Provenance:

Private collection, Wyoming

 

Hang around enough cowboys, or cowboy artists, and they will eventually refer to the book We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher. Written by E. C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott and Helena Huntington Smith, We Pointed Them North chronicles Abbott’s adventures as a cowboy in the late 1800s. Colorful, poignant, funny and even thoughtful, Abbott’s story is considered a classic piece of cowboy history. One of the book’s many fans was Tom Lovell, who painted The Snowy Owl Prophecy directly from Abbott’s tales of living and working in the West. “E.C. (Teddy Blue) Abbott was an English-born Texan who spent his early years driving trail herds north to Kansas. Later he made his home in Montana and married a Cheyenne girl,” Lovell wrote. “Naturally he was on good terms with the Indians. One day in early winter he was riding with a friend when they came upon a snowy owl. The Indian told him that it was their belief that this was a sign of a very severe winter. This was not necessarily so but about every five years these large birds would drift below the Arctic Circle because their food supply (lemmings) would become scarce. Abbott was a friend of Charlie Russell’s and wrote his own story, We Pointed Them North.”