SOURCE: "A Summary Introduction to Frederick Remington," in Prefaces, Little, Brown and Company, 1961, pp. 175-86.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1961, Dobie describes Remington's life and praises his writing and the power of his visual art.]

Frederic Remington worked for only about twenty-five years. During the half-century that has raced by since he died just past his forty-eighth birthday—still in the Horse Age—his fame as depictor of the Old West has not perceptibly diminished. Yet no adequate life of him has been published. The one considerable piece of writing on his life and work worthy of respect by people entitled to an opinion is the chapter "Remington in Kansas" (pages 194-211, plus a wealth of notes, pages 355-363) in Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850-1900, by the late Robert Taft, of the University of Kansas, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1953. The present essay owes far more to this noble work of vast knowledge, all ordered and evaluated, and of quiet power than to all other sources.

Frederic Remington, Artist of the Old West, by Harold McCracken, 1947, contains a useful bibliography of Remington's writings, books illustrated by him, appearances in periodicals, and his bronzes.

Remington's own writings—all illustrated—are the best sources for facts and understanding about him, but many of them in magazines antedating his death—including the autobiographical sketch in Collier's Weekly (New York, March 18, 1905)—are available in only a few libraries.

The most knowledgeable person alive on Remington is probably Miss Helen L. Card, proprietor of the Latendorf Bookshop (containing more art than books), 714 Madison Avenue, New York. She does not publish enough, but her two pamphlets, privately printed at Woonsocket, Rhode Island, 1946, on A Collector's Remington (I. "Notes on Him; Books Illustrated by Him; and Books Which Gossip About Him." II. "The Story of His Bronzes, with a Complete Descriptive List") contain as much concentrated protein as wheat germ.

Frederic Sackrider Remington was born of parents strong of body and character in Canton, New York, October 1, 1861. His father owned and edited the local newspaper but left it to fight for the Union. Frederic, an only child, early learned to swim, fish, and play Indian in the woods. He hung around the Canton fire station in order to associate with the horses. He drew them and other forms of life on margins of schoolbooks and in albums. From high school he was sent to a military academy, against which he rebelled, at the same time filling a sketchbook with pictures of cavalrymen battling horseback Indians. At home on vacation, he improvised a studio in an uncle's barn. His models were horses—not only carriage horses but several Western ponies belonging to town people.

In the fall of 1878 he went to Yale University, playing football and studying in the Yale Art School. The one other member of his art class was Poultney Bigelow, who became editor of Outing magazine and, in 1886, discovered in some pictures offered him "the real thing, the unspoiled, native genius dealing with Mexican ponies, cowboys, cactus, lariats, and sombreros." The artist turned out to be Remington of Yale.

In 1880, Remington's father died and Frederic inherited a few thousand dollars. He refused to return to Yale but seems not to have known what he wanted until he made a trip to Montana in August of 1881. In 1882, Harper's Weekly (February 25). published a picture entitled "Cowboys of Arizona: Roused by a Scout." According to the credit line it was "drawn by W. A. Rogers from a sketch by Frederic Remington."

Young Frederic had been corresponding with a Yale friend named Robert Camp (B.A., 1882) of Milwaukee who had gone to Butler County, Kansas, where he was trying his hand at sheep raising. By the end of 1882 he owned a section of land and 900 sheep. In March, 1883, Remington joined him and bought a quarter section (160 acres) not far from Camp's for $3,400. It had a three-room frame house, a well, a corral, and two barns on it. Shortly thereafter he bought an adjoining quarter section for $1,250. He bought horses before he bought sheep. The one he rode was a dun mare from Texas that would not have been ridden by any self-respecting range man in Texas—solely because she was a mare: such was the etiquette of the times. But she suited Remington and he named her Terra Cotta. He hired a hand named Bill, who by his talk was an authority on horses. They built a sheep shed. Remington then bought several hundred sheep, which Bill left him to herd until he hired a neighboring boy and thus bought his own freedom. He was still chief cook and bottle washer on his own ranch.

At that time sheep were as respectable as mules or cattle. As Robert Taft shows, up to 1885 no conflict in Kansas existed between sheepmen and cowmen. Remington did not become an artist of sheep, though he made a drawing of his own flock. Inside one of his barns he carved on the wooden wall the picture of a cowboy roping a steer. He was depicting the conventional rather than what he saw. His post office was Peabody, Kansas. Under date of May 11, 1883, he wrote a "legal friend" in Canton, New York: "Papers came all right—are the cheese—man just shot down the street—must go." Robert Taft made full examination of files of Peabody newspapers, interviewed many people, including Robert Camp, Remington's ranching compadre, but found no evidence whatsoever of "man just shot down the street." To tell the truth, Remington carried on the shooting most of his life.

Of his practice in drawing during his Kansas sojourn, Robert Taft wrote:

He spent considerable time with his sketch book. He sketched his ranch, his sheep, his neighbors and their activities. He went to Plum Grove and sketched the preacher who visited the schoolhouse on Sundays and the sketch was then passed around the audience. A neighbor bought a trotting horse and Remington drew the horse. Bob Camp's cook was greatly pleased when Remington drew for him on rough wrapping paper a sketch of a cow defending her calf from the attack of a wolf. Many evenings a crowd would gather at the Remington ranch and Remington would sketch the individuals as they "chinned" with one another or as they boxed, for boxing was a favorite sport of the young ranchers. Few cared to put on the gloves with Remington.

In the spring of 1884 he rode horseback to Dodge City, then the "cowboy capital of the world," and other points in the cow country. Back with his sheep, he learned that Terra Cotta could not outdodge a jackrabbit. Then he learned that a mare "looking old and decrepit," owned by a stranger looking still older and more decrepit, could outrun two horses that his friends and his hired man Bill had spent days and nights extolling. He lost Terra Cotta on a bet. He wrote and illustrated the jackrabbit and horse races for Outing magazine (New York, May, 1887), under title of "Coursing Rabbits on the Plains."

On Christmas Eve at a schoolhouse party, Remington and his gay friends got so prankish that they were ejected. In a justice of the peace court he paid the costs for his bunch. He did not like dipping sheep, or helping with lambing, or shearing, or any other drudgery. The market for wool was away down before his first clip sold. In May, 1884, after sheep-ranching for two months over a year, he sold out to become a professional artist. Robert Taft points out that his brief ranching experience was essentially contemporaneous with similarly brief ranching experiences of Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, and Emerson Hough. He came to illustrate both Wister and Roosevelt and to know them well. Hough, in sarcasm, later called Buffalo Bill, Ned Buntline, and Frederic Remington "the tripartite" creators of the American West. The Kansas year set him on his course.

In October, 1884, Remington married the girl who had been waiting for him—Eva Caten, of Gloversville, New York, not far from his own home town. They went to Kansas City to live, but Remington's pictures were not finding a buyer and before long Eva returned to the bounteous table of her people, while Frederic rode horseback for Arizona and the Apaches. When he got to New York the next year he found, as has been told, a market in Outing, edited by his Yale friend Poultney Bigelow. That same year he broke into Harper's Weekly. Eva now joined him in New York and thenceforth they lived together, childless, in reasonable harmony so far as the world knows.

By 1888 he was illustrating Roosevelt's Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail and other books and was moving up into the Century and other superior magazines. He did a great deal of writing and illustrating for Harper's Monthly, beginning in 1889, but did not hit the big pay that Collier's provided until 1898. His nonfiction books are made up mostly of materials first used in magazines.

For years after his pictures—with writings—came into demand, Remington alternated pretty much between trips westward for copy, ideas, knowledge, all sorts of notes and sketches and work in his studio. The contents of Pony Tracks, both writing and pictures, illustrate the kind of experiences to the West and South that Remington transmuted into what makes him remembered. In December, 1932, at the Piedra Blanca hacienda, in northern Coahuila, Mexico, I encountered an old, stoveup American cowhand who had ridden with Remington across unfenced ranges of that country. He said that nobody had to wait for the stout man, but that he had to have an extra-stout horse under him. A few years later I came to know Montague Stevens, of New Mexico, with whom Remington went on a grizzly hunt that he put into Harper's Monthly and later into Pony Tracks. General Nelson Miles was on that hunt also, and in his book Meet Mr. Grizzly—excellent on hounds, on sense of smell, and on the Trinity College, Cambridge—author Montague Stevens pays a lot more attention to the general than to the artist. The artist in his account pays lively attention to the bear, to hounds and cow horses, and to "a big Texan" who'd been shot by a forty-five, who cooked for the camp and could read sign.

About 1892, Remington bought a house in New Rochelle, not far out of New York City, and established a studio there. In that year, also, he illustrated Parkman's The Oregon Trail—one of his outstanding achievements. In 1898 he bought Ingleneuk, a five-acre island in the St. Lawrence River, enlarged the house on it, and built a studio. For another decade, however, New Rochelle was to remain home for the Remingtons.

He could toil terribly, habitually rising at six, breakfasting at seven (half a dozen chops "and other knick knacks" as Mr. Pickwick would say), then working in the studio until midafternoon, often returning in the evening. For a long time he struggled to keep his weight down. At sixteen he described himself as 5 feet 8 inches high, weighing 180 pounds. He was mighty proud of the way he rode up with General Nelson Miles and other seasoned soldiers during their chasing around after Sioux in the year 1890. At that time Remington weighed 215 pounds. In 1894, age thirty-three, he recorded: "Without a drink in three weeks. Did 15 miles a day on foot and am down to 210 pounds." In 1897, age thirty-six, he wrote a friend: "Have been catching trout, killing deer—feel bully—absolutely on the water wagon, but it don't agree with me. I am at 240 pounds and nothing can stop me but an incurable disease." He had only eleven years left before the incurable disease would strike him down. Long before the end he had grown too fleshy to mount a horse or do much walking, but not to keep on drawing and painting and writing.

In 1894 the sculptor Ruckstull set up a tent on a vacant lot in New Rochelle, and there other art people of the community watched him model an equestrian statue for some military hero, whose name is unimportant, to be erected in front of the state capitol of Pennsylvania. Remington was eager to learn the sculptor's technique, and Ruckstull seems to have been just as eager to teach him. Augustus Thomas, the playwright whose Arizona had been proposed by Remington, noticed that Remington had "the sculptor's angle of vision" and encouraged him to strike out in that field. Here I'm following Helen Card. In 1895, Remington achieved his first and perhaps his best statue, "The Bronco Buster," which is only two feet high. In years that followed he achieved twenty-three other bronzes. Numerous sculptors have made numerous cowboys and range horses but "The Bronco Buster" was the first in the field. To quote Helen Card again, "Subject was everything to Remington, and with him techniques and theories were properly only means to help him tell his story. . . . Rodin's remark was that if you are unconscious of the technique, but are moved to the soul [by the result] then you may be quite certain that the technique is all there."

In May 1909 the Remingtons moved to an expensive house and studio on a plot of ground they had bought near Ridgefield, Connecticut. Remington had burned many pictures with which he was dissatisfied. Although he could not ride horseback in the West any more, he was settling down to put on canvas things that wanted to come out of himself. He had said more than once that he wanted his epitaph to be: HE KNEW THE HORSE. On Christmas Day of that year (1909) he was very ill. The next day he died, forty-eight years, two months, and twenty-six days old.

One cannot be absolute on the numbers, but according to one statement, Remington had completed more than 2,700 paintings and drawings, had illustrated 142 books, and had furnished illustrations for 41 different magazines. He is not being judged now by quantity, and will not be judged by quantity. He knew the horse, all right, and he knew the West—but more as a reporter than as a part of it. At times he was a superb reporter. I would say that in "The Sioux Outbreak in South Dakota," a chapter in Pony Tracks, he is a better reporter on cavalrymen than sentimental and loved Ernie Pyle was on American soldiers in World War II.

He knew cavalry horses and cavalrymen better than he knew cows, cow horses, and cowboys. On board a battleship off the Cuban coast during the Spanish-American War, he wrote in an article for Harper's Weekly: "I want to hear a shave-tail bawl; I want to get some dust in my throat, kick dewy grass, see a sentry in the moonlight, and talk the language of my tribe."

As well as he pictured and wrote about "my tribe," if what he said in combined mediums be compared with Captain John G. Bourke's On the Border with Crook, Remington diminishes in amplitude, in richness of knowledge, in ease and familiarity with land, frontiersmen, soldiers, Indians, and in nobility of outlook.

In the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Rembrandt has six pages and Remington has one-sixth of one page. I guess the proportions are about right. Evaluations of Remington will not be right unless the evaluers keep perspective and proportion. Now and then a writer's best, an artist's best—for some imaginers at least—is something untypical, though not unrepresentative—something that has smouldered long in him and is near to him but would hardly be wanted by his rut-following editors, publishers, and public. "The Fight for the Waterhole" is near the climax of Remington's paintings of violence. Placed next to it in a little-known album of reproductions is a picture entitled "A Prayer to the Gray Wolf." It shows an Indian standing with one foot on the head of a dead buffalo partly consumed by wolves while a second Indian stands out on the bleak prairie, maybe ten steps away, his shortened shadow on the ground, arms and hands spread downward, his whole body in an attitude of supplication. He is brother to a wolf trotting around rather near while two of his mates stand away out yonder beyond rifle range. The quietness of everything, the at-oneness between man and beasts (both the quick and the dead) and the earth (including sparse clumps of grass)—this is not the Remington many times iterating "man-just-shot-down-the-street."

It is not necessary to run down good Bourbon in order to enjoy good Scotch, and I trust I am not doing that when I say that Remington toiled too furiously trying to satisfy the demand for naked action to linger and let things soak into him. He knew more than he understood. In this respect he is not the equal of Charles M. Russell, although he may have had some advantage in craftsmanship. I cannot say. As a reporter through eye and ear, through drawing, painting, and writing, Remington habitually got and gave the right words, but less frequently the right tune. Sometimes even his soldiers seem to me clever imitations of Kipling's.

In ripeness, the right tempo is always present. I think of two drawings by Charlie Russell. One of them is "The Trail Boss." He is sidling over in the saddle, resting his knees, while his horse rests on three feet. The two repose on a slight elevation of ground, the herd moseying by, and you may be sure the boss is not looking at the steers in general but in particular. He knows every one in that long, strung-out herd, the drag so far behind that only the dust it raises can be seen. No honest trail boss ever wanted any stampede; but if one should occur in the middle of the night, this boss and the bony cow horse would leap into action—in order to restore quiet.

In my mind's eye I often recall a black-and-white vignette of Russell's, one among forty illustrations he did for The Virginian. A cowboy on herd, the fat steers lazily grazing, is prone, asleep, his head in the shade of his horse, the only shade there is. The horse is not used to a man stretched out on the ground under him and is not contented. Russell made "dead man's prices" painting action for calendars and for rich purchasers of Western culture. He also was a sculptor. No bronze he made is more permeated with the beautiful, the spiritual, and with understanding of Indian nature than one called "Secrets of the Night." It is of a medicine man, cunning and mysterious, with an owl, wings spread, beak at the listener's ear.

Well, Frederic Remington reported aright much that nobody can ever again see or hear. If his illustrations for Longfellow's Hiawatha are made on somewhat the same principle that an interior decorator chooses pictures, it is to be remembered that he understood the crouch of a panther, the howl of the coyote, and the gesture of the medicine man. If few secrets of the invisible passed into him, he translated the drama of the visible into an astounding variety of pictures that do not fade in interest or power.