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Show Charley Russell's Funeral I : .e N , I A dramatic funeral cortege filed over the dusty, sage-bordcred sage-bordcred road leading to the little cemetery just outside Great Falls, Mont, a few days ago. Above is a picture of it. A shabby, old-fashioned black horse, mute symbol of a more peaceful day when the bodies of men were taken slowly to their final resting place, led the procession. Two horses of the dray type, nothing jaunty or spirited or ritzy about them, plugged along, drawing the old hearse. Behind the hearse plodded a horse without a rider. The horse's rider was ahead. He was the man drawn m Ihe old hearse. Charles M. Russell, the "Cowboy Artist was being buried as he had asked. , ."Take me to the cemetery with hosses," he had said. Acclaimed in sophisticated, metropolitan centers of the world, selling his pictures of the west at $10,000 each and more, Russell preferred to live and die where "hosses" were to be found. "" ,, It was because Russell couldn't write very well Or spell very well that he brought fame and fortune to himself and glory to his state and his friends. ' The winter of 1884 went down in history to ranchmen of the west. Terrific cold and blizzards killed cattle by thousands thou-sands and tens of thousands. The foreman of the N Bar R outfit, where Russell was a cowboy, wanted to write a letter to the boss up in Helena, asking for help. 1 . . He couldn't write or spell much either, and asked Russell to help him. Russell, with just a few pencil strokes, "wrote" his letter in picture form. There were but two figures in it : a solitary, starved cow on the barren prairie, her tail frozen off, so starved an object that the very skin seemed cracked; a coyote, hungry, too, waiting for this sorry mouthful. ; "The Cowboy Artist" was made. That rough, postcard picture was copied from coast to coast. Art dealers beseeched him for work. Great galleries made room for his western pictures. i For 42 years "Cowboy Russell" sent his horses and cattle and cowboys and coyotes out o an appreciative world; to kings and presidents and great industrial powers. Then the other day he died, and journeyed to the grave behind his beloved "hosses." It's difficult to say just what the moral of this story of Charles Russell's life and death is, if any. If the reader wishes to point his own, perhaps a tribute paid Russell by one of his pals. Horace Brewster, another man of the Montana range, will help. Said Brewster. "I've known Charley Russeil for 44 years, in sun and shade, and he sure was for his friends, and as white a guy is ever came down the trail. He never swung a mean loop in his life, never done dirt to man or animal. If I don't meet him in the big roundup Over There, it'll be my fault and not his, 'cause I know he'll be givin' me a loot-up, no matter how ornery I am." |