By the time Russell created the model for The Bug Hunters, the grizzly bear had nearly been wiped out of existence in Montana. Since 1903 the state had offered a bounty for each one killed, and the hide and meat could be sold for a tidy profit as well. With such incentives to hunters, only a few bears were left in the most inaccessible reaches of the mountains. Russell greatly lamented their loss, and the grizzly became to him a symbol of the vanishing American frontier. In 1926, the last year of his life, Russell decided to model a new version of a subject he had done sixteen years earlier as The Lunch Hour. His reasons for doing this are unknown, but he may have felt the need to improve on the earlier work in order to reintroduce it for exhibition and sale. The new version became known as The Bug Hunters. Compared to The Lunch Hour, this new version is certainly more successful in sculptural terms; the composition is massed more effectively, with the animals well proportioned to the more strongly modeled base. Although Russell seems to have completed the model for this bronze during his last stay in California in April 1926, there is no evidence that he saw a finished cast prior to his death the following October. The collector George D. Sack maintained that he acquired the “first cast” of the bronze in December 1926, two months after Russell’s death, so it may well be that no casts of this bronze were made in the artist’s lifetime. Prior to 1929, the initial casts of the bronze were made by Roman Bronze Works; after that date the casts were made under Nancy Russell’s supervision at the California Art Bronze Foundry. Only a few casts of this bronze were sold, and it may be due in part to the steep retail price—$300—that Mrs. Russell assigned to it. The later casts of the bronze, including this one, are not as finely detailed as those first produced by Roman Bronze Works.