By 1897 Russell had been working in Montana for roughly seventeen years, having come west from St. Louis in 1880 as a teenager. He spent the 1880s as a wrangler and night herder in the Judith Basin, where he observed Blackfeet, Crow, and Cree camps firsthand and lived for a period among the Blood Blackfeet in Alberta in 1888. By the mid-1890s he had given up cowboying entirely for full-time painting, and subjects of Native domestic and travel life — as distinct from battle scenes or hunts — became a sustained interest. Travois imagery recurs throughout his work because the device condensed everything that interested him about pre-reservation Plains mobility: the horse culture, the movable lodge, the household on the march.

Russell (1864–1926) is the central figure in the Montana school of Western art and, with Frederic Remington, one of the two artists most responsible for shaping popular visual memory of the northern Plains. The sheet entered the collection of Amon G. Carter, the Fort Worth publisher and oilman whose Russell and Remington holdings became the founding core of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art when it opened in 1961. Although this watercolor does not illustrate a Lewis and Clark Expedition episode directly, Russell was the principal twentieth-century painter of Corps of Discovery subjects, and his ethnographic studies of travois transport inform the visual vocabulary later applied to expedition scenes such as his Montana statehouse mural and the Sacagawea paintings of the early 1900s.

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The subtitle “Old Style Warfare” signals Russell’s intent to record intertribal combat as it had been waged before the consolidation of the reservation system, when raiding and counter-raiding between Cree bands from the north and Blackfeet on the northwestern plains were ongoing features of life on the upper Missouri and Saskatchewan drainages. By 1895, when Russell made the painting, those running fights were a generation in the past. He was thirty-one and had been living in Montana since 1880, first as a wrangler and then increasingly as a working artist; he had spent the winter of 1888–89 with the Blood (Kainai) Blackfeet in Alberta, an experience that shaped his lifelong attention to Blackfeet material culture and to the horse cultures of the northwestern plains more broadly. Watercolors of this period helped him transition from illustrator to recognized painter of the West.

Russell (1864–1926) produced thousands of works ranging from quick sketches to large oils, and intertribal combat scenes form a recognizable subset within his output, distinct from his cowboy subjects and his Lewis and Clark paintings of the early twentieth century. The present sheet bears the credit line of the Amon G. Carter Collection and entered the holdings of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, the institution Carter’s collection seeded, which holds one of the most comprehensive groups of Russell’s works on paper. Its current location is not recorded in the available documentation.

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By 1900 Russell had been working professionally as an artist for roughly a decade, having transitioned from cowboy life in the Judith Basin to full-time painting in Great Falls, Montana, in 1893. The turn of the century marked an important period of consolidation in his career: he was producing more finished watercolors for eastern clients and publications, and his marriage to Nancy Cooper in 1896 had begun to shape his work toward a more deliberate professional output. Scouting parties, hunting scenes, and pre-reservation depictions of Plains life were among his recurring subjects, drawn from his own observation of Blackfeet, Crow, and other Northern Plains peoples during his Montana years, including a stay among the Blood Indians in Alberta in 1888.

Russell (1864–1926) became the defining painter of the Northern Plains, and works like this one belong to the genre of Indian subject pictures that he produced in parallel with his cowboy scenes. The painting is held by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, part of the Amon G. Carter Collection assembled by the Texas publisher and oilman whose holdings of Russell and Frederic Remington formed the founding core of the museum when it opened in 1961. While not a Lewis and Clark subject directly, the work documents the mounted Plains scouting traditions that the Corps of Discovery encountered between 1804 and 1806 along the Missouri and its tributaries, and Russell’s broader body of work has long informed the visual imagination of the expedition.

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The scene records the events of August 17, 1805, when the expedition’s advance party, led by Meriwether Lewis, made contact with a Shoshone band on the upper waters of the Beaverhead drainage. When Clark’s main party arrived with Sacagawea serving as interpreter, she recognized the band’s leader, Cameahwait, as her brother—a coincidence that secured the horses and guidance the Corps needed to cross the Bitterroot Mountains. Horse Prairie Creek, where Jackson places the encounter, flows into the Beaverhead near the site historically identified as Camp Fortunate. The episode has long been treated as one of the providential turning points of the expedition.

William Henry Jackson (1843–1942) is better known as the photographer who documented the Hayden Surveys of the 1870s and produced the first photographs of Yellowstone. Late in his very long life he returned to painting, producing a series of small watercolors of frontier and exploration subjects, many commissioned or acquired by railroad and historical interests in the 1930s and early 1940s. This 1940 work belongs to that late watercolor production, made when Jackson was ninety-seven. It is held in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. Jackson’s Lewis and Clark watercolors have been reproduced regularly in popular histories of the expedition, contributing to the visual vocabulary through which twentieth-century audiences pictured Sacagawea’s role.

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The watercolor was made in 1833 during the expedition of Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, whom Bodmer accompanied as expedition artist from 1832 to 1834. The party ascended the Missouri aboard American Fur Company steamboats, reaching Fort McKenzie in present-day Montana before wintering at Fort Clark. Blackbird Hill, in what is now Thurston County, Nebraska, had already entered the literature of the river: Lewis and Clark visited the grave on August 11, 1804, climbing the bluff to place a flag on the mound, and Maximilian’s party stopped at the same location nearly three decades later. By 1833 the site functioned as a recognized landmark for traders, naturalists, and travelers moving upriver.

Bodmer, a Swiss-born artist trained in Zurich and Paris, was twenty-three when Maximilian hired him. The Missouri watercolors and the aquatints later engraved from them for the atlas accompanying Maximilian’s Reise in das innere Nord-America (1839–1841) constitute the most detailed visual record of the upper Missouri before the cholera and smallpox epidemics of the late 1830s transformed the region’s Native communities. The original field watercolors, including this view, were preserved in the Wied family collection at Schloss Neuwied for more than a century before being acquired by the InterNorth Art Foundation and placed at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, which holds the principal repository of Bodmer’s American work. The Blackbird’s Grave sheet has been frequently reproduced in Lewis and Clark scholarship as a visual document of a site the Corps of Discovery itself recorded.

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The work dates to 1833, the year Bodmer ascended the Missouri with Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied on the American Fur Company steamboat Yellow Stone and later the keelboat Flora. The expedition followed much of the route Lewis and Clark had recorded nearly thirty years earlier, reaching Fort McKenzie in August 1833 before wintering at Fort Clark among the Mandan and Hidatsa. Bodmer’s assignment was visual documentation, and he produced hundreds of sketches and watercolors of landscape, fauna, and Indigenous peoples to accompany Maximilian’s scientific observations. Bison were both subject matter and provision on the journey, and Bodmer recorded them repeatedly along the upper river.

Karl Bodmer (1809–1893), a Swiss-born painter trained in Zurich and Paris, is known almost entirely for the two years he spent on the Missouri with Maximilian; he returned to Europe in 1834 and spent the rest of his career in France, associated loosely with the Barbizon circle, rarely revisiting American subjects. The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha holds the principal collection of his North American watercolors and field studies, acquired from the Maximilian-Wied estate at Schloss Neuwied through the InterNorth Art Foundation in the 1980s. Within the Lewis and Clark memory tradition, Bodmer’s Missouri River views have served as the closest visual approximation of the landscape the Corps of Discovery traversed, since no expedition artist accompanied Lewis and Clark themselves.

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The watercolor was made during the 1832–1834 expedition of Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, a German naturalist who had hired the young Swiss artist Bodmer to document the journey up the Missouri. In 1833 the party traveled by the American Fur Company steamboat Yellow Stone and then the Assiniboine from St. Louis as far as Fort McKenzie in present-day Montana, wintering at Fort Clark in North Dakota. Snags were a constant operational concern: Maximilian’s journals record repeated delays as crews cleared or maneuvered around them, and the steamboat Assiniboine itself would later be lost on the river. A study like this served Maximilian’s scientific project of recording the physical character of the western environment, not only its peoples.

Bodmer (1809–1893) is best known for the eighty-one aquatints engraved after his Missouri watercolors and published in Maximilian’s Reise in das innere Nord-America (1839–1841). He spent most of his later career in France, associated with the Barbizon circle, and produced relatively little American material after the expedition. The bulk of his original Missouri River watercolors, including this sheet, descended through the Wied family until purchased by Northern Natural Gas Company in 1962 and given to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha in 1986, which now holds the Maximilian-Bodmer Collection. Landscape studies like this one are valued by Lewis and Clark scholars as the earliest detailed visual record of conditions Lewis and Clark themselves had described in prose nearly thirty years earlier.

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The scene corresponds to the expedition’s progress down the Columbia in late October and November 1805, when the captains repeatedly described meetings with Chinook, Clatsop, and Wahkiakum people who came alongside in cedar canoes to trade fish, roots, and wapato. Russell painted this watercolor in 1905, the year of the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon, a celebration that generated commissions and renewed public interest in expedition imagery. He was then in his mid-forties and at the height of his commercial success, producing illustrations for magazines and books alongside his easel work.

Russell, born in St. Louis in 1864, had moved to Montana as a teenager and built his reputation on firsthand familiarity with the northern plains, its wildlife, and its Indigenous peoples. He returned to Lewis and Clark subjects throughout his career, producing the well-known oils Lewis and Clark Meeting the Flathead Indians (1912, for the Montana State Capitol) and Lewis and Clark on the Lower Columbia in oil (1905), of which this watercolor appears to be a related study or independent treatment in the lighter medium. The work is held by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, whose collection of Russell paintings and watercolors—assembled by Amon G. Carter Sr. beginning in the 1930s—is among the most extensive in any public institution and a central resource for scholarship on Russell’s depictions of the expedition.

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