The modern West rapidly took shape in the decades after the Civil War. The completion of the transcontinental railroad hastened settlement and urbanization as well as the confinement of Plains tribes to reservations. However, the close of the frontier only intensified the public’s love affair with the heroic characters and unspoiled beauty of the Old West. An endless stream of dime novels; adventure stories published in illustrated papers and magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, Collier’s, and Field and Stream; and popular spectacles like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show testified to the lasting importance of the Western frontier in the American imagination.
Frederic Remington, a New Yorker educated at Yale, was among the greatest of the Western painters and illustrators of the late nineteenth century. Remington rendered frontier action with great skill; the iconic images in his Old West paintings resonate with both the triumph and tragedy of American Western history.
Like Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell witnessed the last days of the Old West, but he did so from the perspective of a Montana horse wrangler rather than a sophisticated traveler from the East. Russell excelled with figures and horses in complex motion—and often on the verge of disaster. Charles Schreyvogel made his first trip west several years after the end of the Plains Indian Wars. By interviewing veterans of those conflicts, Schreyvogel became their premier visual historian.
