Cover Art Description:
Historians, friends, and admirers have told Charles M. Russell’s life story hundreds of times in all manner of books, pamphlets, interpretive signage, and oral narratives. His drawings and paintings have decorated bars, smoking rooms, galleries, letters, books, and postcards. Families that measure their history in Montana in generations possess time-honored tales of Russell’s unquenchable good cheer and selflessness. In certain respects Russell’s likeability and down-to-earth good nature worked against his being taken seriously as an artist by some critics early in his career, but his Indian Hunters’ Return (1900, oil on canvas, 24" x 36") on the cover clearly marks him as a painter who understood deeply the rhythms of western life for all its inhabitants, in this case those of the Bloods of Canada. Before he painted this canvas, working cowboys and horse-mounted riders dominated Russell’s work. Moreover, his earlier depictions of Indians tended to be relatively static and unemotional. In this lively and detailed work, though, Russell captures that crucial moment during winter when a hunt’s results determines life and death for the hunters’ families. The sheer exuberance and relief etched on faces in the camp reflect Russell’s own recollections of time spent with the Bloods.
Indian Hunters’ Return is a featured painting in the Montana Historical Society’s Mackay Collection.
© Montana The Magazine of Western History, Montana Historical Society. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited.
