Poker & Pop Culture: Frederic Remington’s Cowboys, Cards, and Carnage

We’ve been considering a number of different cultural productions inspired by poker during its early history, including stories (true and fictional), songs, articles, and early films. Many of these creative responses to America’s most popular card game were not only inspired by it, but the most popular of them would in turn help shape opinions regarding poker going forward.

Another example worth including as we continue our transition from the 19th to the 20th centuries is the significant contribution of the American artist Frederic Remington whose paintings, illustrations, and sculptures of the Old West would help shape how that era would come to be remembered.

Remington exerted direct influence not only on how the Old West “looked” to his own and future generations, but what it “meant” as well, with his imagery and depictions of the American cowboy inspiring early Western films and contributing to an Old West mythology that continues to have its effect today.

Among Remington’s works were a couple of especially popular ones depicting card playing in that Old West context, and those, too, would have their influence when it came to poker’s reputation and place in the culture.

The Rise of Remington

Remington was born in New York in 1861 at the start of the Civil War. His father was a Union colonel, and young Remington would be similarly nurtured early on for a military career himself. However a talent for drawing would carry him down a different path that included a short stint at art school at Yale University during the late 1870s.

Frederic Remington

As a young adult Remington was able to to travel west and see many of the landscapes and scenes he’d spend his later life reproducing, getting involved early on with the popular Harper’s Weekly where his first drawings were published. More schooling back in New York followed, and by the age of 25 he’d scored his first Harper’s Weekly cover, a sketch of a scout tracking Geronimo amid the decades-long Apache Wars.

Other early highlights for Remington included being recruited to illustrate future president Theodore Roosevelt’s 1887 book Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, then doing more traveling out west and witnessing first-hand the aftermath of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee from which he’d produce numerous paintings and illustrations.

A one-man show at the American Art Galleries furthered his fame, and by the end of the century Remington had become one of the country’s best known artists, even having a couple of his paintings appear on postage stamps. At the start of the new century, he’d reunite with Roosevelt while serving as a war correspondent and illustrator for the New York Journal during the Spanish-American War.

During the years preceding his premature death from complications with appendicitis in 1909, Remington wrote novels, sculpted, and continued to paint and sketch despite the popularity of his naturalistic style starting to wane as more impressionistic artists began to enjoy greater notice.

Filling in Details of the Mythic Cowboy

Remington’s legacy was particularly felt when it came to later depictions of the American cowboy in the Old West by other artists as well as in fiction, movies, plays, and later television shows. One series of his titled The Evolution of the Cowpuncher (1893) had special influence, a collaboration with the fiction writer Owen Wister best …

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