of Flathead injuns, they'd just been paid a lot of money by the government, and they was whipping their ponies up and down the street in bunches.

- [Narrator] What Russell saw was the commotion of a frontier town buzzing with gold fever, and he loved it.

- [Narrator] Here were the men of his boyhood dreams, the flesh and blood of all the romantic stories he'd heard.

The weather-browned cowboys with worn leather chaps and six-guns strapped to their hips, bull whackers, wagon bosses, buffalo hunters, and frequently an Indian with the stare of a hungry wolf in his eyes.

Charlie had made up his mind that these were to be his adopted people.

- [Narrator] Charlie probably felt time in the old west was sweeping quickly by, and he was in a hurry to catch whatever he still could, in any way he could.

- [Austin] He knew right then that he was going to stay, and he was going to get clothes to suit the country.

He bought a beaded buckskin shirt and a big hat with a fancy band on it, a Hudson Bay sash 9-foot long and colored red, blue, yellow, green and purple, which Pike considered damned foolishness.

But Charlie went ahead and bought 'em, and wore 'em.

That's how he got his first nickname, Buckskin Kid.

(townsfolk chattering) - [Narrator] Pike Miller and the Buckskin Kid spent a week in Helena putting together a wagon and provisions, then for three weeks traveled 200 miles with the wind east, through the crazy mountains and the belts to the Judith Basin.

The region had been a prehistoric inland sea, but in 1880 it was a sea of grass surrounded by a coastline of snow-capped mountains.

(thunder crackling) In many ways, it was this view, and time, that would always stay with Charles Marion Russell.

- [Charlie] When I came west, I got the cream.

Let the come lately's have the skim milk.

(cattle lowing) - Pike and Charlie were headed to tend sheep, but central Montana then was predominantly cattle country, with an estimated half a million head in the territory.

The two arrived in a snow storm and stayed for a night at Bill Korel's home.

Pike told the Korel's that he had just returned from the states, and introduced his young companion as Kid Russell.

Charlie had a paint box with brushes, water colors, black crayon and a ball of bees wax wrapped in a flannel cloth.

Pike said "Show 'em what you can do."

- [Mr.

Korel] He painted a few horses on the backs of some old envelopes.

They amused us very much, but we placed very little value on them, and they were eventually burned in my heating stove.

- [Narrator] In the early Russell years, before the Buckskin Kid became the legend, delighting in and then tossing a piece of Russell's art would be a familiar story.

It probably didn't take too much thinking (sheep bleating) for the Buckskin Kid to quickly realize that tending sheep didn't suit him.

Neither did Pike Miller.

- [Charlie] Miller did not understand the boy's nature, and was not backward about telling me that I was no good.

So we split up, and I didn't think Pike missed me much, as I was considered pretty ornery.

- [Narrator] Ornery and unhappy, Charlie spent more time sculpting than herding.

From working in his father's brick and tile works in St.

Louis, he had learned something about clay and how to fire it, and while working for Pike Miller he built a crude kiln.

- [Bill] He was supposed to be herding sheep, but was modeling, deer, horses, cattle, bears and other creatures and characters.

These he gave to every Tom, Dick and Harry.

Had I at the time the slightest knowledge of the fabulous value that would later attach to the artist's model, huh... - [Narrator] Soon Charlie geared himself up for a different role, he donned his beaded buckskin shirt and he paid a Piegan Indian named War Wound $45 for a mare and a pinto pony he would call Monty.

Over the decades it was often said that Monty became one of Charlie Russell's most cherished friends, and would stay with him over thousands of miles, criss-crossing central Montana.

- [Charlie] We were kids together.

We have always been together.

We don't exactly talk to each other, but we sure savvy one another.

- [Narrator] But these were their first miles together, and that first evening, adrift and homeless together, it wouldn't be difficult to imagine the Kid mumbling self-doubting questions to his new pony.

As the sun faded and slowly climbed up the crazy mountains, Charlie and Monty camped along the Judith River.

(frogs croaking) - With no money or grub, life did not seem joyful, and I felt mighty blue.

While I was wondering where my next meal was coming from, a rider with several pack horses appeared and made his camp on the river near me.

- [Narrator] He was Jake Hoover, a trapper Charlie had seen in the mountains before.

Jake asked the 16-year old where he kept his grub.

- [Charlie] I ain't got none, I answered, and then I told him my troubles.

He listened till I was through, and while I was talking I couldn't help feeling that he would be my friend.

"Well," he said, "if you want to, you can come with me.

"You can stay till you get something better to do."

- [Narrator] Stay he did.

For almost two years he joined forces with this bearded, long-haired mountain man, who never traveled without a 44 Winchester across his saddle.

(gun firing) Years later Charlie said Jake shot a rifle faster than any man he had ever known.

(gun firing) Hoover had just sold elk and deer that he had killed to local ranchers along the Judith River, and he was on his way home to his cabin on the south fork of the Judith in Pig Eye Basin.

Finally, Charlie was about to shed his 16-year old St.

Louis skin, and become the mountain man's apprentice.

(placid string music) - Early next morning we broke camp and started for the mountains.

Shut off from the outside world it was a hunter's paradise bounded by walls of mountains and containing miles of grassy open spaces, more green and beautiful than in man-made parks.

Nature had surely done her best, and no king of the old times could have claimed a more beautiful, more bountiful domain.

This life suited me.

- He had so many memories.

He had to have so many memories here, and I guarantee every one of 'em was heart-filled.

The scenery, the times he had with Jake Hoover, the experiences with the animals, I'm sure he felt lucky.

And it was just a part of uh, not being hooked up and connected with the real world.

Because this was Charlie's world.

- [Narrator] Charlie had few outdoor skills, and only sheer teenage brawn to offer.

But perhaps most importantly he had one thing that would serve him the rest of his life.

He was an entertainer, with a laconic sense of humor.

- You know he would get to the truth.

You can say a cold blooded truth if you say it funny enough you won't make a person mad (chuckles).

- Russell learned a great deal from Hoover, and not just from how to run a camp or clean a deer that had been shot, but also how to be a man in a man's world, which was tell a story, but make it funny.

Tell about an adventure but make yourself the brunt of the joke, not to be a braggart, all these things that boys have to learn to become men, to become mature, to join the tribe of elders.

- Hi boys!

- We lived in an era of story telling, but, there was one inflexible rule.

The narrator could tell of his misadventures but was not allowed to tell of his exploits.

He could tell about the heroism of others, but was careful to avoid bragging.

He did not want to be nicknamed Windy.

- [Narrator] Years later Charlie cloaked his time with Jake Hoover with layers of nostalgia.

- Living with Jake Hoover in his cabin for a year was critical to Russell, when he looked back.

When was Montana at it's best, and he thought nothing rivaled or certainly exceeded his time with Jake Hoover, and his sense that he had lived a part of the frontier dream.

(crude rattling) - [Narrator] The time living in Hoover's cabin was also Russell's first up-close contact with Indians.

History, with the advantage of time, would eventually proclaim that the Indian Wars were basically over by then, but if you were living in Pig Eye Basin in 1880, it probably didn't feel that way.

- [Harold] Occasionally a small party of Indians came up the trail to do a bit of hunting in the valley.

They were generally from the reservations and avoided white men down in the Judith Basin like wolves in the night, but they were often on horse stealing expeditions, or hiding out from posses on their trail.

- [Austin] It was Charlie's first encounter with Indians.

He couldn't talk to them at all, but Jake could, mostly in sign language.

- [Narrator] For Jake Hoover, living by himself, it was not only good manners to be hospitable when Indian guests arrived, it was also strategic and a matter of survival.

The Indians in the region knew and respected Jake.

He treated them well, and they did so in kind.

(drum beating) Charlie learned a little sign, with Jake and the Indians, as well as both the ways and anatomy of animals, a curriculum beyond any art academy in the world.

- Jake gave him the opportunity to really really understand the anatomy of animals, the hides, their size, their shapes, their habits, you name it.

- There are many stories told by friends of his where he could be sitting in conversation, with a chunk of modeling clay, and not even be looking at his hands, and talking, and at the end of the conversation, there would be a bear, or a horse or something.

The man could think with his fingers.

- I don't think there was an American artist in his era that could do wildlife as well as he could in three dimensions.

And lots of people said, that one of his animals in action or at rest were the most natural that they had ever seen.

(perky string music) - [Narrator] Charlie often made the rounds in the Judith Basin where he became a welcome visitor, entertaining ranchers and their families with his art and his banjo.

- [Woman] His fund of good stories and his keen sense of humor made him a popular guest at any of the cattle ranches through the long winters.

I think they used to vie for his company and offer bribes to get him at many of the ranches.

- [Narrator] Laura Lolly Edgar was his first real girlfriend, and she never forgot him.

60 years later, she remembered.

- [Laura] We were young, and thrown together constantly.

We had been comrades before we were sweethearts.

(birds chirping) We both loved the mountains, the sky, and the little river.

We rode long hours over the hills, and built our castles in the air.

- [Austin] Later when he began whoring around and drinking and gambling, he had perhaps more fun, or at least more noisy fun, but never again the perfection of that first year in the foothills.

You're young only once.

Charlie was young the right way, and look what it did for him.

(energetic rustic music) - [Narrator] By 1882, Charlie had earned enough from selling furs and meat to buy a train ticket to St.

Louis to visit his family.

Back home it wouldn't be hard to imagine that the Kid, about to turn 18, was almost prancing with his new Montana version of himself.

He soon became the center of attention.

- [Harold] He was a westerner now, even the way he talked, the way he walked and the battered old broad-brimmed felt hat he persisted in wearing.

He half-heartedly recalled, there weren't much call for speech making out in his country.

Then he would enthrall his listeners with some of the stories Jake Hoover had told him, garnishing them with colorful bits of cow country lingo he had picked up.

- [Narrator] He was so entertaining and enthusiastic about Montana and the west that he quickly acquired a sidekick, a cousin who joined him on the way back to big sky country, but outside of Billings, two weeks after they arrived, his cousin suddenly died of Rocky Mountain fever.

Some say Charlie had guardian angels.

Some say he moved on the skin of the Earth in a remarkably providential way.

He was the kind of person who didn't really have plans, but the right things came his way.

(relaxing guitar music) This time, it was a cattle outfit with a trail boss looking to hire.

- [Charlie] There was a little snow, as it was early in April, but after riding about 15 miles I struck an outfit coming in to receive 1000 cows for the 12-Z and V outfit up in the basin.

The trail boss hired me to help him out on the trip west.

- [Narrator] They were headed for the Judith Basin, and the apprentice mountain man, in a right-time-right-place moment, was about to become a cowboy, in essence leaping across western epics and into a time that would essentially brand him.

- He had lived through he thought, a great experience, his regret was he wasn't there 30 years before, when it would have been even greater.

But he was so glad he was there in the 1880s.

- [Narrator] Russell's first cattle drive took a month to reach the Judith Basin, and what the Kid saw when he arrived was mammoth.

(cattle lowing) A spring roundup of 85,000 head of cattle, over almost 100 square miles.

And in yet another right-time-right-place moment, a trail boss for a big outfit, Horace Brewster, was short on cowhands.

(plucky guitar music) - [Horace] Russell showed up on morning at camp, he had 50 cents in his pocket and looked like he needed a job.

I kind of took to him and put him on as horse wrangler.

He had never herded, so I sent Charlie Coathey of the BD outfit to show him how to wrangle.

- [Austin] The night wrangler has to see that the horses don't drift off across country.

The wrangler, riding slowly around the bunch, sings to himself, not only because he's lonely, but to warn the horses where he is so that they won't be startled when he suddenly looms up over them.

One frightened horse, snorting and floundering up on his feet, can start the whole herd.

Night herding, sundown to sunup, is a long shift.

- [Narrator] The teenage nighthawk from St.

Louis was probably nervous when he got the job to herd horses, and to keep them from roaming.

In the beginning he held them maybe too tightly.

That was okay by his boss Horace Brewster, who would say, "I'd rather ride 'em hungry than hunt 'em."

- [Cowboy] Charlie weren't a good roper, nor a good bronc rider, he didn't seem to be particularly interested in acquiring either nack.

Many's the time when a steer broke out of holdup, I've seen Charlie set his pony, and never make a move, when he could it roped.

- [C.

J.]

(chuckles) He was the most scared fellow I ever saw when there was the least chance of anyone getting hurt.

(horse whinnying) A fella got throwed off a bucking horse, Charlie would actually turn white.

- [Charlie] Although I worked for many years on the rein, I am not what the people think a cowboy should be.

I was neither a good roper nor a rider.

I was a night wrangler.

How good I was, I'll leave it to the people I worked for to say.

In the Spring I wrangled horses.

In the Fall I herded beef.

I worked for the big outfits, and I always held my job.

- [Austin] Charlie stayed with the outfit all summer.

And next fall old man True hired him to night herd beef.

For the best of the next 11 years, Charlie sang to the horses and cattle.

(hooves clattering - Montana had two styles of cowboys, Californian and Texan.

(relaxing guitar music) West of the Rocky's cowboys came with a Spanish flair, and some crossed over the divide.

But for the most part on the east side of Montana, Texas cowboys were the stars, the men who had shoved cattle north through the gauntlet of rain, snow, blistering heat, numbing cold, rivers, stampedes, rustlers, outlaws and Indians.

They were, or liked to think of themselves as, the real cowboys.

(energetic guitar music) - [Charles] All in all my years on the trail were the happiest I ever lived.

There were many hardships and dangers of course, but when all went well, there was no other life so pleasant.

Most of the time we were solitary adventurers in a great land as fresh and new as a Spring morning, and we were free and full of the zest of darers.

- The main dynamic of these norther plains, was that, opening the new ranges in the 1880s, and all this grass and very few cattle.

So now you had a vacuum, and the cattlemen love a vacuum with open grass, and so the cattle were being brought up from Nebraska, and Kansas, where some of the herds were being kept, as well as thousands of head of cattle were brought around from the west coast, through Oregon and Nevada, and the confluence was right over here, they were paying a lot of money to put the cattle on these ranges, and the area that Charlie Russell called home.

- [Charlie] I'm talking about the days of the open range, when there wasn't a wire from the arctic sea to the Gulf of Mexico.

- [Teddy] I was with Texas cowpunchers from the time I was 11 years old, and I stayed with the cattle and went north with them.

There was all new country up there, and I wanted to see it.

- [Narrator] Russell and E.C.

Teddy Blue Abbot probably were both born under the same Western stars and once they finally met, tending two different herds of cattle on bordering Montana roundups, they became immediate friends.

(hooves pounding) - They liked to frolic, I think that's the word Teddy uses, at some point, and there weren't all that many companions that were as happy-go-lucky as they were.

So, they were fast friends.

- [Teddy] He would put his horses on one side of a crick, and I on the other, then we would sit on a hill and watch 'em and talk.

I had a kazoo.

I would play a tune and we would both laugh like two kids, which we were.

- [Narrator] They were kids, pretty much the way most of the cowboys were.

It was a young man's game.

(poignant music) And it was a tough one.

- Being a cowboy in Montana, in the American west, in the 1880s wasn't all Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

The hours were long, they slept out in the rain and snow, and the pay was lousy.

It was a crappy job.

Today it's easy to romanticize it, and there were a lot of great things about it, but it's sort of going before the mast on a whaling ship or being a lumberjack, this was hard work.

- [W.H.]

On a trail drive the puncher might work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and he might have to travel 1200 miles with no comforts other than a campfire and his bedroll.

On a given day a cowboy could find himself in the middle of a prairie fire, quicksand, or a stampede, and on any day he could be thrown or kicked by a horse, charged by a steer, or half-frozen on a winter search for strayed livestock.

Complaining was considered unprofessional.

It irritated others and invoked no sympathy whatsoever.

(flame hissing) (cattle lowing) - [Teddy] I was in two stampedes that I will never forget.

One night just before time to come off guard, my partner and I met.

I asked him what time it was and he popped a match.

Them parlor matches that just come out.

I thought he'd have sense enough to pull away from the herd a little ways but he didn't.

At the flash of the match, they were off.

I came so damn near to being killed that night, (sighs), well, it was all in the game.

Cowpunchers knew it.

- [Narrator] For all that could, and often did go wrong, there were not many cowboys who would have traded their work and lives for anything else.

Cowboy pride and stoicism, the ability to endure, became part of American mythology.

Many of Russell's cowboy friends were part of the workforce that drove the cattle north to the Dakota and Montana territories where cattle barons were hoping can't-miss opportunities would mean tripling their investments.

(poignant music) It was wide open spaces, and the wild, wild west, and everything was up for grabs.

Soon the entire northern range would be claimed.

By 1886 at a meeting in Miles City, cattle barons essentially divvied up 1/3 of Montana.

- [Teddy] The whole thing was run according to a system.

The range was all organized into round-up districts, bounded by certain mountain ranges and streams.

There were no fences.

Ownership of a calf was determined by the brand on the cow.

- [Narrator] The work was something like a military campaign, clearing out territory.

The general was the trail boss, below him the cowboys who roped, wrangled, branded and herded.

Near the bottom were the night wranglers, and that included Charlie Russell.

- Nighthawk was a job that a lot of the cowboys did not like, number one you're on horseback all night long.

And as the cook was yelling breakfast is ready, the rest of the cowboys got up, had breakfast, caught their horses, basically at that time the nighthawk was off duty and could have breakfast, and get ready to take nap.

- [Narrator] In the morning instead of just spreading his bedroll, Russell would watch what he considered to be the real cowboys, the skilled ropers and riders doing their jobs.

- And he could makes sketches of them and really see the cowboy life that they were living, almost objectively.

He was one of them, but he had the time, and perhaps even the leisure to record what he saw.

So his job was critical to his art in a way.

- As a horseman, when I look at one of Russell's paintings, I can see absolutely nothing amiss in the posture of the rider, in the equipment that's on the horse, in the horse's movement, in the horse's anatomy, and if you've ever ridden a horse much you now that their eye, and their ear, and their feet all coordinate.

And that's why a lot of times in Russell's art you'll notice a horse with one ear forward and one ear back.

The back is to the rider, the forward is to the cattle or to the bear or whatever else is out there.

- I think in a lot of respects, that lack of formal training stood him in good stead.

Because it allowed him I think to be honest in his portrayals of what he was seeing.

And as a result of being one of the boys and being wide-eyed, I mean the guy is able to capture things in this raw untutored but undoubtedly powerful way.

- [Cowboy] It's gonna get cold tonight (mumbles)... (laughing) - We'd hurry in at night, just to listen to his yarns, and laugh at the pictures he drew.

Nobody ever though he'd amount to anything.

(cowboys laughing) He just made us happy, therefore he was welcome in any cowboy camp, anywhere.

- And when you're riding on the brink of death at times you need somebody to lighten the mood.

You've got somebody that can tell the humorous side of things, and get people to get off the near death experience that they just had was very valuable at that time.

- [Narrator] Then again the brink of death might not be on horseback, or in the crush of a stampede, or a skirmish with a band of Indians.

(wind howling) But in the north wind.

(forlorn music) - The winter of 1886, '87 is probably the most storied, on the Montana range, because it marks one of those ending points again, in a particular phase of Western history.

- It was a bad, bad, bad winter.

(wind howling) - That was the celebrated winter that broke the back of the range cattle business.

In late fall we had several snow storms and I saw the first white owls I have ever seen.

The Indians said they were a bad sign, heap snow coming, very cold, and they sure hit it right.

- In November, the first snow flakes came.

The bottom fell out of the temperature, the ice storm just drove right into you.

And that kind of set the stage for the winter to come.

- [Charlie] The winter of '86 and '87 all men will remember.

That was the hardest winter the open range ever saw.

- [Harold] There was no shelter for beast or man, the ground was frozen hard as rock.

Merely riding all day in the saddle was an agony almost beyond endurance.

Nights were 100 times worse.

More than one night herder failed to return to the bunkhouse, his frozen body found the following Spring.

- [Rancher] We are having the worst weather ever heard of in this country.

For the last six days the mercury's been from 20 to 40 below, storming most of the time.

It's so cold that when an animal lies down, their legs freeze.

- The cowboys were reluctant to go out and check on the herds, their lives were at peril.

They were in the habit of taking their boots and sticking them in buckets of water and freezing their feet because that was better than the ambient temperature outside.

It's hard to imagine today.

- [Teddy] You know what Indians say.

Indians make little fire, sit close, white man make big fire, sit back.

Well that winter we made big fires and sat close too.

And when I come home, at the end of winter, I smelled so strong of smoke the girls ordered me out of the house.

- [Granville] It was as though the arctic regions had pushed down and enveloped us.

Everything was white, not a point of bare ground was visible in any direction.

Fat young steers froze to death along the trails.

The herds that were driven up from the south and placed on the range at late in summer, perished outright.

Others lost from 75 to 80% of their cattle.

This was the death knell to the range cattle business.

- Because there were no fences, they drifted.

The drifted into coolies and draws, and got bogged down and starved, or they drifted into towns and started gnawing on whatever they could, and they just kept going south.

When it thawed in the Spring, ranchers went out and looked at the carnage.

They found brands on animals from hundreds of miles away.

They just kept walking with the snow and the wind driving them, from the north, and they walked until they died.

- [Harry] The worse sight of a lifetime.

Cattle everywhere, bawling for feed, dead cattle everywhere.

- [Austin] This winter, the famous winter of '87, snow crusted over and stayed.

Cloven footed cattle can't paw through snow.

They just go back in the brush and hump up, tail to the wind, and starve, (wolves howling) which made it nice for the wolves, they came through the winter fat.

- So in the meantime, back at the ranch.

(perky guitar music) Charlie Russell is riding the grub line at Jesse Phelps O-H ranch, and as the winter gets worse and the cattle are getting in dire, dire straights, and they can see that it's really bad, they're wondering how they're gonna tell these rich cattlemen in Helena.

Well they got a letter from Louis Kauffman asking how his cattle were.

- [Charlie] One night, Jesse Phelps got a letter from Louis Kauffman, and Louis wanted to know how the cattle was doing, and Jesse says to me, "I must write a letter to Louis "and tell him how tough it is."

I was sitting at the table with him and I said "I'll make a sketch to go with it."

- And Charlie, who was spending his time doing various doodling and drawing, takes a piece of cardboard, probably from a box of shirt collars, turns it over and-- - He sits down he draws a picture of a really starved-out looking cow with the wolves circling.

Her bones all hanging out, and she had a Bar-R brand on her, which was Louis Kauffman's brand.

- [Narrator] In the lower corner he drew a buffalo skull, and signed his initials, C M R.

- Charlie threw it down on the table, he says, "Here, send that with your letter."

Jesse Phelps looked at it and he says "Hell, we don't need no letter, just send this."

- [Narrator] They mailed the nighthawk's postcard to Helena where it was quickly passed around town, and then beyond.

As the story goes, cattle barons to investors to butchers got drunk on the sight of the drawing and the shock of the bad news.

And in time, the person who signed C M R in the corner would become famous.

- It is a stunning sketch, because it's smaller than a postcard, and in that little space, it is the perfect symbolic expression of the end of the open range.

It's astonishing.

- Charlie's life was never the same, because he was the cowboy artist who in this quick sketch, had boiled it down to the essence of this tragedy, this epic disaster that occurred.

- [Narrator] In some ways it was a ghostly rerun of the slaughter of the bison, but this time the cataclysm was dead cattle littering the prairie, from the Canadian border to the Texas panhandle.

They called it the Big Die Up.

- [Announcer] C. M. Russell and the American West is made possible with production support from Ossie Abrams and Davide Orecr, Joseph Sample, Tom Petrie and Trevor Rees-Jones, and by the following.

Also from... And by the University of Montana.

And from viewers like you, who are friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.