.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Never shying away from presenting the West at its highest pitch, Charles Marion Russell’s A Disputed Trail stands among his most dynamic confrontations. A frontiersman and two packed horses navigate a frozen ledge, cinched tight to the mountainside—and a grizzly explodes out of the path ahead. This is Russell’s drama at its purest: the split second when instinct outruns thought. The viewer arrives just after the shock registers and just before the world breaks open.
Capturing the pulse behind these “predicament” scenes—a designation used by Russell expert B. Byron Price—Price explained, “In the late 1890s Russell began to write and illustrate stories for magazines of outdoor life such as Recreation, Western Field and Stream, and Sports Afield. As his work became better known, his hunting scenes and paintings of wildlife began to attract the patronage of wealthy sportsmen, as well as less well-to-do admirers.” (Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonné, Norman, Oklahoma, 2007) That broad popular appetite for action, narrative, and wilderness spectacle pulses through works like A Disputed Trail, leaving the viewer suspended at the edge of their own metaphorical cliff.
When Russell painted A Disputed Trail in 1908, he was operating at the height of his technical powers. As a young cowboy on the range, he had taught himself to paint with watercolor pigments he kept rolled in his bedroll, sketching whenever he found a spare scrap of paper or wood. Over time, his understanding of the medium deepened. By 1901 he was highly skilled in translucent pigment, but his extended trip to New York in 1904 proved transformative. There he mixed with professional painters and absorbed new techniques. Whereas before he had used opaque white sparingly, by 1904 he was working with opaque watercolors much more boldly, gaining new depth, control, and refinement in his surfaces. By mixing opaque details with transparent washes, Russell gained a new level of control—allowing him, in works like A Disputed Trail, to sharpen contrast, heighten atmospheric drama, and articulate the rocky, ice-flecked ground with startling clarity.
Painted with exceptional detail, the grizzly bear carried enormous symbolic weight in American frontier culture. Like the horse, steer, and buffalo, it emerged as a potent emblem of the West’s natural legend and lore. Where the horse and steer signaled the working realities of frontier life—and the buffalo its fading mythic past—the grizzly represented the primordial wilderness still lying beyond the reach of settlement. Russell had long painted the two opposing identities of bears: the majestic and curious creatures that roamed forested slopes, and the ferocious predators known to attack those who trespassed into their domain.
While A Disputed Trail falls wholly within the latter category, Russell understood this cultural tension thoroughly. Early travelers from Lewis and Clark onward described encounters with grizzlies as harrowing and extreme, but they also respected the animal’s towering power—its size and ferocity commanding as much admiration as fear. Russell would also have been familiar with President Theodore Roosevelt’s widely publicized exploits in Montana. Roosevelt, who famously helped popularize the comforting, slightly patriotic stuffed teddy bear, was equally known for his hunting prowess. As he wrote in Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches: “I have known one or two men who at different times tried to hunt the grisly… but they were never met with success. This was probably largely owing to the nature of country in which they hunted, a vast tangled mass of forest and craggy mountain.” (Montana’s Charlie Russell, Helena, Montana, 2014, p. 141) Such accounts reinforced the grizzly’s cultural status as the ultimate opponent—cunning, powerful, and unstoppable at close quarters.
The predicament in A Disputed Trail calls for a wholly different protagonist than the cowboys and ranchers by which Russell had built his name. Instead, he turns to one of the West’s earliest archetypes—the lone mountain man, trapper, and prospector. Growing up in St. Louis, Russell devoured the tales of independent adventurers who roamed the early West by choice and instinct. Montana frontiersman John Healy described such men as those who, when “outfitted with a good horse, rifle and knife could not only support life in the most remote canyons of the Rockies… With this meager equipment he was the most independent and self-reliant man on earth.” (Montana’s Charlie Russell, p. 70) It was an ideal perfectly embodied by Russell’s beloved mentor Jake Hoover, whom he met in 1881. Little is known about Russell’s formative years under Hoover’s tutelage—and what survives is likely embellished—but the emotional truth remains. In later years, Russell recalled that Hoover “knew the ways and habits of all the wild creatures in the mountains” and that riding beside him felt “like a chapter from one of my favorite romances of the Rocky Mountains.” (Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Autumn, 1958, p. 14–15)
Here, the bear erupts from the upper path, shocking the lone mountain man, outfitted with horse and rifle, into firing an instinctive shot. But the confrontation is about more than brute force. The horses rear and scramble against the shale; the rider leans forward, rifle braced but hope uncertain; the trail vanishes into a sheer drop. Everything—terrain, gravity, animal instinct—colludes against the man. Russell, always the consummate dramatist, offers no resolution. The painting ends where the story begins.
Capturing the pulse behind these “predicament” scenes—a designation used by Russell expert B. Byron Price—Price explained, “In the late 1890s Russell began to write and illustrate stories for magazines of outdoor life such as Recreation, Western Field and Stream, and Sports Afield. As his work became better known, his hunting scenes and paintings of wildlife began to attract the patronage of wealthy sportsmen, as well as less well-to-do admirers.” (Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonné, Norman, Oklahoma, 2007) That broad popular appetite for action, narrative, and wilderness spectacle pulses through works like A Disputed Trail, leaving the viewer suspended at the edge of their own metaphorical cliff.
When Russell painted A Disputed Trail in 1908, he was operating at the height of his technical powers. As a young cowboy on the range, he had taught himself to paint with watercolor pigments he kept rolled in his bedroll, sketching whenever he found a spare scrap of paper or wood. Over time, his understanding of the medium deepened. By 1901 he was highly skilled in translucent pigment, but his extended trip to New York in 1904 proved transformative. There he mixed with professional painters and absorbed new techniques. Whereas before he had used opaque white sparingly, by 1904 he was working with opaque watercolors much more boldly, gaining new depth, control, and refinement in his surfaces. By mixing opaque details with transparent washes, Russell gained a new level of control—allowing him, in works like A Disputed Trail, to sharpen contrast, heighten atmospheric drama, and articulate the rocky, ice-flecked ground with startling clarity.
Painted with exceptional detail, the grizzly bear carried enormous symbolic weight in American frontier culture. Like the horse, steer, and buffalo, it emerged as a potent emblem of the West’s natural legend and lore. Where the horse and steer signaled the working realities of frontier life—and the buffalo its fading mythic past—the grizzly represented the primordial wilderness still lying beyond the reach of settlement. Russell had long painted the two opposing identities of bears: the majestic and curious creatures that roamed forested slopes, and the ferocious predators known to attack those who trespassed into their domain.
While A Disputed Trail falls wholly within the latter category, Russell understood this cultural tension thoroughly. Early travelers from Lewis and Clark onward described encounters with grizzlies as harrowing and extreme, but they also respected the animal’s towering power—its size and ferocity commanding as much admiration as fear. Russell would also have been familiar with President Theodore Roosevelt’s widely publicized exploits in Montana. Roosevelt, who famously helped popularize the comforting, slightly patriotic stuffed teddy bear, was equally known for his hunting prowess. As he wrote in Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches: “I have known one or two men who at different times tried to hunt the grisly… but they were never met with success. This was probably largely owing to the nature of country in which they hunted, a vast tangled mass of forest and craggy mountain.” (Montana’s Charlie Russell, Helena, Montana, 2014, p. 141) Such accounts reinforced the grizzly’s cultural status as the ultimate opponent—cunning, powerful, and unstoppable at close quarters.
The predicament in A Disputed Trail calls for a wholly different protagonist than the cowboys and ranchers by which Russell had built his name. Instead, he turns to one of the West’s earliest archetypes—the lone mountain man, trapper, and prospector. Growing up in St. Louis, Russell devoured the tales of independent adventurers who roamed the early West by choice and instinct. Montana frontiersman John Healy described such men as those who, when “outfitted with a good horse, rifle and knife could not only support life in the most remote canyons of the Rockies… With this meager equipment he was the most independent and self-reliant man on earth.” (Montana’s Charlie Russell, p. 70) It was an ideal perfectly embodied by Russell’s beloved mentor Jake Hoover, whom he met in 1881. Little is known about Russell’s formative years under Hoover’s tutelage—and what survives is likely embellished—but the emotional truth remains. In later years, Russell recalled that Hoover “knew the ways and habits of all the wild creatures in the mountains” and that riding beside him felt “like a chapter from one of my favorite romances of the Rocky Mountains.” (Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Autumn, 1958, p. 14–15)
Here, the bear erupts from the upper path, shocking the lone mountain man, outfitted with horse and rifle, into firing an instinctive shot. But the confrontation is about more than brute force. The horses rear and scramble against the shale; the rider leans forward, rifle braced but hope uncertain; the trail vanishes into a sheer drop. Everything—terrain, gravity, animal instinct—colludes against the man. Russell, always the consummate dramatist, offers no resolution. The painting ends where the story begins.