(birds chirping) (horse snorts) NARRATOR: In the early 19th century, more than 30 million American buffalo were said to blanket the Great Plains.

Bison migrating by an Indian encampment could shake the ground for days on end.

As late as 1871, an American colonel reported passing through a herd 25 miles wide and 50 miles long.

But in a flash, they were virtually all gone.

♪ ♪ Slaughtered in apocalyptic numbers by market hunters or decimated by a disease brought north with trail-driven Texas cattle.

At the turn of the 20th century, perhaps a thousand head remained.

In 1907, in the jagged shadows of a place the Salish Indians called Sniél-emen, or Mountains of the Surrounded, an attempt began to round up and save one of the few remaining herds and relocate them 1,200 miles north to Canada.

The effort drew national attention as cowboys and Indians, journalists and photographers, and one Montana cowboy-turned-artist heeded the rallying call.

NANCY RUSSELL (dramatized): You must know what all this meant to the artist.

These wild buffalo that hardly knew what a man looked like.

Mr. Russell rode as one of the men, and in that way saw a great deal that was priceless.

NARRATOR: He rode across the foothills, up and down ridges and through clouds of dust, in what would later be called the greatest rodeo in American history.

And for Charles M. Russell, the great roundup would both trigger his imagination and gather his memories: this was not the first time that he had seen the last of something.

MAX EVANS: He captured the last ten years of a period.

He showed something to the world that was very rare and precious and only here for a short time, a very brief but beautiful time.

He captured it, old Charlie Russell.

NARRATOR: He wasn't quite famous as an artist yet.

To many people at the roundup, he was just a cowboy from the old days.

Presidents, royalty, Hollywood movie stars, art galleries and museums had not begun collecting his work.

Although, in Montana, pretty much everybody knew who the cowboy artist was.

He signed his name on his art and his illustrated letters C.M.

Russell.

But everyone just called him Charlie.

BRIAN DIPPIE: The experience of riding as a cowboy on the buffalo roundup made a lasting impression on Russell.

Obviously, in his head, he could imagine that he was riding with buffalo hunters in the days of old.

NARRATOR: He was thrilled to join the roundup and he wrote elaborate letters to his friends about the frequently dangerous operation, including two nearly fatal close calls.

CHARLIE RUSSELL (dramatized): I'll tell you, for a second or two, my hair didn't lay good.

(chuckles) NARRATOR: At the roundup, he still dressed as he had decades earlier, when he first arrived in Montana, when there were no fences across the West-- when he was known as Kid Russell.

His look would always be his way of tethering himself to history, with the blood of a forever cowboy forever running in his veins.

No one ever forgot him, and he never forgot the roundup.

For Charles Marion Russell, it wasn't just buffalo being rounded up, but a reverie of personal memories of old friends, old horses, and old stories circling around him.

Between breaks in the roundup, he sketched and painted while lying on a tent floor, and sent richly ornamented letters to his friends.

RUSSELL (dramatized): I have always liked to tell stories with the brush, so I've tried in a way to keep memory's trails fresh.

NARRATOR: And that trail had begun more than 20 years earlier, with a palm-sized sketch he drew that both captured the end of an era in American history and made him famous.

ANNOUNCER: "Charlie Russell's Old West" is made possible with production support from Ossie Abrams and David Orser; Joseph Sample; Tom Petrie and Trevor Rees-Jones; Julie Cliffton, the Montana Film Office, and David Leuschen.

Also from: And by the following: (crickets chirping) NARRATOR: Charlie Russell had arrived on a stagecoach as a restless, adventure-seeking 16-year-old, with the reluctant blessing of his affluent St. Louis parents, who yielded to his pleas to go west, the same direction a great American fictional boy had taken.

At the end of "Huckleberry Finn," Huckleberry Finn says, "I'm going to light out for the territories," and by that, by the way, he means Indian Territory.

Well, Charlie Russell says the same sort of thing.

"To find myself, to find the true self, I'm going to light out for the territories."

NARRATOR: His parents hoped their son's fantasies about the West would meet a hard frontier reality and dry out his wanderlust.

It didn't.

RONDA: Charlie Russell belonged to the generation of young white men who grew up immediately after the Civil War.

And they asked a question that haunted them for the rest of their lives: "What is my great adventure?"

For them, it was the West.

And what did the West promise?

For Russell and for his generation, the first word that comes to mind is the word "adventure."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The Big Sky both captured him and set him free.

He was quickly fired from his first job herding sheep, but he then lived with and learned from a mountain man for two years before getting a job with a cattle outfit.

From the end of his teens until he was almost 30, he crisscrossed Montana on a beloved horse he bought from an Indian named War Wound.

He named the horse Monty, after a Mexican card game, and the two seemed to travel with a lucky horseshoe around the saddle horn.

For years, Kid Russell would hop from cowboying jobs to saloons to whorehouses and back to cowboying, always with Monty.

RUSSELL (dramatized): We were kids together.

We have always been together.

We don't exactly talk to each other, but we sure savvy one another.

NARRATOR: Russell entered the world of working cowboys as a nighthawk, someone who watched over the remuda of horses, or the herd of cattle, at night.

It was a lowly rank that he never rose above, singing at night to the horses or cattle to keep them calm, or himself not so lonesome.

Nighthawking required little skill, but the job suited him.

DIPPIE: It was an occupation in short that gave you time to observe.

He could watch what he thought of as the real cowboys, the skilled ropers and riders, doing their jobs, and he could make sketches of them and really see the cowboy life that they were living almost objectively.

He was one of them, but he had the time and perhaps even the leisure to record what he saw.

So, his job was critical to his art in a way.

(cattle mooing) NARRATOR: Russell traveled with a sock stuffed with art supplies and in his pocket, a wad of modeling wax.

In the mornings, he didn't go to sleep right away, but watched the real cowboys at work, drawing and painting on anything he found-- the back of tin can labels, cardboard boxes, and scraps of wood-- just to amuse himself and the other wranglers.

In between, he told jokes and stories, and in the process, became as valuable to the boys as the best roper in the outfit.

As one old cowboy recalled years later, "We just liked having the kid around."

RUSSELL (dramatized): I have many friends among cowmen and cowpunchers.

I have always been what is called a good mixer.

I haven't been too bad or too good to get along with.

Laughs and good judgment have saved me many a black eye, but I don't laugh at other's tears.

You know, humor gets to the truth.

You can say a cold-blooded truth.

If you say it funny enough you won't, you won't make a person mad.

(chuckles) NARRATOR: By the late autumn of 1886, the kid was riding the grub line and working for the OH Ranch co-owner and foreman Jesse Phelps, when a perfect storm of weather and geography burst the bubble of the open range cattle boon... ♪ ♪ And changed his life.

DIPPIE: The winter of 1886-87 is probably the most storied on the Montana range, because it, it marks one of those ending points, again, in a particular phase of Western history.

TEDDY BLUE ABBOTT (dramatized): That was the celebrated winter that broke the back of the range cattle business.

In late fall, we had several snowstorms and I saw the first white owls I have ever seen.

The Indians said they were a bad sign.

"Heaps snow coming, very cold," and they sure hit it right.

NARRATOR: The winter came quickly and hard, and it stayed.

Snow fell and fell.

The mercury barely moved, for weeks stuck between 20 and 40 below, sometimes dropping to minus 60.

As the winds howled, the cattle disappeared into snowdrifts.

Cowhands sent to search for them disappeared, too, until their bodies were found in the spring.

ABBOTT (dramatized): You know what Indians say.

"Indian make little fire, sit close.

White man make big fire, sit back."

Well, that winter, we made big fires and sat close, too.

And when I come home at the end of winter, I smelled so strong as smoke the girls ordered me out of the house.

NARRATOR: Most of the cattle in Montana had been trail-driven from Texas as part of what has been called the greatest forced migration of animals in human history.

Now, as the snow buried the plains, starving longhorns turned back toward home.

JOHN TALIAFERRO: They just kept going south.

Because there were no fences, they drifted.

They drifted into coolies and draws and they just kept walking with the, with the snow and the wind driving them from the north, and they, they walked until they died.

RUSSELL (dramatized): One night, Jesse Phelps got a letter from Louis Kauffman, one of the biggest cattlemen in the country, and Louis wanted to know how the cattle was doing.

And Jesse says to me, "I must write a letter to Louis and tell him how tough it is."

I was sitting at the table with him and I said, "I'll make a sketch to go with it."

NARRATOR: Russell took a piece of cardboard, probably from a box of shirt collars, and drew a picture of a starving cow with the wolves circling.

The cow had a bar R brand on her, Louis Kauffman's brand.

In the lower corner, Charlie drew a buffalo skull and signed his initials, CMR.

They mailed the nighthawk's sketch to Helena, where it was quickly passed around town and beyond before it was tacked onto the walls of a saddle shop for all to see.

As the story goes, everyone from cattle barons to investors to butchers got drunk on the sight of the drawing and the shock of the bad news.

And in time, the person who signed "CMR" in the corner of what was later titled "Waiting for a Chinook" launched a career.

DIPPIE: It is a stunning sketch because it's smaller than a postcard, and in that little space, it is the perfect symbolic expression of the end of the open range.

It's astonishing.

NARRATOR: In some ways, it was a ghostly rerun of the slaughter of the buffalo, but this time, the cataclysm was dead cattle littering the prairie.

From the Canadian border to the Texas Panhandle, they called it the big die-up.

MAN (dramatized): Chuck!

Come on, you cow nurses, come and get it!

NARRATOR: Cowboying in the 1880s meant riding for miles and miles in unfenced, sweeping country.

RUSSELL (dramatized): I'm talking about the days of the open range, when there wasn't a wire from the Arctic Sea to the Gulf of Mexico.

NARRATOR: But farmers, or the nesters, as Russell often derisively called them, were coming, and Charlie's trails were about to get plowed under.

DIPPIE: And that's why he chose a buffalo skull as his symbol.

The great herds were gone.

That way of life was gone.

And the buffalo skull summed it up.

NARRATOR: Through it all, he basically stayed the same 16-year-old tied to a trusty pony.

As his wife, Nancy, would later say, "He is just a boy grown tall."

Because of the renown of "Waiting for a Chinook," the Montana press began reporting the cowboy artist's comings and goings on the range, without mentioning his frequent trips to saloons and upscale brothels, such as the notorious Coliseum in Helena, run by a famous madam, Chicago Jo.

Speculation began that perhaps the cowboy artist would consider studying in Europe for formal art training.

Instead, he saddled Monty and rode north to Canada, where he would live with the Indians.

The details of that summer were and still are fuzzy, mostly because of Russell's embellishment, but the emotional impact on Russell was not.

By 1888, what remained of the disappearing open range was above the 49th Parallel, where Indian tribes still were able to maintain their traditional ways.

Russell camped near the Blood Indians, and spent days listening to stories of old tribal days unfold in sign language.

JACK GLADSTONE: With American Indian sign language, he started to pick up the vehicle of expressing meaning without words, without the Tower of Babel, without the confusion that, seemingly, he had some problems with earlier, in school.

Sign talk is all about connecting hearts and the essence of that meaning, it's the language of the heart.

NARRATOR: As a boy, linguistic rules had been an enormous challenge.

Russell may have had a learning disability.

Teachers either ignored him or beat him, not only for his struggles with grammar and spelling, but for doodling in the margins of his ledgers and smuggling dime store adventure magazines between the covers of his books.

RUSSELL (dramatized): They couldn't teach me anything in school.

They just let me sit.

NARRATOR: School was prison, and all he wanted was out.

He often skipped, wandering the St. Louis mule markets and Mississippi River wharves to watch magic lantern shows and listen to riverboat travelers' tales of what lay far beyond, along the upper reaches of the Missouri River.

Now, in 1888, 24-year-old Charlie, in a teepee, listening to Blood Indian tales, was actually living those adventure stories.

For the young cowboy, it was an entry and a passage to another world.

DIPPIE: The most important thing that happened in the summer of 1888 is, Charlie Russell had had his eyes opened to a West that he had not really known before, the West of the Indian.

And the Indian thereafter would be an increasingly important part of all of his art, his sculpture, his paintings, his pen-and-ink drawings, his stories.

He had been changed.

NARRATOR: Those first years in Montana, living and learning about animals in the mountains, his 11 years as a cowboy, and particularly that summer with the Blood Indians, transformed him.

But for Charlie Russell, an even more important change would soon arrive, packaged as a Kentucky-born teenager.

Nancy Cooper's early life could not have been more different than her future husband's.

Her mother, Texas Annie Mann, was abandoned, first by Nancy's father in Kentucky, and then by a second husband, who left her in Montana.

DIPPIE: Texas Annie scrabbled together some kind of living in Helena.

It's controversial to say so, but she may have been forced into prostitution.

It was the fate of a number of deserted wives in the West at a time when women had few opportunities.

NARRATOR: Twice forsaken, Texas Annie contracted consumption and died in 1894, leaving behind 16-year-old Nancy and a stepsister.

DIPPIE: Nancy had a hardscrabble youth, in short, there's no point in minimizing it.

She was a sweet-faced-looking young woman, rather pretty, and I think it would be fair to say that she had to live by her wits for a while in Helena.

And that sweet-faced young lady had an absolute iron core.

Life had made her tougher than she looked.

NARRATOR: Alone and living by her wits, Nancy's teenage narrative remains unclear and may be shady.

But she was thrown a lifeline by an older friend of Charlie Russell's, and given a housekeeping job, when, one night, the cowboy artist came for dinner.

Nancy had heard stories about the dinner guest and expected a rough-and-tumble cowboy with a six-shooter, but unexpectedly, he didn't arrive as advertised.

From his blond hair to his gray-blue eyes and slender hands that moved and seemed to shape the air while he talked, she was smitten.

The feelings were mutual.

Things happened fast.

Despite Charlie being 14 years older, they were married within a year, and within a handful of years, Nancy pointed her husband down a new trail, one that would eventually lead to national recognition and fame.

CHARLIE RUSSELL (dramatized): I trotted in harness with the best booster and partner a man ever had.

She could convince anybody that I was the greatest artist in the world, and that makes a fellow work hard.

You can't disappoint a person like that, so I did my best work for her.

NARRATOR: More than just in harness, Nancy drove the CMR wagon, and made sure it was always filled with Charlie's work-- with price tags.

She was young, uneducated, and trying to succeed in a male-dominated world of art and business.

In the beginning, she had more determination than skill, but the expertise came, and the arithmetic added up to a woman who was ahead of her time.

NANCY RUSSELL (dramatized): I would tell Chaz, "You paint these paintings.

"I will attend to the distribution end of the enterprise."

NARRATOR: One of the Russells' most significant moves was simply relocating downriver to the newly electrified city of Great Falls, where, with the help of a Russell family inheritance, they bought a house in the best part of town, then built a studio out of telephone poles for Charlie next door.

He called it his shack.

RONDA: For Charlie, Great Falls was not just home.

It was the place where he could plant his easel.

The place where he could plant his eye, the eye of his mind, so that then he could imagine, he could envision the West.

NARRATOR: The log cabin studio would be Charlie Russell's time machine, keeping the 20th century out and the Old West in.

A CMR museum of cowboy and Indian artifacts, from Winchesters and Colt .45s to horse bells, saddles, Indian blankets, and medicine pouches, each with a story that led down an autobiographical trail to Russell's Old West.

CHARLIE RUSSELL (dramatized): The bunch can come visit, talk, and smoke while I paint.

That's going to be a good shack for me.

NANCY RUSSELL (dramatized): He loved that telephone pole building more than any other place on Earth, and never finished a painting anywhere else.

LARRY LEN PETERSON: Charlie really found his sweet spot when he married Nancy Russell.

She provided focus, drive, confidence that he didn't have before.

And he had reached what Wallace Stegner calls his angle of repose, and now the empire builders together were ready to build their empire.

NARRATOR: In 1904, with Nancy as trail boss, the Russells took the cowboy artist's work to the most un-cowboy place in America.

♪ ♪ THAYER TOLLES: New York, then as now, was really the capital of the American art world.

So, for someone like Russell to come to New York in 1904, that was critical to the development of his national reputation.

He really lived and breathed the West, but at the same time, he realized that to succeed as an artist, he needed New York.

NARRATOR: In the big city, Charlie appeared as sort of an "aw, shucks" reticent cowboy, but Nancy saw one thing clearly: opportunity.

It was the golden age of illustration, and the nation's appetite was for nostalgia.

With advances in inexpensive printing, illustration became the contemporary democratic medium to tell a romanticized version of America's recent history: tall tales of cowboys and Indians in a monumental landscape.

Russell received commissions for everything from calendars to cigar boxes to book illustrations.

The cowboy artist fit in easily, and not just for his work.

TALIAFERRO: Charlie, of course, in his way, referred to it as the land of tall teepees.

And the more he got into city life, Charlie's defense was always to be more of a cowboy.

And it caught on-- people liked the fact that Charlie was always in character, even when he was far away from his home range.

CHARLIE RUSSELL (dramatized): I'm still on dear old Broadway among the cliff dwellers.

Everybody lives high here, but they ain't got me skinned much.

I'm camped above the timberline myself.

NARRATOR: Camped in Manhattan, Russell's first exposure to New York may have been as important an experience as his first two years in the Montana mountains.

During the day, he roamed the city and studied technique and color from fellow artists like John Marchand and Ed Maureen, who took him under their wing and into their studios.

Russell was a quick study, and the CMR learning curve became almost a vertical line.

RUSSELL (dramatized): What I would like most is to know how artists lay on color.

I'd like to have a chance to study this in some good studio.

So when Russell went to New York for the first time in 1903-1904, the illustrators that he came into contact with introduced him to new materials and new techniques.

This painting just sings with color.

Even if you look at the signature, he's used four different colors in his signature.

So, he comes back from New York, and basically, his palette becomes technicolor.

NARRATOR: Brilliant but natural color, especially of the vast Montana Big Sky, would become a Russell trademark.

RUSSELL (dramatized): When it comes to making the beautiful, Ma Nature has man beat in all ways, and that lady still owns a lot of Montana.

NARRATOR: Flush with their first success in New York, Charlie and Nancy Russell bought a piece of what Ma Nature still owned in Montana and built a cabin, Bullhead Lodge, on the shore of Lake McDonald in what would soon be Glacier National Park.

He described it as a place where, "Big hills wear white robes and where the teeth of the world tear holes in the clouds."

He marked his new territory by nailing a buffalo skull to a tree.

GLADSTONE: I think Glacier played a role in reawakening Russell to the essence of the American West.

I suspect that the longer he was in Montana, the more his soul was indigenous.

RUSSELL (dramatized): I spend my summers at Lake McDonald on the west side of the main range, where I have a cabin.

That's about as wild a place as you'll find these days and that is what I like.

NARRATOR: Artists, friends, and celebrities came to visit, and it was where Nancy cultivated potential clients.

Entertainment was outdoors and often included a favorite bit of make-believe: Charlie and Nancy dressing up to perform a grown-up version of Cowboys and Indians.

Frequently, their guests joined them to pose and perform in a kind of summer stock historical theater.

SEAN STANDING BEAR: I've seen some of those photographs of him dressed up, and he doesn't look like he's being funny.

He looks like he's being serious.

Just look at his body language, and, and look in his eyes.

He was feeling it.

NARRATOR: One of the most influential visitors to Bullhead Lodge was Philip R. Goodwin, a young illustrator with an art school pedigree and a portfolio that included covers for "Saturday Evening Post" and dozens of books, including Jack London's "Call of the Wild."

Goodwin's mentoring influence on Russell was profound, expanding and intensifying his palette and sharpening some of his compositions into so-called predicament paintings, where there was story-like drama with uncertain outcomes that some described as "a book in a page."

TALIAFERRO: The narrative quality of all his paintings, they are like snapshots from longer stories.

Everybody who looks at them, whether they were a cowboy or one of his later patrons, can imagine what happened just before and what is going to happen next.

They are freeze frames, they're almost cinematic.

NARRATOR: Having witnessed the West in transition as a young man, by the time he was in his 40s, Russell had developed the skills to match his memories and produced some of his greatest paintings and sculptures.

In 1911, Charlie and Nancy brought Russell's latest Old West freeze frames, and some of his best and mature work, back to New York, this time to the prestigious Folsom Galleries on Fifth Avenue.

It would be the most important exhibition of his career.

DIPPIE: He called it "The West That Has Passed."

He didn't say, "The West I lived," or, "The things I did."

It was something larger than that.

It was an idea about loss, nostalgia, sentiment, and a glowing vision of what it would have been like to have been there when the world was young.

NARRATOR: The show was a kind of "Best of Charles Marion Russell," from the highly acclaimed "The Medicine Man" to "Jerked Down" and the bronze "Nature's Cattle."

The new work ranged from the statuesque to the dramatic, with signature CMR Western realism.

JANE LAMBERT: As a horseman, when I look at one of Russell's paintings, I can see absolutely nothing amiss in the posture of the rider, in the equipment that's on the horse, in the horse's movement, in the horse's anatomy.

And that's why, a lot of times in Russell's art, you'll notice a horse with one ear forward and one ear back.

The back is to the rider, the forward is to the cattle or to the bear, or whatever else is out there.

NARRATOR: It was a realism that hit with an almost irresistible power, especially for a nation with one eye on the rear-view mirror as it entered the 20th century.

The New York press took notice of the vision, and of the character in the gallery with the cowboy hat, boots, and red sash.

DIPPIE: "The New York Times" devoted half a page to his story and his art, and he was on his way.

He wasn't just a regional artist now.

From New York in 1911, the steps are absolutely obvious to greater and greater fame, celebrity, popularity.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Charlie Russell may have thought his West had passed, but his vision collided with the future in 1913, when he visited the famous Armory Exhibition, where artists like Picasso and Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp and Henri Matisse, first brought European modern art to an American public.

Russell was quick to declare he had little in common with what he saw.

RUSSELL (dramatized): Yes, I saw the Cubes and Futes exhibit in New York.

It may be art, but I can't savvy it.

Most people can't savvy all this dreamy stuff.

This is a time, modern art was going one way, Charlie was kind of going the other.

He liked this sort of naïf image that he had, and he wasn't about to buy in to the, all the new trends of modern art.

RUSSELL (dramatized): Know why painters are impressionistic?

Because they can't draw and they know they can't, so they blur their painting and hide their bum drawing.

TALIAFERRO: But in a funny way, he was a real beneficiary of the Armory show, because he presented a sort of wholesome alternative.

There were a lot of people who wanted to collect art in the United States, there were a lot of robber barons and corporate titans who wanted manly art.

They were the, they were corporate cowboys, if you will, and they wanted the art that would reflect their sensibilities.

So Western art was just the thing for them.

NARRATOR: In the wake of the Folsom exhibition, the governor of Montana commissioned Russell to paint a mural to adorn the state House of Representatives.

It was understood the painting would be a Western subject.

Russell, at first daunted, came up with an inspired solution.

RONDA: Russell did a radical thing.

He took this arch-typical American story and he turned it on its head, and he said, "We need to see this story "through the eyes not of Lewis and Clark, "but through the, through the eyes of people who were already there."

NARRATOR: The working canvas was 12 by 25 feet, and the Russells had to add logs to Charlie's shack and raise the roof just to make room for it.

It could be said that in the process, he raised consciousness.

RONDA : This painting makes a powerful statement, a statement about the complexity, the richness, the diversity, the centrality of Native people to the history of the American West.

It is a political statement.

Russell says to us, "Look with fresh eyes.

"Listen carefully.

"Listen to other voices.

Listen to other experiences."

For me, this is the Charlie Russell legacy.

NARRATOR: Two years later, the prestigious Montana Club in Helena commissioned Russell for a painting for their reading room.

Like the House of Representatives mural, the subject that the artist chose was transcendent.

Russell reached back to his memories from the buffalo roundup at Pablo, and then went beyond that to imagine what the West was like before the white man arrived.

To many, it is his masterpiece, and maybe the turning point when the cowboy artist actually became the Indian artist.

GLADSTONE: Charlie Russell used the title "When the Land Belonged to God" to really indicate a notion of stewardship.

I mean, when the land belonged to God, God-- Creator, Great Spirit.

KATHRYN RED CORN: When I first saw "When the Land Belonged to God," I knew then that Charlie Russell got what Indians were about.

NARRATOR: More and more, what Indians were about became the focus of Russell's work.

Increasingly, his subjects were tribal people.

As Russell would declare... RUSSELL (dramatized): The old-time Indian was the most picturesque man in the world.

NARRATOR: But that world had become a lost world.

Native Americans had been crushed and put on reservations, and the Old West fenced with the so-called devil's rope.

But the more the Old West faded, the more determined Russell was to immortalize it, and at the beginning of the 20th century, Charlie's coin was becoming the nation's.

MINDY BESAW: Nostalgia does get a bad rap, but the end of the frontier seems to be also the birth of nostalgia.

They go hand in hand.

Just as it's passed, now we're interested in it.

NARRATOR: Charlie Russell didn't call it nostalgia.

He called it something else.

In 1919, writing to Frank Bird Linderman, he described his own credo.

RUSSELL (dramatized): Since you're saddled to romance, he's a high-headed hoss with plenty of blemishes, but keep him moving.

NARRATOR: And it wasn't just Charlie Russell on the Western trail of romance and reverie.

A former Pony Express rider, Buffalo Bill, had taken his circus-style pageant of the Old West around the world.

And in Canada, a trick roper named Guy Weadick turned a local rodeo into an international attraction: The Calgary Stampede.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, a cowboy named Will Rogers would, like Russell, take a familiar trail east, to New York and eventual fame, when he polished a Western vaudeville act, "Ropin' Fool," for a new medium: flickers.

ROCHELLE NICHOLAS: Charlie and Will, although they were superstars, they were down-to-earth, plain folk.

Both those individuals remind me of my ancestors that just liked a simple life, that came from an agrarian background, that were close to the earth, that celebrated folk ways, that enjoyed a good laugh, but could withstand hard labor and work, and understood the rigors of, of life.

NARRATOR: Will Rogers, Buffalo Bill Cody, Guy Weadick, and Charlie Russell were kindred souls with sensibilities and histories shaped by geography.

(projector whirring) And America had an appetite for them, most voraciously via Hollywood.

(seagulls squawking) ♪ ♪ In 1920, to escape Montana winters, the Russells began spending part of each year in California.

And in the Golden State, Nancy saw new and golden opportunities for art with a buffalo skull signature, including "Salute to the Robe Trade," which she sold for $10,000 to a millionaire oilman, which Charlie bemusedly described as "dead man's prices."

DIPPIE: Russell carried in his head loads of things he wanted to paint.

He had ideas about what he had not yet done and, and often said that, if he was asked, "What's your best painting?"

"Well, I haven't painted it yet.

It's still here in my head."

NARRATOR: And Charlie, with his Western outfit and cowboy vernacular, always seemed just outside the frame of all his work.

As was the case with his art, his illustrated letters, his conversations and his stories, all carried a simple message.

TALIAFERRO: Charlie Russell was both the acolyte and the preacher of the Western myth.

He was first the seduced and then he became a seducer.

(horse whinnies, gun firing) He lamented the loss of the West that has passed, but then went on to convince us and convince himself that that West, that mythic West had been quite real.

And the way he was able to convince us was because he was so authentic himself.

NARRATOR: As Nancy knew better than anyone, Charlie's art and his character were an irresistible combination.

Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, Nancy landed a major Hollywood patron when she sold "The Navajos" to Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

(movie set bell ringing) Charlie and Nancy had visited Fairbanks on the set of "The Three Musketeers," where Charlie drolly leveled the playing field between his world and Hollywood's.

CHARLIE RUSSELL (dramatized): I told Doug Fairbanks, "We both are picture makers."

NARRATOR: Orbiting Hollywood stars, Nancy, once alone in the world and almost living on the streets, must have felt a sense of validation.

But approval did not come from all spheres.

Charlie's nephew put it acidly.

AUSTIN RUSSELL (dramatized): Nancy had one great defect, her blind worship of the bitch God of success.

And by that, I don't mean just money.

You could see her effect on Charlie all the time, and not merely in his work.

NARRATOR: Many of Russell's old pals, from the range to the bar stool, did not approve of the trail Charlie was following, or at least not the trail boss.

They saw Nancy as tightening the reins on their friend, leading him farther and farther away from Big Sky country and putting her hand over his shot glass.

When her husband would saddle up and ride Monty, and then, later, Neenah, in the direction of the Mint, the Silver Dollar, or the Brunswick, she would hold up and wave two fingers.

NANCY RUSSELL (dramatized): Two drinks, Charlie, only two drinks.

NARRATOR: Will Rogers liked to say that Nancy took an O out of saloon and made it read "salon."

(seagulls squawking) It's hard to say how much Charlie enjoyed his fame or California.

He poked fun at both, caricatured himself in his letters, ridiculed the realtors and boosters, complained about the weather.

But there definitely were parts of California he enjoyed.

Russell embraced the new movie medium, especially Westerns.

UTTER: He loved nature and he loved a good story.

And, you know, those are two great pieces of subject matter for movies.

CHARLIE RUSSELL (dramatized): This is one country where looks get you a job.

NARRATOR: Now another Old West devotee entered the Russell household: a deaf teenage cowboy from Oklahoma who had worked as a wrangler for early Hollywood star Tom Mix.

His name was Joe De Yong.

Hoping to learn about art and maybe find a hero, he had traveled to Montana with a friend to meet the cowboy artist he had read about.

DE YONG (dramatized): Russell got down a peace pipe and cut up some Indian tobacco, and lit the pipe and then hand it to each of us, and we all took a puff.

NARRATOR: The smoke was binding, and Joe De Yong had a new artistic family.

He would help with chores and with tending to the Russells' newly adopted son Jack.

But most consequentially, he would become Russell's only real protégé and eventually bring the Russell look to Hollywood.

Over the years, De Yong and Russell spent countless hours together, sharing notes and drawings, and going to the movies and using Indian sign language to critique Hollywood's exaggerated version of the Wild West.

RUSSELL (dramatized): As there are no more real cowboys, I myself play off quite a little coin at them screen roundups.

I take back anything I ever said, with my hat in my hand, about movie cowboys.

They're good riders and hard to scare.

NARRATOR: Later, De Yong, equipped with years of study under Russell, and essentially linking Russell's art and demands for authenticity to Hollywood Westerns, worked for Cecil B. DeMille and became a technical adviser for other directors, such as Howard Hawks, William Wellman, and, most memorably, designed sets and costumes for George Stevens' classic "Shane."

Call me Shane.

NARRATOR: In terms of authenticity, or at least backdrop, Russell's and fellow artist Frederic Remington's different visions of the Old West soon became both references and majestic storyboards for Western movie scenes.

PETER BOGDANOVICH: Both Ford and Hawks mentioned Charlie Russell as an influence in terms of their compositions.

You can see it in Ford and Hawks, but particularly with Hawks, in "Red River," I think there are some compositions that are virtually remakes of Russell's paintings.

BYRON PRICE: John Ford is taking Charlie Russell's Square Butte and creating the Monument Valley, monumental iconic landscape for which he is known, taking a page right out of C.M.

Russell.

Looks like you've got yourself surrounded.

PRICE: The Indians riding along the mountaintops comes straight from Russell.

So many of the clichés that are thought of as clichés, but you have to go back and say Russell invented those clichés.

NARRATOR: Ultimately, it was getting work done, and especially keeping and cherishing friendships, that was at the core of Charlie Russell.

ABBOTT (dramatized): Dear old Russ, big-hearted and open-handed.

He would often split his last dollar with a friend.

Money was nothing to him.

A friend was everything.

DIPPIE: He was quick to say, "Old friends are not merely the best, but they're your comrades in memory."

NARRATOR: Late in his career, Russell worked on an almost seven-foot-wide gift for friend and patron Malcolm Mackay.

He titled the painting simply "C.M.

Russell and His Friends."

♪ ♪ Time was slipping away from Russell, and the painting would become almost an homage, a wistful last curtain call for some of the most memorable characters in Russell's life.

It was his personal goodbye version of "The West That Has Passed."

DIPPIE: His Montana becomes the subject that he always returns to in his art.

But he had the power, the gift to make his nostalgic yearning global.

A world vision, in effect, of the American West.

RUSSELL (dramatized): Most of the men I knew and worked with on the open range have crossed to the tall range.

Good or bad, it seems to me now in my memory just back that they were all good enough.

So when it comes to my cash-in, I want to go to their wagon.

And if the Injun is right when he says, "Hosses go, too," I want my same strength.

NARRATOR: During the early 1920s, Russell's health began to decline.

There was old cowboy wear and tear and something much more serious.

When he went to the Mayo brothers' clinic in the summer of 1926 to have a goiter removed, a battery of tests confirmed the worst.

At some point, he probably had suffered a heart attack, and his heart was seriously damaged.

The doctors gave him a year, but he only had months.

He was not surprised.

RUSSELL (dramatized): I have been near enough Hell to smell smoke.

Old Dad Time trades little that men want.

He has traded me wrinkles for teeth, stiff legs for limber ones.

NARRATOR: In the spring of 1926, when he and Nancy were in California, Russell, with failing energy and health, had struggled on the floor of an adobe casita on actor Harry Carey's ranch to complete a commission for a painting for oilman Edward Doheny.

And, as a historical footnote, in the corner of the frame, the cowboy artist may have inserted a hidden message about the oil business.

STEWART: What you find at the very end are three little oil derricks that are almost an afterthought.

But what's more amusing for me is that down in the brush, not too far from those oil derricks at the end of the mural, is a rattlesnake.

One wonders, did he have a commentary on Doheny and the oil and gas people that-- was he biting the hand that fed him?

We don't know for sure.

DIPPIE: Will Rogers found it almost amusing.

He called Charlie Russell "the only honest man in oil."

(laughs) He meant as an oil painter.

NARRATOR: It was a 44-foot, two-part mural entitled "The History of the West," which Nancy pushed and sold for $30,000.

The painting made Charlie the highest-paid living artist in America, but the living would not be easy, nor last long.

On an autumn weekend that year, Russell, barely able to walk around town, ran across the editor of "The Great Falls Leader."

RUSSELL (dramatized): Well, the old pump ain't working, and I'm weak as a cat.

And the doctor says I can't even ride a horse.

I've thrown my last leg over a saddle.

The old pump is about to quit.

(harness bells jingling) NARRATOR: Two days later, it did.

♪ ♪ On October 24, 1926, Charles Marion Russell, the so-called chronicler of "The West That Has Passed," crossed over to what he called the tall range.

At his funeral, tributes poured in from around the nation and the world.

The city of Great Falls shut down, but Montana's Big Sky opened up.

As the funeral procession wound through Great Falls, something strange and remarkable happened, especially since it was nearly Halloween in north central Montana: a rainbow appeared.

By the time they reached Highland Cemetery, the funeral cortège stretched two miles behind them.

Funerals are for burying the dead and for resurrecting stories.

And every person on the Great Falls streets, at the cemetery, and probably across most of Montana, if not the West that day, had a Charlie Russell story to tell.

Perhaps the best measure of the love and affection that Montana held for Charlie Russell is in the census of the people who claimed they knew Charlie Russell and had ridden with him on the range, had visited him in his studio, had had a drink with him in various saloons in Great Falls and elsewhere.

I think if you added up that list of people who, who all had those stories of having been with Charlie Russell, or their father having been with Charlie Russell, or...

It exceeds the number of people who ever lived in Montana for the entire time of Charlie Russell's life.

NARRATOR: They buried the cowboy artist on a hilltop and blanketed the grave site in flowers: flowers shaped in lariats, saddles, and even his trademark buffalo skull.

The site is now marked with a massive stone and a bronze artist's palette, and the 360-degree view of the Montana Benchlands is proudly called Russell Country.

PAT WILLIAMS: Charlie Russell is one of two statues that Montanans chose to put in the U.S. Capitol-- every state gets two.

And isn't it interesting that Montana, this state that some people see as a raw-boned, rough, hang 'em high, ask questions later state, the two people they chose was a welfare worker named Jeannette Rankin, who was the first woman elected to Congress, and an artist, Charlie Russell?

DE YONG (dramatized): According to the chief, the most picturesque stretch of mountain and plains was out on a big prairie hill south of Great Falls.

After a frosty morning, when the work wouldn't go so well, he'd put on a mackinaw, pick up his bundle, put his hat down, and step out to the outside, where old Neenah would be stepping about pretty, with his neck and tail kinked, blowing mighty scary.

For an old horse, he had a lot of stuff.

An hour or so later, Russell would come back, his face red and a light sort of blazing in his gray eyes, build a cigarette, grin, sort of a shame-faced way, and sign, "My medicine is strong now."

On such rides, he most often headed for those rolling prairie hilltops south of town, where now, under a big rough boulder, he's making the big sleep, with the high woods to the east, the belts and little belts to the south, and the Rockies showing plain in a long, low, snow-capped line to the west.

Out where there's room, a Big Sky, a long look, and lots of color.

ANNOUNCER: "Charlie Russell's Old West" is made possible with production support from Ossie Abrams and David Orser; Joseph Sample; Tom Petrie and Trevor Rees-Jones; Julie Cliffton, the Montana Film Office, and David Leuschen.

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