Indian Women Moving
Charles M. Russell’s Indian Women Moving depicts a Plains Indian family group on the march across open prairie country. The composition centers on mounted women, with travois-laden horses pulling the household possessions of a band relocating camp. Children, dogs, and pack animals fill out the procession, which moves across the canvas from right to left against a landscape of rolling grassland and distant hills. Russell rendered the scene in oil with the loose, narrative brushwork characteristic of his late-1890s easel work, paying particular attention to the harness, parfleche bags, and lodge poles that constituted the material culture of a mobile camp. The palette is keyed to the muted greens, ochres, and grayed blues of the northern plains.
By 1898 Russell had been painting professionally for roughly a decade, having transitioned from working cowboy to full-time artist after his marriage to Nancy Cooper in 1896. The late 1890s marked his shift toward more ambitious oil compositions and a sustained engagement with Indigenous subject matter, particularly the Blackfeet, Crow, and Cree peoples he had observed during his years on the open range and during a stay among the Blood Indians in Alberta in 1888. Scenes of camp movement were a recurring theme in his work; they allowed him to document a way of life he understood to be receding under reservation policy and the closing of the open range, processes well advanced in Montana by the time this canvas was painted.
Russell (1864–1926) spent virtually his entire adult life in Montana and became the state’s most identified artist, his reputation built on firsthand familiarity with both cowboy and Native subjects. Indian Women Moving entered the collection of Amon G. Carter, the Fort Worth publisher and oilman whose acquisitions of Russell and Frederic Remington became the founding holdings of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, where the painting remains. While not a Lewis and Clark subject in the literal sense, works of this kind have long informed the visual imagination of the expedition era, supplying scholars and the public with credible images of the mobile Plains societies the Corps of Discovery encountered between 1804 and 1806.
