SOURCE: "Frederick Remington: The Artist as Local Colorist," in South Dakota Review, Vol. 12, No. 4, Winter, 1974-75, pp. 76-88.

[In the following essay, Erisman considers Remington's written works, seeing them primarily as examples of local color fiction that occasionally supersede this designation. ]

Frederic Remington (1861-1909), American painter and sculptor, needs no introduction; Frederic Remington, American author, is virtually unknown. No one having the sketchiest acquaintance with the American West can fail to recognize either a Remington bronze or a Remington oil. "The Bronco Buster," for example, or "Coming Through the Rye," with its four carousing cowboys, is as familiar as "The Fight for the Waterhole." "Dash for the Timber," or "A Cavalryman's Breakfast on the Plains." All are commonplaces. By contrast, the very titles of Remington's books are unfamiliar, and the number of persons who can claim a first-hand acquaintance with Sundown Leflare (1899),John Ermine of the Yellowstone (1902), or The Way of an Indian (1906) is infinitesimal.

That Remington's writings, fictional and non-fictional, are largely overshadowed by his paintings and sculptures is not surprising, but unfortunate. It is unfortunate because his fiction, and, to a lesser extent, his journalism. complements his pictorial vision of the West. In his writings, as in his pictorial works, Remington portrays the region as seen through the eyes of a dedicated local colorist. If his writings are largely free from the exploitation of sentimentality and the picturesque that blights the works of a Bret Harte, they nevertheless contain other, essential qualities of local color writing: a sincere regard for the typical inhabitants of an area, an understanding of the significance of the past and the present, and an awareness thatlife in a particular time and place has a uniqueness distinguishing it from the national life of which it is a part.

Of the several traits that identify local color in literature, the most obvious is the author's consistent attention to typical character types. Bret Harte makes good use of the technique in his stories of the mining camps, but it remains for Hamlin Garland to give it its most extended theoretical statement. In Crumbling idols (1894), he calls for a truly localized literature, one dealing with "the heroism of labor, the comradeship of man,—a drama of average types of character, infinitely varied, but always characteristic." This literature, he goes on to say, will use the speech as well as the lives of the ordinary populace: "We propose to use the speech of living men and women. We are to use actual speech as we hear it and to record its changes. We are to treat of the town and city as well as of the farm, each in its place and through the medium of characteristic speech."¹ Local color writing, for Garland and others, is a literature of the average person.²

Remington's emphasis upon western types in his artistic works was recognized early. Owen Wister, introducing Done In The Open (1902), a book-length collection of his pictures, writes: "As the historian Green wrote what he called a history of the English people, so Remington is drawing his contemporary history of the most picturesque of the American people. . . . No artist until Remington has undertaken to draw so clearly the history of the people."³ This opinion is echoed by Royal Cortissoz, the art critic, in American Artists (1923). Referring to Remington as a "painter of life", Cortissoz goes on to remark: "It is impossible to reflect upon his art without thinking of the merely human element that went to its making, the close contacts with men and with the soil in a part of our country where indeed the atmosphere of the studio is simply unthinkable. . . . His men and his horses are emphatically of the practical, modern world, a world of rough living, frank speech, and sincere action."⁴ The point seems clear. Remington, in his paintings, chooses for subjects the basic types of the region that he is striving to depict.

The same characters who move through Remington's paintings appear in his writings. He concentrates, not surprisingly, upon the obvious—the Indian, as in "The Story of the Dry Leaves" (1899); the cowboy, as in "In the Sierra Madre with the Punchers" (1894); or the soldier, as in John Ermine of the Yellowstone. Equally typical, but perhaps less obvious, are those characters who indirectly reflect the impact of the white man upon the West—bartenders, gamblers, and half-breeds. His novel-length collection of short tales, Sundown Leflare, gives convenient access to some of these. Its hero, Laflare, is himself a half-breed—"cross-bred," Remington says, "red and white, so he never got mentally in sympathy with either strain of his progenitors. He knew about half as much concerning Indians as they did themselves, while his knowledge of white men was in the same proportion." Leflare, in turn, goes on to describe the professional gambler who eventually strips him of his money: "All time dar weare a leetle white man what was hang roun' de log house un shuffle de card. He know how shuffle dose card, I tell you. He was all time fool wid de card. He wear de store clothes, un he was not help us bran' de horse-ban', 'cause he sais, 'Dam de pony!'"⁵ Remington is clearly working along the lines set down by Garland; not only does he include a variety of character types, but he attempts to capture the flavor of their idiom as well.

Additional evidence of Remington's desire to present typical characters appears in his delineation of women. His neglect of women in his painting is well-known;⁶ in his writings, however, women abound, in a gallery of carefully drawn females spanning the full range from Indian squaws, as in The Way of an Indian, to officers' ladies and their frigidly Easternized daughters, as in John Ermine of the Yellowstone. He does not, to be sure, deal explicitly with saloon girls, those professionally friendly fixtures of the frontier, but he alludes to them often enough to establish their presence. No one would be surprised had Remington confined himself to writing about the military, Indians, or cowboys; these are the persons with whom he was most closely associated during his sojourns in the West. That he goes beyond these, however, to include a wide variety of character types, suggests that he, like the local colorists, is attempting to give a full-scale, comprehensive picture of Western life. He looks to the typical, at every level and in every setting.

A second characteristic of local color writing, somewhat less obvious than a concentration upon typical characters, is the author's tendency to deal with times gone by. This tendency, combined with the general geographic remoteness of the area being described, creates an aura of romantic nostalgia, from which the irretrievable past emerges as somehow better, or more noble, than the inescapable present.⁷ Thus, for example, Harte's tales of the gold-mining camps of the 1850s or Sarah Orne Jewett's accounts of the fading New England fishing villages of the 1880s benefit from the remoteness of their subjects in space and time.

Admirers of Remington's art works recognized quite early that he, too, was memorializing a vanishing past. Francis Parkman, for example, commenting upon Remington's illustrations for the 1892 edition of The Oregon Trail, writes: "The Wild West is tamed and its savage charms have withered. If this book can help to keep their memory alive, it will have done its part. It has found a powerful helper in the pencil of Mr. Remington, whose pictures are as full of truth as of spirit, for they are the work of one who knew the prairies and the mountains before irresistible commonplace had subdued them."⁸ It is apparent to the historian that Remington's pictures document the passing of the West.

Equally apparent is Remington's own consciousness of the West's demise and his role in documenting it. In 1900, writing to Owen Wister about the projected Done In The Open, he remarks: "I am as you know working on a big picture book—of the West and I want you to write a preface. I want a lala too no d newspaper puff . . . but telling the d public that this is the real old thing—step up and buy a copy—last chance—ain't going to be any more West etc."⁹ More restrained but no less explicit is his public statement of 1905, published in an issue of Collier's devoted to his work:

I knew [as early as 1881] the railroad was coming—I saw men already swarming into the land. I knew the derby hat, the smoking chimneys, the cordbinder, and the thirty-day note were upon us in a resistless surge. I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever, and the more I considered the subject the bigger the Forever loomed. .. . I saw the living, breathing end of three American centuries of smoke and dust and sweat, and I now see quite another thing where it all took place, but it does not appeal to me.¹⁰

Remington makes his goal quite clear. He intends, as G. Edward White elsewhere notes, to raise the realities of the American West to "the level of history and romance.""

Since Remington, the artist, is devoted to invoking the spirit of the West's passing, it is not expected to find Remington, the author, equally devoted to the task. In his writings, his fond regard for times past is as explicit as his skepticism what his own time considers progress. Writing in Crooked Trails (1898) of Big-Foot Wallace, the Texas adventurer, for example, he says: "Wallace was a professional hunter, who fought Indians and hated 'greasers'; he belongs to the past, and has been 'outspanned' under a civilization in which he has no place." Later in the book he presents the military in the same light. Referring to Sergeant Carter Johnson of the Third Cavalry, he remarks: "He was thumped and bucked and pounded into what was in the seventies considered a proper frontier soldier, for in those days the nursery idea had not been lugged into the army."¹² Both passages carry the same message: life was livelier and sturdier in the past.

The theme reappears in Remington's stories of Sundown Leflare, the half-breed. Here, though, it is less blatant, tempered by the author's developing sense of an encroaching technology and its effect upon traditional ways. In speaking of his standing in the Indian community, Leflare says: "I was all same Enjun—fringe, bead, long hair—but I was wear de hat. I was hab' de bes' pony een de country, un I was hab de firs' breech-loadair een de country. Ah, I was reech!" Though very much a part of the Indian world, he has already adopted the white man's hat, and measures his wealth with the white man's armament. The last story of the collection, which deals explicitly with the conflict of cultures, makes even clearer the degree of his contamination by progress. Subtle cultural tensions permeate the story, between Leflare and the narrator and the medicine man and the priest. Their most memorable expression, however, comes in Leflare's own actions—although a firm believer in the power of his medicine bag to strengthen his scouting ability, he nonetheless gains a tactical edge over his opponents with a pair of government-issue binoculars."

Consistently though he laments the passing of the West and its way in his writings, Remington makes his most extended and sustained statement of the theme in his novel, John Ermine of the Yellowstone. The novel's East-meets-West theme is obvious throughout, as Ermine, the Indian-reared white scout, meets and falls in love with Katherine Searles, the product of an Eastern finishing school. As he unfolds the story of Ermine's inexorable downfall, Remington over and over refers to the scout's ties with the past. His ancestry, for example, predates American civilization: "Any white man could sec at a glance that White Weasel was evolved from a race which, however remote from him, got its yellow hair, fair skin, and blue eyes amid the fjords, forests, rocks, and ice-floes of the north of Europe." Descendant of an ancient people though he may be, Ermine is still an integral part of the Western scene. He belongs, but must die; in contrast, the Katherine Searleses, though strangers to the West, will prevail. Remington speaks to this as he describes Ermine and a fellow scout on the trail: "These two figures, crawling, sliding, turning, and twisting through the sunlight on the rugged mountains, were grotesque but harmonious. America will never produce their like again. Her wheels will turn and her chimneys smoke, and the things she makes will be carried round the world in ships, but she never can make two figures which will bear even a remote resemblance to Wolf-Voice and John Ermine. The wheels and chimneys and the white men have crowded them off the earth."¹⁴ There is no longer room for Western man.

Working well within the traditions of local color writing, Remington skillfully evokes romantic nostalgia in describing the West of an earlier day. He is not, however, satisfied with a sentimental lament for the end of a way of life. Instead, he goes on, stressing (as in the passage from John Ermine just cited) that the way of life that has ended is one organically suited to the time and place. It is natural. The way of life that replaces it is artificial, and will work to the detriment of human worth. His sense of the organic Tightness of things, growing perhaps from his painter's vision, makes him more than just another local colorist.

Of the several qualities that define local color writing, the most significant is the writer's concern with giving a detailed presentation of the locale of the story, and a corresponding concern with the ways in which this locale can influence the actions of its inhabitants.¹⁵ These concerns give local color writing its characteristic flavor; they also give it its importance. Locale, obviously, can be described in a variety of ways: "place (including climate, natural resources, and topography); time; cultural tradition; national, racial, or religious inheritance; mode of self-support; and remoteness, whether spatial or cultural, from other communities."¹⁶ As the local colorist suggests to his readers the particular combinations of these elements to be found in a specific place, he also suggests what makes that place unique.

Accompanying this broadly based sense of local uniqueness is an awareness that the location of an event affects—and at times almost determines—the outcome of that event. The characters in a local color work, Donald A. Dike points out, "are deeply rooted in their environment, and their behavior depends on what it has made of them."¹⁷ These characters, in short, and the events in which they take part, are molded by the circumstances in which they live; the resources available to them shape the ways in which they respond to life.

Well developed though his sense of place is, Remington's artistic goal is not so much the accurate portrayal of a specific site as the portrayal of a specific region—the "West". From his earliest drawings, as Ben M. Vorpahl remarks, he strives to capture the peculiar sense of the West, a spaciousness of landscape and spirit that emerges in his letters as an inarticulate "it".¹⁸ As his art matures, his sense of place follows suit, until, as Royal Cortissoz writes, "Under a burning sun he [works] out an impression of his own. Baked dusty plains lead in his pictures to bare, flat-topped hills, shading from yellow into violet beneath cloudless skies which hold no soft tints of pearl or rose, but are fiercely blue when they do not vibrate into tones of green."¹⁹ Impressionism it may be, but it is also a statement of the physical environment of the American West, revealing Remington's powerful response to setting.

A similar response appears in his writings, as he puts into words much the same vision that he expresses in oils. He gives no real specifics, concentrating instead upon the West's total impact. His remarks upon the desert sun are typical: "The sun is no detail out in the arid country. It does more things than blister your nose. It is the despair of the painter as it colors the minarets of the Bad Lands which abound around Adobe, and it dries up the company gardens if they don't watch the acequias mighty sharp."²⁰ More extended are his remarks in Sundown Leflare. Here he comments upon the geographical contrariness of the West, with its blending of monotony and variety. "The high plains," he begins, "do things in such a set way, so far as weather is concerned, and it is a day's march before you change views. I began to long for a few rocks .. . a pool of water with some reflections—in short, anything but the horizontal monotony of our surroundings." Monotony soon gives way to diversity, though, in the vastness of the West and the shifting vistas that it contains: "If one has never seen [the Western landscape], words will hardly tell him how it stretches away, red, yellow, blue, in a prismatic way, shaded by cloud forms and ending among them—a sort of topographical map. I can think of nothing else, except that it is an unreal thing to look at."²¹ This passage, as much as any in Remington's works, captures the essence of his reaction to the West. It is, for him, an area: vast, beautiful, and elemental. That is may also be Arizona, Montana, or the Dakotas is irrelevant. It is simply the West, and that is enough.

Concerned though he is with communicating the physical nature of the West, Remington tries also to communicate the far-reaching effects of the West upon all who live there. He unhesitatingly accepts the realities of Western life, recognizing that it is a continual struggle against superior forces—a recognition that appears in his paintings from the very beginning.²² The forces can be literal, as in "The Fight For the Water Hole," with its five plainsmen surrounded by Indians, or figurative, as in "The Fall of the Cowboy," depicting the inexorable segmenting of the range by barbed wire. Whatever form they take, though, they are formidable, and leave their mark upon the individuals who encounter them.

Remington's grasp of Western reality contributed to the early acceptance of his work. His thorough delineation of the effects of range life upon the cowboy, for example, was instrumental in his receiving a major commission from Outing Magazine in 1886. When presented with a portfolio of drawings, the Outing editor, Poultney Bigelow, responded immediately: "No stage heroes these; no careful pomaded hair and neatly tied cravats; these were the men of the real rodeo, parched in alkali dust, blinking out from barely opened eyes under the furious rays of the Arizona sun. I had been there and my innermost corpuscle vibrated at the truth before me."²³ The same quality, more subtly stated, appears in Remington's 1893 illustrations for Owen Wister's "Balaam and Pedro". Here, in a single drawing, he combines the spaciousness of the West with the realities of human existence.²⁴

Although evident in his paintings, Remington's sense of the organicism of Western life becomes even more evident in his writings. Perhaps because he is working in a different medium, he makes many explicit references to the effects of locale in his writings, until, as in his paintings, he conveys the totality of Western experience. "It is possible," G. Edward White writes, "to see emerging . . . a sense on Remington's part that the climatological and topographical diversity of his West did not preclude its having an environmental sameness. The characters and settings vary, but for Remington the process through which an individual confronts the world about him has a fundamental similarity. It is this process of confrontation, the result of an interaction between a certain kind of environment and, for all his sizes and shapes, a certain kind of individual, which Remington came to see as uniquely Western."²⁵ He sees, in short, that place works directly upon all living things, producing forms and patterns of life peculiar to the region.

The interaction of life and environment permeates Remington's writings. As early in 1889, in "Horses of the Plains," he describes the Western bronco as a unique product of the region:

He graces the Western landscape, not because he reminds us of the equine ideal, but because he comes of the soil, and has borne the heat and burden and the vicissitudes of all that pale of romance which will cling about the Western frontier. As we see him hitched to the plow or the wagon he seems a living protest against utilitarianism; but, unlike his red master, he will not go. He has borne the Moor, the Spanish conqueror, the red Indian, the mountain-man, and the vaquero through all the glories of their careers; but they will soon be gone, with all their heritage of gallant deeds.²⁶

The bronco is for Remington the emblem of a vanished era because he "comes of the soil," having evolved to accommodate a specific set of regional requirements.

The effects of place take other forms, as well. In Crooked Trails, Remington writes in the persona of Joshua Goodenough, scout with Rogers' Rangers during the French and Indian War, remarking in passing on the general adaptations of life brought about by the conditions of the North Woods.²⁷ In Pony Tracks (1895), he comments upon the development of the Western saddle, which he sees as caused by the exigencies of Western life: "For a smooth road and a trotting horse, the European riding-master was right [about the English saddle]; but when you put a man in the dust or smoke, over the rocks and cut banks, on the 'bucking' horse, or where he must handle his weapons or his vieta, he must have a seat on his mount as tight as a stamp on an envelope, and not go washing around like a shot in a bottle."²⁸ Wherever man lives, the place affects his institutions, great and small.

Just as Remington uses his novel, John Ermine, to convey his most explicit statement of the West's passing, so, too, he uses it to speak most explicitly of the way in which location molds life. Ermine, as has been pointed out, is a white man of Scandinavian descent, who is reared from childhood by a tribe of Crow Indians. His genetic inheritance is European. His cultural inheritance, however, is Indian. When the crisis of the story is upon him, precipitated by his proposal of marriage to Katherine Searles, he reverts, not to genetic type, but to cultural type. His civilization vanishes, and he becomes an Indian: "Good-by, good-by, white men," he says, "and good-by, white woman; the frost is in your hearts, and your blood runs like the melting snow from the hills. When you smile, you only skin your fangs; and when you laugh, your eyes do not laugh with you." Ermine's reversion, implied by the language of this passage, Remington confirms as the book draws to an end: "All the patient training of Crooked Bear [Ermine's white mentor], all the humanizing influence of white association, all softening moods of the pensive face in [Katherine's] photograph, were blown from the fugitive as though carried on a wind; he was a shellfish-eating cave-dweller, with a Springfield, a knife, and a revolver. He had ceased to think in English, and muttered to himself in Absaroke."²⁹ The Indian traits, ingrained within him by his upbringing and reinforced by the life he has led in the West, prove stronger than his racial ties. The Indian way of life, influenced and molded at every turning by the imperious demands of the Western environment, proves too strong for Ermine. His white skin cannot save him. He is an Indian, a product of the West, and he dies because of it.

Frederic Remington, writing of the landscape of the West as he painted it, makes clear its physical uniqueness, and the effects of this uniqueness upon life. Recognizing, as Lewis Mumford has said, that "the place does not determine human institutions; but it sets certain conditions," he goes on to explore the ways in which those conditions affect the life that develops under them.³⁰ The effect, whether in something so comparatively trivial as the style of a saddle or in something so profound as a human life, is inescapable.

Throughout Remington's writings, one finds widespread evidence of the techniques of the local colorists. Remington, like the local color writers, attempts to present the typical characters of a specific area; he emphasizes, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly, his sense of the passing of a way of life; and he leaves no doubt of his recognition that the environmental characteristics of a given locale influence the life lived in that locale. Unlike the local colorists, however, he frequently goes beyond the bare-bones definition of local color writing to give an intense statement of his sense of time and place. In this may lie his true literary achievement.

Bret Harte, like Remington an Easterner who went West as a young man, knew well the importance of local materials to the American writer. In 1899, looking back over his own career, Harte observes that the seeds of the American literature of the future reside in the short works of the present, those works that treat "characteristic American life, with absolute knowledge of its peculiarities and sympathy with its methods; with no fastidious ignoring of its habitual expression, or the inchoate poetry that may be found even hidden in its slang; with no moral determination except that which may be the legitimate outcome of the story itself; with no more elimination than may be necessary of the artistic conception, and never from the fear of the 'fetish' of conventionalism."" Harte states here the ideal. He recognizes that he has fallen short of it in his own work, but, knowing the goal for which he was striving, he sets it down for others to achieve.

Within his limits, geographic and artistic, Remington comes close to Harte's ideal, just as he also approximates Hamlin Garland's theories of local color. Determining early in his career to concentrate upon a few essential subjects—the Indian, the military, the West—he goes on to describe them with a thorough, often arrogant knowledge for their details. (His impatience with apparent inaccuracies in the works of others is legend.³²) He attempts to capture the rhythms and inflections of Western speech, whether in the broken English of Sundown Leflare or in the only slightly tidied-up vernacular of the military encampment. He presents, as in his paintings, a selective picture of the American West, eliminating extraneous elements, and he concerns himself less with the telling of a conventionalized story than with the creation of a sense of place and character.

In his lifetime, Remington was widely acclaimed as an innovator in the realm of pictorial art. "He is," an editorial in The Craftsman announced in 1901, "one of the few men in this country who has created new conditions in our art; and must be reckoned with as one of the revolutionary figures in our art history."³³ Even as he was creating new conditions for American art, however, he was quietly advancing the cause of American literature. He will undoubtedly be remembered as a painter and sculptor; this is as it should be, for his paintings and bronzes are major achievements. He also deserves, however, to be recognized as a significant, although minor, author. By bringing the life of the American West in vivid and accurate detail to the readers of the genteel East, he contributes to the nineteenth century's growing sense of national unity;³⁴ by bringing to well-established local color writing the artist's vision, he contributes color and authenticity to the further development of the genre, moving it still further toward truly regional writing. His artistic achievements are major; but his literary achievements are far from negligible.

NOTES

¹ Hamlin Garland, Crumbling Idols, ed. Jane Johnson (1894; rpt. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard, 1960), pp. 25, 132.

² Donald A. Dike, "Notes on Local Color and Its Relation to Realism," College English, 14 (November, 1952), 84.

³ Owen Wister, "Introduction," in Frederic Remington, Done In The Open (New York: P. F. Collier & Sons, 1903), unpaged.

⁴ Royal Cortissoz, American Artists (1923; rpt. Freeport, N. Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), pp. 235, 229, 237.

⁵ Frederic Remington, "The Great Medicine-Horse," Sundown Leflare (New York: Harper & Bros., 1899), p. 3; "Sundown Leflare's Money," Sundown Leflare, p. 79.

⁶ Harold McCracken, Frederic Remington: Artist of the Old West (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1947), pp. 80-81.

⁷ Claude M. Simpson, "Introduction," The Local Colorists: American Short Stories, 1857-1900, (New York: Harper & Bros., 1960), p. 6.

⁸ Francis Parkman, "Preface to the Edition of 1892," The Oregon Trail (1892; rpt. New York: The Modern Library, 1949), p. xvi.

⁹ Frederic Remington to Owen Wister, May, 1900, in Ben Merchant Vorpahl, My Dear Wister—The Frederic Remington—Owen Wister Letters (Palo Alto, Calif.: American West Publishing Co., 1972), p. 287.

¹⁰ Frederic Remington, "A Few Words from Mr. Remington," Collier's, 34 (18 March 1905), 16.

¹¹ G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 121.

¹² Frederic Remington, "How the Law Got Into the Chaparral," Crooked Trails (1898; rpt. Freeport. N. Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), p. 13; "A Sergeant of the Orphan Troop," Crooked Trails, p. 34.

¹³ Remington, "Sundown Leflare's Warm Spot." Sundown Leflare, p. 56; "Sundown's Higher Self." Sundown Leflare, pp. 113-115.

¹⁴ Frederic Remington, John Ermine of the Yellowstone (1902; rpt. Ridaewood, N. J.: The Gregg Press. 1968). pp. 22, 87-88.

¹⁵ Simpson, pp. 12-13.

¹⁶ Dike, p. 82.

¹⁷ Dike, p. 83.

¹⁸ Vorpahl, p. 118.

¹⁹ Cortissoz, p. 239.

²⁰ Remington, "The Essentials at Fort Adobe," Crooked Trails pp. 68-69.

²¹ Remington, "Sundown Leflare's Warm Spot," Sundown Leflare, p. 50; "Sundown's Higher Self," Sundown Leflare, pp. 107-108.

²² Judith Alter, "Frederic Remington's Major Novel: John Ermine," Southwestern American Literature, 2 (Spring, 1972), 44.

²³ Poultney Bigelow, quoted in McCracken, pp. 50-52.

²⁴ Vorpahl, p. 33.

²⁵ White, p. 104.

²⁶ Frederic Remington, "Horses of the Plains," Century Magazine, 37 (January, 1899), 343.

²⁷ Remington, "Joshua Goodenough's Old Letter," Crooked Trails, pp. 92-115, passim.

²⁸ Frederic Remington, "Chasing a Major-General," Pony Tracks (1895; rpt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), p. 11.

²⁹ Remington, John Ermine, pp. 244-245, 268-269.

³⁰ Lewis Mumford, "Regionalism and Irregionalism," Sociological Review, 19 (October, 1927), 285.

³¹ Bret Harte, "The Rise of the 'Short Story,'" Cornhill Magazine, N. S. 7 (July, 1899), 8.

³² Robert Taft, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850-1900 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), pp. 228-230.

³³ Quoted in McCracken, p. 118.

³⁴ Simpson, pp. 5-7.