Product Description

A FEW WORDS ABOUT MYSELF (A personal introduction written by the author but a few months before his death) The papers have been kind to me many times more kind than true. Although I worked for many years on the range, I am not what the people think a cowboy should be. I was neither a good roper nor rider. I was a night wrangler. How good I was, I'll leave it for the people I worked for to say there are still a few of them living. In the spring I wrangled horses, in the fall I herded beef. I worked for the big outfits and always held my job.

I have many friends among cowmen and cowpunchers. I have always been what is called a good mixer I had friends when I had nothing else. My friends were not always within the law, but I haven't said how law-abiding I was myself. I haven't been too bad nor too good to get along with.

Life has never been too serious with me I lived to play and I'm playing yet. Laughs and good judgment have saved me many a black eye, but I don't laugh at other's tears. I was a wild young man, but age has made me gentle. I drank, but never alone, and when I drank it was no secret. I am still friendly with drinking men.

My friends are mixed preachers, priests, and sinners. I belong to no church, but am friendly toward and respect all of them. I have always liked horses and since I was eight years old have always owned a few.

I am old-fashioned and peculiar in my dress. I am eccentric (that is a polite way of saying you're crazy). I believe in luck and have had lots of it.

To have talent is 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 that 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
OLD WEST

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80129 in Books
• Published on: 1996-07-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 211 pages

Review
"Russell writes easily, and in the vernacular. He tells of Indians and Indian fighters, buffalo hunts, bad men, wolves, wild horses, tough hotels, drinking customs, and hard-riding cowboys. . . . [He] lived long enough in the West to acquire a vast amount of information and lore, and he has left enough from his brush to prove his place as a sound interpreter of a stirring period and a fascinating country."-New York Times (New York Times )

"Russell was the greatest painter who ever painted a range man, a range cow, a range horse, or a Plains Indian. He savvied the cow, the grass, the blizzard, the drought, the wolf, the young puncher in love with his own shadow, the old waddie remembering rides and thirsts of far away and long ago. He was a wonderful storyteller. . . . His subjects were warm with life, whether awake or asleep, at a particular instant, under particular conditions. Trails Plowed Under, prodigally illustrated, is a collection of yarns and ancedotes saturated with humor and humanity."-J. Frank Dobie, Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest (J. Frank Dobie Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest )

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Trails Plowed Under by Charlie Russell
This book is one of my top ten favorites. I bought my first copy in 1972 for my father who passed away a year later. I have re-read this book many times with increased pleasure each time. It not only has Charles Russell's drawings and paintings, it has some of the best short stories I have ever read. I've lived in the West pretty much all my life and the characters he portrays ring so true that you know he knew them. He not only knew them, he was able to capture their essence in a few words. I usually don't laugh out loud at what I'm reading, but many of these stories are just plain "laugh out loud" funny. Anyone who enjoys Cowboy Poetry needs to have this in their library. It's not poetry per se, but gives you the same Western flavor in its writing. Most of the stories can be read in 5 minutes or less. I give it a solid 10 out of 5 stars.

The Old West Remembered
This is a classic work of Western nonfiction by a Montana artist whose drawings and paintings helped create the iconography of the early cowboy of the open range. Also a storyteller, Russell wrote this collection of yarns and memories before his death, commemorating frontier life in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It was published in 1927, with an introduction by Will Rogers in the form of a cowboy eulogy. The original edition featured more than 50 of Russell's illustrations, some of them in color.

Unlike the fairly rollicking account of Teddy Blue Abbott, his cowboy contemporary, Russell's book is a more melancholy view of what he remembers as the good old days. His stories are told in an ironic vernacular by an old-timer cowboy named Rawhide Rawlins. Many concern the adventures of cowboys; many also feature Native Americans, in the early years of the agencies (reservations), portrayed with some complexity of feelings, ranging from fear and distrust to respect. Some are outrageously tall tales. Some are spirited character sketches, capturing something of life on the rough, raw land before settlement and homesteading, the motorcar, and civilization - before the plow broke the prairie sod where buffalo and then cattle and cowboys ranged freely.

One of the finest pieces of Western writing occurs in the last chapter, "Longrope's Last Guard," which describes in vivid detail the experience of riding herd on a pitch dark night as the stillness is shattered by an electrical storm that stampedes the cattle and takes the life of one of the men. The burial of the dead cowboy on the open prairie and the subsequent disappearance of his grave is symbolic of the passing of the brief frontier era Russell's words and pictures embrace.

I recommend this book for its capturing of the historical cowboy as remembered by a man who was there and lived among them. As a companion volume, I also recommend Teddy Blue Abbott's "We Pointed Them North," a well-detailed and more light-hearted recollection of the same time and place.

Word pictures from a master painter
Will Rogers said Charlie Russell wasn't "just another" cowboy artist, he wasn't "just another" anything. Though remembered mostly for his paintings, this book proves that Charlie Russell was a keen observer of human nature. This is a sentimental look back at a world that disappeared in Russell's lifetime. The stories will leave you nostalgic for a time you never knew.