Illustrated letter, Frederic Remington to Owen Wister containing a sketch of Remington's bronze Bronco Buster, ca. January 1895

Reproduction number: A87 (color slide; page 2); LC-MSS-46177-7 (B&W negative; page 2)
Two champions of the old West share their common interest in this illustrated letter, ca. January 1895, from sculptor, illustrator, and painter Frederick Remington (1861-1909) to writer Owen Wister (1860-1938). Both originally Easterners, the two men had met in 1893 when Wister went to Wyoming for his health. Remington was working on ranches there and was drawing action sketches of cowboys and Indians, some of which he later incorporated into stories he wrote largely as vehicles for his illustrations. Kindred spirits, Remington and Wister also discovered another common tie, their mutual friendship with outdoor sportsman and future United States president Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). Remington's drawings for Roosevelt's Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888) made the artist famous. Wister had been friends with Roosevelt since his Harvard University days and later dedicated to Roosevelt his most famous Western story, The Virginian (1902). It became a best-seller, was widely translated, gave rise to four motion pictures, and spurred radio and television interest in the western genre. In this letter to his new friend, Remington muses about the instability of his oil paintings and watercolors, which may fade in time "like pale molasses," but he suggests that his new work in bronze--"a cowboy on a bucking broncho"-- will "rattle down through all the ages." Remington's prediction proved correct, and his Bronco Buster remains today one of his most famous works celebrating the vanishing West and helping to shape our national memory of the American cowboy at work. The Owen Wister Papers, preserving this letter with an early sketch of Remington's sculpture, were donated to the Library of Congress primarily by his daughter, Frances Kemble Wister Stokes, great-granddaughter of the actress Fanny Kemble (1809-1893).