Russell Country Big Sandy Highway 87
— the country Charlie Russell kept painting.
Not only on a wall.
“Big Sandy sits on the Hi-Line route across north-central Montana, with the Bears Paw Mountains rising south of town and the Missouri Breaks beyond. Charles M. Russell wintered nearby as a young cowhand in the 1880s and carried the look of this prairie into the rest of his life's work. The grain elevators still mark the horizon a long way out.
Russell Country Big Sandy Highway 87, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Big Sandy is a small farming town in Chouteau County on US 87, about 80 miles south of Havre and 80 miles northeast of Great Falls. The town sits in the rolling wheat country between the Bears Paw Mountains to the south and the Missouri River breaks further on. The Montana tourism region surrounding it is officially called Russell Country, after the cowboy painter Charles M. Russell, who lived and worked across this landscape from the 1880s onward.
Charles Marion Russell came west from St. Louis in 1880 at age sixteen and spent the next eleven years as a working cowhand in the Judith Basin south and west of here. The hard winter of 1886 to 1887, which killed much of Montana's open-range cattle, became the subject of his small watercolour Waiting for a Chinook and made his name. He carried this country in his eye until his death in 1926.
The Hi-Line is the local name for US 2 and the parallel BNSF main line that run across the top of Montana, and US 87 drops south from it through some of the most open country in the lower 48. Distances between towns run 20 to 40 miles. The grain elevators of Big Sandy, Geraldine, and Square Butte mark the horizon long before the towns themselves come into view. Traffic is light. The wind is constant.