Remington completed most of his life’s work at Endion, his home and studio in New Rochelle, New York, which he purchased in 1890 and named with an Ojibwa word meaning “the place where I live.” As early as 1886 he began to collect artifacts for his studio; within ten years his collection had grown to hundreds of objects which he arranged on the walls and employed in his artworks. He had a broad assortment of materials relating to Indian, military, and cowboy life. Remington never purchased items that were merely intended for the tourist trade; instead, he preferred to acquire well-worn clothing and weapons directly from people he met during his trips to the West. There were rifles, saddles, knife cases, traps, powder horns, and buckskins that may have played a role in the creation of the bronze reproduced here: The Mountain Man, one of the artist’s most popular sculptures and his ninth subject in bronze, copyrighted on July 10, 1903.

The artist intended the figure to represent a trapper of the 1830s or 1840s. While working on the model, Remington invited his friend General Leonard Wood, who was about to become commander of the U.S. Army, to bring his horse to New Rochelle so the artist could study its leg movements down a steep slope. In the finished bronze, the hill serves as the base itself—one of the few instances in Remington’s sculpture where the base is fully integrated with the subject. Although more than seventy-four numbered casts of this subject are known, fewer than nine appear to have been made in the artist’s lifetime. This example is cast #34, recorded in the Roman Bronze Works ledgers on December 31, 1918—nine years after the artist’s death. As a result, many of the refinements visible on the bronzes cast in Remington’s lifetime are missing from this posthumous copy.