Frederic Remington

Private collection, Detroit, Michigan
The Jordan-Volpe Gallery, Inc., New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1991

Bruce Wear, The Bronze World of Frederic Remington, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1966, pp. 72-73, another example illustrated
Harold McCracken, The Frederic Remington Book: A Pictorial History of the West, Garden City, New York, 1966, n.p., fig. 370, another example illustrated
Peter Hassrick, Frederic Remington: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture in the Amon Carter Museum and the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Collections, New York, 1973, no. 85, p. 194-195, another example illustrated
Patricia Janis Broder, Bronzes of the American West, New York, 1974, p. 125, another example illustrated
Michael Edward Shapiro, Cast and Recast: The Sculpture of Frederic Remington, Washington, D.C., 1981, pp. 77-81, 105, figs. 33, 69-74, other examples illustrated
Michael Edward Shapiro and Peter Hassrick, Frederic Remington: The Masterworks, New York, 1988, pp. 205, 210, 211, 214, 231, 267, another example illustrated 
Michael D. Greenbaum, Icons of the West: Frederic Remington's Sculpture, Ogdensburg, New York, 1996, pp. 105-112, 190, other examples illustrated 

Remington described the rider in The Mountain Man as an "old Iriquiois [sic] trapper who followed the Fur Companies in the Rocky Mountains in the 30 & 40'ties" (as quoted in Michael Greenbaum, Icons of the West: Frederic Remington's Sculpture, 1996, p. 105). Fur trading, one of America's earliest and most profitable industries, flourished from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. By the time Remington first created his 1903 bronze The Mountain Man, the era of the frontier fur trapper had long since disappeared and the mountain men themselves had emerged as romantic western icons. Remington's Indian trapper would have been a lone traveler who had to survive in the unforgiving Rocky Mountain terrain for months at a time. By the mid-1830's, the market for beaver fur had declined precipitously as new fashions in the hat industry replaced fur with silk and beaver became increasingly scarce; the era of the fur trader ended a decade earlier. Greenbaum continued, "during Remington's lifetime, The Mountain Man was one of his most critically accepted works ... It remains one of his most enduring sculptural works, a striking representational image of the frontier" (ibid, p. 107).