"Nancy worked on this biography until her death in 1940 without ever quite finishing it. Tom Petrie and Brian Dippie have collaborated on brining what she did finish into print, with side-bars, photographs, and artwork to amplify her text. [This book] will delight all those who love Charles M. Russell and his enduring vision of "the West that has passed.""--inside cover.

After Nancy Cooper married Charlie Russell in 1895, she helped turn a journeyman cowboy and ranch hand who sketched and sculpted in his spare time into a full-time artist who sold and exhibited all over the globe. In Behind Every Man: The Story of Nancy Cooper Russell, Joan Stauffer offers the first biography of the person whom Charles Russell called “the best booster and pardner a man ever had.” Stauffer’s portrait, evoked in the voice of its subject and based on a decade of research, offers readers both a complete life story of Nancy Russell and creative insight into her thoughts and feelings. Stauffer reveals that Nancy and Charles’s union created a practical synergy. Always an advocate for her husband, a steward of his art, and a liaison to his admirers and critics, Nancy’s greatest contribution may have been the inspiration she provided Charles. “I done my best work for her,” the cowboy artist once remarked.

Charles M. Russell cowboy, painter, sculptor, writer was an advocate of the people, animals, landscapes, and ideals of the West. Perhaps most importantly, he was an archivist. Through his detailed and honest paintings, sculptures, line drawings, and prose, he memorialized the Western way of life as it was at the turn of the twentieth century. Far from romanticizing the West, Russell's art captured the harsh and beautiful reality of the everyday world he lived in. Russell was one of those rare artists who was famous during his lifetime. Most books about Russell focus on his masterpieces, but Charles M. Russell: Printed Rarities from Private Collections examines the lesser-known but ubiquitous commercial works that made him a household name. These magazine covers, postcards, calendars, cigar boxes, ink blotters, letterheads, and artifacts are today some of the most highly sought after Russell memorabilia.

This first comprehensive biography of Charles M. Russell examines the colorful life and times of Montana’s famed Cowboy Artist. Born to an affluent St. Louis family in 1864, young Russell read thrilling tales of the West and filled sketchbooks with imagined frontier scenes. At sixteen he left home and headed west to become a cowboy. In Montana Territory he consorted with cowpunchers, Indians, preachers, saloon keepers, and prostitutes, while celebrating the waning American frontier’s glory days in some 4,000 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculptures. Before his death in 1926, Russell saw the world change dramatically, and the West he loved passed into legend. By then he was revered as one of the country’s ranking Western artist with works displayed in the finest galleries, his romantic vision of the Old West forever shaping our own. Taliaferro reveals the man behind the myth in his multifaceted complexity: extraordinarily gifted, self-effacing, charming, mischievous, and playful, a friend to rough frontier denizens and Hollywood stars alike. The author also explores Russell’s controversial partnership with his fiery young wife, Nancy, whose ambition and business savvy helped establish Russell as one of America’s most popular artists.

Well known for his sketches, paintings, and sculptures of the Old West, Charles M. Russell (1864-1926) was also an accomplished author in the humorous genre known as "local color." Raphael Cristy sorts Russell's writings into four general categories: serious Indian stories, men encountering wildlife, cattle range characters, and nineteenth-century westerners facing twentieth-century challenges. Russell's art is often misinterpreted as mere longing for a fading open-range west, but his writings tell a different story. Cristy shows how Russell amused his peers with stories that also delivered sharp observations of Euro-American suppression of Indians and humorous treatment of wilderness and range issues plus the emergence of women and urbanization as bewildering agents of change in the modern West. "A welcome departure from the usual biographies and coffee table volumes on Russell and his art. . . . [Cristy] deals with an important, yet relatively unexplored, aspect of the career of one of the most influential interpreters of the American West."--Byron Price, Director, C. M. Russell Center for the Study of Art