The plaster model for The Stampede, shipped to Roman Bronze Works just before Remington’s untimely death on December 26, 1909, was one of the last models the artist completed. In 1908, after finishing a stirring oil painting of a cowboy amidst a stampeding herd of cattle in a raging thunderstorm, he told the buyer of the work that “man was never called on to do a more desperate deed than running in the night with long horns and taking the country as it comes. Nature is merciless.” The following year, on September 27, he noted in his diary that he would attempt to model “a solid group of cowboys and steers in sculpture.” Within two weeks he was hard at work; another diary entry stated, “Put some guts in my ’Stampede’ cowboy.” Another two weeks went by, and he noted again: “Modeled all day—bulls are fierce in mud.” Finally, Remington felt the model was finished and he summoned the workers to begin transferring the clay model into plaster. He told Riccardo Bertelli at Roman Bronze Works, “If this isn’t a killer I’ll quit clay.” Unfortunately, although Remington managed to get the plaster completed and shipped to the foundry, he died unexpectedly before ever seeing it cast into bronze.

The larger size of the model for The Stampede reflected Remington’s growing confidence in his ability to create compositions that could be enlarged to a grander scale. It was finally cast around 1916 under the supervision of Remington’s friend, the sculptor Sally Farnham, who may have made some alterations to the wax intermediary model in order to refine some of the details. It is estimated that Eva Remington, the artist’s widow, authorized as many as three casts of The Stampede prior to her death in 1918. The version seen here, cast #5, is actually a very late example authorized by the trustees of the Remington Art Memorial in Ogdensburg, New York (now the Frederic Remington Art Museum). The mold for this cast was made from cast #3, in possession of the Memorial. A bronze sculpture cast from another bronze rather than the original plaster model is known as a surmoulage; it involves making a gelatin or rubber mold from the original bronze and using that to create a new wax model for casting. Many of the posthumous casts of Remington’s bronzes are probably surmoulages. Overall, these late casts are softer and less distinct than the originals; their surfaces are smoother and lack most of the finer details.