In 1908 Russell participated in the roundup and transfer of a privately owned buffalo herd to Canada, and he took full advantage of the opportunity to observe the creatures at close range. During the roundup, which took place along the Pend d’Oreille River on the Flathead Indian Reservation, the artist would have seen the animals going to water many times. Russell’s friend the naturalist George Bird Grinnell wrote a description a number of years earlier about the animals’ habit of moving along single file on trails worn deep and smooth on the surface of the prairie. “Before cows came into this country, the buffalo or bison covered the plains,” Nancy Russell wrote in describing the subject of Nature’s Cattle. “This is a family; the bull, the cow, and the calf, trailing as though going to water.” The Roman Bronze Works ledgers, now in the Amon Carter Museum Archives, record two “buffalo groups” for June 7, 1911. The bronze was exhibited at the Folsom Galleries in New York that same year. Copies of the bronze were also made by the Benjamin Zoppo Artistic Bronze Foundry in 1916, and the bronze was offered in local galleries for a price of $175. In 1927 or 1928 Nancy Russell began having casts made at a foundry in Los Angeles, and at her death in May 1940 there were four copies of the bronze in her estate, including the one on display here. For the most part, the earlier casts of the bronze show a bit more surface detail. The tail of the buffalo bull loops around and is joined to the animal’s back, while in the later casts the tail is shown erect.