The Canadian scholar Hugh A. Dempsey, a recognized authority on the Blackfoot Indians, has written that while there is no evidence that a person named “Sleeping Thunder” ever existed—Russell used the name in his first published story, which appeared in Recreation magazine in April 1897—the artist did indeed spend six formative months in the spring and summer of 1888 at a ranch near High River, Alberta, where the Blackfeet camped nearby. Dempsey speculates that “Sleeping Thunder” may in fact be based on a Blood Indian named Apskinas, whom Russell got to know during his stay in the area. But Russell also may have had another notable Blackfoot in mind; in 1901, more than twenty-five years before casting the model into bronze, Russell first created this head in plaster as a portrait of Crowfoot, the great Blackfoot chief who desperately tried to help his people adjust to the ways of the white man. It is not known how many copies of this plaster model were produced in Russell’s lifetime, but none seem to have been called “Sleeping Thunder.” Russell apparently agreed to casting his plaster head of a Blackfoot man in bronze shortly before his death, likely at the instigation of his wife, Nancy. He never saw the finished work in bronze, for the initial casting seems to have occurred in the summer of 1927. Surviving documents suggest that it was Mrs. Russell who gave the bronze its title; the museum’s cast seen here would thus be one of the earliest casts, since the California Bronze Foundry changed its name to the California Art Bronze Foundry in 1928. As with many of Russell’s bronzes, the total number of casts of Sleeping Thunder is small. Fewer than ten were probably created prior to Mrs. Russell’s death in May 1940.