In Montana in the 1880s, Charles Marion Russell was just "a kid who drew things" when he was not working as a cowboy. He drew handsome, storytelling pictures of the Great West, full of live-looking cowboys, Indians and galloping horses. He sold them for $5, or even less, until he learned that some people would pay a lot more. He found this out when a man from Boston asked the price of two paintings. As Cowboy-Painter Russell told it later: "He was a plumb stranger ... so I said $50. And I'm a common liar if the fellow didn't dig out $100 and hand 'em over. He thought I meant $50 apiece . . . I didn't say a word. I just bought the fellow a drink and kept the rest. He don't know to this day how bad he beat himself."
Russell died at 62 in 1926. still protesting that he had no idea why some collectors paid the prices they did for his canvases. Yet he exhibited in London, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, and sold several paintings for $10,000 apiece—to Canada for the Prince of Wales, to Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Oilman Edward L. Doheny. That kind of money he called "dead men's prices," meaning the price of an old master. Nonetheless, Charles Russell knew what he could do and had a master's pride in his talent. Standing before a display of modern art, he once said: "I can't savvy the stuff. It may be art, but it's over my head. I may paint a bum hoss, but people who know what a hoss looks like will know I tried to paint a hoss."
Montanans, who know what hosses look like, are proud of Charles Russell's talent too. Last summer they raised $79,000 by public subscription to build a Russell Museum in Great Falls. Last week, as the climax of another public fund drive, the Montana Historical Society took title to a private collection of Russell paintings valued at $300,000. The estate of Rancher-Broker Malcolm Sutherland Mackay agreed to take $50,000 for the collection, after a drive was launched to keep it in the state. Its destination: the new Russell gallery in Helena's Veterans and Pioneer Memorial Building.
The one man who might well have objected to all this attention was plain-speaking Charley Russell himself. "In my book," he once told a Montana booster meeting, "a pioneer is a man who comes to a virgin country, traps off all the fur, kills off all the wild meat, cuts down all the trees, grazes off all the grass, plows the roots up, and strings 10 million miles of bob wire. A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization. I wish to God that this country was just like it was when I first saw it and that none of you folks were here at all."