Painting: Roundup Time

“Get my remains out from under this twelve feet of cold concrete if you have to quarry me out.” So, reasoned his grandson, would William F. Cody have reacted to his final resting place on Lookout Mountain outside Denver. Cody, Wyo., diehards have never succeeded in rustling the U.S. cavalry scout’s body out from under all that concrete thoughtfully poured by Colorado officials,* but this summer they have managed to bring the feud to something like a draw with an authentic re-creation of the Old West featuring “Buffalo Bill’s” own collection of Western painting. Not to be outdone, the Denver Art Museum has mounted its own vivid exhibition of frontier days. Together, the two shows offer the American tourist more rootin’-tootin’ cowhands, Texas longhorns, wild ponies, war paint and buckskin than a month of Saturday nights (see color).

Cowboy King. To Western lovers whose text is the TV screen and the local movie house, the news that Buffalo Bill collected art may sound downright subversive. In fact, it was darned shrewd. Many of the paintings featured old Bill himself, adding luster to his legend. But as a chief scout for the U.S. cavalry and later King of the Cowboys in his own Wild West show, he had a genuine interest in preserving an image of the West that he had known.

One artist much favored by Buffalo Bill was New Yorker Charles Schreyvogel, who reached manhood in the 1880s only to find that the West had already been won. Undaunted, he set out to become the chronicler of the cavalryman in action, and Cody obligingly let him use the cowboys and Indians in his Wild West show as models. The results may have been at times secondhand—and his dust-raising dramas clearly anticipate the modern Western—but such paintings as The Summit Springs Rescue, glorifying Cody’s role in a much disputed battle, so impressed another Wild West fancier, Theodore Roosevelt, that he gave Schreyvogel a presidential permit to visit any Army post or Indian reservation in the U.S.

Knights of the Forest. Older painters did it the hard way. Some, like Frederic Remington, rode with the cavalry; others, like Charles Russell, rode the range as cowboys. Each immortalized the West he knew. Albert Bierstadt portrayed the Rockies; George Caleb Bingham the riverboatmen he first knew as a boy on the Missouri. To William Jacob Hays, the buffalo was already a hulking ghost in the dawn of a new day, while James Walker captured another vanishing species, the Spanish vaquero.

Of all the artists who went west, none returned with so important and thorough a document as George Catlin. The first artist to make the hazardous trip all the way up the Missouri River, Catlin lived among the Indians for eight years, brought back 510 paintings of the doomed “knights of the forest.” His aim, he said, was to so record “their looks and their modes” that they “might live again upon canvas, and stand forth for centuries yet to come, the living monuments of a noble race.” And so they do, ironically, in the Buffalo Bill Historical Center at Cody, Wyo.

* Who claimed his body when Cody died while visiting Denver in 1917, although Bill made his home at Cody, Wyo., the town he had founded, and stipulated in his will that he be buried on nearby Cedar Mountain.