Was the mare for sale? Remington called to Shorty Reeson, according to an old account in the Kansas City Star. She was not, said Reeson (he “being wise in the ways of horse trading”). Was she good under saddle? Remington asked. Best see for himself, Reeson said. So at the busiest intersection in Kansas City, in front of the Grand Junction Hotel, they unhitched the wagon and borrowed a saddle, and Remington swung up to give the horse a try. Satisfied, he agreed to a price of fifty dollars.
And thus the next morning, sometime in August 1885, Remington left Kansas City behind him, heading west.
The scene could hardly be more appropriate—the lone figure of a man on the move, heading into an uncertain, possibly perilous, future in the prime of youth. The background is the Old West, but the man is of greater interest than the background. And of course there is the horse. For Remington there was always the horse. If he could have but one thing written on his tombstone, he once told a drinking companion, it would be “He knew the horse.”
Besides, he had an audience for this turning point in his life, a vital element not overlooked in the old account. “They warned him of the perils. He smiled,” it says. “They coaxed him, he went.” His popularity as a “good fellow” was firmly established. Long afterward, the cashier of a billiard parlor spoke of him lovingly as “One Grand Fred.” Recalling the time, Remington said, “Now that I was poor I could gratify my inclination for an artist’s career.”
He was born on October 1, 1861, in a big frame house that still stands on Court Street in Canton, New York, on the northwest watershed of the Adirondacks, which is about as far north in New York state as it is possible to be without crossing into Canada. His full name was Frederic Sackrider Remington. His father, Seth Pierre Remington, was the proprietor of a local newspaper, a lean, active man, ardent horseman and ardent Republican, who distinguished himself as a Union cavalry officer in the Civil War. His mother was Clara Bascomb Sackrider, whose family had a hardware business in Canton. An only child, little Freddie had the run of the town, his love for which was to be lifelong, as indeed it was for all of New York’s North Country. In 1873 the family resettled in nearby Ogdensburg, overlooking Canada on the St. Lawrence River. Seth Remington, “the Colonel,” had been made collector of the port at Ogdensburg. He sold his newspaper and for both pleasure and profit began raising and racing trotting horses.
In a photograph taken at Canton shortly before the move, eleven-year-old Freddie, dressed in the visored cap and miniature uniform of a volunteer firefighter, poses with the “heroes” of Engine Company One. Twice in consecutive years Canton’s business district—and the Colonel’s printing plant—had been destroyed by fire. The Colonel rallied the town to establish three new fire companies, and Freddie was made an official mascot. On the Fourth of July he marched with his father and the other men of Engine Company One at the head of the parade.
Full grown, standing five feet nine and weighing upward of two hundred pounds, he exuded physical power. A veteran Kansas City saloon keeper who had seen plenty of rough men in his time described him as “a bull for size and strength,” and said Remington could have been a prizefighter had he chosen. A Kansas City matron called him a Greek god who fairly “shone with the light of youth.” Even as a schoolboy he cut an impressive figure. At sixteen, in a letter written from the Highland Military Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts, he portrayed himself as follows:
I don’t amount to anything in particular. I can spoil an immense amount of grub at any time in the day…I go a good man on muscle. My hair is short and stiff, and I am about five feet eight inches and weigh one hundred and eighty pounds. There is nothing poetical about me…. They all say I am handsome. (I don’t think so.)
He had been sent to another military school, the Vermont Episcopal Institute at Burlington, where he had his first formal art lessons, then to Highland Academy, where his pen drawings of soldiers and battles were considered a wonder by his classmates. He had no aspiration to any wealth or fame that called for excessive effort, he wrote in bantering spirit to one of his Sackrider uncles. “I mean to study for an artist.” More often, he talked of pursuing a career in journalism like his father, who was now in failing health and a worry. “Do you miss my ‘gab’ on martial subjects?” the boy wrote after a visit to Canton. “Guess if I hadn’t come home you would have died.”
At Yale he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts and played football, making a name for himself as a first-string forward, or rusher, on the Yale team of 1879—the last of the fifteen-man teams, whose captain was the famous Walter Camp, the “Father of Football.” The program at the School of Fine Arts was under the direction of John Ferguson Weir, an accomplished, European-trained painter known for his dramatic portrayals of heavy industry. Instructions in drawing were under John Henry Niemeyer, “the German,” who held to the classic drill of drawing only from plaster casts and who inscribed on the blackboard a maxim of Ingres’s: “Drawing is the Probity of Art.” When asked for guidance by an aspiring young artist long afterward, Remington said his advice was never to take anyone’s advice, but then added, “Study good pictures and above all draw—draw—draw—and always from nature.”
Repeatedly over the years, he would portray himself as self-taught, and in the main this was so. Nevertheless, his Yale training, brief as it was, served him well and in some of his mannerisms—figures of speech, the clothes he wore—he was to remain unmistakably a product of Yale, more Yale than cowboy, ever after. Friends were addressed as “old boy” or “old chap,” and words like bully became habitual. Traveling to and from the West by train, he was frequently mistaken for an Englishman.
On the death of his father, in 1880, Remington dropped out of Yale after only a year and a half. He tried different jobs in Ogdensburg and Albany, stuck to none, worried about his future, proposed to Eva Caten and was turned down by her father, went west briefly—to Montana Territory, principally for the fun of it—and came home with some sketches and a pale blond mustache. Again he tried a clerk’s life in Albany, hating every moment. On coming into his inheritance at twenty-one, he took off for Kansas, the sheep farm, and his string of misadventures.
Neither his mother nor Eva Caten took an interest in his artistic efforts or held any hopes for him in that line. Only one member of the family, William Remington, a favorite uncle who owned a Canton dry-goods store, remained convinced that the boy’s future was in art. Had anyone else who knew his story been in Kansas City to see him ride away that summer of 1885, they could not possibly have envisioned all that happened so soon after.
His success was sudden and extraordinary. He became focused as he had never been. His capacity for concentrated effort, his energy and productivity were all at once boundless. In little more than a year, back from his wanderings through New Mexico and Arizona, reunited with Eva, his bank account nicely enhanced by his Uncle Bill, he had established himself as a magazine illustrator in New York. He had an apartment in Brooklyn and an entrée at Harper’s Weekly, the country’s leading magazine, where he made his first call dressed in full cowboy regalia. In short order he was discovered by St. Nicholas and Outing magazines. In 1887 Harper’s Weekly alone carried thirty-nine of Remington’s drawings and sketches. He received a commission from Century Illustrated Magazine to illustrate a new series of articles by young Theodore Roosevelt, articles that would later appear as a book, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail. The next year more than seventy Remington drawings and sketches appeared in Harper’s Weekly.
His annual income was a princely eight thousand dollars. He was working now in pen and ink, oil, and watercolor. In 1889, the year of his enormous oil A Dash for the Timber, he and Eva bought a large house on a hill in suburban New Rochelle, New York, with stables and a sweeping lawn. By 1890, only five years after being down and out in Kansas City, he was one of the best-known artists in America, a full-blown celebrity at age twenty-eight. In 1890 Harper’s Weekly ran more than a hundred of his illustrations, seven as double-page spreads. Fur
thermore, he was now writing as well as illustrating. He painted A Cavalryman’s Breakfast on the Plains, Cabin in the Woods, Aiding a Comrade, and The Scout. He had his first one-man show. Eva described him as working as if he had forty children to support. For a new illustrated edition of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, the largest commission he had yet received, Remington would produce twenty-two full-page plates and nearly four hundred drawings.
The improvement in his work, meantime, was astonishing. The first drawings for Harper’s Weekly had, as editor Henry Harper said, “all the ring of new and live material,” but they were “very crude” in execution and had to be redrawn by staff artists. An early oil Signaling the Main Command, painted in 1886, is so stiff, so awkwardly handled overall, that one wonders how possibly it could have been done by the same artist who painted Dash for the Timber just three years later.
In Signaling the Main Command everything is at a standstill, everyone rooted to the ground. Horses and men are like cutouts pasted down on a drab backdrop and on each other. There is no air between them, no life in any gesture. By contrast, A Dash for the Timber is everything suggested by its inspired title (Remington was good at titles). The massed riders charge pell-mell, nearly head on at the viewer. Their horses are flying—hardly a hoof touches the ground—and the dead weight of the one rider who has been hit makes the action of the others, and of the pursuing Indians, all the more alive. The dust flies, guns blaze away, the wind whips the big hat brims. There is no time for second thoughts. It is big action in big space. The painting is nearly the size of a mural, measuring four by seven feet. It drew immediate attention when accepted for exhibition at the National Academy of Design and remains one of the masterpieces of American painting, let alone Western art.
Some of Remington’s subject matter, like Hiawatha, had nothing to do with the West. On occasion, the magazines commissioned sporting sketches. Cabin in the Woods was a North Country scene, and there were to be more as time went on. It was the West, however, that the editors and his public wanted most, the Wild West—cowboys, horses, soldiers, renegade Indians, and action, lots of action—and at intervals during all the work, he kept going back and forth to the West to gather material. He became known as the expert on the subject. The widespread impression was that Remington’s West must be authentic, the real West, and this accounted in no small measure for his popularity. The editor of Century, the highly cultivated Richard Watson Gilder, is said to have offered Remington a box of cigars and said: “Tell me about the West.” “He draws what he knows and he knows what he draws,” the readers of Harper’s Weekly were informed in a biographical essay on the artist.
It was said repeatedly—and usually with Remington’s encouragement—that he had been a cowpuncher himself, that he had seen action with the troops, when in truth he had never done either. To be sure, he had experienced a lot of hard riding with the cavalry in New Mexico and Arizona, in Montana and the Dakota Territory. He had known and observed countless cowboys and Mexican vaqueros, Cheyenne, Apache, Sioux, and Crow Indians. He had seen nearly all the West in every season and made friends everywhere he went sketching and painting or simply using his eyes. “Without knowing exactly how to do it, I began to try to record some facts around me,” he later explained, “and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded. Youth is never appalled by the insistent demands of a great profession.”
Like so many before him and since, he found the West physically and emotionally invigorating—therapeutic. He loved the air, the clear, dazzling light, the freedom he felt in such “grand, silent country.” But it was there also that he had staked his claim professionally—“Cowboys are cash,” he told a friend—and rather than trying to dress the part, to play cowboy or soldier, he seems to have gone out of his way to be conspicuously the observer only, to be nobody but Frederic Remington. On a grueling cavalry exercise in the heat and dust of June in Arizona, an expedition that seems to have been designed in part to test his endurance, he measured up well enough to be elected an honorary member of the troop—he was made the mascot again by his uniformed heroes—but he went wearing an English safari helmet.
On another of his forays, in Montana in 1890, he arrived at an Eighth Cavalry encampment on the Tongue River sitting astride a tall horse and wearing a huge brown canvas hunting coat, yellow English riding breeches, and fancy Prussian boots set off by long-shanked English spurs. He was a memorable spectacle. On his head this time was a tiny, soft-brimmed hat, which in combination with the canvas coat made him look bigger even than he was. A man of phenomenal appetite for good food and drink, Remington had become by then “a huge specimen of humanity,” weighing perhaps 250 pounds. When he dismounted, it is said, the horse appeared glad to be rid of him.
A young officer who was present on that Montana trip, Lieutenant Alvin H. Sydenham, himself an amateur artist, described Remington as a “big, good-natured, overgrown boy” and left this intriguing account of Remington’s working methods in the field:
I watched this fat artist very closely to see “how he did it.” My stock of artistic information was as great when he went away as it was before he arrived. There was no technique, no “shop,” about anything he did. No pencils, no notebooks, no “kodak”—nothing, indeed, but his big blue eyes rolling around at everything and into all sorts of queer places. Now and then an orderly would ride by, or a scout dash up in front of the commanding officer’s tent. Then I would see him look intently for a moment with his eyes half closed—only a moment, and it gave me the impression that perhaps he was a trifle nearsighted.
One morning before dawn, Sydenham was awakened by a prolonged scratching at the flap of his tent. It was Remington asking for a “cavalryman’s breakfast.” Sydenham didn’t know the expression. “A drink of whiskey and a cigarette,” Remington said. The story quickly made the rounds, to the advantage of Remington’s already considerable popularity with the men.
To Sydenham, Remington was “a fellow you could not fail to like the first time you saw him,” and others would later say much the same. Though never a cowboy or soldier, never a good shot, often bothered by the sight of blood, he relished the comradeship of “hard-sided,” plainspoken men, “men with the bark on,” who loved the outdoors as he did and welcomed his high spirits and fund of stories. Nothing gave him such pleasure, Remington said, as sitting about with good companions “talking through my hat.” He was always just arrived from somewhere afar, always on his way somewhere else interesting. In the words of a lifelong friend, an Adirondack hunter and guide named Has Rasbeck, “Remington never stays put for long in any one place, but there’s an awful lot of him while he’s around.”
He called the soldiers of the Indian-fighting army “my tribe,” and they, more even than the cowboys and ranchers, were the “real West,” both in what he painted and what he wrote. It was a highly selective reality, to be sure, as he knew perfectly well. The real West of the sod-house homesteader, of crops and families, of small towns and railroads had no appeal for him. He never responded to any of that as did such chroniclers as Willa Cather or his friend Hamlin Garland, for whom, like Cather, the West was native ground. Remington’s Westerner is a horseman, the wild-riding soldier or cowboy, and Remington’s West is a place of endless conflict, his horsemen ever battling with the elements or the Indian, another horseman, who to Remington was a true savage and so joined with the elements. Nature in his West is never benign or sustaining. It is remorseless, a killer—and thus antithetical to civilization—to any but the brave and uncomplaining. Indeed, it was the very advance of “the derby hat, the smoking chimneys, the cordless binder” that impelled him, he said. “I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish.” The whole picturesque way of life of his tribe was as doomed as that of their Indian foe.
While the rest of the country spoke of the advance of the frontier, the “taming” of the West, as a positive force in the building of American civilization, to Remington the frontier was receding and, in the end
, a tragic loss. He went west to chase a disappearing past, not to find the future. To him the West was more a place in time than any part of the map or something to own. His paintings and drawings, the things he wrote, had nothing to do with dreams of a home in the West. He bought no land there. He wanted none. He never lived there, never stayed more than a month or two at a time. Some of it he thought ugly and depressing, like the Dakota Badlands that so entranced Theodore Roosevelt. What mattered were those wild riders; they were the “living breathing end” of a time that must not go unrecorded or uncelebrated.
Roosevelt, too, in books and articles, was trying to capture the open-range West before it was gone. So also was their mutual friend Owen Wister, whose stories Remington illustrated. Seeing themselves as joined in common cause, they encouraged, advised, and complimented one another. “It seems to me that you in your line, and Wister in his, are doing the best work in America today,” Roosevelt wrote to Remington. He considered Remington the country’s greatest living painter and was hardly less enthusiastic about Remington’s writing. “Are you aware…that aside from what you do with the pencil, you come closer to the real thing with the pen than any other man in the western business?” Roosevelt asked Remington in 1897, by which time Remington had published more than sixty articles. “I don’t know how you do it,” Roosevelt continued, “anymore than I know how Kipling does it.”
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