In the Eye of the Horseman

The Horse is, in a sense, the artist’s animal, as no other animal is or can be. He is large and powerful and swift. He is proportioned to please the eye. His neck and head lend him to romantic treatment. His mane and tail are the perfect flourishes. He has joined with man in countless heroic enterprises. “He is made,” as one authority put it, “to be drawn or carved.”

One man who apparently liked piebald horses was the famous western artist, Charlie Russell, whose first real western horse was a paint named Monte. The story of Monte is told in Russell’s book Trails Plowed Under. Russell purchased the horse from the Piegan Indians.

Charlie Russell, as a youth, had an absolutely unquenchable desire to see the west. A hitch in a New Jersey military school didn’t drown it, and neither did his parents’ objections. So they finally relented, and sent him to Montana in March of 1880. He was barely sixteen. Presently, he settled into a cabin, owned by a trapper named Jake Hoover, on the upper South Fork of the Judith. Hoover, wiser in the ways of the frontier than green Charlie, advised him to swap his two big saddle-broke work horses for a couple of small, sure-footed animals more suited to narrow trails and rough country.

It wasn’t long before a band of Piegans arrived in the neighborhood with a small bunch of horses. One was a young paint that seemed to catch Russell’s eye.

Jake Hoover was commissioned to make the deal. Forty-five silver dollars jingled and the horse, called Paint by the Indians, belonged to Russell. He renamed the horse Monte. Hoover mentioned to Russell that he was lucky to get such a fine horse. The Piegans had sold him only because he was a ghost horse.

Paint, or Monte, was a Crow horse to begin with, and ran buffalo for them for five years. One night while the Crows were camped on Painted Robe Creek, the horse herd was raided by a ten-man Piegan war party. Paint was cut loose by Calf Robe who rode him out of camp amid the shouts, howling dogs, and gunfire. Suddenly, Calf Robe stiffened and slipped to the ground, leaving a bloody smear across Paint’s back.

The Piegan war party, under Bad Wound, ran on through the night, with Calf Robe missing. At daybreak they stopped to change horses. Bad Wound roped Paint. It was then he noticed the blood stain. He knew what had happened to the tenth man. He removed his loop and Paint trotted back toward the herd. Bad Wound quickly drew his Henry rifle and shot the paint, which dropped to its knees and rolled over. Bad Wound said: “It was not good to let a friend [Calf Robe] walk to the sand hills. The trail is long and I have given him a strong horse.”

They moved on, then rested in the evening. Bad Wound checked the herd routinely, but was soon stunned by what he saw. Paint, bloody from the bullet wound but still alive, had rejoined the herd. “Ghost horse,” muttered Bad Wound. Later, in camp, Bad Wound went to Calf Robe’s father and told him:

“Old man, I would give you the horse your son rode, but he is a ghost horse. I tried to give him to your son, but the horse would not die. It is not good to give a friend a pony that dead men ride. Three times while I slept the spotted horse came to me. Your son rode him but he was dead and the pony’s back was red with blood. He is a good horse, but I will never ride him. My heart is afraid, and I have said that it is not good to give a friend what you fear yourself.” That’s when Charlie Russell got him.

Monte and Russell were partners for 25 years. The paint survives in a Russell pen drawing titled The Chief Fired at the Pinto, and in one of the artist’s paintings, a 1905 watercolor titled When I Was a Kid. After Monte died, Russell wrote what should serve as the eulogy: “Me and Monte were kids together. We grew up together, and were together for twenty-five years. When he died in 1904 I had ridden and packed him for thousands of miles. He was more than a friend to me. We didn’t exactly talk together, but we sure savvied each other. Sometimes it seemed that he knew what was in my mind before I did.”

This article was originally published in the August 1970 issue of Western Horseman

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