As early as 1886 Remington began to collect artifacts for his studio, and within ten years his collection had grown to hundreds of objects, which he arranged on the walls and employed in his art works. He had a broad assortment of materials relating to Indian, military, and cowboy life. There were rifles, saddles, knife cases, traps, powder horns, and buckskins that may have played a role in the creation of the sculpture seen here: The Mountain Man, one of the artist’s most popular sculptures and his ninth subject in bronze, was 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.

Until recently, the first cast, recorded in the foundry’s ledgers on July 21, 1903, had been lost. The unnumbered cast depicted here is the only example found so far that is inscribed with the 1903 date, and it is the most finely detailed of any of the lifetime casts. The existence of unnumbered casts of other subjects, all equally fine in execution, seems to indicate that they were produced by the artist as the first casts—some of which he is known to have given to friends. This particular cast is said to have belonged to Remington’s boyhood friend John Howard. Later casts of The Mountain Man show differences in the position of the mule’s rear leg, the trapper’s right arm, and the long rifle—all changes in the composition that were made by the artist himself, beginning with cast #7.