Edgar S. Paxson and the Long Road to Custer's Last Stand

Introduction

Few paintings have shaped the American imagination of the Battle of the Little Bighorn as thoroughly as the nine-by-six-foot canvas that hangs today in the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. Its creator, Edgar Samuel Paxson, was not a native Montanan, nor did he receive formal artistic training. He was, instead, a sign painter, scout, soldier, and self-taught observer of the frontier who spent more than two decades of his life piecing together, detail by detail, a single historical scene. Paxson's career illustrates something particular about turn-of-the-century Montana: the way its raw, recently violent past was already being reworked into legend by the people who had lived through its final years. His story is one of patient craftsmanship, wartime interruption, and a posthumous tug-of-war over where his most famous work should reside.

A Wandering Sign Painter's Arrival

Paxson was born in New York state in 1852 and spent his early years learning to hunt and sketch in the woodlands of the Northeast (Montana Historical Society). He arrived in Montana Territory in 1877, settling first in Beaverhead County, a year after the destruction of George Armstrong Custer's command at the Little Bighorn (Montana Historical Society; Buffalo Bill Center of the West). That timing mattered. Paxson entered a territory still absorbing the shock of the battle, surrounded by soldiers, scouts, and Native people who had witnessed or fought in the events of June 1876. He had no academy training and no patron; to support his family he worked as a sign painter and decorator, a trade that gave him steady if unglamorous employment while he carried a sketch pad wherever he went (Montana Historical Society).

Sources differ slightly on the exact sequence of his early relocations. The University of Montana's Montana Museum of Art and Culture places the family's move to Deer Lodge in 1878, while a gallery biography drawn from exhibition records gives the date as 1879 (University of Montana; Medicine Man Gallery). Both agree, however, that by 1881 the Paxsons had resettled in Butte, drawn by the opportunities of the city's mining boom (University of Montana; Medicine Man Gallery). In Butte, Paxson continued to paint theater backdrops, saloon decorations, and commercial signage, but he also began renting studio space to pursue easel painting in earnest, producing portraits of Native American subjects that, by 1893, were accomplished enough to be displayed in the Montana pavilion at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Montana Historical Society).

Frontier Apprenticeship and Artistic Method

What distinguished Paxson from many of his contemporaries painting the "vanishing" West was his method. He treated historical painting as a research problem rather than an act of pure imagination. According to the Montana Historical Society, he spent months interviewing both white and Native American participants in frontier conflicts, made repeated trips to historic battle sites, and corresponded extensively with military officers who had served in the region (Montana Historical Society). The University of Montana's collection notes add that Paxson developed personal friendships with tribal members, several of whom sat for him in his studio, and that he held what the museum describes as a genuine respect for the hardships Native communities faced as the frontier closed around them (University of Montana). This combination of documentary instinct and personal relationship gave his later work, whatever its limitations as a nineteenth-century white artist's interpretation of Native subjects, a claim to accuracy that his contemporaries did not always share.

The Making of Custer's Last Stand

Paxson's defining project, begun in earnest during the 1890s, was a monumental painting of the Little Bighorn fight, eventually known to the public as Custer's Last Stand. The scale of the undertaking is described with slight variation across sources: the Montana Historical Society calls it a nine-by-six-foot canvas, while a retrospective in Western Art and Architecture magazine lists its dimensions as 70.5 by 106 inches, and a gallery biography rounds the figure to six by ten feet (Montana Historical Society; Finn; Medicine Man Gallery). The discrepancy is modest and likely reflects rounding or measurement of the frame versus the canvas itself, but it is worth flagging rather than silently resolving.

The research behind the painting was, by all accounts, unusually thorough for its era. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West's curatorial history notes that Paxson researched the battle for several years and prepared an explanatory key identifying the major figures depicted, material he later used when the painting toured as a paid exhibition (Buffalo Bill Center of the West). He completed the canvas in 1899, originally titling it Custer's Last Battle on the Little Big Horn; when he copyrighted the work in 1900, he used the title Custer's Last Fight, and only later in life, according to family members, did he settle on the title by which the painting is known today (Buffalo Bill Center of the West).

War Interrupts the Canvas

Paxson's work on the painting was not continuous. He had enlisted in the Montana National Guard, a service that, according to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, helped him cultivate friendships with regional military leaders whose recollections fed into his research (Buffalo Bill Center of the West). In May 1898, that guard service became active duty: Paxson was mustered into the Army and sent to the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, an interruption that halted work on the Custer canvas for roughly a year, after which he returned home and completed the painting in 1899 (Buffalo Bill Center of the West). A separate gallery account states his overseas service lasted eight months rather than a full year, a small but unresolved discrepancy between the two sources (Medicine Man Gallery). Total Guard service is given elsewhere as approximately ten years (Medicine Man Gallery).

Recognition and Public Commissions

Once completed, Custer's Last Stand became Paxson's calling card. He and a business partner sent it on a paid exhibition tour of eastern cities, charging viewers a quarter apiece, accompanied by an explanatory booklet (Buffalo Bill Center of the West). The painting also brought him wider institutional recognition: he exhibited work at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904 and the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland in 1905 (Buffalo Bill Center of the West). In 1906, he moved his family to Missoula, where he would spend the remainder of his career, though a gallery source dates the move a year earlier, to 1905 (University of Montana; Medicine Man Gallery).

Montana's state government soon called on Paxson's documentary skill for public commissions. He was engaged to paint six scenes from Montana history for the Capitol in Helena; the Buffalo Bill Center of the West dates this commission to 1911 for the Senate chambers, while the Montana Historical Society's own bio describes six murals commissioned in 1912 for the House of Representatives anteroom, a discrepancy in both year and specific chamber that later researchers have not fully reconciled (Buffalo Bill Center of the West; Montana Historical Society). The following year, he undertook eight murals for the Missoula County Courthouse, depicting subjects including Sacagawea and the Lewis and Clark expedition; the Montana Historical Society dates this commission to 1914, while the Center of the West places it in 1912 (Montana Historical Society; Buffalo Bill Center of the West; Center of the West product notes on Artvee). The murals took roughly sixteen months to complete and remain installed in the courthouse's entrance hall (Artvee).

Final Years and Friendship with Charlie Russell

By the early twentieth century, Paxson had become, in the words of one retrospective, "a local boy who made good" in a state still working out its own historical self-image (Finn). He was frequently measured against his younger, more commercially successful contemporary Charles M. Russell, whom he came to know personally; sources place their meeting around 1908 (Artvee). Despite the comparison that dogged him in life, Russell's tribute upon Paxson's death suggested a genuine mutual respect: Russell wrote that he was "a painter too, but Paxson has done some things that I cannot do. He was a pioneer and a pioneer painter" (Montana Historical Society). Paxson died in Missoula on November 9, 1919 (Montana Historical Society; Buffalo Bill Center of the West; Finn).

The Painting's Afterlife

The story of Custer's Last Stand did not end with its painter's death. The canvas eventually left Montana for the Whitney Gallery of Western Art in Cody, Wyoming, now part of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, where it remains today (Buffalo Bill Center of the West). According to a True West Magazine investigation, that departure was contentious: it followed what the article characterizes as a dispute in 1962 between the Montana Historical Society in Helena and the Whitney Gallery over possession of the work (Ehlert). Paxson's grandson, William E. Paxson, is quoted in a period newspaper account reproduced in that article as having complained for years about the painting's removal from the state, and as asserting that of the many artistic depictions of the Little Bighorn, only his grandfather's was regarded by qualified experts as historically accurate (Ehlert). In 1963, Western art historian Harold McCracken reportedly went further, calling the painting "the best pictorial representation of the battle" and one of the finest ever created to commemorate the event (Ehlert).

Conclusion

Edgar Paxson's career sits at an odd angle to the mythology he helped construct. He arrived in Montana as an ordinary tradesman, built a body of work through patient interview and observation rather than formal training, and produced, in Custer's Last Stand, a painting whose claim to historical fidelity outlived him and still shapes how the battle is visualized more than a century later. That the canvas now resides in Wyoming rather than Montana, the subject of a mid-century institutional dispute, is a fitting coda to a life spent documenting a region's past for an audience that would keep arguing, long after his death, about who had the right to keep it.

Works Cited

Buffalo Bill Center of the West. "Edgar S. Paxson." Whitney Western Art Museum, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, centerofthewest.org/explore/western-art/research/edgar-s-paxson/. Accessed 29 July 2026.

Ehlert, Linda Wommack. "Custer & the War Between the States." True West Magazine, 25 Sept. 2010, www.truewestmagazine.com/article/custer-the-war-between-the-states/. Accessed 29 July 2026.

Finn, Charles. "Perspective: Edgar S. Paxson." Western Art & Architecture, Winter/Spring 2008, westernartandarchitecture.com/articles/perspective-edgar-s-paxson. Accessed 29 July 2026.

Medicine Man Gallery. "Edgar Samuel Paxson (1852-1919) Biography." Medicine Man Gallery, 26 July 2023, www.medicinemangallery.com/blogs/biographies/edgar-samuel-paxson-1852-1919-biography. Accessed 29 July 2026.

Montana Historical Society. "Edgar Samuel Paxson (1852-1919): Montana's Unassuming Artist." Montana Historical Society, mths.mt.gov/education/bios/paxson.pdf. Accessed 29 July 2026.

Unidentified photographer. "[E. S. Paxson at Work on 'Custer's Last Stand' in His Studio in Butte, Montana]." 1898. Montana History Portal, www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/76943. Accessed 29 July 2026.

University of Montana. "The Edgar Samuel Paxson Collection." Montana Museum of Art and Culture, University of Montana, www.umt.edu/montana-museum/permanent/edgarpaxson.php. Accessed 29 July 2026.