“When the Indian prays or smokes in the act of prayer, he fills his pipe, holds it to the sun or to the heavens, to the earth, then to the four points of the wind,” Nancy Russell wrote in describing the subject of this bronze, “then draws three long draws from the pipe and passes it to whoever or whatever he’s smoking with. In this case, it is a buffalo skull.” One of Russell’s hunting friends, who received a copy of the bronze, later related that Russell told them he had derived the subject from his time in 1887 with Alberta’s Blood Indians, whose elders believed that “some day the buffalo would return from the underground where they had taken refuge, but only after the white man had been driven out of the Indian country. This wonderful day was due most any time but the Medicine Man was praying to hasten that event.” During Russell’s early years in Montana the great herds of buffalo had disappeared from the northern plains, and his sympathy for the plight of the Indians, who had depended on the animal for their livelihood, was well-known to all his friends. This bronze was one of six new subjects that Nancy Russell arranged to have cast at Benjamin Zoppo’s Artistic Bronze Foundry in 1916. She specified that this particular subject be cast in lots of twelve for $10 apiece. As with some of Russell’s other bronzes with broad rounded bases, this sculpture was probably meant to serve as an optional ash tray or pipe stand, and some casts bear evidence that they were used in this manner. The initial retail price for this bronze was $35, but it soon went up to $50. By 1927, after Russell’s death, the plaster master model for the bronze had undergone some restoration and repair at Roman Bronze Works, and subsequent casts sold for $150. The bronze on display here is one of two copies in the museum’s collection; this particular example has no foundry mark, but resembles one of the later casts made by Roman Bronze Works. Both casts were originally part of the Nancy Russell estate.