Russell's Bull Head Lodge art displayed

In 1905, following an art and business trip to New York City, Montana artist Charlie Russell and his wife Nancy returned to Big Sky Country and purchased a small lot on the shore of Lake McDonald near the isolated community of Apgar.

That autumn, five years before the area became part of Glacier National Park, the couple had a small cabin built that they christened Bull Head Lodge. The original cabin had one large room that Russell’s cousin Fergus Mead described as “a fine, big roomy place with a flock of people around all the time.”

To provide some privacy, and perhaps inspired by dressing screens Charlie and Nancy had seen in New York, the Russells installed a series of muslin screens that soon not only accommodated their guests’ modesty concerns but became unique guest registers.

The Montana Historical Society currently holds 12 of the 21 two-by-four-foot screens in its permanent collection in Helena, and their story is told in a new art book by authors Jennifer Bottomly-O’Looney, the society’s senior curator, and Kirby Lambert, a Texas-based historian.

Their 432-page coffee table-style book, “Montana’s Charlie Russell, Art in the Collection of the Montana Historical Society,” features 230 advanced-digital images of Charlie Russell’s artwork held in the society’s permanent collection in Helena.

Both locals and Glacier Park history buffs will recognize some guest signatures on the muslin screens, while others were artists visiting from across the U.S. The sketches, paintings and cartoon-like images accompanying the signatures are the product of several different artists.

Using color plates, historical photos and essays, Bottomly-O’Looney and Lambert provide a rewarding and detailed history of the famous Western artist. The collection of oils, watercolors, letters and sculptures begins with sketches Russell made as a cowhand in the 1880s and ends with his unfinished eight-foot wide oil painting “Kootenai Camp on Swan Lake” from 1926.

Bottomly-O’Looney and Lambert devote an entire chapter to Bull Head Lodge, providing a partial list of names placed on the privacy screens from 1906 through 1921.

Among the guests were artist Joe DeYong, described as “Russell’s only protégé,” and Dorothy “Smiler” Dodge, a Kalispell resident who starting working as a camp maid for dude rancher Howard Eaton in 1916.

The guest list boasts character and diversity, with lively friends and relatives visiting from Great Falls, a chemist from the Boston & Montana smelter in Butte, a Kalispell police chief who moonlighted as a taxidermist, and a photographer from Polson.

One name appears several times on the screens — the Triggs, next-door neighbors “who in many ways served as a surrogate family to the Russells.” Albert Trigg was a “refined English man” who was running the Brunswick Bar in Great Falls in the 1890s when Charlie Russell set up a studio in a back room there.

Bottomly-O’Looney and Lambert give Charlie Russell the last word in an epilogue titled, “A few words about myself.” Their book is available at bookstores for $80, online at www.montanahistoricalsociety.org or by calling 1-800-243-9900.