Frederic Remington’s reputation as a western artist and illustrator has far eclipsed his own writings, which are not extensive but notable. His career as a western writer paralleled Wister’s, with articles and short fiction appearing in
Harper’s and
Collier’s during the 1890s, and two novels after the turn of the century.
Yale-educated, he had the predictable racial and ethnic prejudices of his class. As Jon Tuska has pointed out in
Twentieth Century Western Writers, the mythic drama of the West for him was the U.S. Cavalry and the Indian Wars. Still, like many early western writers, there is a deep ambivalence in him for nearly everything else about western expansion.
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| Frederic Remington |
Half-breed. This short collection of stories features a half-breed Indian, Sundown Leflare, who tells of incidents in his life in a French-inflected dialect. The narrator, like an ethnographer from the East, lets him talk. And while there’s considerable cultural and social difference between them, Remington clearly has a degree of admiration for this man so utterly different from himself.
Sundown is from Crow stock and living in Montana. He has worked as a scout for the U.S. Army and as a trader in skins at a trading post. Any additional income is likely to come from gambling and dealing in stolen horses. He has been married six times and has many children. The most recent is the infant of a white woman who left the child with him and departed by train for parts unknown.
Most of his wives have been purchased by him—for 25 ponies in one case. Then they may be sold after a time to someone else—$100 for that same wife. One was killed while trying to skin a buffalo that turned out to be not quite dead. Another was killed by a Sioux, after only a year of marriage, as she picked wild plums.
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| Sundown Leflare |
One wife, he says, married him for love, leaving her chieftain husband to run off with him. When the whole tribe follows and lays siege to the couple, he gets the spurned husband to settle the matter by agreeing to hand-to-hand combat with buffalo spears and knives. Sundown takes a spear through the shoulder but is the better man with a knife.
Scout. There is a long account of a trek on horseback through winter snows, delivering an order from Fort Keogh to Fort Buford, a distance of over 150 miles. Nearly freezing along the way, Sundown is finally so cold he cannot get on his pony. After briefly joining two Indians, he parts company with them, predicting correctly that they will be attacked on their route by hostile Assiniboine.
Wolves following him, he is too cold to fire a rifle at game for food. He finally stumbles starving into a friendly Indian camp after falling through the ice trying to cross a stream. Stripped and covered in snow, he is slowly brought back to life.
