Charles M. Russell at work painting.

       Charles M. Russell arrived in the Montana territory in 1880, at the age of 16.  He may have felt he was then in virgin land; but this was not entirely so.  The first white men to set foot in the territory were the Verendrye brothers.  They were French fur trappers who, in 1742, ventured as far west as the Yellowstone River.  It was not until 62 years later that the Lewis and Clark expedition passed through the same territory on the way west and on the way back to St. Louis.

      Through most of the first half of the 1800s, Montana was inhabited by Indians, including Sioux, Crow, Cheyenne, Assinboine, Blackfeet, Flathead, Nez Pierce, Pend d'Oreille, Kootenai, and Gros Ventres.  Each tribe had their own homeland and hunting grounds.  In the 50 years following Lewis and Clark, whites were very cautious about entering this unquestioned Indian domain.  A few trappers and fur traders cautiously worked and tracked on the banks of the Missouri, the Yellowstone, and their tributaries; but they did so at the mercy of their Indian hosts.  They were simply making a dangerous foray into a harsh but beautiful and bountiful country.

      It was gold that finally turned Montana white.  Gold was found there as early as 1850.  Thereafter, a series of gold strikes gave rise to boom towns along creeks in the mountainous western portion of the territory.  Alder Gulch became Virginia City.  Last Chance Gulch later became Helena (the current capitol of Montana).  Congress recognized Montana as a territory in 1864, the year of Charlie Russell's birth.

      Probably lured by Montana gold, my late husband's grandfather, Caleb  Duncan, and his brother George immigrated to Montana from New Brunswick, Canada in the early 1880s.  Their names are recorded in the 1880 Montana census of Virginia City.  Family accounts indicated they later settled in the Judith Basin area near Lewistown.  The poem SHANEY RIDGE is based on an actual incident that marred their lives.  At about the same time, Charlie Russell was living with a mountain man named Jake Hoover.  He was a trapper, hunter and prospector.  Hoover was a man of action and skin hunter who sold meat, among other things, to the ranchers who lived along the Judith River.  Hoover by 1880 had built a cabin in the Pig-Eye Basin, where the Judith River leaves the Little Belt Mountains.  Russell lived with Hoover for about two years; and when he was not working or exploring the country about him, he was painting.  Russell later worked as nighthawk and horse wrangler with a Judith Basin outfit. Caleb Duncan knew Charlie Russell.