(light piano music) - [Male Narrator] As America entered the 20th century and as Charlie Russell became celebrated, more and more he composed illustrated letters to old and new friends, from aging cowboys he had known when he and the country were young, to saloon keepers, actors, artists, and rodeo impresarios.

The letters frequently described his travels from Montana to New York, to Europe and California, as well as chronicling their old cowboy pal on a new and not so open range.

- He had no problem making himself that funny, eccentric figure from the past wandering in the present where, ah, he stood out by the outfit he wore.

He was the cowboy artist, now a celebrity, an international celebrity, and he reasoned himself into the picture.

In particular in California, where beach culture was an endless topic of conversation, he liked to joke about the fact that as an artist he had to go down to the beach to study human anatomy.

It gave him a chance to comment on the modern world, which may have caused progress in many directions but it hadn't apparently improved human anatomy.

And it gave him fun.

- Sadly for people who aren't interested in the West, Western history, Western art, they have no idea who this guy is.

He is one of the nuggets that America has stepped over.

While looking for the gold they stepped over this nugget time and time again, and it just breaks your heart.

And I think that's what we're trying to do here is to say, "Look America, "let me introduce you to one of your great sons "who you seem to have forgotten?"

- Any other body part I missed that we want to-- - No.

- I think we did it, right?

- It's pretty good.

- Charlie Russell?

- Yep, go look him up.

- Wow, I've got my smartphone.

- Yeah, I know.

The smartphone is so smart it better know who Charlie Russell is.

- I'll check out Charlie.

- Yeah, do so, do so.

It's a great story of a young man with dreams, and to find a woman who supported him, and together, not eh, eh, but together, they created a world class love affair.

This fella is Charlie Russell, the godfather of all Western art.

He's the first guy that did paintings as if these people were valued enough to do paintings of, cowboys and the Indians.

And the interesting thing of course is that he saw this firsthand.

And so this is where art becomes both painting, but it also becomes documentary.

This is what I saw.

- [Male Narrator] And what he didn't see he heard or read about, and what he didn't hear or read about he imagined, and he turned all of that into art.

- [Male Narrator] C. M. Russell and the American West is made possible with production support from Ossie Abrams and David Orser, 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.

- [Male Narrator] In 1906, Nancy, Charlie, and his Father, took a trip to visit the grand old ranches of old Mexico.

(Spanish guitar music) For Charlie it was a pilgrimage to cowboy Mecca.

- [Male Narrator] It's sure an old time cow country.

I traveled from the north line to within 100 miles of the isthmus and never saw a wire.

- [Male Narrator] 18 months later and back in Montana he would see wire, and lots of it, and holding pens, and for what he thought might be the last time, buffalo.

Once an estimated 30 to 60 million bison roamed the North American continent, but by 1900 there were perhaps 1,000 left.

Finally, an attempt was made to save the few that remained with two roundups in Pablo, Montana to haze and ship them to Canada.

Charlie Russell was intrigued.

- [Female Narrator] You must know what all this meant to the artist.

It was the last time on this continent these wild creatures would ever break their hearts against the cunning of man.

- [Male Narrator] He was officially invited to be an observer.

He dressed as he had back when he was cowboying in the Judith Basin.

A photographer chronically the roundup never forgot him.

- [Male Narrator] Gathered round the campfire at night he would keep us all entertained, and he never ran out of stories.

- [Male Narrator] Russell sketched and painted what he observed, and dangerously, he was almost trampled, participated.

Hazing buffalo into pens may have sounded straightforward on paper.

(exciting music) (cowboys shouting) But the experience wasn't.

- [Male Narrator] It was one of the wildest and wooliest roundups the West has ever seen, a hell for leather rough and tough event never attempted on such a scale before or since.

- Riding as a cowboy on the buffalo roundup in the spring of 1909 made a lasting impression on Russell.

Obviously in his head he could imagine that he was riding with buffalo hunters in the days of old.

- [Male Narrator] He painted Wounded Buffalo and Pablo Buffalo Drive and many others, but the buffalo painting that many have called his masterpiece would require at least a five year gestation period.

In 1914, Russell's friend, writer Frank Bird Linderman, spearheaded an effort to get the prestigious Montana Club in Helena to commission Russell for a painting to hang over their reading room mantle.

What Russell imagined was transcendent.

- Today here we are on the Missouri at a place called looking across it a place called Dead Man Coo-ley, and when he was asked to do When the Land Belonged to God I can imagine he thought of this place.

It's magical, it's beautiful, it's God's country.

It's like it's untainted from man.

- [Male Narrator] The painting still resonates with people whose ancestors were here eons ago.

- Charlie Russell used the title When the Land Belonged to God to really indicate a notion of stewardship.

I mean When the Land Belonged to God, God the Creator, Great Spirit.

- When I first saw When the Land Belonged to God I knew then that Charlie Russell got what Indians were about.

- When people come into the gallery and look at When the Land Belonged to God you can see the look of awe on their face.

They are just taken by the vastness that they see, the buffalo going all the way beyond their eyesight into the landscape's distance, and that buffalo, the lead buffalo in front, just steaming and frothing.

It's just an awe inspiring painting.

And I've seen people just stopped in their tracks looking at the painting.

- [Male Narrator] Montana's landscape became more and more central to Charlie Russell's work.

In 1905, he and Nancy bought a piece of land along the Rocky Mountain spine of Montana at the entry of what would soon be Glacier National Park.

Russell described it as, "A place where big hills wear white robes "and where the teeth of the world tear holes in the clouds."

- [Male Narrator] When it comes to making the beautiful, Mother Nature has man beat always, and that lady still owns a lot of Montana.

- [Male Narrator] The Russells built a rustic cabin on the shores of Lake McDonald, and Russell marked the spot with a buffalo skull nailed to a tree.

- Lake McDonald was his home away from home, his return to sort of a wilderness splendor.

- Glacier played a role in reawakening Russell to the essence of the American West.

- [Male Narrator] I spent my summers at Lake McDonald on the west side of the main range where I have a cabin.

This is about as wild a place as you find these days and that is what I like.

If it's laying down you need, Lake McDonald is the best ground in the world, and my lodge is open and the pipe lit for you and yours.

You know that lake country sings the cradle song to all who lay in her lap.

(indistinct singing playing on phonograph) - [Male Narrator] Artists, friends, and celebrities came to visit, and it was where Nancy cultivated potential clients.

Sleeping quarters were cots separated by screens that became annual guest registers, signed and often illustrated by visitors.

Entertainment was outdoors, from barbecuing to canoeing and pack trips, to a favorite bit of make believe, Charlie and Nancy dressing up to perform a grown up version of cowboys and Indians.

Often their guests joined them, donning grease paint and wigs to pose and perform in a kind of summer stock historical theater.

- When Charlie Russell and his wife Nancy dressed Indian and played Indian, to me it was a form of flattery.

But to understand the broader context of Russell's life, I suspect that the longer he was in Montana the more his soul was indigenous.

- It doesn't look like he's being funny.

He looks like he's being serious.

Just look at his body language, and look in his eyes.

Charlie was honoring the people and trying to show them in their best possible light.

I believe that to my soul.

- [Male Narrator] In the evening there were stories of cowboys and Indians, of myth and legends.

And once again, Nancy thought of marketing possibilities.

She had Charlie dictate many of his stories, which after his death she would compile into Trails Plowed Under, where Charlie's literary alter ego, Rawhide Rawlins, tells Russell's own backstories and tales of life on the open range.

- Bull Head Lodge was Charlie's favorite place on Earth.

It's where he was the most comfortable.

It's where they could entertain friends and family.

And perhaps the most consequential friend Philip R. Goodwin.

- [Male Narrator] Unlike Russell, Philip R. Goodwin was art school educated, a pupil who celebrated Illustrator Howard Pyle who also mentored N. C. Wyeth.

Goodwin had illustrated covers for Saturday Evening Post and dozens of books, including Jack London's Call of the Wild, which helped make London America's first millionaire author.

As with his friendship with cowboy pal Teddy Blue Abbott, Russell and Goodwin clicked.

After a stone mason finished work on the Bull Head Lodge fireplace, Goodwin and Russell etched a dozen images into the mantle.

And like the new fireplace, the connection between the two artists would last.

- [Male Narrator] A little panache.

- At the time he visits Charlie and Nancy he's only 25 years old.

He was a wunderkind, and he blew Charlie and Nancy away.

He affected their art like no other person.

And it was in that period that Russell's art really took off.

- [Male Narrator] It's been said Goodwin's mentoring influence on Russell was profound, expanding and intensifying his palette and simplifying his compositions into so called predicament paintings where there was drama with question mark outcomes.

Russell had witnessed the West in transition, and by the time he was in his 40s he had developed the skills to match his memories and produce some of his master paintings.

- Among Charlie Russell's quotes is one of the more interesting ones, "Anything that was important happened a long time ago."

He wanted to record it as it was then until all of a sudden it all disappeared, and it disappeared during his tenure in a sense when he was there.

It went from being very real to very yesterday.

- [Male Narrator] Yesterday was the currency of Charlie Russell, and inspired by Bull Head Lodge, Mexico, the Pablo buffalo roundup, and his own memory, Russell's art, particularly for early 20th century America, was timely.

It did take a series of trips to New York to get traction and a track record, but Russell kept doing what he always did with his art, he told stories.

Nancy sold them and his career took off.

[train clacking] and [trai] In 1911, Charlie and Nancy traveled to New York with four years' worth of mostly new and serious paintings and sculpture, 31 works in all, including "e Me" All were about yesterday.

To sell them, the Russell'.

Charlie's job was to give modern American public wha.

The past.

and Nancy's job was to attach a price tag.

And a gallery across the street from Tiffany's was ready for the Russells' cargo.

(light piano music) Gallery exposure was critical.

While Russell could easily continue to make a living as an illustrator, Nancy did not want her husband pigeon holed.

- Nancy was careful about that.

She didn't want Charlie mistaken for an illustrator.

He was an artist, and the distinction was important to everybody in that period.

An illustrator worked on assignment while the artist worked from inspiration.

It was an easel painter as it was called.

- [Male Narrator] His one man show at the prestigious Folsom Galleries was Russell's big breakthrough.

For many in New York, it was a breath of fresh, Western air.

- He has a sort of a breathless spontaneity to his work.

Most artists, American artists, were painting impressionist studies of ladies in white sitting on the shore of Long Island Sound with their parasols watching rut-gas round the point.

And so Russell was just this genius phenomenon.

- [Male Narrator] And Nancy made sure the public got to know her husband.

- Today if Nancy and Charlie were living, Nancy would use every available tool to advertise and promote him.

She would use the Internet, she would use Twitter, Facebook.

She would be up on the latest and she would make sure that everybody saw his art by all the tools available.

- [Male Narrator] The Russells titled the Folsom Galleries show simply and grandly.

- He called it The West That Has Passed.

He didn't say the west I lived or the things I did.

It was something larger than that.

- [Male Narrator] Russell's contemporary Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum called Russell's work, "A book in a page."

- Because often things are going on, especially if they're cowboy pictures, that you don't even get.

What are they doing?

But as you begin to know him, and to know him is to know him as a person and as a writer, as well as as a painter, it all kind of comes together as this wonderful thing.

- [Male Narrator] I live back there in those days all the time.

I don't have any trouble seeing my pictures.

- [Male Narrator] The New York Press applauded the Folsom show, and The Medicine Man was singled out for particular praise.

- [Male Narrator] The painting The Medicine Man is a band of Blackfeet Indians heading kind of south, and I believe it's fall.

I believe they're headed for a fall hunt.

He has a whole band with him.

And Charlie obviously wanted a majestic, beautiful background so he picked this area to paint that painting.

- [Male Narrator] The landscape was taken from a sketch I made.

I remember when this was game country.

This country today is fenced and settled by ranchmen, farmers, with nothing but a few deep worn trails where once walked the buffalo.

But, I am glad I knew it before nature's enemy, the white man, invaded and marred it beauty.

- [Male Narrator] What Russell saw and knew with his book in a page, his stories on a canvas, captivated New Yorkers.

- The New York Times devoted half a page to his story and his art, and he was on his way.

He wasn't just a regional artist now.

His reputation, St.

Louis, New York, and suddenly spread.

It would lead to his first international exhibition in Canada in 1912, and a London exhibition in 1914.

From New York in 1911, the steps are absolutely obvious to greater and greater fame, celebrity, popularity.

(piano music) - [Male Narrator] Charlie Russell may have thought his West had passed, but his vision collided with the future in 1913 when he visited the famous Armory Exhibition, where artists like Picasso and Cezanne, Marcel Duchamp and Henri Matisse, first brought European modern art to an American public.

Russell was quick to declare he had little in common with what he saw.

- [Male Narrator] Yes, I saw the cubes and futes exhibit in New York.

It may be art, but I can't sev-ee it.

Most people can't sev-ee all this dreamy stuff.

- This is a time modern art was going one way.

Charlie was kind of going the other.

He liked this sort of (mumbles) image that he had, and he wasn't about to buy into all the new trends of modern art.

- [Male Narrator] Know why painters are impressionistic?

Because they can't draw and they know they can't, so they blur their painting and hide their bum drawing.

- But in a funny way he was a real beneficiary of the Armory Show, because he presented a sort of wholesome alternative.

There were a lot of people who wanted to collect art in the United States.

There were a lot of robber barons and corporate titans who wanted manly art.

And they were corporate cowboys if you will and they wanted the art that would reflect their sensibility.

So Western art was just the thing for them.

- [Male Narrator] And Western art was just the thing for the highest elected official of Montana.

- With success and critical respect in New York then came more success and respect back home in Montana.

And one of the people who was drawn to Charlie Russell was the governor of Montana looking to put a mural in the house of representatives and looked east for more classically trained artists.

- [Male Narrator] If you want cupids and angels and Greek goddesses, give the New Yorker the job.

If you want a Western picture, give it to me.

- [Male Narrator] Russell got the job.

It would be a massive undertaking in terms of size, spirit, and subject matter.

Russell felt daunted at first, but then he came up with a brilliant solution.

- He took this arch typical American story and he turned it on its head.

And he said, "We need to see this story "through the eyes not of Lewis and Clark, "but through the eyes of people who were already there."

- [Male Narrator] The working canvas was 12 by 25 feet, and the Russells had to add logs to the artist studio and raise the roof just to make it fit.

It could be said that in the process he raised consciousness.

It took him a year to complete, but the result was spectacular.

- This painting makes a powerful statement, a statement about the complexity, the richness, the diversity, the centrality of native people to the history of the American West.

It is a political statement.

Russell says to us, "Look with fresh eyes.

"Listen carefully.

"Listen to other voices.

"Listen to other experiences."

For me, this is the Charlie Russell legacy.

- [Male Narrator] As Russell was completing work on the house of representatives mural, he received an invitation from Frank Bird Linderman to attend the annual July 4th pow wow on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning.

Linderman , like Russell, had grown up with Montana with work as a trapper, prospector, politician, and insurance salesman, and importantly a transcriber of Indian stories and folktales, including Indian Why Stories, which Russell would later illustrate.

Together, Linderman and Russell worked beyond the page and canvas to pressure the federal and state governments to find a home for the wandering Cree Indians.

- Russell was always the champion of the disrespected, and that's why he is as important today as he was then, perhaps even more.

The disrespected was the lowly cowboy, the Indian whose civilization had been destroyed, women that were relegated to their homes.

He has Nancy running his life.

He had no problem with women in high positions.

And also he was an environmentalist.

All of these together made Russell a man of his time but out of his time, a man of our time but out of our time.

- [Male Narrator] Later that summer, a former trick roper named Guy Weadick invited Russell and Nancy north to what would become something of a Western pageant, (horns playing) the Calgary Stampede.

For Russell, it was a chance to see the West, the West of cowboys and Indians as entertainment.

For Nancy, it was a chance to sell her paintings to visiting Canadian industrialists and English royalty.

And Nancy was right.

She sold 13 of her husband's 20 exhibited paintings at what were described as unprecedented prices.

English admirers pushed Russell to exhibit in London, and with Nancy getting the high prices she asked galleries across the country began to follow suit.

The Russells left Canada all smiles.

Back in Montana Russell wrote Weadick, "Friend Guy, "in my time I've seen some roping and riding, "but never before have I seen so much of it bunched "as I did at Calgary.

"I've seen some good Wild West shows, "but I wouldn't call what you pulled off a show.

"It was the real thing, and a whole lot of it."

- [Male Narrator] Popular variations on the Western real thing came in many packages, all with one key ingredient, nostalgia.

- The end of the frontier seems to be also the birth of nostalgia.

They go hand in hand.

Just as it's passed now we're interested in it.

- [Male Narrator] Charlie Russell didn't call it nostalgia.

He called it romance.

In 1919 writing to Frank Bird Linderman, he described his own credo.

- [Male Narrator] You've ridden (mumbles) romance, and it damn near throwed you, too.

- [Male Narrator] By the eve of World War II, Charles Marion Russell had his high headed horse moving.

But even as the new century powered relentlessly forward and Russell became more successful, he always kept one foot firmly in the Old West, the West that has passed.

(light piano music) It was in his art, his persona, and virtually ever letter he illustrated for his friends.

It was a difficult two step moving forward while staying behind, but the Russells would use it to breeze across the dance floor of the American art world.

And the Russells weren't the only ones on the dance floor.

Charlie's friend Will Rogers and theatrical impresario William Frederick Buffalo Bill Cody carried similar Western rigging, and it carried them to stardom.

Oklahoma cowboy Will Rogers, like Russell, took a familiar trail east to New York where he turned a Western vaudeville act, Ropin Fool, into a silent screen sensation.

But his gifts went well beyond lariat.

He rode his wit, radio talent, and movie roles into super stardom at home and around the world.

Russell and Rogers were kindred souls with sensibilities and histories shaped by geography.

- Charles Russell and Will Rogers were passionate about the West.

They were passionate about the open frontier.

Whether they were conscious of preserving the West or not, it was just a part of their lifestyle and their being.

- Will Rogers and Charlie Russell were two peas in a pod.

They actually looked a lot alike with that floppy blonde hair, kind of stocky build and twinkling eyes.

Gosh, they had so much in common.

- Although they were superstars, they were down to earth plain folk.

Both those individuals remind me of my ancestors, of common folk, that just liked a simple life, that came from an agrarian background, that were close to the earth, that celebrated folk ways, that enjoyed a good laugh but could withstand hard labor and work and understood the rigors of life.

(folk music) - [Male Narrator] When Russell and Rogers arrived in New York someone else was already peddling geography and history.

(upbeat piano music) - Buffalo Bill's Wild West comprised four words, his name, the West, the region, and the word sandwiched in between, wild.

- In some ways you say, "Well, Buffalo Bill brought the West to the world."

It's really astronomical how many people witnessed the West through Buffalo Bill.

- [Male Narrator] Russell probably saw the Wild West show on his first trip to Chicago.

Some of his old pals rode in the show, and he finally met Buffalo Bill Cody after he had returned from touring in Europe.

- [Male Narrator] I was down at Madison Square Garden and met Cody.

He's lost most of his hair in the London fog, but his backlocks are still long.

The show was good, real cowboys and Indians.

- [Male Narrator] Russell memorialized Buffalo Bill on canvas, while Charlie's theater friend, William S. Hart, rode a new medium to fame, one that featured big stories on big canvas, flickers.

In 1920 to escape Montana winters, the Russells began spending part of each year in California.

And in the Golden State, Nancy saw new and golden opportunities for art with a buffalo skull signature, including Salute to the Robe Trade, which she sold for $10,000 to a millionaire oil man.

- [Female Narrator] Charlie looked so funny the day we got home after closing the bargain.

I said, "It's kind of nice for a real live kicking artist "to enjoy some of the fruits of his own work."

- [Male Narrator] Soon after, Nancy landed a major Hollywood patron when she sold The Navajos to Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

(bell ringing) Charlie and Nancy had visited Fairbanks on the set of The Three Musketeers, where Charlie wistfully leveled the playing field between his world and Hollywood's.

- [Male Narrator] I told Doug Fairbanks, "We both are picture makers."

- [Male Narrator] Will Rogers echoed the sentiment and told Fairbanks, "Doug, you think you can make pictures and you can, "but this old boy could make some closeups and long shots "that'll live longer."

Orbiting Hollywood constellations, Nancy undoubtedly felt a sense of validation.

But, approval did not come from all spheres.

- [Male Narrator] Nancy had one great defect, her blind worship of the bitch goddess success, and by that she didn't mean just money.

You could see her effect on Charlie all the time, and not merely in his work.

- She liked money.

I'm not sure that Charlie Russell was as enamored of it as she was, but like all artists there are two things that you want to do.

You want to be recognized as really good, and you want to get paid, and that was a motivation for Russell.

- [Male Narrator] Many of Russell's old pals, from the range to the bar stool, did not approve of the trail Charlie was following, or at least not the trail boss.

They saw Nancy as tightening the reins on their old pal, leading him farther and farther away from big sky country and putting her hand over his shot glass.

Will Rogers got a kick out of saying that, "Nancy took an O out of saloon and made it read salon."

- Charlie understood that his friends would not be happy with Nancy, but he let her kind of take the fall.

And Nancy was willing to take the heat, because she wanted to perpetuate the legend along with Charlie of him being an untainted genius.

- You don't want to be forgotten if you're an artist.

You want people to pay attention to what you're doing.

But if it gets between you and your pals, the way you live, if it elevates you in a way that they're not comfortable with you anymore, it's a big negative.

- [Male Narrator] It's hard to say how much Charlie enjoyed his fame, or California.

He poked fun at both, caricatured himself in his letters, ridiculed the realtors and boosters, complained about the weather.

But there definitely were parts of California he enjoyed.

- [Male] Charlie very much embraced the movies.

He embraced the movie stars.

- [Male Narrator] And the movie kingdom embraced Charlie.

- [Male Narrator] Never a blowhard, Charlie was a born mixer.

Whether among old friends or total strangers, people invariably hung on his every word like so many little kids.

- Nancy was delighted because the movie stars were very wealthy, and they liked Western art as did the oilmen in Southern California.

- [Male Narrator] In poor health and just months before he died, Russell completed his last major commission, The History of the West.

He stretched the canvas across the floor of an adobe on actor Harry Carey's ranch and painted it for a California oilman who was caught up in a national scandal.

And as a historical footnote, in the corner of the frame the cowboy artist may have inserted a hidden message about the oil business.

- [Male Narrator] What you find at the very end are three little oil derricks that are almost an afterthought.

But what's more amusing for me is that down in the brush, not too far from those oil derricks at the end of the mural, is a rattlesnake.

One wonders did he have a commentary on Doheny and the oil and gas people?

Was he biting the hand that fed him?

We don't know for sure.

- [Male Narrator] And the hand that fed him, especially with this mural, fed him a lot, $30,000, the highest price for a painting done by a living American artist.

- Will Rogers found it almost amusing.

He called Charlie Russell, "The only honest man in oil."

He meant as an oil painter.

- [Male Narrator] Nancy had pushed Charlie to finish the painting, and at the end they both were exhausted, but Nancy was also beaming.

- [Female Narrator] Chaz had a very sad face, because we were not bound for home.

I had done quite well indeed with so little rest.

Success is the tonic.

- [Male Narrator] You can certainly say this much for Nancy, she made Charlie a material success.

- [Male Narrator] Through it all, whether in Great Falls or Bull Head Lodge, in Hollywood or on the beaches of California, Charlie kept working, and working, even on his illustrated letters.

And like his studio work, those letters had a particular quality that made them endure.

And it was that quality that made Russell, and later his protege Joe DeYong who worked on set designs for Western classics such as Shane, so valuable on a movie set.

(cinematic instrumental music) - [Male Narrator] Charlie's creative ability hinged upon his having spent his earliest years in wilderness surrounding.

His advice in later years to a hopeful young artist was, "Stick to Mother Nature.

"She'll never fool you."

- He loved nature, and he loved a good story.

And those are two great pieces of subject matter for movies.

(piano music) - [Male Narrator] And Russell also loved just going to the movies.

- [Male Narrator] As there are no more real cowboys, I myself play off quite a little coin at them screen roundups.

I take back anything I ever said with my hat in my hand about movie cowboys.

They're good riders and hard to scare.

- Charlie liked Hart and Carey, because they made realistic silent movies and Westerns.

He loved going to them.

He'd go with Joe DeYong.

Joe DeYong loved it because Joe DeYong was deaf.

So, they could sit in the theater doing Indian sign language critiquing the movies and the authenticity of the movies.

- [Male Narrator] In terms of authenticity, or at least backdrop, Russell's and Frederic Remington's different visions of the West soon became templates for directors and cinematographers.

- Both Ford and Hawks mentioned Charlie Russell as an influence in terms of their compositions.

You can see it in Ford and Hawks.

Particularly with Hawks in Red River I think there's some compositions that are virtually remakes of Russell's painting.

(cowboys shouting) - [Male Narrator] And with Charlie Russell it wasn't just his paintings, it wasn't just his sculpture, it was Charlie Russell the character.

(suspenseful music) There are stories that the Charlie persona and distinctive walk were passed on from Charlie to actor Harry Carey, to director John Ford, and eventually to John Wayne.

- John Ford is taking Charlie Russell's Square Butte and creating the Monument Valley monumental iconic landscape for which he is known taking a page right out of C. M. Russell.

The Indians riding along silhouetted against the top of the ridges, Charlie Russell.

So many of the cliches that are thought of as cliches, but you have to go back and say, "Russell invented those cliches."

- Looks like you got yourself surrounded.

- [Male Narrator] And they would eventually become cliches for something even bigger.

- Well, I think the West is kind of a mythological place.

It probably didn't exist exactly the way they make it in movies.

It was probably quite a bit different, but it's become mythologized.

It's become a part of Americana.

- This is not a very coherent myth.

It's kind of an exhausted myth.

But hopefully still (mumbles) mythologized.

People won't have it, and they will deal with their imagination.

- [Male Narrator] It has been said that Charlie Russell was old garde, but in many ways his work and ethos were firmly avant-garde.

The mythologized West, the West of the imagination, is still very much alive in far flung places from Hollywood to around the globe, especially in Montana.

It remains material for the movies, for artists, and storytellers.

- I think I was drawn to the idea of the West long before I was drawn to the west.

- And the landscape is as much a part of your imagination as it is a reality.

- The American West is a great hero story.

It's a visual feast, and it's been exploited by artists like Remington and Russell, and by filmmakers, and by historians, and by me for that matter.

(folk music) - [Male Narrator] Charlie Russell never seemed to lose his boyhood dreams and ideas about the West.

He had gone West, and in an almost spiritually timed moment he witnessed the cataclysmic end to the open range cattle business.

He saw the West in a way that maybe others didn't, and he recorded it.

And then he grew up with the West.

It was as he said a West that had passed and even today is still passing.

(exciting upbeat music) One thing that has never passed is the demand and rising prices for work with a C. M. Russell signature.

- 75,000 for the Russell.

- [Male Narrator] From cowboy cabins to private collections, to galleries, to museums and razzle dazzle Western auctions.

- Sold at $350,000 you got it, my friend.

- [Male Narrator] Russell's work continues to command attention, admiration, and hefty dollar figures.

- Let's let them look at it one more time, 1,300,000.

Sold it.

You bought for $1,250,000.

- [Male Narrator] And it all started with a Montana winter sketch.

- It seems like a snow storm that was devastating for everybody else in 1886 was that turning point for Russell.

And I'm not so sure he was even looking for it at that point.

He was still in that childlike state of creating for fun.

There's something in we artists that makes us not want to give up, and as in Charlie Russell's case he comes from that primitive start and ends up at a very advanced stage of not only craftsmanship but communicating his message, which is the most important thing in art.

It's not all about ... Craftsmanship is a great part of it, but are you getting the message across?

That's the ultimate goal.

- The vastness of the images and the landscape, the sheer vastness, and the unspoiled beauty that you see and really speaks to you, especially as an artist.

You want to go out there and start painting the landscapes, and take your easel outside and just paint the beauty.

- The West retained its grandeur and its space, and it's one of the great contradictions of the Western story.

The individual is all important, and yet against this vast sky the Westerner is reduced to a smaller and smaller part of the land.

It's always the land, the animals on the land, and this incredible setting of grandeur.

- How can one man accomplish that much in the same years that the rest of us have?

And he maintained friendships, another thing that we all know takes a lot of time.

We all have the same time on Earth, and some folks just get an awful lot done.

- [Male Narrator] Finally it was getting work done, and especially keeping and cherishing friendships, that was the essence of Charlie Russell.

- [Male Narrator] Dear old Russ, big hearted and open handed, he would often split his last dollar with a friend.

Money was nothing to him.

A friend was everything.

- And he was quick to say old friends are not only the best, but they're your comrades in memory.

(light piano music) - [Male Narrator] Friends came together Christmas of 1920 when Malcolm Mackay, a New York financier and great patron of Russell's, asked his friend to think about doing some kind of art piece for the Mackay's home in new Jersey.

He made the ask through Nancy.

- [Male Narrator] Tell Charlie to give his imagination a slack rope till he creates something.

Then snub it up good and hard and put the C. M. R. brand on it and I know it will be a wonder.

- [Male Narrator] The painting was rooted in a postcard and took over a year for Russell to complete.

(light piano music) He called it Charles M. Russell and His Friends.

- Russell sits horseback in front of Square Butte.

and he summons the actors to his stage.

- [Male Narrator] Although not clearly identified in the painting, it wouldn't be hard to imagine Russell imagining his friends, Young Boy, Teddy Blue, Con Price, Bill Rantz, the whole gang across the decades from Russell's Old West.

- They come up out of the Missouri River breaks, Native Americans, cowboys, all horseback Russell gesturing like Charles Wilson Peale inviting you to be a part or to take a look at his play.

- [Male Narrator] It was almost seven feet wide, and this time Nancy did not attach a price tag.

It became a deeply personal gift from Charlie and Nancy to Mackays.

When the Russells visited New York again and stayed at the Mackays' New Jersey home the unveiling was ceremonious, with Charlie and Nancy dressed as Indians the way they would at Bull Head Lodge, only now in front of the Mackay fireplace, with Charlie talking Indian sign to the Mackay family and Nancy interpreting.

- [Female Narrator] We were completely transported into the past.

Later, Charlie and my husband heated branding irons and burned as many brands as they could remember all over the logs.

- [Male Narrator] Today, C. M. Russell and His Friends is exhibited as part of the Mackay Collection at the Montana Historical Society, and the backdrop the artist used is still there.

- When he painted himself like this what he was doing was showing the world what he dearly loved, and it was Montana, it was the Indians and the cowboys.

He just opened his arms and said, "Here it is."

It was just so special Montana to Charlie Russell.

And I think it's so special what Charlie Russell left us.

- [Male Narrator] During the early to mid 1920s, Russell's health began to decline.

There was old cowboy wear and tear and something much more serious.

When he went to the Mayo Brothers Hospital in the summer of 1926 to have a goiter removed, a battery of tests confirmed the worst.

At some point he probably had suffered a heart attack and his heart was seriously damaged.

The doctors gave him a year but he only had months.

He was not surprised.

A few years earlier he had written, "I have been near enough to Hell to smell smoke.

"Old Dad Time trades little that men want."

On a late October weekend Russell, barely able to walk around town, ran across the editor of the Great Falls Leader.

- [Male Narrator] Well, the old pump ain't working, and I'm weak as a cat.

The doctor says I can't even ride a horse.

I've thrown my last leg over a saddle.

The old pump is about to quit.

- [Male Narrator] Two days later it did.

(somber music) They buried the cowboy artist on a hilltop and buried the grave site in flowers, flowers shaped in lariats, saddles, and even his trademark buffalo skull.

The site is now marked with a massive five foot igneous stone and a bronze artist's palette.

The 360 degree view of the Montana Benchlands is still proudly called Russell Country.

The landscape remains as beautiful today as it was when Charles M. Russell was laid in the ground, as does the country 250 miles and several mountain ranges to the south where the 16 year old first entered big sky country in 1880.

Just months before Russell died, he wrote a preface to his book More Rawhides.

It reads like it was written by someone who knew his future would be short.

- [Male Narrator] Any man that can make a living doing what he likes is lucky, and I'm that.

Any time I cash in now, I win.

- As the famous historian K. Ros-tool said, "If Montana has contributed one thing to the West," the legacy of the West, "It's Charlie Russell and his paintings.

"It was Montana that inspired him.

"It was Montana that he painted."

- His Montana becomes the subject that he always returns to in his art.

But, he had the power, the gift, to make his nostalgic yearning global, a world vision in effect of the American West.

And to this day, many people still think of the real West as Charlie Russell's West.

- Charlie Russell is one of two statues that Montanans chose to put in the U.S.

Capitol.

Every state gets two.

And isn't it interesting that Montana, this state that some people see as rawboned, rough, hang 'em high, ask questions later state the two people they chose was a welfare worker named Jeannette Rankin, who was the first woman elected to Congress, and an artist, Charlie Russell.

- [Male Narrator] According to the chief, the most picturesque stretch of mountain and plains was out on a big prairie hill south of Great Falls.

After a frosty morning when the work wouldn't go so well, he'd put on a Mackinaw, pick up his bundle, put his hat down, and step out to the outside where old Nina would be stepping about pretty, with his neck (mumbles) blowing mighty scary.

For an old horse, he had a lot of stuff.

An hour or so later, Russell would come back, his face red and a light blazing in his gray eyes, build a cigarette, grin sort of a shame faced way, and sign, "My medicine is strong now."

On such rides, he most often headed for those rolling prairie hilltops south of town where now under a big rough boulder he's making the big sleep, with the Highwoods to the east, the Belts and Little Belts to the south, and the Rockies showing plain in a long, low, snowcapped line to the west, out where there's room, a big sky, a long look, and lots of color.

- [Female Narrator] C. M. Russell and the American West is made possible with production support from Ossie Abrams and David Orser, 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.

♪ I'm up in the saddle, the reins are in my hand ♪ Goodbye fair lady, I'm leaving Cheyenne ♪ Goodbye fair lady ♪ I'm leaving Cheyenne (folk music) (light piano music) (light piano music) (light piano music)