Object Details
Object Essay
In 1888 Century Magazine accepted a series of articles written by Theodore Roosevelt describing his experiences as a rancher in the Dakota Territory. He had just seen some of Frederic Remington’s first illustrations of western life and insisted that the artist be engaged to illustrate his articles. Both men, who had not yet met, had recently failed in their respective ranching endeavors, the victims of bad weather and uncertain markets. Retaining an insatiable appetite for the West, Roosevelt and Remington recorded their experiences with respect, even if through rose-colored glasses. In retrospect, they seemed destined for this collaboration.
Our Elk Outfit at the Ford was an illustration for Roosevelt’s article “The Ranchman’s Rifle on Crag and Prairie,” published in Century in June 1888; it later became chapter five of the book in which the reprinted articles were collected. Roosevelt wrote of hunting with his characteristic zest, of “the keen pleasure and strong excitement of the chase” and the hunter’s prowess, without which “he would almost always be sadly stinted for fresh meat.” Our Elk Outfit illustrates his third paragraph:
A small band of elk yet linger round a great patch of prairie and Bad Lands some thirty-five miles off. . . . Once last season, when we were sorely in need of meat for smoking and drying, we went after them again. . . . My two hunting horses, Manitou and Sorrel Joe, were at home. The former I rode myself, and on the latter I mounted one of my men who was a particularly good hand at finding and following game. With much difficulty we got together a scrub wagon team of four as unkempt, dejected, and vicious-looking broncos as ever stuck fast in a quicksand or balked in pulling up a steep pitch. . . . We got out to the hunting-ground and back in safety; but as the river was high and the horses were weak, we came within an ace of being swamped at one crossing.1Roosevelt 1968, 64–65. First published in book form as Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (New York: The Century Company, 1888).
When drawing or painting images to be reproduced in books or journals, artists habitually worked in monochrome, as Remington did here, in order to ease the transition to the publishing medium, which might be wood engraving or photogravure.
Were it not for the original context of the illustration, one might not recognize Roosevelt as the second horseman. This is an early moment in developing Roosevelt’s image as an intrepid outdoorsman and frontiersman. Remington and Roosevelt became lifelong friends from this first collaboration, and Roosevelt praised Remington’s writings as well as his painting and drawing, implicitly comparing him to Rudyard Kipling—not without justification.2“Remington and Kipling had been drinking companions at The Players and had become friends in the course of Remington’s illustrating a Kipling story for Cosmopolitan. . . The two were called ‘well matched in audacity, frankness, and power of picturesque speech.’” See Samuels and Samuels, 231. The great popularity of the Century series was a major factor in the “sudden and extraordinary” success of Remington as an illustrator.3Shapiro 1988, 19.
William Kloss
Excerpted from Jonathan L. Fairbanks. Becoming a Nation: Americana from the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State. New York: Rizzoli, 2003.