Best quarter in America

Despite some snafus, Schweitzer and the quarter commission got the final selection right. The Charlie Russell skull is the quintessential Montana symbol. Perfect. That's one way to secure the Great Falls vote (or at least the western half of it). The only thing that bothers me a bit is that they call it a "bison skull" constantly. It isn't though; it's a cattle skull.

The skull comes from the famous western artist Charles M. Russell, who signed his paintings with a skull alongside his initials. He first used the skull on a watercolor called "Waiting for a Chinook (The Last of the Five Thousand)." A young Russell had been working as a cattle hand for a rancher during the winter of 1886-87. Long story short, there was little in the way of food for the cattle. To make matters worse, a chinook had melted the top layer of a foot and a half of snow, resulting in a thick sheet of ice that the cattle's hooves couldn't penetrate. Russell told the story later on in life:

The winter of '86 and'87 all men will remember. It was the hardest winter the open range ever saw. An awful lot of cattle died. The cattle would go in the brush and hump up and die there. They wasn't rustlers. A horse will paw and get grass, but a cow won't. Then the wolves fattened on the cattle.... Now I was living at the OH Ranch that winter. There were several men there, and among them was Jesse Phelps, the owner of the OH. One night, Jesse Phelps had got a letter from Louie Kaufman, one of the biggest cattlemen in the country, who lived in Helena, and Louie wanted to know how the cattle was doing, and Jesse says to me, "I must write a letter to Louie and tell him how tough it is." I was sitting at the table with him and I said, "I'll make a sketch to go with it." So I made one, a small water color about the size of a postal card, and I said to Jesse, "Put that in your letter." He looked at it and said, "Hell, he don't need a letter, this will be enough."

At the bottom, Russell placed a small skull that would become his trademark. Bison skull? It is not and never has been a bison skull. Hell, doesn't matter though. We all know what's on the quarter even if the governor who gave the go-ahead to put it on there doesn't.