Title: Drawings
Author: Remington, Frederic
Language: English
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                               DRAWINGS

                                  BY

                          FREDERIC REMINGTON

                            [Illustration]

                        NEW YORK: R. H. RUSSELL

                       LONDON: LAWRENCE & BULLEN

                              MDCCCXCVII

              Copyright, 1897, by Robert Howard Russell.

                     Printed in the United States.



                        Concerning the Contents

SOME time ago I was spending a driven but happy forenoon among those
shops where guns, and fishing tackle, and tents, and all the various
necessities of a Western holiday are found. My time was crowded, and
against the column of items on my list only a few checks had been made,
when I reached “Groceries.” Now, unless you have spent such forenoons
and holidays yourself, the visit among the guns and fishing tackle may
seem to raise questions of greater moment than any which could occur in
the grocery shop. But this is not so. A man soon learns what weapons he
prefers, and enters with his mind settled in advance; whereas, when it
comes to evaporated vegetables, condensed soups, and pellets that can
expand into a meal, you pause over each novelty, and with divided
purpose wretchedly choose and unchoose until you are scarce more manlike
than a woman. At least, such is my case; and having no minutes to
squander this forenoon, I had pencilled my supplies to avoid discussion
and temptation. Even while I was directing how I wished the parcels
tied, mentioning that they were to be much jolted on the backs of
horses, the shopman looked suddenly alert, and said this sounded like a
camping trip. Yes, I told him in my elation, I was bound for the head
waters of Wind River in Wyoming. Instantly the merchant fell from him;
every trace of groceries left his expression; his eye beamed with
eagerness, and he asked in the voice of one who gives the countersign,
“Have you ever been to Arizona?” and hearing that I had, “I served there
under Crook!” he exclaimed. Then names of the North and the South came
to his lips--San Carlos, San Simon, the Gila, the Chiricahuas, the Tonto
Basin, the forks of the Owyhee, Boise, Bidwell, Harney--he spoke of many
familiar to me; and next we were hard at it, this old soldier and
myself, exchanging enthusiasms, gossiping in comradeship among the dried
prunes. Thus I wasted minutes that I could not spare, yet lost nothing
by it; my parcels were put up right. And when this errand was finished,
he watched me depart from the shop door, and sighed, “I should like to
see it all again!”

Since that day I have gone back to him, not always to buy groceries, but
just to pass the word, and thus in the midst of city streets to conjure
up Arizona, or Idaho, or Wyoming. My journeys through those regions have
come after his time. I know none of his dangers and not many of his
hardships. But I too have seen Summer and Winter in the Rocky Mountains,
and the sun rise; and have slept and marched on trails where he went
once. Between us is established a freemasonry: both of us have been _out
there_; both of us understand. It matters not that one was an enlisted
man campaigning against Indians, while the other is nothing but a
voluntary pilgrim to the wilderness. Upon both alike has the wilderness
set its spell. Yes; we certainly understand.

And what is this spell? Scarcely danger, for I have met no dangers
worthy of the name. Scarcely freedom, since the enlisted man can do by
no means what he pleases. Scarcely the immortal lift and purity of that
great air, which I feel, indeed, but to which I can not remember hearing
any trooper allude. Neither will the splendor of Nature explain it; the
inspiring vastness, the transfigurations of the sunset, the swimming
oceans of color, rich, subtle, endless, the more inexhaustible as the
more observed. Only the pilgrims value these things. The chance for
riches it certainly is not, nor the chance for crime. Crime and Fortune
are there as everywhere; but the lost pocket-book is returned when it
would not be in a city, and you meet with few that are troubling about
dollars. Bloody and sudden as death often is there, it is not the
planned murder so much as the quick blow of personal vengeance, the
primitive man dealing with his fellow as in justice he expects his
fellow will deal with him. Finally, it is not adventure alone. Though
roving spirits have come to their own upon the plains, and with Indians
and cattle-driving have let loose the fervid energy no town gave room
for, dreamers strayed there too, many dreamers, and found happiness. In
all of this I am speaking of the wilderness as it was once, and almost
is no more. But you will find the dreamers still, now and then, riding
alone from horizon to horizon, paddling upon sequestered rivers,
hermiting in quiet cabins, all of them escaped from social codes,
reaping the reward and paying the penalty in that archaic silence. For
indeed the silence of that world seems to have come unbroken from behind
Genesis, to have been earlier than the beginning, to make one with the
planets, to have known mysteries, that dwindle Rome to a show. The
little sounds of earth do not break it. In it the painted Indian walks
naked, the twin of its mystery. In it you can wake or sleep, and no man
hinders. Whatever law there is, rises from the ground or falls from the
stars. For the very living, life seems to mingle with the origin before
the dust has returned to dust. That is the spell for trooper or for
pilgrim. From empire to empire, our wise brains have devised conventions
that we may live together, but our unwise hearts crave the something
that wisdom has renounced for us. So most of those you will meet in the
wilderness, be they doers or dreamers, have followed the heart’s desire
and escaped back to Nature.

Ah, there is a lotus also in the West! It has drugged many that have
never returned. But if you wisely tear yourself from it and re-enter the
fold of civilization, and in respectable content sell groceries, for
instance, your heart will remind you of _out there_, now and then, a
word like Owyhee or Wind River will give you a homesickness for the
nameless magic of the plains.

Those happy ones who have known it meet always in that freemasonry which
set the soldier and me talking like old acquaintances. And therefore I
am going to show him these drawings; for every one will speak to him of
_out there_. He will rejoice in their truth--indeed truth is a pale
word--it is the vibrating thing itself which seems to rise out of these
pages. Even to me they flash and throb with life I have lived, and how
much more to a man whose years preceded mine and who had dangers where I
had none!

I have stood before many paintings of the West. Paintings of mountains,
paintings of buffalo, paintings of Indians--the whole mystic and heroic
pageant of our American soil; the only greatly romantic thing our
generation has known, the last greatly romantic thing our Continent
holds; indeed the poetic episode most deeply native that we possess.
Long before my eyes looked upon its beautiful domain, I studied the
paintings; but when Remington came with only a pencil, I forgot the
rest! And now I have seen for myself, and know how he has caught alive
not only the roped calf, or the troop cook sucking his comfortable
corn-cob, the day-by-day facts of the wilderness, but the eternal note
also, the pity and the awe of that epic life. He has made them visible
by his art, and set them down as a national treasure. Look at the Pony
War Dance. That wild fury of religion, that splendor of savagery clashes
down to us from the Stone Age. If you will open the Old Testament where
Joshua delayed the course of the sun, or they blew down a city wall with
a trumpet, you will come upon the same spirit. Look at the Medicine-men
and the lightning. Again man’s untamed original soul communes with a God
of vengeance and terror. Is it not like Elijah and the fire-stroke from
heaven upon the altar? Then turn to the Sheep-herder’s breakfast. Unless
you have known that solitude, no words of mine can tell you how
Remington has been a poet here. With some lines and smears on paper he
has expressed that lotus mystery of the wilderness. He has taken a
ragged vagrant with a frying-pan and connected him with the eternal. The
dog, the pack-saddle, the ass, the dim sheep in the plain, those tender
outlines of bluffs and ridges--it is Homer or the Old Testament again;
time and the present world have no part here!

Perhaps you do not value all this as I do. Perhaps the seamy side shuts
you from the rest, and you shrink from the brutality of man and the
suffering of beast. I have heard people speak thus sometimes, and give
thanks for their books, and their bathrooms, for the opera, and for
Europe where they can travel in a landscape seasoned by history. Well,
Europe is richer, much richer, than any desert, and it is toward its use
and comprehension, on the whole, that our struggling faces are set. Our
fond, quack-ridden Republic looks, after all, toward the old world for
its teaching. But we have a landscape seasoned by mystery, where chiefs
and heroes move, fit subjects for the poet. If you do not see this,
perhaps you are too near. Let me ask you to think of the bloody
slaughters in Homer, and of all the great art you know from him to the
present day; has not the terrible its share of notice? Doubtless you
would have stopped Homer’s reciting to you how bodies were hacked to
pieces beneath the walls of Troy, and how swinish were sometimes the
companions of Ulysses. But now you read it all with pleasure. Do you
believe Art would have amounted to much if it had excluded pain and
ugliness and narrowed its gaze upon the beautiful alone?

At any rate I am glad that we have Remington, one of the kind that makes
us aware of things we could not have seen for ourselves. We have been
scarce enough in native material for Art to let go what the soil
provides us. We have often failed to value what the intelligent
foreigner seizes upon at once. And I think as the Frontier recedes into
tradition, fewer of us will shrink from its details. If Remington did
nothing further, already has he achieved: he has made a page of American
history his own.

OWEN WISTER.



DRAWINGS

[Illustration: Forsythe’s Fight on the Republican River, 1868--The
Charge of Roman Nose.]

[Illustration: Coronado’s March--Colorado.]

[Illustration: The Missionary and the Medicine Man.]

[Illustration: Hunting a Beaver Stream--1840.]

[Illustration: The Hungry Winter.]

[Illustration: Fight Over a Water Hole.]

[Illustration: When His Heart is Bad.]

[Illustration: A Citadel of the Plains.]

[Illustration: On the Northwest Coast.]

[Illustration: The Sheep Herder’s Breakfast.]

[Illustration: The Gold Bug.]

[Illustration: An Overland-Station: Indians Coming in with the Stage.]

[Illustration: The Well in the Desert.]

[Illustration: The Borderland of the Other Tribe.]

[Illustration: Her Calf.]

[Illustration: A Government Pack Train.]

[Illustration: The Charge.]

[Illustration: The Pony War-Dance.]

[Illustration: The Coming Storm.]

[Illustration: His Death Song.]

[Illustration: Protecting a Wagon Train.]

[Illustration: The Water in Arizona.]

[Illustration: Government Scouts--Moonlight.]

[Illustration: A Crow Scout.]

[Illustration: A Mountain Lion Hunting.]

[Illustration: Coyotes.]

[Illustration: Hostiles Watching the Column.]

[Illustration: Satisfying the Demands of Justice: The Head.]

[Illustration: Sketch-Book Notes.]

[Illustration: The Punchers.]

[Illustration: Riding-Herd in the Rain.]

[Illustration: Mexican Vaqueros Breaking a “Bronc.”

[Illustration: A “Sun Fisher.”

[Illustration: A Running Bucker.]

[Illustration: Riding the Range--Winter.]

[Illustration: Snow Indian, or the Northwest Type.]

[Illustration: Nez Percé Indian.]

[Illustration: A Cheyenne Warrior.]

[Illustration: A Greaser.]

[Illustration: A Captain of Infantry in Field Rig.]

[Illustration: A “Wind Jammer.”

[Illustration: Cavalry Column Out of Forage.]

[Illustration: Half-Breed Horse Thieves of the Northwest.]

[Illustration: A Misdeal.]

[Illustration: Over the Foot-Hills.]

[Illustration: Taking the Robe.]

[Illustration: Cowboy Leading Calf.]

[Illustration: Cow Pony Pathos.]

[Illustration: The Cavalry Cook with Water.]

[Illustration: A Modern Cavalry Camp.]

[Illustration: Fox Terriers Fighting a Badger.]

[Illustration: High Finance at the Cross-Roads.]

[Illustration: Sketch-Book Notes.]

[Illustration: The Indian Soldier.]

[Illustration: The Squaw Pony.]

[Illustration: U. S. Dragoon, ’47.]

[Illustration: A Scout, 1868.]

[Illustration: U. S. Cavalry Officer on Campaign.]

[Illustration: A Reservation Indian.]

[Illustration: Solitude.]

[Illustration: The Twilight of the Indian.





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