This large watercolor is one of the rare examples Russell executed on toned paper. It shows a group of Blackfeet warriors resting on a hillside, bathed in a soft, yet revealing light. They wear face paint as “medicine” for protection in times of great risk, such as participating in a war expedition. The warrior at the left wears a hairpiece common to the Blackfeet or the Crow, a decorated strip around the middle of the head that has been adorned with tassels of human hair. The warrior at the right wears a wolf-fur headdress usually reserved for the scout of a war party. The guard visible on his left hand is an interesting detail; although ethnologists have seldom seen such an object, it is doubtful that Russell simply imagined it. The beadwork on the warrior’s bow case and the Pendleton blanket leggings suggest a date contemporaneous with the execution of the watercolor. Depictions such as this reveal a thinly disguised nostalgia for a world that was no more. At the time Russell painted this work, the exploration and settlement of the West was widely viewed as a glorious era of the nation’s past, gone forever. Accompanying by a deep nostalgia for the past was a sense of confusion and loss over the burgeoning problems of the present. Russell’s personal outlook reflected this, for as his artistic career progressed he withdrew further into the past, becoming more outspoken about the so-called “progress” of civilization. He became particularly bitter over the despoliation of nature and the destruction of Native American life by whites. For Russell, the “golden age” of the American frontier was the period when there were no white Americans—only indigenous peoples in their native landscape.