During his initial years in Montana, Russell probably witnessed the practice of fleshing and scraping a cow buffalo hide by Indian women, and he depicted it a number of times in his art. One contemporary writer described this process: “It was arduous work. The hides were fleshed; that is, cleaned of all adhering scraps of meat and fat, then laced into lodgepole [pine] frames, where they dried as stiff and firm as boards. Then, standing upon the hide, smooth side up, the tanner, with an elkhorn handled, steel bladed instrument the shape of a hoe, chipped it to about one-half its original thickness and rubbed it with grease. When that was thoroughly soaked in, the hide was then well smeared with a mixture of boiled liver and brains, folded and rolled, and laid away for several days in order for the mixture to neutralize the glue. Then came the hardest of the work: the tanner for an hour or so at a time rubbed and seesawed the hide against upright, stretched thongs of rawhide until, at last, it became almost as soft and pliable as velvet.” Russell apparently modeled his small sculpture of an Indian woman with a fleshing tool in her lap in 1925. A few months after his death, Nancy Russell wrote George D. Sack, an avid collector of Russell’s bronzes who had acquired a cast of the work. “Charlie really modeled that to try and cast it in plaster himself,” she wrote. “He did make the plaster cast that is used for the model.” The bronze originally sold for $115, but the price went up to $125 by 1928. It is not known how many casts were eventually made prior to Nancy Russell’s death in 1940, but the number seems to be less than eleven. The bronze seen here was cast by Roman Bronze Works in New York; Mrs. Russell stopped using them in 1928, moving her business to a foundry in Los Angeles nearer to her home. This cast is therefore one of the earliest that were produced.