The Broncho Buster

September 1893

“The Evolution of the Cowpuncher” with Owen Wister

In September 1893 Harper’s Monthly publishes “The Evolution of the Cowpuncher”, Remington’s collaboration with Owen Wister — the first statement of the mythical cowboy in American literature, which spawned the whole genre of Western fiction, films and theatre that followed. Remington supplied the concept, the factual content and the illustrations; Wister supplied the stories, sometimes altering Remington’s ideas.

January 1897

To Cuba as a correspondent for Hearst's paper

His association with Roosevelt, then New York City Police Commissioner, pays off: the artist is hired as a war correspondent and illustrator for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and sent to Cuba with the celebrity journalist Richard Harding Davis. Cuba's apparent peacefulness leaves them nothing to report; in a famous but probably apocryphal exchange of telegrams, Remington says there will be no war and he wishes to return, and Hearst replies that the artist should furnish the pictures and he will furnish the war. Remington returns to New Rochelle while Davis remains.

1898

At war in Cuba: a heroic image shattered

As the Spanish–American War takes shape, he returns to Cuba to see military action for the first time and goes through the most wrenching, disillusioning experience of his life. Witnessing the assault on San Juan Hill by American forces, including those led by Roosevelt, he sees his heroic conception of war shattered by the actual horror of jungle fighting and the deprivations of camp. His reports and illustrations on his return focus not on heroic generals but on the troops.

1900

Harper's drops him; he writes a novel