Back-Tracking in Memory

She was eighteen, effectively an orphan, and he was thirty-two, a former cowboy from a good family in St. Louis struggling to make his living as an artist. She would be by his side for the rest of his life as his wife, cheerleader, and extraordinarily capable business manager. When he died in Great Falls, Montana, in 1926, shortly after they celebrated their thirtieth anniversary, Charlie Russell was at the top of the heap, an American original world famous as the "Cowboy Artist." A few months earlier Nancy had written an acquaintance who remembered her from her hardscrabble youth in Helena, "Yes, I am, or was, the little girl you were talking about, way back in '94. . . . I, as you know, married the only Charles Russell in the world and my life has been very full of romance, which they like to make moving pictures out of, only mine happens to be real." She realized that with Charlie's passing, it was up to her to keep that dream alive by keeping him alive...