Loops and Swift Horses are Surer Than Lead, by Charles Marion Russell (1916)

 

Hello There!

First off, I wanted to thank everyone for the kind words! I am a Western Writers of America Finalist for Best Western Juvenile Fiction for my book, Tom Mix and The Wild West Christmas. This is, simply, the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me, and I am thrilled beyond words. Thanks to everyone at Western Fictioneers who sent best wishes.

This month, I wanted to look at a painting by cowboy artist Charles Marion Russell. 

We can start with the obvious: the title of this work, Loops and Swift Horses are Surer Than Lead.  In my study of Western Art over the years, I have had occasion to look at several pictures that include bears in an attitude of menace. In fact, after Native Americans, bandits and over-zealous lawmen, perhaps the bear is the most frequently represented foeman in Western Art.

However, most any of Charlie’s contemporaries would take the obvious route, and paint a picture of Western figures shooting and killing the bear.  (Or, reaching for their rifles to do so, or putting them down after they have done so.)  Not Charlie. His cowboy heroes, though obviously well-armed, rope and scare the bear away to safer climes. Always more Roy Rogers than Clint Eastwood, Charlie didn’t see the West as a vast panorama of hardship and cruelty, but, rather, a boyish paradise of freedom and fun.

This is where Charlie differs most significantly from the artist frequently associated with him, Frederic Remington (1861-1909). For Remington, the West was unending hardship, merciless desert and physical exertion, a battle for survival to be won or lost. It is Remington, of course, who created in his work the now-familiar Western trope of the bleached steer skull that can still be seen in countless depictions of the West. Make a wrong move, Remington implied, and you’ll end up the same.

If this picture is any indication, perhaps Charlie’s vision was the truer one.  Loops and Swift Horses now hangs in the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and is based on a true-life incident. This painting came about by way of his friends, the Coburn brothers of the famous Circle C Ranch in eastern Montana, where they described the roping of a giant brown bear. Artistic license was taken when Charlie turned the bruin into a Grizzly, but the rest of the story was true right down to the landscape in the background: the scenic Coburn Buttes.

The dominant color of the picture is blue, but Charlie manages to mute or pop shades of it to represent everything from trees to sky to mountains, to foreground scrub. Yet, the color never becomes monotonous or gimmicky. 

Charlie was also the master of figures in motion.  His horses move. Many of our greatest artists have been able to depict horses of majesty, of size, of monumentality, but Charlie’s horses are seen in dramatic action, twisting or jumping with a febrile life of their own. I can think of no finer painter of American horses than Charlie Russell.

 

Finally, Charlie underscores the tumultuous action of the picture with a rainstorm in the middle-distant horizon. Like all Western landscape pictures, the view-horizon is vast, going on for miles. Thus the far-off rain storm underscores the ‘storm’ of action going on between cowboys, horses and bear. 

Speaking of movement, take a moment to look at the bear. It twists and pivots on unsteady ground … you can almost feel the weight of the animal as it is pulled and slides down the natural incline. The cowboys, too, move as if in motion, alternately pulling or swinging their lariats. And notice the cowboy on the right, looking over his right shoulder, with right leg raised as counter weight to keep in saddle.

This is a really good picture, and something mysteriously akin to the essence of Charlie – not only is his West a world of action, freedom and camaraderie, but it can be a fairly bloodless one, too. Charlie loved the animals he found out West (when visiting cities, he always went to the local zoo, where he said he felt most at home), and it’s not surprising that he would depict his heroes scaring away the threat of a grizzly, rather than killing it. 

Perhaps we should all take a page from Russell’s notebook, and produce work that preserves the best parts of ourselves (or, at least, the myth of the best part of ourselves). The more I look at Charlie’s work, the more convinced I become that we need more artists like him now.

Of Rodeos, Trochees, and Western Novels

By Rod Miller

 Most writers of my acquaintance have been at it for a long time. They claim they wrote their first story at age nine or thereabouts and haven’t stopped writing since. Many say they “must” write, and suffer some sort of withdrawal when not tapping away at the keyboard.

Not me.

I spent the first 45 years of my life with no notion of writing a poem or a story or anything else we usually call creative writing. Other than the routine stuff in required English classes, I’ve never had any education or formal training in creative writing.

That said, I suppose I have been blessed with the ability to string words together. But it has always been with a purpose in mind—essay questions on tests, writing for school newspapers, and the like. And, since graduating from college with a degree in Journalism back in the mid-70s, the purpose has been business—writing advertising copy of all kinds. Other than a few essays for advertising trade magazines and such, that was pretty much it. 

Then, one day in the mid-90s (the decade, not my age—I’m not that old, yet) I wondered if I could write a poem. A cowboy poem to be specific. 

You see, I grew up in a cowboy family in a small town and spent a good part of my youth horseback, and a lot of time feeding, branding, and otherwise tending cattle. Cowboy stuff—real cowboy stuff, not that nonsense on TV and in movies—was a big part of life where I grew up. Like a lot of kids then and there, the rodeo bug bit me, and throughout high school and college and for a time afterward I spent most every spring and summer weekend straddling the bucking chutes at rodeo arenas around the West, climbing onto the backs of horses called broncs whose only function in life is to eat hay and buck off cowboys like me with the temerity to think they can’t.

  Well, they can.

 There may still be depressions the size and shape of my head in several rodeo arenas that attest to that fact. I tell you this only because the addled brain that resulted is responsible, more than anything else I can remember, for my (eventual) taking up of the pen to write for fun, rather than work.

As a lifelong member of the cowboy culture and longtime fan of cowboy poetry, it’s only natural, I suppose, that when I wondered if I could write a poem, that would be the kind of poetry I would attempt. And, given my appreciation for rodeo, it’s no surprise that a lot of the poems I wrote (and still write, on occasion) use rodeo life as their subject.

Not knowing any better, I assumed the reason one wrote poems was to get them published. There were, at the time, a couple of national and a few regional magazines edited for Western enthusiasts that published poetry either regularly or occasionally, so I started sending them poems. And, much to my surprise, they started publishing them. Other poems made their way into anthologies.

Which only spurred me on. I managed to get enough poems published to qualify for membership in Western Writers of America, where I met lots of real writers who knew what they were doing and were kind enough to offer advice and encouragement.

That, along with the same curiosity that led to me to write a poem (and the addled former-bronc-rider brain that allows such ill-considered notions to pass through unfiltered), made me wonder if I could write a short story. So I did, and several of my stories have been published in Western anthologies. I tried a novel and that was published. Then another, and that was published. A couple of nonfiction books got written and published. A collection and a chapbook of poetry. A bunch of magazine articles. Some book reviews. A series of essays on writing poetry for CowboyPoetry.com (in which I pretend to know how to write poetry). And so on. 

All in all, writing has been a pretty smooth ride, compared, at least, to riding broncs. I’ve been lucky. Most everything I’ve written has been published, by everybody from well-known New York imprints to unheard of art-house presses.

One of my short stories was even a Finalist for a Western Writers of America Spur Award back in 2006. A recent short story, “The Death of Delgado,” from the anthology The Traditional West, won a 2012 Spur Award for Best Western Short Fiction and was a Finalist for a Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award (as was my novel, The Assassination of Governor Boggs). A 2012 Spur Award for Best Western Poem for a piece from my collection Things a Cowboy Sees and Other Poems also came my way, and the book won the Fred Olds Poetry Award from Westerners International.

Who knows what the future holds? I write for fun (and occasionally for profit), but do not feel compelled to do so and, thank goodness, don’t rely on the income to pay my bills (advertising still does that). So, I write whatever seems interesting and enjoyable at the time, then figure out who might want to apply ink to it. At the moment, I’m awaiting publication of a third novel (Cold as the Clay) that’s due out anytime now From High Hill Press/Cactus Country Books, and there’s a fourth  novel in the hands of a publisher awaiting rejection. A nonfiction pictorial about westward migration and settlement, Go West: The Risk & The Reward, is slated for October release.

And there are a few poems and stories, a novel, and a nonfiction book either in progress or awaiting attention. I’ll get to them, as soon as I find the time and the inclination.

Finally, while I came to writing late and took an unusual road, I like it here. It’s a whole lot easier than getting bucked off ornery broncs. And at least as much fun.

 Rod Miller is among the original members of Western Fictioneers. He is Membership chair and serves on the Executive Board of Western Writers of America. Visit www.writerRodMiller.com for more information.