Russell shared a long friendship with Will Rogers (1879–1935), the famed western vaudeville performer, film star, and satirist. The two men first met when the Oklahoma-born comedian was based in New York City, and they hit it off with each other from the very start. “He is the greatest artist of this kind in the world,” Rogers wrote his fiancée from Butte, Montana, in June 1908. “Remington is not in it with him he lives just above here in Montana but is becoming very noted had a studio in N.Y. last winter and has been at my flat there lots of times.” In 1924 Rogers was still extolling Russell’s virtues as a man and artist in his nationally-syndicated newspaper column. “He is the only painter of western pictures in the world that a cowboy can’t criticize,” Rogers wrote. “Every piece of leather or rope is just where it would be.” By this time, Rogers had relocated with his family to Los Angeles, and the two men managed to get together whenever the Russells traveled to California. During his visit to California in March–April 1926, Russell fashioned a plaster model of Rogers on horseback with the intention of having it cast in bronze. Although the bronze is not mentioned by name, it seems to have been delivered to the Rogers’ household in June 1926, approximately four months before Russell’s death. On June 27 Betty Rogers wrote Nancy Russell that she was enclosing payment of $600 for the bronze, adding that “it arrived in perfect condition and we are so happy and proud to have this beautiful piece of Charlie’s. . . . Tell Charlie I have nothing in my home I prize as much as I do this piece of his, we are all crazy about it and I’m so happy and proud of it.” Though Rogers received the first cast of the work, it is unclear whether Russell himself ever saw the sculpture in bronze before his death on October 26 of that year.