Charles M. Russell stands with Frederic Remington as one of the two great painters of America's frontier West. Though best known for his paintings and bronzes, Russell was also an illustrator of books, magazines, and newspapers. In all mediums he strove to depict accurately the peoples, animals, and landscapes of the West, but his view of the West was so nostalgic that his artist's eye remained focused always on the West that no longer was.

Despite his close association with the West, Charles Marion Russell was not born on the frontier; he entered the world on 19 March 1864 in the well-settled vicinity of Saint Louis, Missouri. Russell's Yale-educated father was a well-to-do manufacturer of firebricks who could afford to give his son a good education-a gift in which Charlie had little interest. Russell was such a poor scholar that he never mastered more than the basics of spelling and...