Among innumerable admirers of Montana legend Charles “C.M.” Russell, I was delighted to read in this Flathead Beacon that for the first time in nearly 120 years the cowboy artist’s historic Lake McDonald cabin and studio will open to the public.
Whitefish philanthropists Dave and Sherry Lesar this past summer purchased the Bull Head Lodge, built by Charlie and his wife Nancy some five years before the creation of Glacier National Park. The couple was to see to its careful restoration before tours and perhaps even artist retreats kick into gear.
The timing couldn’t be better. This year happens to mark the 100th anniversary of Russell’s death at the age of 62.
While most everything’s been written about the Montana luminary and his lasting contributions to Western art and indeed American history, I’m proud to possess in my rare-book collection a beautifully bound congressional volume—blue hardcover with gold lettering, its few published copies presented mainly to elected officials and dignitaries—chronicling the 1959 unveiling of a magnificent bronze statue of Russell in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall.
Talk about pomp and ceremony for the otherwise quiet and contemplative Montanan, who by then was buried for more than 30 years. The spectacle began with a rousing Western-style parade through the nation’s capital: congressmen and senators, cowboys and Indians, “bevies of beauties”—all on horseback to escort Charlie’s statue to the top of Capitol Hill.
“The day before there had been ‘horseplay,’ which the man being honored would have loved and in which he would have felt much more at ease than in the formal dedication about to take place,” Edward L. Fike, editor and publisher of the Lewistown Daily News, wrote to readers back home—his observations worthy of inclusion in the 92-page ceremonial memento.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower was among those paying tribute to “this great artist,” who captured “the life and spirit of the American West for all of us” and will now “take his rightful place of honor in the Capitol.”
Actually the first of two esteemed Montanans (each state is allowed only a pair of sculptures) immortalized in the Capitol’s hallowed hall of prominent Americans, the second honoree being the pioneering politician Jeannette Rankin, whose statue was dedicated in 1985 when I happened to be covering the Congress.
“The rays of the afternoon sun on this warming spring day of March 19 [fittingly enough, Russell’s birthday] fell across the vast space giving the [Capitol rotunda] the formal atmosphere of a cathedral,” Fike described. “Indeed, there was something semisacred about the occasion.
“No one spoke above a whisper,” he penned. “State and national leaders—the captains and kings and the plain citizens of Montana, including a delegation of Indians in full, feathered regalia, sat before a temporary platform behind which loomed the veiled figure in bronze.
“And so on his 95th birthday … Charles Russell, already destined to live through his imperishable art, has joined his old friend Will Rogers in America’s ‘Valhalla.’”
A nod by the scribe to America’s favorite philosopher, who on the heels of Charlie’s passing (Rogers would outlive Russell by a decade) recalled how his longtime friend came to be called “Mr. Montana.”
“He had a great underlying spiritual feeling, a great sympathy and understanding for men of the world,” Rogers praised. “He not only left us great living pictures of what the West was, but he left us an example [of] how to live in friendship with all mankind.”
Among numerous Montana dignitaries on hand to present the 7-foot statue—sculpted by native Montanan John B. Weaver, but not before he competed with other sculptors in the state for the honor—were the prominent senators Mike Mansfield and James E. Murray, representatives Lee Metcalf and LeRoy Anderson, and last but not least Governor J. Hugo Aronson, who arrived from Helena with his lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, clerk of the supreme court, treasurer, auditor, and superintendent of public instruction all in tow.
Treated to a 30-minute concert by the United States Marine Band Orchestra, with colors posted by the United States Air Force Color Guard, the overflow crowd heard one speaker after another pay tribute to the nation’s most celebrated artist.
“Charlie Russell had keen insight,” Murray proclaimed. “He used these outstanding abilities to paint the West as it was, the bad along with the good, the tragic along with the comic. He adhered to the facts. Charlie Russell painted history. He understood that he was participating in great events.
“He saw the Indian moving from his traditional life to the reservation,” the senator reflected. “He understood the nobility and tragedy of the Indian, who was crowded onto a reservation.
“Later he saw the cowboy crowded off the open range by the homesteader’s barbed wire fence. Whoever studies Charlie Russell and the story which he tells will learn something of art, something of history, and much about getting along with his fellow man.”
Having grown up in the Bitterroot Valley, Metcalf explained how Charlie painted people and little else: he painted naked Indians, cowboys on the plains, and hunters under trees.
“The only manmade things Russell liked to draw or paint were the working clothes, the saddles, the guns, and the bows and arrows,” he pointed out. “He hated the influx of the homesteaders, the ‘trails ploughed under,’ the railroads and the automobiles.”
K. Ross Toole, director of the Museum of the City of New York, albeit not before serving as director of the Montana Historical Society (born and raised in Missoula, he was also a popular professor at the University of Montana for 16 years) offered a somewhat blunt tribute.
“It’s a fine thing that Montana has placed the statue of Charlie Russell in National Statuary Hall,” he remarked. “The statue belongs here. Russell doesn’t.
“Maybe he belongs where most of us think he is: in the places he painted; in the fierce ecstasy of Montana’s sunsets; in the mountain meadows; and knee deep and alone in prairie grass.
“But if you look westward from where Charles Russell is buried you can see Square Butte, his butte—purple in the morning, red at noon, and blue in the evening. And it is always far away; it seems to retreat even as you move toward it. That is what Charles Russell does. Maybe it’s that way with all great men. Maybe they don’t really belong to any place at all. Maybe they belong to time.”
Anticipated to be the highlight of the ceremony was the Rev. C.Q. Christoph Keller, who gave the benediction. Keller not only was Charlie’s best friend, he preached his funeral sermon.
In fact, shortly before he took his final breath, Russell asked his wife to call Keller to their home at once.
“‘Keller,’ Charlie said—and Charlie always called me simply Keller, taking no note that I am a man of the cloth; he was that sort of an informal individual. ‘Keller, when I die I want it to be this way: When people read about it in the newspapers the next day I want them to say: My God, old Charlie’s dead.’”
Observed Fike: “This simple recollection made ‘old Charlie’ live again as a colorful and wonderful man. And it was a high spot because the pomp and circumstance, the inevitable formality had stripped this great man of warmth and made him almost as cold and lifeless as the bronze statue in his honor …
“In his wildest imaginings as he lived the adventure of Montana’s frontier days, Charlie Russell could never have foreseen this moment of dedication to his worth beneath the great dome of our Capitol with bands, marching color guards, and a gathering of the captains, kings, and common folk to do him honor.
“And yet, this is altogether fitting, because after all is said and done, art and literature best reflect a civilization—and indeed often alone survive it.”
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.