Works of Art

When Remington journeyed to Arizona in the summer of 1888 to ride with a U.S. Cavalry unit at Fort Grant, he resumed contact with Powhatan Henry Clarke, a young lieutenant there. Clarke proved to be an invaluable source of information for the artist, and their correspondence was frequent until the summer of 1893, when Clarke lost his life in a swimming accident. The character type that Remington saw in Clarke—a handsome, brash officer whose exploits frequently ran afoul of his superiors—would appear in many of his subsequent works. While in Arizona with Clarke, Remington experienced firsthand some of the rigors of cavalry life. On June 17 he participated in a greuling desert march. “The heat was awful and the dust rose in clouds,” he reported to his wife. “The fine alkalai dust penetrates everything but the canteens. The color of the command was completely lost.”

Remington indeed left the color out of this study of a cavalry unit caught in a sudden sandstorm; it appeared in Harper’s Weekly for September 14, 1889, as an illustration to a story by a former cavalry soldier about an Arizona desert sandstorm his unit had experienced. “All in one moment the whole sky seemed to rush down upon us as if it were a big pepper-box with the lid off, and instantly all was dark as night, and I felt as if forty thousand ants were eating me up at once,” he recalled. “You should have seen how the beasts whisked round to get their backs to it, and ducked their heads down! And how the men shut their eyes and pulled their hats down over their faces, and covered their mouths with their hands! But it was no use trying to keep the dust out; it seemed to get inside one’s very skin. When it cleared off we all looked as if we’d been bathing in brown sugar, and you might have raked a match on any part of my skin, and it would have lit right away.”