Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), American painter, left one of the most extensive and accurate pictorial records of the Old West.

Charles Marion Russell was born on March 19, 1864, in St. Louis, Mo., to a comfortable family. As he was hard to control, his parents sent him to military school in Burlington, N.J. In 1880 he left for Montana and for the next twelve years worked as a sheepherder and cowpuncher. In 1888 he spent six months with the Blood Indians in the Northwest Territory. All the while, he drew and painted, seldom selling his work, more often giving it away.

Starting in 1890-1891 in Lewiston, Mont., Russell began to sell his paintings; he also executed a mural for a bank there for which he received $25--the most money he had ever earned for a single work. In 1891 a bartender in Great Falls, Mont., contracted for all of Russell's work. The...