Montana that was once owned by the artist Charlie Russell and only a few months after Russell's death. Russell was on the Knight Ranch when Bascom was working there, and had drawn a sketch on the bunkhouse wall and also finished a large oil painting of Raymond Knight on his favorite mount, Blue Bird, roping a steer. Although Bascom was educated in one-room school houses and only completed one full school year, never finishing high school, he never lost his desire to be an artist. He subscribed to a correspondence art course wherein both Russell and Remington gave instructions on their drawing techniques. "Through those art lessons these two masters of western art were my first real art teachers," Bascom recalled. "In fact the only instructions I ever had in western art were from Remington and Russell." Even though he had no high school diploma, the Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, accepted him as a student in the fall of 1933. "There I was a 27 years old college freshman who hadn't been to school in years," Bascom recalled. "I felt like a wild horse in a pen." But as a BYU student, he was persistence, taking every art course the college offered. He studied painting and drawing under professors E.H. Eastmond and B.F. Larsen, and sculpture under Torleif S. Knaphus. In the summertime between school years, Bascom was a rodeo contestant where he gained notoriety as a cowboy artist and rodeo champion. He interrupted his college education in 1934 with the intent to compete, along with his three brothers, at the World Championship Rodeo in London, England. During his freshman year of 1933–34, Bascom won the Studio Guild Award for the best student art work of the year. He won that top art award again in 1936, as well as the Honorable Mention Award. He was a member of the BYU Art Club and the Canada Club as well as the Delta Phi fraternity. He was a popular entertainer with his cartoon drawings at the University Dames Club of which his wife Nadine was a member. He graduated from BYU with a degree in Fine Art in 1940. His fellow art students voted him "most likely to succeed" as an artist. He was a member of the Brigham Young University Alumni Association and elected to the BYU Emeritus Club in 1990. Later he attended classes at Long Beach