Frederic Remington, perhaps best known as a painter, sculptor, and illustrator, ranks as one of the most important chroniclers of the nineteenth-century American West. His depictions of cowboys, frontiersmen, and Indians--many of which appeared in national magazines such as The Century, Harper's Monthly, and Collier's--his paintings, and his bronzes etched a West of mythic stature that continues to hold sway in late-twentieth-century American popular consciousness. But Remington was also a shaper of words, and the West and western life found in his writings both complement and complicate the visions articulated in his art. Grounded in the romantic notions garnered from reading adventure stories as a youth and in the realities of his own travels through the West in the 1880s and 1890s, Remington's essays, short stories, and novels grapple with change and loss in ways of life and cultures amid a vanishing landscape.

Frederic Sackrider Remington was...