Frederic Remington

No one ever caught the Old West, either in spirit or in fine detail, as faithfully as Frederic Remington. An Easterner, a Yale student and a youth of independent means, he went west in 1880 at the age of nineteen to make his own way as a cowboy and gold prospector. Fascinated by what he saw, he began filling notebooks with on-the-spot sketches of men and animals in action. Years later Remington asked to have his epitaph read: “He Knew the Horse.” He knew also the Indian, the cavalryman and the cowpuncher, the wagon train, the roundup and the campfire, the working and fighting of frontier life that was vanishing even as he caught it with his brush.