Like the Knights of the Round Table and the Greeks of the Iliad, the cowboys of the Old West have given heroes and myths to the whole world. How much would we give to see paintings of King Arthur and Lancelot or Achilles and Hector made by their contemporaries! Fortunately for us the colorful heroes and bristling drama of the Old West was recorded by an artist who was there, Charles M. Russell.

Here in these pages, 73 of Russell's paintings from the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth, TX, are splendidly reproduced and accompanied by the descriptive and illuminating commentaries of art critic Louis Chapin. In their brilliant range of color, mood, and action, these pictures confirm Russell's high standing not only as an American of unforgettable wit and charm but as an artist deeply committed to his subjects and superbly gifted in painting them.

Russell went to Montana in 1880 as a teenager lured by life on the big cattle ranges, and he went just in time. The fences were already going up, the ranchers were turning into farmers, the buffalo were vanishing, and the Indians, whom Russell came to know almost as well as he did his fellow cowboys, were being herded onto smaller and smaller reservations. The Old West, in other words, was becoming a thing of the past.

Fortunately, Russell recorded the Old West before it changed, documenting it forever. His oils and watercolors fairly spill with life. In his work and now in this book, the Old West seems resurrected, complete with the people who were its life: not only the cowboys and the Indians, but the trappers, the outlaws, the vigilantes, the half-breeds, and the explorers around whom an exciting century of American history and discovery had come into being. Here are the makings of rediscovery.