In the early 1920s a group of Charles M. Russell’s closest friends in Great Falls, Montana, were partners in the Montana Newspaper Association, a venture that published advertising supplements in the state’s daily newspapers. They hit upon the idea to publish a series of entertaining stories chronicling the history of the Old West, and they prevailed on Russell to provide pen-and-ink illustrations for each one. These stories appeared nearly every Sunday for a year, from March 5, 1922, through February 18, 1923. Nearly all of Montana’s 170 newspapers carried this popular series. For his part, Russell was glad to participate; he loved the history of the American West, avidly reading many books on the subject. Today these wonderfully narrative drawings stand apart from the articles they once accompanied. The original ink drawing pictured here was originally in the estate of the artist’s widow, Nancy C. Russell. It is part of a group that constitutes the largest selection of them to be found anywhere—almost half the number that the artist eventually produced for the series. In each of them, Russell’s fluid and dextrous lines create a vivid picture of truly historic events—elevating them to the power of epic and myth. Pierre de La Vérendrye and his sons traveled across the northern plains to Lake Winnepeg in 1738, searching for the “western sea.” In 1742 two of La Vérendrye’s sons pushed westward to the Mandan villages to explore farther and trade for furs. In Russell’s time they were credited as the first white men to behold the Rocky Mountains, but now it is generally believed that they got no farther than North and South Dakota, and thus could not have seen that mighty range. Instead, they probably saw the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, which lay well to the east of the Rockies. Russell could not have known much about Indian dress in that earlier period; the style of blanket strip on the warrior in the center did not come into use until after 1850, a hundred years after this event occurred.