Russell is known as the Cowboy Artist who saw it all and got it right. A rich kid from St. Louis, he left home in 1880 to join the big roundups in Montana, where he mixed with cowpunchers, Indians, preachers, and prostitutes. He memorized their stories and sketched their lives and, after the death of his rival Frederic Remington, became the foremost documentarian of the closing of the frontier. Before he was through, his masterpieces hung in America's finest art galleries and stateliest mansions.

His paintings have appeared on three postage stamps, and his buffalo-skull logo still appears on every Montana license plate. In this, the first full-scale biography of Montana's favorite icon, John Taliaferro deepens and humanizes Russell's remarkable achievements. For once, the truth outdoes the legend.

This is also the story of a nation in transition. Russell saw buffalo give way to cattle, horses give way to cars. He survived stampedes, blizzards, and firewater, only to face panics, jazz, and Prohibition. He blamed homesteaders, then robber barons, for ruining his West, but over time they became his most devoted friends and patrons. In his final years he was adopted by William S. Hart, Will Rogers, and Hollywood directors, and had a say in how the West would be immortalized on the silver screen.

Charles M. Russell is one of America's most charismatic and complex icons. At last, here is a portrait that does him justice.