ABSTRACT
The lives of two men who lived at the same time in the same small city exemplify, by a happy coincidence, the opposite ways Americans would have into the twentieth century of being westerners. The city was Great Falls, founded in the mid-188os by one of these men in a curve of the Missouri River still flowing toward Canada before turning to the east. This particular lonely section of Montana in 1920, the year the founder died, was busy transforming itself out of an already mythical frontier into the Main Street of Sinclair Lewis. But at ninety, in the final year of his life, Paris Gibson had the satisfaction of seeing his small place becoming what he had planned. His younger contemporary and friend Charles Marion Russell, by this time the most famous inhabitant of Great Falls, was the painter, sculptor, and storyteller who had captured the transient reality and romance of the older West in his arts.
