Oh.

God!

Come on.

You cannot just come and get it.

Roll from the skillet.

Roll out.

Cover for Charlie Russell.

Working for a living in the 1880s still meant riding the range.

Still as a nighthawk.

But as things changed in Montana cattle country.

So did Charlie Russell.

Undoubtedly, the most important event in Russell's life occurred in 1895, when he met a recently homeless 17 year old young woman.

Without her, the world probably would never have heard of C.M.

Russell.

That sweet faced young lady had an absolute iron core.

Life had made her tougher than she looked.

She may have had a little Scarlett O'Hara in her.

That determination that I'm not going to look back.

Her name was Nancy Cooper, and she didn't look back.

And she too would never be hungry again nor left alone in this world.

And the way she would do that was by being absolutely determined to make something of the man she would marry.

Without her, I would probably never saw her reach any.

I further than make a few pictures for my friends and acquaintances in the West.

She is a businessman and and the creative.

She lives for tomorrow and I live for yesterday.

It's a 5050 game with us.

Nancy talks about how she understood Charlie had this genius, but she didn't know what it was.

She knew that he needed that space to have his his memories come up, to have the pictures that he kept in his mind.

He once said to her, Nancy, I wish you could see the things that I see.

She understood that she'd married a man with a gift that few other Americans have ever had.

And that gift was going to be fulfilled, and she was going to be the person to fulfill it.

She was really a woman of today and the wrong time to.

First picture made with paint was up in Montana that was working with a cattle outfit, and when winter came round there was a slinky poof.

Wanted to picture in color staying up on his wall.

So I made it for him.

Didn't have anything else to do.

Painted it with house paint because I didn't have anything else and didn't know about other paints either.

What do you think Russell's payment for this would be?

A few drinks and a few drinks.

Probably a bar tab.

I would bet you anything it was probably a bar tab or even to pay for a bar tab.

He'd already and incurred you right at the saloon.

This was a picture of round up with the post there.

Anybody know it was somebody's first picture where there was a white tent painted all white, where there was a black horse.

I painted him all black.

In the years that followed, Russell's palette would expand.

Watercolors and oils would traverse the visual spectrum, especially the colors of Montana's Big Sky, and his sculpting clay would become bronze.

But his subject matter essentially stayed the same.

Cowboy camp may have been crude, but it's a variation of a story he would tell and retell, sometimes with a radical view.

He would look at things from an American Indian perspective.

Well, I see that powerful sense of what will be lost.

But Russell had an innate gift that allowed him to turn his own nostalgia into a national and international nostalgia.

So much of the world could look at a Russell painting and think, I wish I were alive.

Then I could ride into that world and experience it.

C.M.

Russell and the American West is made possible with production support from AC Abrams and David Orser.

Joseph Sample, Tom Petri, and Trevor Rhys-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.

The world of Charlie Russell and his cowboy friends may have seemed glamorous and exciting, but in truth, much of cowboy life was simply long, hard, and tedious.

In many ways, the picture was day in and day out.

Ordinary.

But if you could add to that picture the elements that were interesting.

If you could see the cowboy at work on the open range as part of a great segue, if you could see a few wild animals, or hear about a last buffalo or two, and imagine the days of the great herds and what the world looked like.

If you could take what was and let your imagination expand, then in fact you have Charlie Russell's West.

Charlie Russell was both the acolyte and the preacher of the Western myth.

He was first the seduced and then he became a seducer.

He lamented the loss of the West that is passed, but then went on to convince us and convince himself that that West, that mythic West had been quite real.

And the way he was able to convince us was because he was so authentic himself.

His art work, of course, but also the way he dressed, the way he rolled his cigarets.

He never was out of character.

Charlie Russell may have been a little late arriving at the apex of the wild and wide open west, but he stayed in costume.

He lived the life and lived it well.

When earning the moniker cowboy meant something, just being called a cowboy was your greatest honor.

It was like being called a Nobel Prize winner, though the word wasn't used lightly.

When you call somebody a cowboy, that was your greatest honor.

You get made earned that among their peers.

A Cowboys life could be brutally grueling.

The pay was low, and even when Charlie Russell's art took a humorous spin, toughness and a rugged but glorious landscape was always the underlying motif.

And it was also what varnished the early American cowboy into folklore.

The comradeship of the trail, the epic sight of great brown rivers, of cattle on the move, the satisfaction of passing the toughest test in the trade and perhaps to a proud awareness of being part of something fundamental and grand.

In some ways, Charlie was like a contemporary Johnny Appleseed.

Only Russell's sack of seeds was a sock with watercolors, and he spread his work across the Montana prairies.

He would draw on cracker boxes, box slats, poker chips, playing cards if they were in town.

Almost every canvas topping on the chuckwagon and bed wagon that he worked on had original Russell art scratched on to it, so he just couldn't help himself.

He was constantly creating.

People talked about riding off across the sagebrush, seeing something flutter, and it would be one of Charlie's drawings that just was caught out there while he worked at his art.

He still cowboys.

And he didn't miss much in the way of a cowboy's extracurricular life either.

Charlie's first art studio had swinging doors for the 1887 painting Cow Camp.

Most of the characters in the painting were identifiable cowboy punching friends of Charlie's, including Jim Shelton, owner of the Utica Saloon.

Of Charlie's memories of Utica in this area when he was a young man and cowboy here and there.

They were good medicine to him.

The rest of his life, bar none.

They were good medicine.

All of his most cherished memories, his most cherished friends that he loved dearly, was down in this area, in this country.

And he never, ever forgot it.

He never, ever forgot his friends up until the day he died.

His first major painting may have been fun and meant to only be cartoonish, but the Helena Weekly Independent took notice.

It was painted in the seclusion of a cow camp on the Judith Range, and by a cowboy.

It represents a round up camp after early breakfast.

The artist is Charles Russell, a cowboy 21 years of age.

The cowboy in every tone, gesture and movement.

He is truly the artist of the prairies, the cattle cab and the range.

He was also an artist who basically gave away his pictures to his friends.

It was all just fun and he was in on the fun.

20 years later, long after painting cow camp and on the crest of national recognition as an artist.

Russell zoomed in a little closer with A quiet day in Utica and added himself as an eye witness.

And he's right there in the middle, wearing his characteristic red mountain sash and his short brim Montana cat.

You just recognize it right away with the look on his face.

He's very much an artist who loved humor.

He loved the goodness of man in terms of their ability to laugh at their foibles.

Cowboy life in those days was not popular, was not glamorous.

In fact, cowboys were held in low esteem.

They were considered borderline criminals because of how rough they could be if they rode into town in the wrong kind of mood.

The boys wouldn't all get to town at once, as a rule, but when they did, there was hell.

A puppet.

A lot of this shooting you hear about was just crazy high spirits.

You'd be standing up to the bar with a pipe in your mouth and bang the pieces.

All fell to the ground.

Somebody took a shot at it.

We were wild and reckless.

It's true.

And to understand that, you would have to know the kind of life we led.

We were out there for months on end, on the trail or living in some cow camp, eating bad food, sleeping in wet clothes, and had the advantages of fresh air being able to ride on a horse and you got to carry a gun for the Judith Cowboys when it was time to clean up.

The 1880s laundromat was the widow Oates, who homesteaded six miles outside of Utica and took in cowboy laundry to help raise her three children, including daughters who the cowboys called Swamp Angels.

We knew who Charley Russell was.

He was always nice to me, but mother had no use for him.

He was notoriously dirty and untidy in his habits.

A few times that mother did any of his washing, she made him boil the whole works before she would even touch him.

On the other hand, Charley, like most cowboys, also knew how to cut a shadow.

Charlie's hat, boots, spurs and bridle were the height of cowboy fashion.

Of course, those were the days when we didn't get to town only 2 or 3 times a year.

But when we did, we dressed like millionaires.

As long as our money lasted.

There was one time when Charlie could ride like hell.

That was when he came to town to have a few drinks and, see the girls.

There was nobody now, but the beat kid rustled to the front door of the hottest place in town, and when they hit the bright lights of some little cow town that looked like gay Paree to them, they just went crazy.

I was a wild young man.

Life has never been too serious with me.

I lived to play.

I drank like never alone.

And when I drank, it was no secret.

As Russell's biographer noted, along with liquor, much of that enjoyment was found in the company of women whose virtue was negotiable.

It was a commodity that was important to, to the economies of these small town settlements.

And later it became quite an important part of the economy of places like Butte and Helena.

Great Falls.

In one place, the census taker enumerated the persons job as, horizontal work, you know.

So not necessarily.

Did they use the term prostitute?

Sometimes they would use the term sporting woman.

Sporting lady, soiled dove.

those kinds of terms.

Cow punchers treat them sporting women better than some men treat their wives.

If you were good, too, they'd appreciate it.

And believe me, they had ways of repaying a canvas, as I got to know.

And there were many ways that the women could repay them.

They could take them under their wing, but they could also, you know, repay them with physical favors and, cowboys, you know, that's what they were after.

And probably if it weren't for these women, these cowboys would probably never wash their hair, never get a shave, never clean up prostitutes in Montana, especially high end ones, came from distant cities San Francisco, New York, and perhaps most famously in Helena, via a madam from the windy City.

Chicago Joe Hensley, Chicago Joe owned a saloon and right next door, a theater touted and derided as very, very body.

The Coliseum had featured heavily curtained balcony boxes which men could rent.

Girls and liquor were the private entertainment, and pretty much anything could go on.

For Russell, his earliest art clients were his cowboy friends and undoubtedly the girls who worked the Coliseum.

Many, many years later, after Charlie gave up that kind of life and gave up the the drinking, in his, home in Great Falls, there would come a knock at the door and there would be one of these women that he had known in his wild years, and they would be holding a little teacup or some little item that he had painted, and they would want the famous artist to sign it, you know, and, Nancy never did appreciate that.

But Charlie never made excuses for his former life.

I mean, it was part of part of who he was.

Chicago.

Joe knew Charlie and a cowboy friend of his.

Phil wintered very well in early 1888, Russell and Weiner dressed up as an Indian couple for a Helena masquerade ball and took first prize.

It wasn't long after that Charlie agreed to help Phil Weiner to elope with Chicago, Joe's niece.

The plan coincided with a Helena Independent story that once again touted the young cowboy artist, and mentioned Russell might be considering traveling to Italy to study and develop his talent, but partly because of his promise to help fill Weiner and his bride to be slip out of Helena and rendezvous in Canada, Russell didn't travel to Italy but headed north.

To live with the Indians.

In 1888, the disappearing open range had moved north, where what remained of free Indian tribes still were able to maintain their old ways across the Canadian border.

Charlie rode Marty in that direction.

On his way north, he witnessed Canadian Mounties with a blood Indian prisoner, the same lawman who frequently and sometimes amusingly, became subjects of Russell's later paintings.

Because of the fame of his sketch waiting for a Chinook, Russell's comings and goings were often recorded in the Montana press, and where there were gaps, Russell sometimes embellished his travels with local and native color.

He was with the Blood Indians and lived with them for months.

He was friends with a young fella named Sleeping Thunder, and through him the older men of the tribe got to know Charlie and liked him so well that they wanted him to join them.

The blood apparently were fascinated by the cowboys drawings, and they welcomed him to sit with Medicine Whip, the patriarchal warrior hero of his people for long storytelling sessions transmitted in the silence of sign language with American Indian Sign Language, he started to pick up the vehicle of expressing meaning without words, without the Tower of Babel, without the confusion that seemingly he had some problems with earlier in school.

So, sign talk is all about connecting hearts and the essence of that meaning.

That's the language of the heart.

It was a language, not of grammar, spelling and writing that Russell had struggled with since childhood, but a language that Russell seemed to know instinctively.

The easy, windblown way he moved his hands as he talked showed that, like his red brother, he had learned his lessons from falling clouds, an eddying leaf, moving water woodsmoke, and the play of light and shadows on an open fire.

As a sign talker, he was all Indian, wrote a wonderful letter years later, showing himself listening to an old blood Indian, listening to this man recreate a lost world.

And it filled Russell's mind.

Indian life, what had been and was.

No more buffalo hunts, tribal glory.

The old days.

It is often said that Russell had a photographic memory, and it undoubtedly helped him absorb tribal lore and customs.

Russell's nephew later said the Indians thought his drawings a kind of magic medicine, each drawing a spirit picture, a sort of colored shadow that did not vanish.

The tribe must have thought highly of the young cowboy, and while with the blood Russell was given something important an Indian name, because his tight blue riding breeches Foxton a seat was white.

Buckskin made him look from behind like the rear view of an antelope.

They called him our Kush, which means pronghorn or antelope.

Historians and biographers have suggested Russell may have even considered marrying an Indian woman, possibly the water girl, who would later appear in many of his paintings.

He joked about it, that it would be the only time he would ever, marry into royalty because she was a chief's daughter, she would be a princess.

He may very well have been involved, or at least met an Indian girl or two.

but the summer changed him.

In the summer of 1888, his Charley Russell had had his eyes opened to a West that he had not really known before the west of the India.

Russell came late to the West End, to the time when Indians peopled the country, and he later told his nephew that he couldn't help seeing that the Indians day was done.

Even so, his time with the Canadian Indians seemed to be life changing, and throughout the rest of his life, a large part of his paintings and some of his major works were about Indians and their way of life.

Whatever the reason, he quit the blood camp and rode south back across the border to Montana.

He may have left his Indian friends, but he never turned his back on them.

Like Teddy Blue Abbott, he carried a deep sensitivity about the plight of Indians.

It was a perspective generally out of step with the white man in the West times.

I was always different from the general run of the white man, because I liked the Indians and could see their side of things.

I was sorry for the Indians and ashamed of the deal they got at the hands of the white man.

Once I said to Russell, God, I wish I'd been a Sioux Indian a hundred years ago.

there's a pair of us.

They've been living in heaven for a thousand years.

When we took it away from them for $40 a month.

For the time being, Russell rejoined his own people.

Teddy blue, however, kept something of a foot in both worlds and did marry a half Indian woman, Mary Stuart, daughter of Granville Stuart and his Shoshone wife, Albany.

I went back to the just taking my old place Wrangler duties.

Country was getting pretty well settled and sheep had drained, so the cow decided to move all that summer.

Next we traveled the cattle north to milk River.

One newspaper reported that Russell returned to subdue the erratic Bronco and chase the nimble and elusive calf.

In some ways, that elusive calf was Russell.

He followed the herds North, spent time back with Jake Hoover, wandered and drifted between jobs and grub lines throughout central Montana, circling from Chinook to Lewistown to Helena and Great Falls.

The sun was setting on the open range, and Charlie knew it.

By now, the West was changing fast stage lines.

Freighters, steamboats, and the constantly lengthening railroads were pouring.

White men into Montana.

Charlie saw the change and didn't like it.

He was drinking harder and painting harder too.

At one point, a Great falls barkeep tried to contract Russell to paint for him with a contract Charlie said was as long as a steak rope.

It stipulated that the cowboy artist would get $75 a month room and board if he agreed to stay in front of the easel for 12 hours a day from 6 to 6, even though the pay was double.

What a cowboy could make, Russell balked.

I argued that there was some difference in painting and sawing wood, so we split up and I went to work for myself.

It was said Russell could sell his paintings to patrons and friends in Great Falls before the paint was dry, but he was a poor businessman and charged far too little or just gave his work away.

Charlie, barely treading water, retreated to Chinook, where he and a half dozen cowboy buddies called themselves the Hungry Seven.

They spent the winter of 1892 drinking, hiring more drinking, stealing chickens, more drinking, borrowing money and more drinking.

But the hungry seven briefly pooled their dough to open a saloon, but they tended to give away the liquor.

They didn't drink themselves.

It was another case of Charlie being a soft touch and a poor self-promoter.

He knew his product, but wasn't good at naming a price.

Any price a business weakness that would eventually require a remedy.

My booze parlor didn't last long.

14 days.

I think it was like the life of a butterfly.

A short but a very merry one.

Next spring, Charlie went back to the milk River country and his last job as night wrangler for the Bear Paw Pool.

In the fall, he did something few, if any, artists ever did to be able to attend an opening show of his work he hired on as a cowpoke to ride a train with boxcars of cattle heading to the Chicago stockyards across town.

The Chicago World's Fair was exhibiting three of his paintings in the Montana Pavilion.

I remember that morning well, I was armed with a punch pole, stuck car under me, loaded with grass eaters.

I came from the big outdoors and the light, smoke and smell made me lonesome.

The minute I hit the burger shed, Macao garments and got into a white man's harness, a hard hat, boiled shirt, lace shoes, all the gear known to civilized man, along with the splendor of the first Ferris wheel.

Art from around the world, was on exhibit, and the cowboy artist undoubtedly was able to see everything from Rembrandt and Vermeer to the new fangled thing coming out of Europe Impressionism.

But he reportedly also paid special attention to his American contemporaries, from Whistler to Eakins to John Singer, Sergeant and Frederic Remington as his biographer later noted, even if he did not like everything he saw, he now knew what he was up against.

Two other critical things happened in Chicago that year, both of which Russell must have noted Frederick Jackson Turner, almost in the manner of Moses receiving the tablets on Mount Sinai, famously declared the end of the American frontier something Charlie had witnessed firsthand, and American superstar William F Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show performed a romanticized vaudeville style spin on recent history that had occurred on the left side of the American continent.

It was a powerful one two punch.

In Chicago, Russell witnessed the power of art, history, romance and entertainment, and it undoubtedly branded him.

When he returned to Montana, he gave up cowboying and, as he later lamented, I never sang to horses and cows again.

I believe I would know an old cowboy in hell with his had burnt off.

It's the way they stand and walk and talk.

There are lots of young fellas punching cows today, but they never can take our place.

Cow punching as we knew it is a thing of the past.

Oh, there's a lot of a lot of the songs for the people who live the old West and South, attach their hopes and dreams to it.

My own people talk about it as if it were heaven or something.

And yet underneath it, as large, like my father knew that it was in heaven and much closer to hell.

Russell's initial decision to quit the range and focus on his painting was intense but wobbly.

He flame on every old timer of cowboy who showed up in Great Falls, as well as a new timers wanted to have a drink with the cowboy artist, and when they bought, he bought back.

Old Doc Sweet had told him, straight and plain, Charlie, you better stop it.

Whiskey and paint don't mix.

You're going to get the shakes.

And then where are you drawing?

B but he had one real advantage.

He was still bull headed.

And that is a great advantage when you've got to stop drinking.

Why don't you stop drinking?

Stop it now go home to Saint Louis and get one of your brothers or somebody who knows something to handle your paintings for you.

That's what you need, a manager, Charlie.

No.

He didn't know it was going to get a manager, but he didn't go to Saint Louis.

Instead, he set out for Cascade.

The move to Cascade was critical.

It kept him at arm's length from the temptations of Great Falls and Helena, and it put him in position to meet someone who would become the most important person in his life.

Later on in life, someone asked Charlie, why did he marry her?

And, he said, well, she was the only good girl that would have him a good girl who had a rough start and a bumpy road before Nancy Cooper's trail crossed Charlie Russell's.

Born in Kentucky, her father abandoned her mother before Nancy was even born.

Two years after Nancy's birth, her mother, Texas Annie Mann, married a first cousin, Thomas Allen, and they moved to Helena, probably lured by the siren call of gold strikes.

But Last Chance Gulch evidently was a missed chance for Mr.

Allen, and he too packed up and left Texas.

Annie Mann, Texas Annie scrabbled together some kind of living in Helena.

it's controversial to say so, but she may have been forced into prostitution.

But it was the fate of a number of deserted wives in the West at a time when women had few opportunities.

Twice forsaken Texas.

Annie contracted consumption and died in 1894, leaving behind 16 year old Nancy and a stepsister.

Psychologically, I think Nancy was a survivor.

Anybody that's been abandoned either gives up in life or they fight and they fight hard.

And Nancy was a fighter.

Nancy had a hardscrabble youth.

In short, there's no point in minimizing, she was a sweet faced looking young woman, rather pretty.

And I think it would be fair to say that she had to live by her wits for a while.

And on Helena, alone and living by her wits, Nancy's teenage narrative remains unclear and maybe shady.

An adult friend feared she was beginning to run with the wrong crowd, and in 1894 managed to get Nancy on a train with a job prospect as a housekeeper at the home of Lila and Ben Roberts, whose former Helena saddle shop had been the solo exhibit space for waiting for a Schnook.

Ben Roberts was an early and creative supporter of Russell's.

He printed waiting for a Chinook as a postcard and helped the young artist publish illustrations.

But perhaps his greatest favor to Russell was inviting him to dinner 1st October evening.

In 1895, the Roberts teenage housekeeper was excited to hear about their guest, someone who came with a reputation she expected a rough and tumble cowboy with a six shooter, but unexpectedly, he didn't appear as advertised.

I had heard of him and how much he knew about Indians and cowboys and the Wild West.

And she heard boots on the porch board and and then the door burst open.

In the end, Mr.

Roberts said, Lila, Charley's here and there.

She was looking at Charley Russell.

His face was Indian like, square jaw and chin, high cheekbones, gray blue, deep set eyes that seemed to see everything but with an expression of honesty and understanding.

He wore a Stetson hat, high heeled riding boots and tight trousers held up by a sash.

There must be a gun hidden away somewhere in that sash, but it could not be seen.

Though I tried my hardest.

There was something different about this man.

He took off his coat and walked over to the wash bench as he washed.

I was watching him as closely as possible without being observed.

While he was drying his face.

There seemed to be a chance to take a good look from boots up.

When my eyes reached his head, he was dry on one side of his face and peeking out one corner of the towel at me.

He laughed and I almost dropped the plate of fried ham.

Everyone noticed his hands, but it was not the rings that attracted, but the artistic, sensitive hands that had great strength and charm.

When he talked, he used them a lot to emphasize what he was saying.

Much as an Indian would do.

She was 17.

He was 31.

Things happened fast.

We were married September 9th, 1896, in the Roberts living room.

There were just nine people present at our wedding.

Charlie had only $15.

He gave $10 to the preacher who tied the knot, and $5 to the fellows around town to keep them from shivering in us.

I made the wedding cake and Charlie froze the ice cream.

After we had refreshments, Charlie and I started on our journey through life.

Our wedding trip was 100 yards to a one room shack next to the Roberts, and we watched their marriage.

Their partnership, believe me, was one of those marriages in which the total exceeded the sum of the parts.

I tried it in harness with the best boosting partner a man ever had.

She could convince anybody that I was the greatest artist in the world, and that makes a fellow work hard.

I can't disappoint person like that.

So I did my best work for her.

It was said Charlie knew how to radiate charm.

Huck Finn, Lancelot.

He could melt men and women with equal effect.

Nancy, almost exactly 14 years his junior, had her own weaponry.

Although not quite polished yet, she had the business sense and determination that would eventually put her husband on America's artistic map.

Those first years together were probably Nancy and Charlie's happiest.

It was a simple life in a big landscape.

The Missouri River gave us fish when we wanted to try for them, but Charlie didn't care much about fishing.

He would rather ride out on the buttes or back into the hills, where he could watch the changing shadows and color on rocks with cloud effects that made patterns across the great valley that stretched out below us.

Throughout his life and career, Charlie would turn those horseback rides into art, and Nancy would turn them into money.

If left to himself, Charlie was not very practical.

He would devote just as much care to things not meant to sell.

When the Park Hotel in Great Falls commissioned Russell to illustrate Christmas dinner menus, he decorated 125 with 125 separate watercolors.

He was paid $20 for the batch, or $0.16 apiece.

It was almost ridiculously generous arithmetic, perhaps too typical of the always too generous Charlie Russell, but it was also something that Nancy would never, ever permit again.

Charlie's best outlet was Charles Shetland, who ran a painting glass store in Butte, Montana.

The big, drunken gambling labor troubled town where the copper smelters are more than once Shadowlands orders paid the rent and brought in food.

Just as Charlie was about to give up art and go back to the range.

One time, Mr.

Chatelaine came to visit us.

Do you know Russell?

He said, you don't ask enough for your pictures.

That last bunch you sent me, I sold one for enough to pay for six.

I am paying you your price.

But it's not enough.

I think your wife should take a hold of that end of the game and help you out.

However, the young married couple made their private deal, especially after the Christmas menu debacle.

Nancy finally and firmly took over the transformation of her husband from cowboy to professional artist.

From that time, the prices of Charlie's work began to advance.

Nancy took to the role, at first less with skill than with determination.

As Russell's nephew said, they just went at it blind.

Nancy had very little education, nothing to show that she was as smart as a steel trap and then quick as a lash of a whip.

But it all came out when she began living with Charlie Dog ignorant.

That's what we were.

Luck, skill, determination, smarts, whatever their pooled talent might be called.

It worked.

Although it took a little time and strategy to take off.

After the death of Charlie's mother and with a small family inheritance in 1897, the Russells reportedly tied most of their belongings on to a pack horse and moved to Great Falls, where there was a market for Russell's work.

On the northeast side of town, they built a new home next door to a saloon keeper friend from England, Albert Trigg, his wife Margaret, and his daughter Josephine.

The Trigg family became dear friends, especially Josephine.

They visited the Russells almost daily, and over the years they took the couple under their protective wings.

After the cottage home was finished and furnished, Charlie told me I want a log studio some day.

Just a cabin like I used to live in.

The logs were telephone poles, somewhat out of keeping for the upscale neighborhood and a city that was not only growing, but quickly stratifying.

One day a neighbor said, what are you doing at your place, Russell?

Building a corral.

Charlie thought the neighbors didn't want the cabin mixed in with the civilized dwelling, but way down on his heart, he wanted that studio.

It took some time and encouragement from Albert Trigg, but eventually Charlie came around from that day to the end of his life.

He loved that telephone pole building more than any other place on earth, and never finished a painting anywhere else.

The walls were hung with all kinds of things given to him by Indian friends, and his horse jewelry, as he called it, that had accumulated on the range was as precious to him as a girl's jewel box.

To her.

Charlie finally realized, that's going to be a good shack for me.

The bunch can come visit, talk, smoke while I paint.

The bunch that came to visit him in the studio over the years were a cross-section of the old and new West, including a traveling stage actor who would become Hollywood's first Western star, and Russell's link to the new art form of film.

Another member of the bunch who wouldn't show up until 1914 would become the critical, artistic and cinematic splice for keeping Russell alive for future generations.

He was a deaf teenage cowboy from Oklahoma.

Jodie Young is, in fact, what he claimed to be, and that is Russell's only real protege.

Much of what we know about Russell's working methods came from the young, who, at 18, hired on to work with actor Tom mix but soon contracted spinal meningitis, which left him permanently deaf.

Convalescing, he studied Western art, and when his strength returned, he headed to Montana with a friend to meet his hero.

Russell got down a piece pipe and cut up some Indian tobacco and lit the pipe and then handed to each of us, and we all took a puff.

The smoke would bind the two the rest of their lives.

The young would practically move in with the Russells, sometimes camping in the studio, and was a regular guest at Bullhead Lodge.

He helped with chores and eventually help with raising the Russell's adopted son, Jack Charlie.

We got to decide today if we're going to keep the baby Caden.

Why do you figure you're going to do?

Let them throw the poor little devil in a garbage can?

Do you like him?

I'm sure I do, Charlie, but we got to let the people know today.

Well, if you like him.

Why, I like him a lot.

So let's keep.

They named him Jack Cooper.

Russell after Nancy's father.

Jack may have had Charlie's last name, but he never really knew his father who would die when Jack was ten, it was Jody Young who really knew Charlie knew him as if he was his father, at least artistically.

The two communicated with Indian Sign or with notes, and Jody Young threw out nothing that came from Charlie Russell.

This is an absolutely invaluable record, because the scrawled answers by Charlie on the notepaper, become the the commentary we lack otherwise by Russell on art.

But I feel justified in saying that I knew Russell as well as anyone now living and far better than most.

Charlie and me, we run together fine.

When Russell was working and young was watching, a frequent studio visitor was a young boy, a Cree Indian.

When Charlie Russell moved to Great Falls, many of the Cree were living on the outskirts of Great Falls, picking garbage out of the alleys and essentially living out of the dumps.

Certainly.

the lifeline the Charlie through young boy was, was, essential.

Young boy continued Russell's education in old tribal ways, while also occasionally posing for some of Russell's paintings.

The young boy and Russell had a special bond that extended to something particularly important to both.

When Marty became too old to be ridden, it was young boy who brought Russell a new horse, appropriately called Nina or Chief, a nickname CMR would soon be called himself.

Russell seemed to love the studio company, and when he didn't, when he was immersed in his work, he entered what friends called the Deep silence.

Visitors got the message and slipped out.

If he don't talk, I don't want to break his train of thought.

Some evenings he'll draw stuff he saw a long time ago and explain it.

Other evenings maybe he'll read and say nothing.

Then again, we'll tell each other stories in sign.

That's the way it goes.

Russell's daily rounds usually meant he rose before dawn and began work by six and finished by noon.

When he headed toward the Great Falls watering holes, Charlie was never inclined to drink alone.

He had become a semipublic character, whose presence amounted to a trade asset in any place where liquor was sold.

If not approving, Nancy at least tolerated things when her husband would saddle up and ride Monty, and then later Nina in the direction of the mint, the Silver Dollar, or the Brunswick, she would hold up and wave two fingers.

Two drinks, Charlie, only two drinks.

Two drinks practically would have been abstinence to the younger Charlie, who could match drinks with just about anyone but undoubtedly under Nancy's influence.

Eventually, Charlie would permanently quit the bottle.

Marriage saved Russell from the life of a rounder.

From the beginning, she rode herd on him in an effort to keep him from spending too much time in the local saloons, but he worked desperately at his painting, and paintings quickly flowed.

Some glowed with domestication, but most were destined for the local saloon trade.

For the mint, he painted a large oil, the hold Up, depicting big nosed George and his gang of outlaws robbing the Deadwood stage for the silver dollar.

He painted for watercolors, the panels moving from a horseback cowboy watching the herd to the cowboy at a brothel, then back on the range where he is self administering an elixir to relieve an unidentified form of social disease.

Body painting seemed to tickle Russell's fancy, but not Nancy's, and years after Russell's death, she tried to retrieve and no doubt destroy them.

But local saloon keepers like Bill Rance of the Silver Dollar and Sid Willis of the mint never obliged.

While Russell worked at his art, Nancy undertook whatever needed to be accomplished, which in the beginning meant just gaining approval from his Saint Louis family.

There was a question in the minds of the family, and seeing me was the only way to settle it.

So Charlie's father came to Great Falls to visit.

I guess I passed inspection, as father always made me feel that I was really and truly his daughter, the senior.

Russell's acceptance must have been particularly poignant for a girl who, as a child, was abandoned by a father and a stepfather at site no.

They were shocked by her English and amused by her clothes and by her ignorance of everything they thought important.

They found her very adaptable.

A girl that age is like water pour into any pitcher, no matter how convoluted, and she takes the pitcher shape with effortless ease.

It might not have been effortless, but what Nancy managed to learn quickly was how to survive and thrive in the urban art world.

Success would soon come tapping at the door.

Or rather, Nancy dragged success in hogtied and branded.

Charlie really found his sweet spot when he married Nancy Russell.

She provided focus, drive, confidence they didn't have before, and now the Empire builders together were ready to build their empire.

And to do it, to build their empire, they would begin by going to what would soon be called the Empire State.

Charlie Kid Russell had spent 11 years as a cowboy and would spend 33 years as a professional artist.

Between the saddle and the easel, it was an arithmetic or a Nancy calculus that eventually would equal financial success and international renown.

And the way he did it, the way Nancy got it done, was by bringing the cowboy artist and his work to the most, cowboy of places in America.

New York, then, as now, was really the capital of the American art world.

So for someone like Russell to come to New York in 1904, that was critical to the development of his national reputation.

He really lived and breathed the West.

But at the same time he realized that to succeed as an artist, he needed New York.

Russell had to start from scratch and say, I've got to start painting pictures for wealthy people on the East Coast and on the West Coast, and stop thinking about where there is somebody who's an old rancher is going to buy my painting anymore.

And that's when his career took off.

It was the golden age of illustration.

With advances in inexpensive printing, illustration became the perfect democratic medium to tell a romanticized version of America's recent history tall tales of cowboys and Indians.

Russell fit in quickly and easily.

He received commissions for everything from calendars to cigar boxes, as well as an assignment to illustrate the first feminist Western written by a Montana woman, Bertha m Bauer, whose central character would become a series of books and then films.

Russell was well received in the city, and fellow artists such as Ed Breen, Wil Crawford and John Marchand took Russell under their wing, shared their studios and talked shop.

What I would like most is to know how artist Leon go.

I would like to have a chance to study this in some good studio.

So when Russell went to New York for the first time in 1903, 1904, the illustrator city came into contact with introduced him to new materials and new techniques.

This painting just sings with color.

Even if you look at the signature.

He's used for different colors in his signature.

So it comes back from New York and basically his palette becomes Technicolor.

While friends and artists showed the Russells around the big city, actor Williams Hart was in town and took the couple to see the Atlantic Ocean.

Nancy and I was stomping our feet and blowing on our fingers to keep warm.

But Charlie, with Ed, uncovered his tasseled blond mane blowing in the wind, was actually wading through the edge of the breakers.

Come out of there, you dog on sagebrush cow!

Wilder yelled at him.

I may never see this creek again, Bill.

His voice trailed back through the wind and he kept on walking.

For the next 22 years.

Nancy kept Charlie on the move, hurting the cowboy artist and his work to New York, Europe, across North America, and finally to metaphoric winter ranges in California, where the sage brush cal waddy would see the Pacific Creek.

And Nancy began making plans to build a final home trails and.

Next time on CM Russell and the American West, Nancy puts herself in charge of selling Charlie's art to rich oilmen and Hollywood stars, while Charlie helps moviemakers put the West on film.

Kim Russell and the American West is made possible with production support from AC Abrams and David Orser.

Joseph Sample, Tom Petri and Trevor Rhys-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.

I'm up in the saddle, wrangler in my hand.

Not my fair lady, I'm believe.

Try and run, my fair lady.

I'm believe I'm.

And.