We’ve
all seen the old Western films in which cowboys and vigilantes take on the Wild
West. This version of the West had gun duels, bank robberies, and a really
eccentric but hard-working, masculine dominated society. This image makes for
great movies but what the West was actually like has been a hot-button topic
among historians. I won’t try to answer the question of what the West really
was because people much smarter than me have written many books on the topic.
What we’re going to look at is what happened that made people believe and enjoy
this idea of the lone cowboy and mountain men who charged forward in the name
of Manifest Destiny!
But first, our object!
This is The Broncho Buster a sculpture created by Frederic Remington. The
copyright is from 1895 but there’s an interesting timeline for this piece that
I’ll get into a few lines down. The sculpture is cast bronze from one of the
originals that Remington created. Take a good look at the sculpture. Depicted
is a rough and tough gentleman atop a bucking horse. Every inch of this
sculpture screams rugged, from the detail to the action depicted. Look at how
much detail Remington put into the muscles and mane of the horse and also the
clothing and facial features of the cowboy. Remington said of The Broncho Buster, “Only those who have
ridden a bronco the first time it was saddled, or have lived through a railroad
accident, can form any conception of the solemnity of such experiences. Few
Eastern people appreciate the sky-rocket bounds, grunts, and stiff-legged
striking.” This rich detail is something you can see in all of Remington’s artwork,
whether painting or sculpture. 
From the
copyright date of 1895 to about 1918, there were a few different waves of
copies being made of The Broncho Buster.
Overall, about 160 were made while Remington was alive so those would be the
most authentic and would’ve had his approval before being sold. After his death
in 1909, about 300 more were made that didn’t have his touch on them and there
are some differences in the quality with this batch.
Let’s put it in context and answer our
question.
Around
the turn of the century, there was a shift in the view of the American West
which is when we see the lone ranger and gunfights in the middle of towns show
up in pop culture. Before that, people were pretty realistic about what was
actually happening in the West. The only way for the typical family to survive
on the frontier was by building a community. You needed neighbors (even if they
were a few miles away) to make it very long in the rough environment. Eventually,
people – especially on the East coast – heard stories about the few who did
venture out into the unknown like fur traders and mountain men and that’s where
the image of the lone wanderer came in.
Remington
held an interesting place in this transition. Originally an East coaster
himself, Remington moved around the West (Illinois, Montana, Kansas, Missouri),
striking out on his own before moving back east to Brooklyn, NY to attend art
school. He found that interest in the dying West was coming back which led his
art to sell widely. Remington’s style was very naturalistic and always focused
on the people and animals of the West. This was in contrast to other famous
artists who depicted the vast, empty landscape in their works. Remington’s
style became very popular with his art showing up in Harper’s Weekly and he was contracted to head Westward to produce
more. Remington also wrote quite a bit and along with Owen Wister, wrote “The
Evolution of the Cowpuncher,” in 1893. This novel was one of the first
descriptions of the mythical cowboy in American literature and came before
Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis (if you aren’t familiar with this,
definitely look that up because it was instrumental in how the idea of the West
and Manifest Destiny became solidified for much of the 20th
century).
I
encourage you all to stop into the Farm House Museum to take a close-up look at
The Broncho Buster because it really
is an amazing sculpture and the detail is worth a thousand words. This
sculpture by Frederic Remington resonated so much with the American West that
when the Rough Riders returned east, they presented their leader, Theodore
Roosevelt with a copy. Seeing the lifelike detail and vigorous movement
captured in The Broncho Buster, is
worth every minute.
