Russell’s small sculpture of a dancing Indian was one of several subjects designed to be used as an ashtray. According to one source, the figure represented a Crow warrior celebrating successful coups taken against an enemy. Robert H. Lowie, an anthropologist who studied the Crow in Russell’s day, described the ceremonies of song and dance that attended the return of a successful war party to a Crow village, including the “Long Dance,” held immediately after the braves’ arrival to celebrate the achievements of the “coup-strikers” among them. Lowie described the movements of some Crow dances as involving low, leaping motions by individual dancers in a side-to-side direction. The figure in Russell’s sculpture seems to move in similar fashion, his flowing braids and the trailing wolfskin at his side suggesting rapid movement to the right. In a letter dated March 22, 1916, Nancy Russell contracted with the Benjamin Zoppo bronze foundry to cast nine of her husband’s subjects, including The Scalp Dancer in lots of six or more at $10 apiece. Interestingly, the work was exhibited under the title Dancing Indian until January 1925; at that point Nancy Russell copyrighted the work’s title as The Scalp Dancer. Evidence suggests that the copies of this work made by the Roman Bronze Works foundry commenced a few years prior to that, but some of those casts proved defective, and Russell himself was forced to rework the plaster master model before any more were cast. The bronze displayed here is not one of the defective casts, but one of three copies that remained in Mrs. Russell’s estate after her death in 1940.