During his last years, Russell became increasingly interested in the early history of the American frontier, particularly the fur trade period when legendary figures like Jim Bridger performed their historic exploits. Bridger was lionized in the period as one of the immortals among American trailblazers, the discoverer of the South Pass in Wyoming (crucial to the success of the Oregon Trail), and the Great Salt Lake in Utah. As a native of St. Louis and a direct descendant of the famous Bent family who dominated trade on the Old Santa Fe Trail, Russell regarded men like Bridger as true American heroes of a golden age that had long since passed. In 1922 the artist illustrated an article on the frontiersman as part of the syndicated newspaper series, “Back-Trailing on the Old Frontiers,” commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Bridger’s first journey from St. Louis to the Rocky Mountains. The pose of Bridger and his horse in the pen drawing that Russell made to accompany the article is nearly identical with that of the bronze he would create a few years later. Russell always maintained that he first came west to become a mountain man, and his love for the romance and adventure of that phase of western history is exemplified in the dashing figure of Bridger astride his horse, ready to respond to some unseen danger. Russell modeled the figure during his last visit to California, and it seems not to have been cast in bronze until early in 1927, a few months after the artist’s death. The first documented cast was sold in March of that year for $500. Nancy Russell thought this bronze to be “a real inspiration and one of the best things Charlie did,” but added that “it is too bad he did not see it in bronze.” Some time after December 1927, Mrs. Russell began having the Jim Bridger bronze cast in Los Angeles. The example on display here, one of three copies that were left in Mrs. Russell’s estate at the time of her death, bears the mark of the California Bronze Foundry, which only operated under that name from December 1927 through December 1928.