Letters from Across the Big Divide: The Ghost Writings of Charles M. Russell

By Brian Morger and Richard E. Baker

Will Rogers once wrote, "Charlie Russell is the only western artist a true cowboy can't find fault with." Rogers also considered Charlie America's best storyteller, cowboy humorist, and sagebrush philosopher.

Though Charlie was under-schooled and semi-illiterate, his salty writings still delight readers eight decades after he crossed "the big divide."

Richard Bird Baker has long strived to bring Russell's wit, humor, cynicism, and horse sense back to life, depicting Charlie writing letters about current events, trends, and issues in colorful cowboy lingo. This edition is a must for fans of cowboy humor, salty metaphors, and sagebrush philosophy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 9, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595613793

Brian Morger

Richard Bird Baker is a lifetime fan of Charlie Russell. He grew up a block from the cowboy artist’s home and log cabin in Great Falls, Montana, at a time when many of Charlie’s former neighbors still exchanged witnessed accounts and rumors about Mr. Russell. He has published four books with iUniverse, three of which have won national literary awards.

Book preview

Contents

Dedications

Author’s Introduction

An Introduction

by the late Bill Rance

Ink Talk One

Ink Talk Two

Ink Talk Three

Ink Talk Four

Ink Talk Five

Ink Talk Six

Ink Talk Seven

Ink Talk Eight

Ink Talk Nine

Ink Talk Ten

Ink Talk Eleven

Ink Talk Twelve

Ink Talk Thirteen

Ink Talk Fourteen

Ink Talk Fifteen

Ink Talk Sixteen

Ink Talk Seventeen

Ink Talk Eighteen

Ink Talk Nineteen

Ink Talk Twenty

Ink Talk Twenty-One

Ink Talk Twenty-Two

Ink Talk Twenty-Three

Ink Talk Twenty-Four

Ink Talk Twenty-Five

Ink Talk Twenty-Six

Ink Talk Twenty-Seven

Ink Talk Twenty-Eight

Ink Talk Twenty-Nine

Ink Talk Thirty

Ink Talk Thirty-One

Ink Talk Thirty-Two

Ink Talk Thirty-Three

Ink Talk Thirty-Four

Ink Talk Thirty-Five

Ink Talk Thirty-Six

Ink Talk Thirty-Seven

Ink Talk Thirty-Eight

Ink Talk Thirty-Nine

Ink Talk Forty

Ink Talk Forty-One

Ink Talk Forty-Two

Ink Talk Forty-Three

Ink Talk Forty-Four

Ink Talk Forty-Five

Ink Talk Forty-Six

Ink Talk Forty-Seven

Ink Talk Forty-Eight

Ink Talk Forty-Nine

Ink Talk Fifty

Ink Talk Fifty-One

Ink Talk Fifty-Two

Ink Talk Fifty-Three

Ink Talk Fifty-Four

Ink Talk Fifty-Five

Ink Talk Fifty-Six

Ink Talk Fifty-Seven

Ink Talk Fifty-Eight

Ink Talk Fifty-Nine

Ink Talk Sixty

Ink Talk Sixty-One

Ink Talk Sixty-Two

Ink Talk Sixty-Three

Ink Talk Sixty-Four

Ink Talk Sixty-Five

Ink Talk Sixty-Six

Ink Talk Sixty-Seven

Ink Talk Sixty-Eight

Ink Talk Sixty-Nine

Ink Talk Seventy

Ink Talk Seventy-One

Ink Talk Seventy-Two

Ink Talk Seventy-Three

Ink Talk Seventy-Four

Ink Talk Seventy-Five

Ink Talk Seventy-Six

Ink Talk Seventy-Seven

Ink Talk Seventy-Eight

Ink Talk Seventy-Nine

Ink Talk Eighty

Ink Talk Eighty-One

Two post thoughts

Dedications

This book is dedicated to the memory of two centenarians: George Washington Bird, one of Great Falls’ designers, known to me as Grampa’, and Stella Willard Baker Tuman, known to her grandchildren as Big Mother, an early Great Falls resident and fascinating individual. Both were contemporaries of Charles M. Russell. Both have probably visited his camp across the big divide.

This book is also written to the memory of many of the elders of my boyhood neighborhood. Many of my neighbors of the mid-nineteen fifties had been Charlie Russell’s neighbors thirty years earlier. Some had known him as children. Others had known his as young or middle-aged adults. Some had known him quite well. Others had known him only by recognition. Regardless of how well or how little they’d known him, everyone remembered him as the most intriguing character our hometown has known.

My childhood elders who remembered Mr. Russell included Mr. and Mrs. Carl Snyder Sr., Florence Buck, Judge Charles Pray, Agnes Milch, George Bates, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Sherer, Gaylord Musselman, Marie Riley, Charles Restelli, Mr. and Mrs. William Remmel, Mr. and Mrs. Louis Brovan, William and Myrtle Serviss, Sophia Bartlett, Charles Bartelt, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Peressini, Victor Matoon, Mr. and Mrs. Earl Johnson, Lucius Rutherford, Vera Thelan, Mary Pfeiffer, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dowell, Myrtle Jones, Gracie Beard, Russell Strain, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Burrel, George Fisher, Mr. and Mrs. George Bird, James Howard Baker, Evelyn Bird Baker, Bill Bertsche, Mr. and Mrs. Willard Kennedy, Mr. and Mrs. James MacGowan, Nannie Good, Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Janzan, Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Stafford, Mr. and Mrs. Judd Walker, Mr. and Mrs. Jules Rinnan, Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Perry, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Curry, Donna Murray, Pearl Thompson, Eva Stamm, Mr. and Mrs. Ben Wilkins, Mr. and Mrs. Norman Hjelm, Dinora Jacques, John McCain, Clifford McCain, Edwin McCain, Margaret Stark, Nita Christopherson, Norman Wenner, Mary Sternot, Glen Wyatt, and Mary Slager.

I’d like to acknowledge a special memory of Frank Sherer, our elderly neighborhood cobler, Albert and Dora Rusch, who bought the North Side Fire Station to house their Rainbow Grocery, Old Black Joe, son of a freed slave, Carl Snyder Sr., who bought Bill Decew’s Grocery to house the Northside Drug, the amazing operetic voice of Tony Pinski, and the richest man in town, Mr. O’Leary, whose Electric Center was housed in Frank Sherer’s building that formerly housed Carl Snyder’s original North Side Drug.

Thanks again Brian Morgar for the ideal artwork on this book’s front and back covers. Thanks to Dr. Raphael Cristy for the one-man performances depicting Mr. Russell that were part of my inspiration to attempt to write these letters from Charle. Thanks to Lonnie Baker, Diane Stinger, Steve Langford, Aaron Feild, Don and Diana Hartman, and Jacque Evanson for helping me with the baffling technology involved in the contempory process of writing and submitting a manuscript.

To have talent is of no credit to its owner. What man can’t help he should get neither credit nor blame for—it’s not his fault. I am an illustrator. There are lots better ones, but some worse. Any man who can make a living doing what he likes is lucky, and I’m that. Any time I cash in now, I win.

Charles M. Russell

Great Falls, Montana

1926

Author’s Introduction

On October 24th, 1926, at about ten-thirty at night in the Russells’ bedroom, the greatest western and wildlife artist ever to live spoke his last words to Doctor Edwin. I guess I ain’t gonna’ be able to make the grade for you this time, Doc, he expired as his soul set out across The Big Divide.

On Oct. 24th, nineteen autumns later, at almost the same time of night, I was born in Charlie Russell’s neighborhood on the lower north side of Great Falls, Montana. I grew up in a modest old house in that historical, Victorian-styled area one and a half blocks from the Russells’ house and log cabin. At that time, the neighborhood was still full of people who’d known Charlie. Many neighbors still possessed the drawings and statuettes Charlie had made for them.

As the grandchildren of people who’d known Charlie Russell, we north side kids grew up in the shadow of this amazing man who the neighbors still talked about almost daily. We played in Charlie’s yard and climbed on the large rock flower garden that every kid in the neighborhood believed entombed the cowboy’s last horse. We climbed his apple tree and pilfered what we believed were among the best apples in town. In those days, the landscape in front of Charlie’s cabin sloped down to a cement wall. In the middle of the wall a large cement diamond framed a sculpted buffalo skull, Charlie’s signature. That wall provided us with one of our favorite places to jump from into a pile of autumn leaves and to throw snowballs from at passing neighborhood rivals. We played war and shot japs in Charlie Russell’s former back yard and in the back yards of the two adjacent houses to the east. The alley behind the Russells’ house was the only one in the neighborhood that was paved with concrete, providing us with the solid, flat surface we needed to launch tin cans with firecrackers.

We grew up overhearing a lot of loose talk about Charlie in the corner grocery, the corner drug store, the cobbler shop, the flower shop, on people’s porches, and in everyone’s back yard. How much of the local scuttlebutt was true and how much was rumor no one knew. Nevertheless, I’ve relied on some of this neighborhood hearsay in the composition of these letters with little regard as to what is fact and what is rumor.

Charlie left no autobiography. Many details about his life have never been historically clear. A lot of contradiction existed among conflicting neighborhood memories, and perhaps even more contradiction has existed among Russell’s biographers. A few of his more recent biographers have described some of the accounts written by his earlier biographers as the Russell legend. Nevertheless, I have utilized material from both his earlier and his more recent biographers with little attemp to distinguish fact from legend. A mixture of fact and legend has always comprised our western heritage.

I am not an authority on Russell’s writings, his art, nor his life. However, I have thoroughly enjoyed his yarns, his letters, his biographers, and his art. All the opinions expressed in these letters from Charlie correspond to Russell’s known attitudes. Readers familiar with Charlie’s written lines will readily notice that I frequently depict him rewriting some of them, usually as a reference point from which to approach our new century’s concerns. I have tried to keep my presence out of these essays and to present them as if they’d come directly from Charlie’s pen. When discussing points on which Charlie and I would disagree, I’ve attempted to suspend my personal beliefs and to write strictly from Russell’s point of view. Charlie was highly opinionated, and he was one of his days’ most vocal critics of modernization. He could be considered one of our nation’s first environmentalists.

When writing these letters from Charlie for public radio broadcasts or for newspaper columns, I intentionally avoided topics on which Russell’s opinion is not known, at least to me. I could not honestly attempt to represent Russell’s ideas about certain issues, including homosexual marriage, abortion, and illegal aliens. I simply don’t know what his attitude might have been toward these and various other questions. I’ve had to decline using a number of topics suggested by readers and listeners for that reason.

Most of the letters in this collection have previously been published in Great Falls area newspapers or have aired on Montana Public Radio. Many of them depict the cowboy artist commenting on contemporary trends, events, and issues. A few are simply yarns possessing varying amounts of fact and fiction that were not included in Russell’s Rawhide Rawlins collections.

This book presents these letters in the order they were written, but they don’t necessarily need to be read in chronological order. People have told me that the quality of these writings steadily improved over the years, and lately, as I’ve made final revisions and proof readings of the collection, I’ve come to agree with these people’s judgement. I also believe that all of these writings, due to recent revision, now read smoother and sound more natural than they did when they were originally printed or broadcasted.

The language used in these writings is my attempt at recreating Mr. Russell’s speech. Originally a Missouri dialect, it soon became embellished with late-nineteenth-century metaphors from Montana’s cow camps, bunk houses, saloons, and card games. Russell also enjoyed using a fair sprinkling of colorful metaphors he learned from the Blackfeet and the Blood Indians to flavor his letters, and I have capitalized on many of these expressions. I’ve collected the enclosed linguistics from Russell’s writings, the writings of his cowboy contemporaries, and the speech of elderly rural Montanans. All mistakes in spelling, grammar, and usage are intentional. Any attempt to modernize or standardize the language in these writings would detract from Russell’s powerful, colorful style of self-expression. For clarity, I have chosen to use standard punctuation and capitalization, two things Russell often ignored. However, I have maintained some of Russell’s misspellings for literary flavor.

My purpose in these writings has been both to teach and to entertain. I try to portray Charlie as being naively and humorously out of touch with modern times, yet able to offer some solid, old-time hoss sense, something we modern cliff dwellers often overlook. He was known as an eccentric genius. He defies modern labels to such an extent that it’s impossible to define him as either a liberal or a conservative. As Will Rogers put it, he was just ol’ Charlie.

Rogers referred to Charlie as the only western artist a true cowboy couldn’t find fault with, and declared that Remington ain’t even in it with Russell. Rogers also considered Russell the best storyteller, cowboy humorist, and sagebrush philosopher he’d ever met. I personally suspect that some of Rogers’ written ideology and editorial style grew out of his admiration for Russell.

Russell published two short collections of yarns known as the Rawhide Rawlins tales. In addition, hundreds of illustrated letters from Russell to his friends have survived and have been compiled and published in several large volumes. If you haven’t read these delightful, rustic writings yet, see if your library still has them. If not, they can likely be obtained through inter-library loan. They were much of the inspiration for the pages ahead in this book.

As I have noted, the basis for these writings is partly historical, partly legendary, and partly neighborhood hearsay, accurate or inaccurate to varying degrees. Several years ago, I mailed a few letters from Charlie to C. M. Russell historian, author, and reinactor Dr. Raphael Cristy. I asked him which literary genre he thought these writings represent: history, biography, fiction, nonfiction, easays, historical fiction, philosophical nonfiction, fictitious essays, or historical-fictional autobiography?

Dr. Cristy responded via snail mail that regardless of the letters’ historical or fictional content, … you’ve written under the assumed characterization of a deceased individual assumed to be living an after-life, and with an assumed ability to write letters to contemporary earthly beings. That couldn’t be construed as anything but fiction.

Dr. Cristy thus convinced me that these writings are fiction. However, conventional works of fiction are normally in the form of novels, short stories, or drama. These writings, of course, pertain to none of those genres. I am not aware of any other writer who has attempted to compose essays in the first person from the standpoint of a deceased character. Perhaps I’ve happened upon a new genre or subgenre of fiction. If that’s the case, I’d like to hang a name on this new literary style: a post-mortem character representation.

I hope you enjoy reading this P.C.R. as much as Charlie enjoyed dictating it. Any questions, comments, or objections concerning these writings can be addressed to [e-mail].

Richard Bird Baker

An Introduction

by the late Bill Rance

The wrangler whose words are about to come buckin’ out of the chute needs no introduction. It’s me who needs introducing. I’m Bill Rance, the barkeep who owned the Silver Dollar Saloon in Great Falls, Montana. It’s the watering hole that became the Silver Dollar Barber Shop during prohibition. Maybe some of you once tried—with no luck—to pluck some of them silver dollars from the sidewalk outside the front door.

All the paintings that hung behind my back bar were made by the steady hand of my best friend—who I’ll soon shut up for—Charlie Kid Russell, the best artist ever to trade a masterpiece painting for a round of drinks. Long before I set up my layout in the Silver Dollar, me and Kid Russell worked many fall cattle drives together near the highline, and we crooked our elbows and painted our noses together many’s the time in the Judith.

Six winters after Charlie cashed in, I followed his tracks across the divide. I soon spotted the smoke of his campfire in the Shadowy Hills. We’ve shared a passel of good yarns since then, and we’re still thicker than two hoss thieves. I’d know his ashes in a whirlwind.

There’s two things you need to savvy about Charlie before you read any of his ink talks. First, you can’t change his mind no more than you can turn a stampede. That’s the straight goods. Once he gets an idea proned into his head, ya’ couldn’t shoot it out with a scattergun.

My memory’s cinchin’ itself onto a night when we was sleepin’ off a drunk in a spinnin’ hotel room in Reed’s Fort. Charlie wakes up gasping, I can’t breathe! The air’s too stale in here! Open a winder before I cash in!

I tries all the windows, but they don’t budge. Panicking, Kid Russell kicks a hole through a glass pane. Now I can breathe again, he rejoices. In half a minute, he’s sound asleep as a tree. In the morning, he wakes up as sober as a hoot owl to find his hoof print in the glass door of a bookcase.

The other thing to remember about Charlie is he’s sometimes a little careless about noticing who’s within shootin’ distance before he unloads some unpopular words. Once when William Jennings Bryant was running for president, he was train-hoppin’ across the west giving speeches. Don’t ask me what he was talking about; he never did say. When Bryant blows into Cascade, he finds the streets empty as a church on payday, except for that lazy Kid Russell saunterin’ about town. Figgerin’ everybody should recognize him, Bryant don’t introduce himself when he asks Charlie, Where is everybody?

They all took the last train to Great Falls to hear that windjammer Bryant.

Charlie could never be anybody else’s man or expect anyone else to be like him. He always allowed it was a lone play to him to catch his own hoss and skin his own skunks. He’d always fill his own hand, play his cards as best he knew how, and blame nobody but himself if his hand was trumped. Yet he was the most generous cowhand in the Judith, the quickest friend I’ve ever known to stake another cowboy to the last of his jingle or to saw off on a pal the last of his Bull Durham or his whiskey.

Whether or not you credit his words, you can bet your last shot of joy juice he’s shootin’ ’em straight from the heart. He’s still as square a cowboy as you’ll ever ride up on, and he still stands a full eighteen hands high. When you cut his trail across the big divide, you can tell him I said so. And you no longer need to fear that Nancy the Robber will head you off when you ride up on Charlie’s camp. These days on our range, she no longer gets her back up when Charlie wants to share a horse ride, a yarn, or a drink with the old bunch.

The Late Bill Rance

Ink Talk One

SKU-000092880_TEXT.pdf

1994 in the moon the snow melts

If my memory’s sittin’ square in the saddle, Montana’s seen sixty-eight winters since I crossed the big divide over to the Maker’s eternal range. I was seldom hobbled or hogtied when it came to waggin’ my tongue, but I’ve always been as slow as a cow in a bog at makin’ an ink talk. I hope you folks savvy it ain’t because I no longer think about my old friends. I haven’t forgotten a single pal.

What spurs me to writing is this dispute over the Elks Lodge selling my oil painting, The Exalted Ruler. A lot of folks back on my old range have taken to buckin’ and kickin’ over the chance that my old pardners might sell it to some out-of-state party. Folks have been askin’, What would Charlie say?

I’m not a top hand with a pen. I can get plumb tangled up in my verbal lariat. But I’ll try to reel it out to you as to how my thoughts are grazin’ touchin’ this sale. This fracas has gotten as touchy as a teased rattlesnake, so I’ll try to avoid stampedin’ any hard feelings.

It does my old hide good to see how folks on your range still take to my art. It fills me with pride from horn to hoof to know some folks hope The Ruler will never leave Great Falls. But I gotta’ sing a might low on this tune, for nobody’s guiltier of selling my work afar than me and Mame. We peddled them paintings in Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London, and Paris, to name just a few camps. Oh, I know there’s folks who say I’d never have fancied them sales without Mame playing her hand in it, but let’s not blame her. I stacked my chips in with hers every jump of the way, and we won out a far more handsome pot with them paintings than I ever thought they was worth.

Most of my critics have been better to me than I deserve. I’ve said this plenty, and now I’ll chew it finer. Talent is a God-given gift, and nobody deserves to be credited or faulted for his