Charlie Russell’s Last Legacy

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There isn’t much that hasn’t already been written about Charles Marion Russell, the Montana cowboy artist whom most art collectors, dealers and museums consider to have been America’s greatest painter of the Old West. Russell — born in St. Louis, Missouri, on March 19, 1864 — was also sometimes as well noted for his curmudgeonly feistiness and fierce independence as he was for his art. One example of that legendary stubbornness is brought out below in a little-known incident that occurred in the last days of his life — a tale that needs to be added to the Charles Russell legend before it is lost forever to the permanent pages of history.

The story began to unfold in the 1940s in the sleepy California agricultural town of Camarillo, which is about 50 miles north of Los Angeles and was best known for decades as the site of a mental institution. There, on a picturesque knoll north of town, stood St. John’s Catholic Seminary. On the grounds of that serene and peaceful religious retreat was a two-story structure built in 1939 that the people of Camarillo began to whisper about more and more, especially after World War II.

What they were saying, at first, was hard to swallow: Inside this building was a painting by the “Cowboy Artist,” Charlie Russell, that was rumored to be more than 20 feet long. But what in the world would a Russell painting be doing in a Catholic seminary in California? After all, Russell had done most of his cowboying in Montana, and he worked out of a Great Falls, Mont., studio during the last 24 years of his life. Moreover, if the giant painting was in the seminary, how did it get there?

One of the authors, Lee Silva, first heard the rumors about the enormous Russell painting one day in 1969. And so, with a mixture of disbelief and a historian’s curiosity, he went to the seminary and knocked on its main door. Here’s what happened, as Lee tells it:

I was guided to a mysterious-looking, imposing building — which I learned was named the Doheny Library — that sat alone, some distance from the other buildings of the seminary. When I was politely ushered inside by the curator, I was informed that the library was open to legitimate historians and researchers only, and not to the public — an explanation that accounted for the mysterious aura that the building had taken on to outsiders over the years.

On the way to an upstairs room, we passed a collection of framed autographs of every president of the United States. And that was only the beginning of my visit to this Old West Land of Oz.

Inside the second-floor “Western” room, I found myself staring incredulously at not one, but two 20-foot-long Charles Russell murals, set up high against the ceiling on opposing walls!

Below one mural was a large oil painting by William R. Leigh (1866-1955) titled The Happy Hunting Ground. And on a table to the right was the largest bronze that Russell had ever sculpted, titled Meat for Wild Men, depicting Indians on horseback attacking a herd of buffalo.

Beneath the second mural, there was a Frederic Remington oil painting titled The Navajo Raid, and on the other side of a door, a smaller Russell oil painting titled The Snow Trail.

There aren’t enough adequate words to describe everything that was in that one room, let alone the remainder of the building. There were framed watercolors of cowboys painted by H.W. Hansen, portraits of Indians by Grace Hudson, oil paintings of Indians by Henry Raschen, and in one corner of the room, an upright piano with a mural of an entire Indian village painted by Edwin Deming across its front and on its sides.

It was probably the biggest private collection of major paintings by major Western artists that had ever been accumulated in one room — all buried in a Catholic seminary!

On later visits, I was allowed to go into the walk-in vault and study the smaller paintings that were hanging on its walls and were also filed in dozens of drawers, including many Charles Russell letters and drawings, and many more Grace Hudson paintings.

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