RECOLLECTIONS OF FREDERIC REMINGTON

BY AUGUSTUS THOMAS

Author of “Arizona,” “The Witching Hour,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY FREDERIC REMINGTON AND A PORTRAIT

FREDERIC REMINGTON had a large mind in a big body. The mind had great natural capacity in many directions, and in one of those directions was remarkably self-taught. The body had been splendidly cultivated and came to be unwisely overtaxed. His young manhood was spent in the far West, at work with the cow-boys and near the soldiers and Indians whose picture historian he was destined to become. The life of those men was rude and exciting. Much that would be considered dissipation in civilized surroundings was logical reaction to their environment—man’s answer to nature’s challenge. Remington adopted the cow-boy habit and point of view, and finally assimilated the cow-boy standard and philosophy. It is necessary to consider that fact if one would accurately estimate his character, his work, his achievement, and his untimely end. His very intimacy with the men and the material he drew was purchased at what others may call that cost. Future generations who profit by the facts he recorded must not quarrel with the method of their unconscious acquisition; and the wisest of those who loved him would be less wise if they wished any of his steps retraced. That education reinforced the independence of his nature, made him indifferent to the “cards and custards” of society, and, to speak after his own fashion, kept him “with the bark on.” He worked unhampered by rule, example, or opinion, a veritable child of nature, and he died untamed. Nature and second nature kept him at high pressure. He lived, thought, spoke, and worked by a series of explosions insulated under deep sympathy and great good humor.

Remington was primitive and partizan. Sensitive as an Indian, he liked instinctively and enduringly, he hated intuitively and long. He adored the memory of his father, who had been a soldier, and he remembered him in his uniform. Besides, in the West, in Frederic’s day, the local advent of the troopers meant sudden and inflexible order. The military acted promptly and without debate.

Remington loved the soldiers; he loathed all politicians because they talked.

One of Remington’s distinctions between orators and officers is worth recording. He had been recently visiting General Chaffee and more recently listening to Mr. Bourke Cockran and Mr. William J. Bryan. Indian fashion, he was half acting the manner of all three and feeling inwardly for his answer. “This is it,” he said; “Chaffee tells you to do a thing like this; he looks out from under his eyebrows with his head down; the orator throws his head up and looks out from under his eyelids. The soldier menaces—the orator hypnotizes.”

Remington kept near the ground in all his thinking. The superstructure of things, the embellishment of ideas, the amplification of systems, had small attraction for him. He had a passion for the roots, for the explanations, for the causes. His speech was laconic. If his friends had known the sign language he would generally have used it. His own vocabulary was small, vital, and picturesque, singularly free from slang, but strongly colored with military terms and phrases. He was a good listener and a good laugher. Like the disappearing Carson River, an adequate joke flowing through his system would rise again with recurrent and unexpected irruptions of reflected sunshine. He had also the quality of being humorous himself, and the flavor of his humor was Western, fresh, and wholesome.

One evening he strolled, astonished and abashed, into our half-lighted dining-room,where, unknown to him, a dinner party was in progress. After his own dinner he had come “across lots” for a cigar and our usual argumentative salvation of mankind. The introductions being over, a lady purring at the great man in knickerbockers and herculean stockings asked:

“Did you ride your bicycle, Mr. Remington?”

“Ride it? Ha-ha! Why the blankety-blanked thing wouldn’t let me walk with it.”

From a photograph by Sarony, owned by E. W. KembleFREDERIC REMINGTON

From a photograph by Sarony, owned by E. W. Kemble

FREDERIC REMINGTON

Mrs. Remington had a liking and a capacity for philosophic study. Some of the modern phases had her attention, and one of them which she felt would be useful she pressed upon Remington’s notice. His hospitality to the idea was more tolerant than acquisitive, and at times he may have really doubted its potency; but if he had any criticism it was never spoken, and perhaps never implied. One morning during that period, however, his man Tim brought me a brief note, which read as follows:

Dear Tommy:I was in town last night at The Players and I got so out of tune with the Infinite that you could notice it for two blocks.

Dear Tommy:

I was in town last night at The Players and I got so out of tune with the Infinite that you could notice it for two blocks.

“THE SCALP”

MODELED BY FREDERIC REMINGTON

The value of mere anecdotes of any man is that each reader draws from themthat side of the personality which he would have seen and drawn from the man himself, not merely the element open to the proper vision of the reporter; and that must be the excuse for anecdotes. E. W. Kemble, or, as his friends know him, Ed Kemble, introduced the writer to Remington in 1890. The two illustrators were friends, but the most beautiful side of their friendship needed a third friend for its precipitation. Kemble is universally amusing when he cares to be. Few men are his equal in putting the spirit of caricature into ordinary verbal report or comment; even his famous drawings do not show such sure fun. Remington responded promptly to Kemble’s comedy, however expressed. Most men who know it do the same, but Remington went further. When Kemble had left him after any interview, all of Kemble’s woes of which Remington had been the repository were suddenly dwarfed in the larger horizon of Remington’s experiences and transmuted into side-splitting jokes. In his mind, Kemble was never “grown up”; and Kemble reciprocated. Remington’s throes, viewed through Kemble’s prism, were just as amusing. They took even each other’s art as playfellows take each other’s games. There were years when much of their leisure was passed in company; in the winter, skating and long walks over the hills of Westchester; in the summer, swimming baths in the Sound, bicycling, and tennis. Their understanding was mutual and immediate. One night after the theater, on the train home from New York, sitting together, Remington was by the car window, Kemble next to the aisle. An obstreperous commuter was disturbing the passengers, men and women. The busy conductor’s admonition had been ineffective, the brakeman’s repeated expostulations useless. The men passengers seemed cowed; the rowdy was gaining confidence. On his third blatant parade through the car, and as he passed Kemble’s side, Remington’s two hundred and fifty pounds of bone and muscle reached out into the aisle, and, with the precision of a snapping-turtle, lifted him from his feet like a naughtyboy and laid him face downward over Kemble’s interposing lap. With the spirit of perfect team-work, as Remington held the ruffian, Kemble spanked him, while the legs in the aisle wriggled frantically for a foothold. The correction, prolonged and ample, was accompanied by roars of laughter from fifty other passengers. Being done, Remington stood the offender on his feet. The man began a threatening tirade. Before half a sentence was uttered Remington had him again exposed to Kemble’s rhythmic tattoo. This was enough; and when again released the fellow rapidly left the car for the relative seclusion of the smoker.

Mrs. Remington used to tell of her husband’s return to her one night when they had transiently taken rooms at a New York hotel. Remington, after escorting her back from the theater, had her consent to a little romp at the club. It had come to be two o’clock in the morning; Mrs. Remington had gone to bed, but was as yet only in the border-land of sleep when she was aroused by the repeated slamming of hallway doors. At the proper moment in the crescendo her own door was opened, and in the frame of light stood her husband, quickly joined by a protesting attendant.

“It’s all right,” said Remington; “this one’s my wife—good-night!”

One early morning in February, 1898, James Waterbury, the agent of the Western Union Company at New Rochelle, telephoned me that theMainehad been blown up and had sunk in the harbor of Havana. Knowing the interest the report would have for Remington, I immediately called him on the telephone and repeated the information. His only thanks or comment was to shout “Ring off!” In the process of doing so I could hear him calling the private telephone number of his publishers in New York. In his mind, his own campaign was already actively under way.

One incident of that campaign illustrates the primitive man in Remington. He and Richard Harding Davis were engaged to go into Cuba by the back way and send material to an evening newspaper. The two men were to cross in the night from Key West to Cuba on a mackerel-shaped speed boat of sheet-iron and shallow draft. Three times the boat put out from Key West and three times turned back, unable to stand the weather. The last time even the crew lost hope of regaining port. Davis and Remington were lying in the scuppers and clinging to the shallow rail to keep from being washed overboard. The Chinaman cook between lurches was lashing together a door and some boxes to serve as a raft. Davis suggested to Remington the advisability of trying something of the kind for themselves.

“Lie still,” Remington commanded; “you and I don’t know how to do that. Let him make his raft. If we capsize, I’ll throttle him and take it from him.”

Some months later, on learning of the incident, I tried to discuss the moral phase of it with him; but he brushed my hypocrisy aside with the remark: “Why, Davis alone was worth a dozen sea-cooks. I don’t have to talk of myself.”

His experiences in Cuba were scarcely more supportable than this unpropitious start. The heat was terrible, the transportation bad, and his physical condition poor. He suffered. Growling over it all, long afterward he said to me:

“From now on I mean to paint fruits and flowers. Then if I’m ordered to the scene of action I can go fearlessly.”

Until his increasing weight made it hard to find a mount, he liked to ride. He had no fear of any horse, and among men he had a man’s courage; but he had an unreasonable fear of dogs. Once, on the occasion of a men’s dinner in the early days of the bicycle’s popularity, Kemble had made a souvenir caricature for each guest. The card at Remington’s plate represented Frederic in the costume of a bronco buster, with chaps, sombrero, and guns, riding a bicycle—a look of terror on his face. The bicycle was bucking half-way over the road, frightened at a little cotton dog on four wooden wheels. Nobody laughed more heartily over the card than Remington, and for years it had a place of honor in his studio.

The waning of his great strength was a more sensitive subject with him than his increasing weight, which produced the condition. Gradually in our Sunday walks, the hills grew steeper for him. His favorite ruse for disguising the strain on him was to stop occasionally and survey the landscape:

“Look there, Tommy, how that land lies. I could put a company of men back of that stone wall and hold it against a thousand until they flanked me.”

As with the Southern gentleman who used to look out of the window after passing the decanter to his guest, it was the part of friendship on these occasions to multiply details of the supposititious fortifications until the commander regained his wind.

One Sunday morning in those later days I went with him to the office of an osteopathic physician who was treating him. The osteopath was a slight man and not tall. Remington, lying face downward on the operating-table, presented a skyline so much higher than that of the average patient that the doctor standing on the floor lacked the angle of pressure necessary to his treatment. The doctor therefore mounted a chair, from which he stepped to the table, and finally sat astride of Remington, applying his full weight to the manipulation which he was giving to the spinal column.

Copyright by Mrs. Frederic Remington. From a photograph by Davis and Sanford.“THE BRONCO BUSTER”FROM THE SCULPTURE BY FREDERIC REMINGTON

“THE BRONCO BUSTER”

FROM THE SCULPTURE BY FREDERIC REMINGTON

“I hope I’m not hurting you, Mr. Remington?” said the doctor. Remington answered:

“It’s all right, Doctor—so long as—you don’t—use your spurs.”

Early in his occupancy of the New Rochelle home—perhaps in 1895—he added to his house a studio. This room was twenty by forty feet on the floor, and twenty feet to the roof-tree. A big skylight was in one pitch of the roof; windows with the sills breast-high were on one end, and one side wall. The second end had a double door big enough to admit a horse, or to be opened wide as he painted the horse in the open air outside. All four walls of the studio were covered, above doors and windows and in their dead spaces, with military and Indian and Mexican trappings of all descriptions from spurs to war-bonnets; there were guns of every kind ever carried by an American soldier; all kinds of swords and bridles, saddles, belts, canteens, and cartridge-boxes, powder-horns, bayonets, and knives; there were war clubs, tomahawks, bows, arrows, spears, tom-toms, pipes, scalps, and the wands of medicine-men; moccasins, blankets, beaded deerskins, and the skulls of buffalo, mountain goats, and American carnivora; sombreros, quirts, horsehair lassos, chaps, serapes, ollas, mats, pots, and baskets; in short, not prints or catalogues, but, for all that he might need for any Western picture, the veritable thing itself. He knew the troop and tribe and time and latitude of each. Accuracy in their use was his religion. In his chosen field he abhorred anachronisms. There was considerable éclat over the exhibition of a painting by a new-comer. The subject showed in an Indian fight the rescue of one trooper by another. Remington took one look at it and turned away in disgust. Bits of arms, uniforms, and harness that had never met outside of a museum were assembled in the picture. To the ordinary observer their association was harmonious; but to his expert eye it was falsehood and fake.

In the four arts which he essayed—letters, illustration, painting, and sculpture—Remington was self-taught. His writing was soon abandoned because it was not easy to him, and was not so remunerative as was drawing done in the same time. He had something to say, however, when he did write, and he had an attractive and a graphic style. Great good nature and wholesomeness showed through his lines, and he wrote always from the inside of his subject. It is not the province of this rambling anecdotal recollection of him to attempt an appreciation or a criticism of his art, but one may with propriety note the rapidity with which he overcame the initial difficulties of his tasks and outgrew the unavoidable mistakes of the beginner. Thumbing the older numbers of the magazines in which his earliest illustrations appear,[2]notably those of the Roosevelt articles, one sees that the salient marks of the novice, the small hands and feet of his figures, soon disappear, and in their stead the vigorous members of a master are employed.

Drawn by Frederic Remington“I TOOK YE FOR AN INJIN”

Drawn by Frederic Remington

“I TOOK YE FOR AN INJIN”

Remington’s first work was in black-and-white India-ink washes. He was skilled with the pen, but to achieve values by multiplied strokes was foreign to bothtemperament and training. As those technically informed are aware, but as not all readers know, his illustrations, like all printed pictures, since the direct drawing upon boxwood and lithographic stone was superseded, were made on a large scale and reduced by photographic processes to the size needed for the printed page. He usually worked on a cardboard twenty-four by thirty inches, or thereabout, in size. From black-and-white washes he advanced to black-and-white in oils, and again from these to canvases of such color in flat fields as lent themselves to the earlier reproductions for magazine covers and double pages. During all of this time he was acquiring a technic that grew through the various stages of his contemporaries’ estimate from rebuke to admiration.

Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. MerrillTHE PACK-HORSE MEN REPELLING AN ATTACK BY INDIANSFROM THE PAINTING BY FREDERIC REMINGTON❏LARGER IMAGE

Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merrill

THE PACK-HORSE MEN REPELLING AN ATTACK BY INDIANS

FROM THE PAINTING BY FREDERIC REMINGTON

❏LARGER IMAGE

It was an exhibition of Charles Rolla Peters’s moonlights, about 1894, that gave Remington his most serious wish to paint. The mystery of these efforts and their largeness were keyed to the mute though not inglorious poet in him. He came to see and to master the nuances of the moon’s witchery in all her moods. It was interesting to follow his awakened and developing sense of color. Nature on that side made more and more appeal to him, until in our Sunday-morning and weekday-evening tramps the tints of sky and field and road almost totally dislodged the phantom soldiery from the hillsides.

About 1896 Ruckstuhl, the sculptor, set up a tent on a vacant lot back of our place at New Rochelle, New York, and began in clay the construction of the half-size model for the heroic equestrian statue of General Hartranft that now stands in bronze in front of the State-house at Harrisburg. It was Remington’s first intimate view of sculpture in the making. The horse especially interested him. During the two months that the sculptor labored, Remington made daily visits to the Ruckstuhl tent. The following winter I was sitting one day in his studio watching him at an illustration for some story of Owen Wister’s. He was working “chic,” that is to say, without models, and was making his first marks in charcoal. His outline began to show a cow-boy in the foreground of a bar-room shooting toward the back of the picture, into the perspective of which ran the bar and its stampeding clientele. As it occurred to him that the bulking figure of the local egotist obscured too much of other interesting detail, he quickly dusted off the drawing and reversed his characters, thereby making the aggressor stand in the background and putting the victims to the front. With equal ease he could have put his cow-boy to either side of the room. I said to him:

“Frederic, you’re not an illustrator so much as you’re a sculptor. You don’t mentally see your figures on one side of them. Your mind goes all around them.”

Not long after that he bought a set of tools. Ruckstuhl sent him a supply of modeler’s wax, and he began his “Bronco Buster.” It was characteristic of the man that his first attempt should be a subject difficult enough as a technical problem to have daunted a sculptor of experience and a master of technic. His love of the work when he got at it, his marvelous aptitude for an art in which he had never had a single lesson, are some evidence that it was possibly hismétier. His few bronze groups and figures that rapidly followed “The Bronco Buster,” and his heroic equestrian monument of “The Pioneer” in Fairmont Park, are the work of one who surely would have excelled in sculpture if he had lived to follow it.

Remington thought he believed in “art for art’s sake,” but I know of nothing that he ever did in any of its departments that did not primarily attempt a story. His wish to tell something that had touched him, and tell it at first hand, was as primitive as the instinct of a caveman.

The boy in the nursery wants something that will go. There is a kinship in Remington’s frequently expressed choice of an epitaph:

“He Knew the Horse.”

His death occurred December 26, 1909. On January 1, 1912, the present Democratic administration of New Rochelle was formally installed. It transacted no business that day except to pass a resolution requesting the New Haven Railroad, which was constructing a new station near Remington’s old home, to call that stop “Remington Place.” The railroad graciously complied. Remington’s fellow sculptor, Robert Aitken, has under way a portrait bust of him and four pedestal bas-reliefs. This monument is to be set up fronting the station, and perhaps it, too, will carry that commemorating phrase.

[2]See THECENTURYfor January, April, July, and August, 1889, June, 1896, and February, 1902.

Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson“PEGGY”FROM THE MARBLE BUST BY EVELYN BEATRICE LONGMAN❏LARGER IMAGE

Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson

“PEGGY”

FROM THE MARBLE BUST BY EVELYN BEATRICE LONGMAN

❏LARGER IMAGE

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