Wister was a Philadelphian, a Harvard graduate like Roosevelt, wealthy, citified, a little finicky, anything but a Westerner. Kidding him with advice on how to do a proper Western story, Remington wrote, “Put every person on horseback and let the blood be half a foot deep. Be, very profane and have plenty of shooting. No episodes must occur in the dark.” Wister privately thought of Remington as a “rollicking animal” and “the most uneven artist I know,” as he confided to his mother, but he provided a glowing introduction for a portfolio-sized book of Remington drawings called Done in the Open. Remington, he said, was more than an artist, he was a national treasure. It was out of the creative production of Roosevelt, Wister, and Remington—three Easterners—that a heroic vision of the Wild West emerged to claim the popular imagination as the nineteenth century was about to end; and it was in the East, in comfortable surroundings, that their important work was done. Roosevelt wrote his spirited accounts of roundups and bucking horses at a desk at Sagamore Hill, his twenty-two-room house overlooking Long Island Sound at Oyster Bay. Wister “pegged away” at The Virginian, the first true Western in American literature, while escaping a Philadelphia winter in Charleston, South Carolina. Remington produced the great body of his work in a studio built to order on his hill at New Rochelle, from where he, too, could catch a glimpse of Long Island Sound.
But of the three, Remington had, as Roosevelt admitted, the greatest talent and the greatest influence. He produced much, much more, in print and on canvas, and with greater feeling. However selective or romanticized his West may be, he loved it with a passion. His work, as he said, was always more a matter of heart than head.
His pleasures were simple. He loved horses, dogs, good cigars, snow storms, and moonlit nights; fresh vegetables, pancakes, spareribs, pigs’ knuckles, salt pork and milk gravy, roast beef—nearly everything ever put on his plate but spinach and Virginia ham, which he thought tasted like stove wood. “How that man would eat,” recalled a waitress at an Adirondacks hotel. “My, my, my, how that man would eat!” When he was drinking, which was often, he preferred Scotch or martinis, and apparently he could drink just about anyone under the table. According to his biographers, Peggy and Harold Samuels, Remington could drink a quart of liquor in an evening.
He was a warm friend, by all accounts, a generous host, and a faithful correspondent who enlivened his letters with delightful little drawings, usually as a way of poking fun at himself. His spelling was atrocious. (He spelled whom with an e on the end, humor was humer. He even had trouble getting the names of his best friends right.) Dressed for one of his expeditions into New York, he wore a silk hat, kid gloves, patent-leather shoes, and carried a walking stick with an elk-horn handle. Otherwise he was without pretense and considered the best of company by many of the prominent figures of the day. He counted among his friends General Leonard Wood, dramatist Augustus Thomas, architect Cass Gilbert, the painters Childe Hassam and John Twachtman, and his fellow illustrator Howard Pyle.
He and Eva had no children, nor does he seem ever to have shown any interest in children. His life was his work, his travels, his friends, his lunches in town at the Players Club, an occasional black-tie dinner, and Eva, for whom, it is said, he had an abiding devotion. She was small and dark-haired, with large, wistful eyes. He called her “kid,” because she was three years older. In one letter she refers to him as “my massive husband,” and in old photographs and drawings of the two together, she looks about one-third his volume.
He named their house at New Rochelle Endion, an Algonquin Indian word meaning “the place where I live.” At first he worked in the attic, then downstairs in the library. Later, he built his “Czar-sized” studio, twenty-four by forty feet and twenty feet high, with a stone floor, brick fireplace, and a big skylight such as he had never had before. He filled it with his treasured props—old rifles, revolvers, an 1840s cavalry saber, a pair of snowshoes, riding paraphernalia. There was an immense moose head over the fireplace, a human skull on the mantelpiece, Indian rugs on the floor, Indian pots and baskets scattered about—drums, tomahawks, any number of beaded shirts and moccasins hanging on the walls. It was all just as he wanted, the place where he liked most to receive friends or to be photographed. The double doors at one end were high and wide enough for him to bring a mounted horse in and out.
On a typical day he worked from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon, preferably sitting down in a broad, low-slung rocking chair, so that he could tilt back to appraise his progress without getting up. He worked fast, totally absorbed and whistling some tune over and over until it drove anyone else present to distraction. After three, he went for a ride or a long walk, though as time went on and his weight increased, the walks became less appealing. Dinner finished, if there was company he would hold forth in the studio again, “talking half the night.” One year he went to Europe on assignment with Poultney Bigelow, a magazine writer and editor whom he had known at Yale. Another year, he made a hurried visit to North Africa, again with Bigelow. Summers, he headed home to the North Country, often to Cranberry Lake, his favorite lake in the Adirondacks, where he would sit in the shade of the hotel porch sketching or trying to hit a loon with his rifle. (He said he shot a ton of lead into the lake and never killed a bird.) With his Adirondack hunting companion, Has Rasbeck, he made a canoe trip down the Oswegatchie River, from Cranberry Lake to where the Oswegatchie empties into the St. Lawrence, descending 1,100 feet in about fifty-one miles, an adventure he described in his favorite of all the articles he wrote, “Black Water and Shallows.” “The zest of the whole thing,” he said, “lies in not knowing the difficulties beforehand.”
In 1895, one of the most important years of his working life, his first book was published, a collection of fifteen magazine pieces that he called Pony Tracks. He painted The Fall of the Cowboy and was working now in “mud,” as he said, sculpting, and beside himself with pleasure, despite the difficulties of the unfamiliar medium. He had found the recipe for being “Great,” he notified Wister.
The result was his first bronze, The Bronco Buster, or “Broncho Buster,” as he spelled it. “Is there anything that man can’t do?” an artist friend exclaimed, on hearing of Remington’s latest efforts. Remington was sure his sculpture would make him immortal. “My oils will all get old and watery—that is they will look like stale molasses in time—but I am to endure in bronze…. I am going to rattle down through all the ages.” He had only been fooling away his time until now, he felt certain. “Well—come on, let’s go to Florida,” he urged Wister, “you don’t have to think there. We will fish.”
Yet, for all this, the exhilaration of the work, the pleasures of home, friends, the voluminous, convivial style of the man, he was churning with anger and distress, anguish over his weight and his drinking. He was beset with fears of getting old. He abhorred the times he was living in, the “enfeebling” present, as he called it. The country was going to hell. He seethed with indignation over the ineptitude of the “peak-headed, pigeon-brained men in public life.” Europe was nothing but a “ten-cent sideshow.” Literary critics were “library upholstery.”
In one of his stories in Pony Tracks, he observed that the cowmen of the West were good friends and virulent haters. Certainly he was too, whether by nature or imitation. When his mother was remarried to a man of whom he did not approve (and for no apparent reason, save possibly that he was a mere hotel-keeper), Remington refused ever to speak to her again.
He despised much of mankind—Italians, Jews, “stinking” Russians, “Polacks,” Hungarians—virtually every one of the new Americans pouring into the country. They were the rubbish of Europe, said this most American of American artists. Once he said he liked writing for the magazines because it gave him a chance to use his right, that is, as a boxer does, to hit hardest. In an article called “Chicago Under the Mob,” an account of the Pullman Strike riots of 1894, during which twelve men were killed, he made pointed contrast between the soldiers, his favorite Tent
h Cavalry, all “tall, bronzed athletes,” and the “malodorous crowd of anarchistic foreign trash” they had to face down. Yet this was mild compared to the outbursts in his private correspondence and some of his diary entries, which went beyond any visceral response to a crisis like the Pullman riots, or the kind of offhand slurs and bigotry common in that day.
“Never will be able to sell a picture to a Jew again,” he told Poultney Bigelow; “did sell one once. You can’t glorify a Jew…nasty humans.”
I’ve got some Winchesters [the letter continued] and and when the massacring begins which you speak of, I can get my share of ’em and what’s more I will. Jews—injuns—Chinamen—Italians—Huns, the rubbish of the earth I hate.
The country was flooding with trash; it was no longer the America of “our traditions,” he remarked in another letter to Bigelow who, as has been said, seemed to bring out the worst in him.
He longed for a war, “a real blood letting.” He started harping on it as early as 1891. When revolution broke out in Cuba and it looked as though the United States and Spain might go to war over Cuban freedom, he wrote to Wister as excited as a twelve-year-old. “Say old man there is bound to be a lovely scrap around Havana—a big murdering—sure.” It was his ambition, he said, “to see men do the greatest thing which men are called upon to do.” His one regret was that so many Americans would have to be killed just “to free a lot of d niggers who are better off under the yoke.” The only combat Remington had ever experienced firsthand was on the Yale football field.
On assignment from William Randolph Hearst, owner of the New York Journal, he and Richard Harding Davis, the era’s most glamorous correspondent, sailed for Cuba to cover the uprising waged by the rebels, if the rebels could be found. Remington and Davis reached the island in January 1897. Reportedly, Remington soon cabled Hearst: “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble. There will be no war. I wish to return.” To which Hearst is supposed to have replied: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Hearst later denied the story. In any event, Remington came home empty-handed and sorely disappointed. But when Davis sent a dispatch about an incident in which a refined young Cuban woman, Clemencia Arango, was stripped and searched by Spanish officials on board an American ship in Havana because she was thought to be a courier for the rebels, Remington was called in immediately to do a drawing for the Journal. It ran five columns wide, its dramatic effect expertly handled by Remington, who contrasted the pale skin of the naked young woman with three hovering, heavily shadowed Spaniards who have not had the courtesy even to remove their hats. With only the Davis dispatch to go by, he had understandably assumed the Spanish officials were men. It was one of the few times Remington ever rendered the female form. “I don’t understand them, I can’t paint them,” he once said of women. But the drawing caused a sensation. That edition of the Journal sold nearly a million copies, a record number. Seeing the story and drawing for the first time, Señorita Arango was mortified. The one Spanish official who had searched her was a woman, she said. The atrocity was a fake.
The war with Cuba, when it came, was the most wrenching, disillusioning experience of Remington’s life. It was nothing like what he had expected; it bore no resemblance whatever to the high drama and heroics he had been painting and writing about for so long. There were no horses this time, no grand, silent country for background. Instead, there was smothering heat, mud, rain, yellow fever, dysentery, atrocious food or none at all, the strange jungle closing in all around. He knew he had made a mistake in returning almost from the moment he arrived. “The men were on half-rations, were out of tobacco, and it rained, rained, rained. We were very miserable,” he reported in Harper’s Monthly, writing now with no romantic illusions concerning the glories of war, writing, as it happens, one of the best of all accounts of the brief, ten-week conflict in Cuba.
Nor was he anything but honest about his own behavior under fire: “A ball struck in front of me, and filled my hair and face with sand, some of which I did not get out for days. It jolted my glass [field glasses] and my nerves and I beat a masterly retreat, crawling rapidly backwards, for a reason which I will let you guess.” He saw face wounds for the first time and trenches full of Spanish dead. “Their set teeth shone through their parted lips, and they were horrible.” It was all horrible. “All the broken spirits, bloody bodies, hopeless, helpless suffering which drags its weary length to the rear, are so much more appalling than anything else in the world that words won’t mean anything to one who has not seen it.” Worst was the specter of white bodies lying in the moonlight, with dark spots on them. According to Remington, it took him a year to get over Cuba.
Meantime, he painted Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill, which makes the war look more like a football game than what he had written about, and Missing, in which he returned to “my war,” to give gallantry its due again: a stalwart cavalryman, his arms bound, a rope about his neck, walks stoically to his fate at the hands of his Indian captors, a good soldier to the last.
“I have spread myself out too thin,” Remington told Wister as the new century began. He was overworked, “crazy with work.” He vowed to do no more writing. After 1905, having published more than a hundred magazine articles and two novels, he abandoned writing altogether. If the fellows who sold groceries could take vacations, he mused, why couldn’t he?
He bought a small island, Ingleneuk, in the St. Lawrence River upstream from Ogdensburg, at Chippewa Bay. He and Eva spruced up the house on the property, built a studio and a boathouse and put in a tennis court. Nothing he had ever owned, no place he had ever seen pleased him more. All his life he had needed the outdoors, as a release and a restorative. That had been chief among the attractions of the West. But here he was home in his own part of the world. He could swim, fish, grow vegetables, or, having cautiously eased his immense bulk into place, go paddling off in one of his beautiful cedar canoes built in Canton by his old friend J. Henry Rushton, who is still remembered as the Stradivarius of canoemakers. On moonlit nights he would climb about the rocks along the shore. Some nights were so still and clear he could hear a dog bark over in Canada. It was also an excellent place for him to go on the water wagon, as he said, since Eva allowed no liquor on the island, which in all comprised about five acres.
The best part of it for Remington was that he could work there as nowhere else, “away from publishers’ telephones,” as he said, “trolleys—fuss that makes life down in the big clearing—which I hate.” He was fed up with “progress,” now more than ever. In 1885, when he set off for the West on Shorty Reeson’s horse, electric trolleys were still a thing of the future in Kansas City, telephones few, long-distance calls made possible only that same summer. The years since had seen the advent of the skyscraper, the automobile, the phonograph, and the adding machine, as well as the discovery of the X ray and the cause of yellow fever—advances in science and technology that brought unprecedented change on all sides and seemed to nearly everyone else entirely welcome, even thrilling. This, after all, was the twentieth century. His friend Theodore Roosevelt, now the president of the United States, was building the Panama Canal. Magazine publishing had been revolutionized by the invention of photogravure printing, which for Remington meant his work could now be reproduced in color. He signed an exclusive contract with Collier’s to do six paintings a year, the subjects entirely of his choosing, for $6,000, and he maintained the rights to the paintings. So because of the new technology he could paint as he pleased, knowing his work would reach an audience of a size never before granted an artist.
Still, he claimed no use or affection for modern times. He was sour on all cities. He refused to own an automobile. To any who thought differently, he said: “Go to your microbes, your statistics, your volts, and your bicycles, and leave me the truth of other days.”
His terrible problem was that the adored other days of the West were to be found no more, though he kept trying. “Shall never come west again,�
� he wrote to Eva during one trip. “It is all brick buildings—derby hats and blue overalls—it spoils my early illusions.” On a later expedition, a wilderness camping trip near “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s ranch in Wyoming, he barely survived a blizzard, too much whiskey, and a “d old bed which made pictures all over me.” He couldn’t wait to get home. “Cowboys! There are no cowboys anymore!” he exclaimed.
In the big studio at New Rochelle in 1905, he had begun his most ambitious project yet, an enormous statue of a cowboy on horseback for Fairmont Park in Philadelphia. It was to absorb him for several years. But at Ingleneuk he concentrated strictly on his painting.
A change had come over his painting. The brushstrokes were looser and the light in his pictures was more diffused. He concentrated more on color than on line. He was painting pure landscapes, with none of the “story” quality obligatory in so much of the illustration he had done since the beginning. He was determined to be accepted as an artist, not “just” an illustrator. Mostly, he was painting to please himself, painting the North Country with a zest.
Evening on a Canadian Lake, among the most evocative of all his works, is of two friends in one of his Rushton canoes. Other paintings from these last summers of his life are Pete’s Shanty, Ingleneuk, Chippewa Bay, and several oil sketches titled Pontiac Club, Canada. They were nearly as much a departure from his previous work as was his first venture in sculpture.
His Western scenes, too, had a different quality. More and more of them were nocturnes like Night Halt of the Cavalry. “No episodes must occur in the dark,” he had told Wister. Now he was absorbed in painting moonlight.
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