Frederic Sackrider Remington was born in Canton, New York on October 4, 1861.  He grew up in Canton and nearby Ogdensburg, where his father, Seth Pierre Remington, was a newspaper publisher, U.S. Customs collector and a distinguished Brevet Colonel during the Civil War.  His mother, Clara Bascomb Sackrider, came from a prominent mercantile family.

As a child, Frederic was a poor student but excelled at pulling pranks.  He enjoyed canoeing, fishing, and frequent camping trips in the Adirondack Mountains.  With concern over his lack of math abilities or discipline of study, he was placed in military school at age thirteen.  But Frederic remained lazy towards work, lacking ambition.  Drawing caricatures of fellow classmates in the margins of Upton’s Infantry Tactics, he thought he might someday go into journalism or art.

In 1878-79, Remington attended the newly established School of Fine Arts at Yale University for three semesters.  An indifferent student with little patience with the classical approach to instruction, his professors said he lacked the talent to be a serious artist.  He excelled on the equestrian team, the football team, and as a boxing champion while at Yale.  Leaving school during the Christmas holidays of 1879, he did not return due to the ill health of his father, who died in February of tuberculosis.

Spending a few weeks in 1881 vacationing on the plains of Montana, Remington becoming obsessed with the west.  He later told of meeting an old-timer bemoaning the passing of the old West, and how he decided to “record some facts around me.”  It is probable that this was a calculated reconstruction of the truth composed by an artist later at the height of his power.  One result from this trip was a sketch worked on plain wrapping paper, submitted and accepted for publication by Harper’s Weekly, although it had to be redrawn by a staff artist.

From 1880 to 1883, he tried a business career in several successive jobs but clerking bored him.  When he received his inheritance, he purchased a sheep ranch in northwestern Butler County, which he owned from 1883 to 1884.

Later selling out, he went to Kansas City where he entered a partnership in a hardware store.  Spending more time sketching than accounting or selling, his hardware partner eventually bought him out.  He became a silent partner in the ownership of a saloon.

Marrying Eva Adele Caten from New York on October 1, 1884, he kept the true nature of his job secret from his wife and family.  When the truth was disclosed, Eva left him and returned east. Through legal maneuvering, he lost his investment in the saloon and lost his house.

Remington traveled again through the West, prospecting and sketching, before moving in with friends in Kansas City.  It was at this point that Remington began painting in earnest, selling his first paintings at W. W. Findlay Art Store.  He now began submitting sketches to magazines back east, along with text for accompanying articles.

Eventually, Remington returned east and was reunited with his wife. His Uncle Bill, long believing that Frederic had been born to be an artist, helped the couple out financially, sending Frederic to study under the Impressionist painters at the Art Student’s League in Brooklyn, New York.  Remington did not stay there long, having little patience for formal training.

When Geronimo led his followers off the reservations in revolt, Remington became a war correspondent for Harper’s, traveling west to send sketches and stories back to New York.

As an illustrator and artist, he achieved great and enduring fame, a considerable fortune, and the admiration of the great personages of his era.  During his day, he sold pictures for upwards of $600; today they are priceless.

Made an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1891, he was also a close friend of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, often invited to stay at his famous ranch.  Another personal friend, Theodore Roosevelt, said of Remington, “It is no small thing for the nation that such an artist and man of letters should arise to make permanent record of certain of the most interesting features of our national life.  The soldier, the cowboy and the rancher, the Indian, the horses and cattle of the plains, will live in his pictures and bronzes, I verily believe, for all time.”

A ruptured appendix and peritonitis ended his life on December 26, 1909, at 48 years of age, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.  As per his wishes he once told to a drinking companion, his tombstone reads, “He knew the horse.”