He Knew the Horse

Frederic Remington was as big as all outdoors. He stood over six feet and weighed, in his late years, as much as 300 pounds. He rode like a Comanche and drank like an unreconstructed reservation Indian--and he recorded the facts of Wild Western life with rare flair.

By the turn of the century he bulked big as an illustrator (and as a Hearstling pictorial reporter), sometimes earning a sensational $25,000 a year. Thirty-six years after his death, the Hearstwhile artist is now recognized for his deadeye accuracy of detail as almost a major historian. Last year A Dash for Timber was sold for $23,000. And last week a Manhattan gallery was showing 28 early black-&-white Remingtons (including eight of his 22 famed illustrations for Hiawatha).

Most of the work in the exhibit was done after the first of Remington's countless western tours. He made the trip at 19, on feet still tender from a year at Yale. He got his first callus when a tinhorn took him for his last cent. He added blisters working as clerk, ranch cook and cowhand. Finally he joined (as a correspondent) the fight against the Apache chief Geronimo.

Back East, he sold his first sketch, Indian Scouts on Geronimo's Trail, to Harper's Weekly for $10. In the next 23 years he produced more than 2,000 pictures, some 15 sculptures (in bronze), illustrated 73 books (13 of them his own travels).

Hearstly Hoax. In 1898, Hearst sent him to Cuba to wait for the Spanish-American War. (When Remington complained that there was no war, Hearst, in a cable that unfriendly Hearst biographers love to quote, wired: "You furnish the pictures; I'll furnish the war.")

Remington and associated Hearstlings improved their Cuban idleness with one of the decade's most lurid yarns: the story of how three young Cuban women were stripped and searched by Spanish police aboard a U.S. steamship in Havana harbor. Remington did the revealing illustration. It was a scoop until the rival Pulitzer press made it equally famous as a hoax.

But about two things--painting and horses--Remington was dead on the level. It was one of the darker hours of his life when he finally had to give up horseback riding because no horse could carry his weight. He painted and cast the horse's strenuous anatomy with freedom and exactness. Long before he died (at 48, after an appendectomy) he had his epitaph ready: "He Knew the Horse."

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