Lost in a Snowstorm — We Are Friends
Russell’s horizontal canvas shows a tense encounter on a windswept plain during a blizzard. A party of mounted white trappers and a group of Native horsemen meet face to face in driving snow, the riders bundled in capotes and blanket coats, their horses heads-down against the weather. The central gesture is one of recognition: a hand raised, palm forward, in the sign-language greeting for “friend.” Russell compresses the figures into a tight, frieze-like band across the middle of the composition, leaving broad expanses of gray sky and blowing snow above and below. The palette is muted—whites, grays, dun browns, the dull red of a trade blanket—and the brushwork is looser and more atmospheric than in his later, more polished narrative pictures.
The painting dates to 1888, when Russell was twenty-four and still working as a wrangler and night herder in the Judith Basin of central Montana. He had come west from St. Louis in 1880 and spent the 1880s absorbing the country, its weather, and its people firsthand, including a winter of 1888–89 spent among the Blood (Kainai) in present-day Alberta. The picture reflects that direct experience: the moment turns on the plains protocol by which strangers met in open country, where misidentification in poor visibility could mean a fight and the sign for peace had to come first and unmistakably. It is not a Lewis and Clark subject, but it belongs to the same northern plains world the expedition had crossed eighty years earlier, and Russell’s reconstructions of that landscape have shaped how later viewers picture the Corps of Discovery’s encounters.
Lost in a Snowstorm — We Are Friends is among the earliest of Russell’s ambitious narrative oils and is often cited as the first work in which he handled a multi-figure cross-cultural meeting with full confidence. It is held by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, part of the Amon G. Carter Collection, the founding gift that established the museum’s holdings of Russell and Frederic Remington. The painting is regularly reproduced in studies of Russell’s development and of plains sign language.
