Eddie Bohlin ran away from home in Orebro, Sweden at age fifteen, hoping to find an apprenticeship as a silversmith.  He was unable to find a position and instead worked his way to America on a four-masted schooner, arriving in New York in 1910.  As he had been raised with horses, he headed for Montana, where he soon found his first job as a wrangler, rounding up more than nine hundred horses to be sold in Miles City, then the horse trading capital of the world.  Miles city, in eastern Montana’s “Empire of Grass,” was the legendary terminus of longhorn cattle drives from Texas.  It was also the shipping hub for the huge horse ranches that sprawled across the prairies of Montana, Wyoming and other states. 

In those days the horse population of Montana reached a peak of two hundred fifty thousand, as opposed to only six to nine thousand horses today.  During World War I the allied nations sent representatives there to buy horses for their armies.

For several years Eddie worked as a cowboy on long cattle drives, both on horseback and as a hand on the freight trains that took cattle to the Chicago stockyards.  Like his great-uncle, the famous painter Anders Zorn (1860-1920), Bohlin had an aptitude for art, which inspired him to attend the Art Institute in Minneapolis for four months.  There he learned the basic concepts that later results in his artistic masterpieces.