In the years prior to contact with the white man, Native Americans developed a unique method of using signal smoke to communicate with one another across the open plains. After the arrival of white traders, they began to use mirrors for the same purpose. United States military officers took note of this unique form of communication, and one enterprising officer developed the concept of signal flags to effect the same purpose. Russell was keenly interested in the early history of the Plains Indian tribes, and he doubtless heard oral accounts of the use of hides to create code messages in puffs of smoke that could be seen at great distances. The famed mountain man Jim Bridger was one of the few white men who could discern the puffs of signal smoke well in advance of others. In Russell’s loosely washed watercolor, an Indian atop a rocky limestone shelf utilizes a striped Hudson’s Bay Company trade blanket to control the smoke emanating from a small fire. In the distance to the right, smoke from another signal fire rises from the summit of a low bluff. The man crouching on a rock at the center of the composition carries a mountain sheep horn bow, made west of the Rocky Mountains by the Nez Perce tribe, who traded actively with the Blackfeet. It was the very best type, made of laminated split horn. The man at the far left wears a black-bear or eagle-claw necklace, smaller and not considered as important as a grizzly claw necklace. The hair of the central standing figure is fixed with an untied forelock in the Blackfoot style. He wears a brightly colored Pendleton blanket, and the beadwork visible below the powder horn at his side is in the style of the reservation period—that is, the 1890s.