He Went To See The West Die

Back in New York by December he called at the office of Poultney Bigelow. Not yet disinherited by his father, Bigelow had purchased Outing Magazine, formerly a bicycle journal, now feebly surviving as a magazine for amateur sportsmen. Outing published Remington's sport scenes as well as his Western scenes. Harper's and other magazines began to do likewise, and the pattern of his working life was established.

The competition for his work drove Remington to step up his output; in 1887 Harper's and Outing published 60 or more pages of his drawings. That year Remington was sent to western Canada, to Blackfoot Indian territory, where the government was experimenting with providing each Indian with rations and $5 a year to compensate for the loss of the buffalo as food. The great majority of Remington's sketches and paintings were Western scenes—Crow Indians firing on the agency in Montana, the interior of a Blackfoot lodge, Royal Canadian Mounted Police in action. But he also rendered peaceful scenes: coursing rabbits on his Kansas ranch, trolling for trout on Lake George in New York, the opening of the Sheepshead Bay track. The cover of the Thanksgiving 1887 issue of Harper's was a Remington of the Yale football team in action—a runner tackled in the open, with five struggling figures fending one another off above the pair on the ground.

The next year Century Magazine commissioned Remington to undertake a series of illustrated articles on Indian reservations in the Southwest. A chain of forts had been built around San Carlos Reservation, and small parties of scouts were constantly dispatched from one fort to another to familiarize the men with the mountain trails, to watch for marauders and to let the Apaches know the Army was on hand. Remington went on a two-week ride with a party of scouts from Fort Grant, and he also rode into Colorado, and south into Texas and Indian Territory. At Hermosillo, Sonora, he took time from his military sketching to hunt peccaries—a little pig "about like a football," he wrote—with a group of Mexican cowboys. In New York again by fall he covered the steeplechase at Cedarhurst, the trotting races at Fleetwood and made a quaint drawing for Harper's called Her First Muskallonge, a girl in a boat staring with deadpan surprise at a fish she has hooked.

Theodore Roosevelt, then at the outset of his political career (and already battling with Piatt), wanted his publishers to hire Remington to illustrate his book Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail. Although Remington was now unusually busy—some 135 drawings and paintings were published during 1888—he still found time to make his annual pilgrimage to the Yale-Princeton game. The Yale team that year included Pudge Heffelfinger and Alonzo Stagg, and Walter Camp considered it the best in football's young history.

Although now financially secure (he was earning at least $25,000 a year), Remington worked harder than ever. Harold McCracken, who started a boom in Remington books with his Frederic Remington: Artist of the Old West, counted 2,739 Remington paintings and drawings dating from the 23-year period between 1886 and Remington's death in 1909. But after 1895, when Remington became interested in sculpture, and especially after 1898, when he was distracted from his usual course of work by the Spanish-American War, his production slackened: 1,800 or more illustrations were published between 1886 and 1896, an average of one every two days.

How did Remington accomplish it? For one thing, his hunting and fishing scenes and his sports paintings were a welcome relief from the almost unbearable tension of his Western trips and his feeling that he was depicting something that was fading before his eyes. For another, his daily routine was grueling. At home he rose at six, had breakfast at seven and worked steadily until three. He sang, whistled, talked to himself, swore and grumbled as he worked. Then he rode for an hour, rested, and, if the work did not require daylight, went back to his studio after dinner. After two or three months of this he found he could not face his studio and took off, sometimes without knowing where he would go. Once he ran the Necoochee River in Canada in a 16-foot canoe, through some 51 miles of primeval forest in which the river dropped 1,100 feet. Another time he persuaded two friends, a lawyer and a businessman, to take a three-week canoe trip to the chain of lakes above the Lake Temiscaminque River in Quebec, of which he wrote, "Then came the river and the rapids, which we ran, darting between rocks, bumping on sunken stones—shooting fairly out into the open air...." One night in the Players Club in New York Julian Ralph, an amiable, unadventurous essayist, told the story about a poet-hunter who never fired a shot. Remington said, "Your poet would not know which end of a gun to aim with. But I'll make a hunter of you.... We'll start tomorrow morning." They bought some clothes in Montreal, traveled by train to Mattawa in central Ontario, picked up supplies, rode a horse-drawn sleigh for two days to a wilderness cabin and were snowbound for five days. Ralph eventually got his moose.

The range of Remington's travels for sport was doubly remarkable in view of his Indian travels: he shot blue quail in Mexico, caribou on the Little Saguenay in Quebec and traveled to New York's Genesee Valley to paint hunters being schooled for the horse show. The longest and the most rewarding of these journeys was to a hacienda near Chihuahua—a week by train, five days by stagecoach through the mountains, a week on horseback. There Jack Gilbert, an Arizona cowboy, had rebuilt an old Jesuit outpost destroyed by Apaches. Remington said his fevered brain was taken by the simple way Gilbert lived; the marvelous color of the country entranced him. He felt that he was back at last in the Old West, "and while I gazed I grew exalted.... I sat on a mudbank and worked at a sketch of the yellow sunlit walls.... There lies the hacienda of San Jose de Bavicora, gray and silent on the great plain, with the mountains standing guard against intruders, and over it the great blue dome of the sky untroubled by clouds.... But one must be appreciative of it all, or he will find a week of rail and a week of stage and a week of horseback all too far for one to travel to see a shadow across the moon."

There was often a lightness and charm in Remington's vacation paintings, as there was in the casual travel notes that accompanied them. He described drenched canoeists wrapped in blankets after being spilled, but did not draw them. "A white man in a blanket," he wrote, "is about as inspiring as an Indian with a plug hat." He watched kingfishers, herons, mink and deer, and the river ahead of his canoe: "In front the gray sky is answered back by the water reflection, and the trees lie as though hung in the air, always receding." That sort of tranquillity contrasted starkly with the terrible urgency of his Western travels. In 1890—the same year in which he and Ralph explored the Canadian wilderness, and in which he published another 100-odd paintings and drawings—Remington accompanied a military commission investigating Indian reservations in Montana. He rode with General Nelson Miles, soon to become commander in chief of the U.S. Army. Remington weighed 215 pounds, and went directly from his studio to the field. Long experience with the cavalry had made him aware of its practice of hazing civilian observers, but General Miles' endurance dumbfounded him. Riding from Fort Keogh to the Crow agency at Fort Custer, they covered 60 miles the first day, 45 miles the second, 60 miles the third (with time out for the general to go over the battlefield at Little Big Horn and analyze Custer's mistakes), then 36 miles back to the railroad, much of this last by night. "You cannot see," Remington wrote. "You whirl through a canyon cut in the mud; you plow through the sagebrush and over rocks clatter and bang. The general is certainly a grim old fellow."

Returning to New York, Remington relaxed by covering the horse show at Madison Square Garden in a series of elegant, almost silken watercolors. Later old Sitting Bull, the conqueror of General Custer, was killed by Indian police at the Standing Rock Reservation. Remington hurried back West.

With every trip Remington realized the West had changed. In 1900 he wrote to his wife from Santa Fe, "Shall never come West again. It is all brick buildings—derby hats and blue overhauls—it spoils my early illusions—and they are my capital."