Welcome to “This Week in the West.” Each week, we’ll share the show’s scripts here on our blog. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app or check back here every Monday.
If you have questions, ideas or feedback about the podcast, you can reach out to podcast@nationalcowboymuseum.org
Episode 8: Frederic Remington
Howdy folks, it’s the fourth week of December 2024 and welcome to This Week in The West.
I’m Seth Spillman, broadcasting from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
On this podcast, we share the stories of the people and events that shaped the history, art and culture of the American West – and those still shaping it today.
He was born in New York and died in Connecticut, but perhaps no one defined America’s imagination about the West more than Frederic Remington.
Every day here at The Cowboy, we stroll past Remington’s remarkable works of art. Cowboys on horseback in the pouring rain. A column of frontier soldiers marching on horseback. A native warrior waving a buffalo skin blanket over his head.
Along with Charles Russell and a handful of others, Remington helped create the archetypes of the West that were built on by successive cultural creators. It is a story we’re proud to steward, along with our collection of original Remington art. Frederic Remington died this week, December 26, 1909.
After a brief stint at the School of Fine Arts at Yale, Remington set out to become a reporter and made his first trip to the West in 1881, visiting the Montana Territory. Remington made a total of 16 trips to the West to gather information, create sketches, take photographs and collect artifacts. He traveled to various locations, including Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, North Dakota, as well as Mexico and Canada. The West captured his imagination and he leaned into art, sketching the landscapes, horses and members of the military.
Five years after that first Western journey, Remington had established himself as an illustrator. His career would accelerate after he crossed paths with another Easterner with an out-sized love of the West.
In 1887, Theodore Roosevelt commissioned Remington to illustrate his new book “Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail.” The job raised Remington’s profile and he was regularly working for the country’s major magazines.
Remington continued to return to the West as a subject.
He feared, as the turn of the Century neared, that he should capture what he was seeing before it was too late.
“I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever… and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed,” Remington wrote in 1905. “Without knowing how to do it, I began to record some facts around me, and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded.”
In 1898, as the Spanish-American War began, Remington traveled to Cuba as a war correspondent, where he was deeply impacted by the brutal realities of war.
After returning to the United States, he entered a highly creative period, marked by a focus on nocturnal scenes.
These works, infused with a sense of tension, looming violence and unsettling quiet, often mirrored the emotional weight of his wartime experiences.
Around 1900, Remington began a series of paintings focused on capturing the colors of the night. In all, he completed over seventy works that explored the technical and artistic challenges of depicting darkness.
“Art is a she-devil of a mistress, and if at times in earlier days she would not even stoop to my way of thinking, I have preserved and so will continue,” Remington said late in his career:
He soon focused on sculpture and added to his prolific artistic output. Remington created more than 3,000 drawings and paintings, and 22 bronze sculptures. He also wrote two novels, and more than 100 magazine articles.
In 1895, he created the sculpture “The Bronco Buster,” showing a cowboy with quirt in hand, hanging onto the reins of a bronc rearing back on its hind legs.
Roosevelt was given a bronze casting of “The Bronco Buster” by members of the Rough Riders. Another original cast was donated to the White House and was kept in the Oval Office from the Carter to the first Trump Administrations.
Around a week before Christmas in 1909 Remington was back living in Connecticut, he complained of not feeling well and a doctor was called in from New York to examine him. Remington needed an appendectomy and underwent an operation.
But complications set in. Two days later, Remington suffered from shock and heart failure.
On December 26, 1909, Remington died. He was 48.
And with that, we put the final brushstrokes on this episode of “This Week in The West.”
Our show is produced by Chase Spivey and written by Mike Koehler
Follow us and rate us on Apple podcasts or wherever you hear us. That helps us reach more people. You can follow us on social media too and online at nationalcowboymuseum.org.
Got a question or a suggestion? Drop us an email at podcast@nationalcowboymuseum.org
We leave you today with the words of Remington’s friend and patron Theodore Roosevelt: “He is, of course, one of the most typical American artists we have ever had, and he has portrayed a most characteristic and yet vanishing type of American life. The soldier, the cowboy and rancher, the Indian, the horses and the cattle of the plains, will live in his pictures and bronzes, I verily believe, for all time.”
Much obliged for listening and remember, come Find Your West at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
