Riding herd, living among Indians, Charlie Russell drew inspiration from danger, always racing time, for a gaudy era was ending and his life's obsession was to capture it on canvas and record it in bronze. As a boy in St. Louis he was the despair of his parents, always running away and playing hooky from school. He longed to travel west, and finally his father sent him to a Montana ranch thinking the rough life would cure him of wanderlust. But at sixteen Charlie was avid for adventure. From the moment he saw and sketched his first buffalo he was bound to the wilderness, and Montana became home.

In partnership with a trapper, Russell skinned game and studied the anatomy of animals, which proved so valuable to his drawings. Later he lived the precarious, drifting life of a cowboy. On his first job he replaced a man killed in a stampede and became a "nighthawk," pledged to protect the herd from Indians and rustlers. It was lonely, dangerous work, but it gave Charlie insights which bloomed his talent to genius.

He sketched what he saw, without romanticism. He painted gaunt, sore-backed horses, starving cattle, scurvy dogs. He painted storms and sunsets and scorched sagebrush. Most marvelously he painted people—mountain men, fur traders, Indians, cowpokes. His friend Will Rogers wrote of him, "He is the only painter of western pictures in the world that cowpunchers can't criticize. Every little piece of leather and rope is just where it should be."

At twenty-one Russell was famous in the West, but years passed before he achieved international recognition. His pictures that sold for five or ten dollars now bring thousands, and the tales he told over campfires are part of our cherished literature.

This is the story of a charming eccentric, a man who adventured strange trails. When he neared the end of his own trail and his doctors told him he had only six months to live, he went right on with his writing and painting, recording the last, wild days of America’s western history.

From the book