Born in Canton, New York, near the Canadian border, Remington grew up in a near-wilderness region, and became an avid hunter and horseman. His father, a Republican newspaper publisher and politician, had been an officer in the Civil War, and thereby cast a heroic shadow which Remington strove to match. The boy was no lover of academic studies, and because of modest artistic abilities, after he had struggled through public, private, and military schools, he elected to enter the School of Arts at Yale in 1878, where he excelled more at sports than in painting, playing football under the captaincy of the famous Walter Camp. The artistic training he received during the two years at Yale helped move him out of the amateur ranks; still, it would be the life he led thereafter that provided Remington his material.

   Called back home in 1880 by the death of his father, Remington was given a minor position in the state capital through the influence of an uncle. A year later, having been refused the hand of the woman who would eventually become his wife, Remington left in a huff for the far West. Unlike Wister, he did not go as a tourist and dude-rancher, but like him Remington found his calling. A brief encounter with a wagon freighter was, as he later recalled, akin to a religious experience: the West, he was told by the man as they sat by their campfire, was gone, and Remington resolved, like Wister a few years later, to preserve the old heroic West through his art. His money exhausted, Remington returned home, and after working in another unpromising patronage job in Albany, and having at twenty-one received his patrimony, he left again for the West. Inspired by "bonanza" propaganda, Remington thought to make his fortune by becoming a stockman in Kansas, but his venture in ranch ownership met with little success. Selling out, he returned briefly to Canton in 1884, was again refused the hand of his intended, then set out for Arizona and New Mexico, with the intention of fulfilling his resolve of turning out pictures of the Western scene for money.

   Returning to Kansas City with the paintings that resulted from this trip, Remington invested the remains of his estate in a saloon, thinking to earn therefrom sufficient income to live on while pursuing his artistic career. He managed to dispose of the crude paintings, but without much return, and soon discovered that he had been swindled by the other owners of the saloon. This left him with nothing. Returning east again, Remington was finally successful in winning the hand of his bride, Eva Caton, taking her back with him to Kansas City, where her presence gave his life a long needed stability. Having placed in 1882 a Western sketch with Harper's Weekly, Remington continued to try that market, with little success. When Eva returned home for an extended visit, her husband rode west into the Arizona Territory in 1885 in search of more material. In a positive turn of luck, he encountered the campaign of the U.S. cavalry against the Apaches of Geronimo, which was getting much attention in the East. Throwing in his lot with the "buffalo soldiers," Remington submersed himself in a rugged and extremely arduous life, and gained considerable experience in the elusiveness of Native Americans on the run and the tenacity of cavalrymen in pursuit. Returning east to New York City with a bulging portfolio, Remington discovered that the editor of Outing Magazine was his fellow student at Yale, Poultney Bigelow. His troubles were over. Not only was Bigelow enthusiastic about his Western drawings, but Bigelow's encouragement sent Remington to the offices of Harper's Weekly, this time with positive results. Commencing in January, 1886, his work began appearing regularly in that popular journal.

   It never stopped. Eva soon joined him in New York, and in 1887 Remington returned to Arizona in a search for Indians that was now somewhat different from the one pursued by the U.S. cavalry he once rode with; now he sought to capture their essence in pictures and, increasingly, in prose descriptions. In the course of repeated returns to the West, he developed a complex attitude toward the Native American, one of admiration qualified by a conviction that a vast distance separated primitive from civilized people. Like Cooper before him, he celebrated the exploits of a doomed way of life, and in so doing, assisted in the preservation of that frontier whose closing Frederick Jackson Turner was about to commemorate. Riding a wave of nos- talgia, Remington found his work in sudden demand, and as his fame as a Western artist grew, he received requests for book illustrations, one of the first being for pictures to accompany the serialized publication in Century Magazine of Roosevelt's Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888), which brought him the friendship of that proponent of the "strenuous life." He drew the illustrations for Wister's first two cowboy tales, for Harper's in 1891, and soon began illustrating his own essays and stories for Century and Harper's.

   In 1888, also, Remington had exhibited a Western watercolor in a competition in New York, and a year later, his ambitious painting of Custer's last stand received a silver medal at the Paris Exposition. These successes started him in yet another artistic direction. During the next decade he was busy with Western trips to seek material, with working up essays, stories, and illustrations drawn from those trips, and with painting and exhibiting the heroic canvases that were becoming in great demand. In 1892, he traveled to Russia and North Africa with Bigelow in search of other exotic subjects--the colorful and ferocious Cossack and Bedouin horsemen--and a layover in Germany during this trip resulted in some amusing depictions of posturing Prussian officers as well. Still Remington's career would be identified chiefly with the American West, including the illustrations he did for an 1892 edition of Parkman's Oregon Trail, as well as the many that accompanied Wister's stories in Harper's.

   In 1898, Remington was sent to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War, that jingoistic conflict that attracted many artists and writers of the day, but the overweight New Yorker found conditions in the field not at all to his liking; he preferred the comforts of the Navy gunboats offshore. Increasingly, Remington became a studio artist, turning out immense canvases and experimenting with the horseman bronzes that would make him famous as a sculptor. His illustrated short stories and essays were gathered in several volumes--Pony Tracks (1895), Crooked Trails (1898), and Men With the Bark On (1900)--and his Western drawings were published in 1902 in Done in the Open, with an admiring introduction and verses contributed by Wister. But the publication of Wister's The Virginian that same year aroused Remington's ire over his friend's pasteurized West, with its convenient, sentimental ending. Remington's stories, based on his long and hard experience with the cavalry on the march, belonged to the Mark Twain tradition of unsentimental realism, and though (like Twain) he could portray tearful situations, they generally involved the deaths and sacrifices of brave soldiers well clear of the influence of women, and they were always close to the facts of Western life--as had been the stories by Wister that he had illustrated. Remington in reaction dashed off a remarkable novel, John Ermine of the Yellowstone, writing so quickly that the book appeared the same year as Wister's. In effect, the story fulfilled Henry James's desires regarding the fate of Wister's hero, that he had died young and unmarried. John Ermine is a white boy raised by Indians, who becomes thereby a savage; his subsequent tutoring in civilized ways by a white man, a humpbacked hermit who has fled the ridicule of society for the wilderness, only applies a veneer to the young man's character. Searching to reclaim his white inheritance, John Ermine becomes a cavalry scout, and falls in love with the fiirtatious daughter of an army major. Having already promised herself to a young officer, she first encourages then spurns him. In a fit ofjealous rage, Ermine sets out to kill his rival, but before he can carry out his plan, he is killed himself by an Indian whom he had earlier insulted. Though clearly the stuff of melodrama, and hardly a considerable challenge to Wister (Remington's novel was never a popular success), John Ermine is a fascinating study of primitivism, and establishes themes and situations that transcend the easy generalities of Wister's text. No American writer of the West before Remington attempted to get inside the Indian character, and in his The Way of an lndian (1906) and the humorous stories told by Sun-Down Lefiare, he was perhaps more successful than any white man before him in grasping the essence of primitive life.

   Remington died suddenly in his studio home in New Rochelle, New York, from the effects of appendicitis. It is doubtful that he would have done much more with his writing, as his experiments with oils inspired by French Impressionism had taken him in an exciting new direction, and his work with bronzes continued to make great demands on his time. But his writings remain a fascinating and idiosyncratic contribution to the literature of the West, a vital expression of a vernacular sensibility, whose rough good nature and slangy personal style are in all ways a contrast to the snobbish and polished manner of his friend and associate Wister. Like Wister, Remington was a bigot; his sympathy with Indians did not extend to other ethnic groups, and he was hostile to the immigration to the United States of Middle Europeans, which he viewed as a threat to the Anglo-Saxon hegemony. These expressions are largely limited to his letters, however, nor do they differ much from the feelings of many of his generation, for whom the Europeanization of America was a terrifying phenomenon. This was in part responsible for the contemporary nostalgia for an earlier time, when moral issues were supposed to have been simple and could be settled summarily with a gun. The result was the myth of the cowboy, with his inevitable horse and invariable Colt, a myth which Remington perhaps more even than Wister was responsible for fixing in vivid and memorable images forever.

*John Seelye, ed, Stories of the Old West: Tales of the Mining Camp, Cavalry Troop, & Cattle Ranch (New York: Penguin Books, 1994) 187-190.

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