By the time Russell made this watercolor, he had gained a considerable degree of skill in the methods of transparent watercolor. Both the background and foreground areas of the composition contain fluid washes and quick brushstrokes of transparent color, often laid over one another to achieve a broader range of tones or additional hues. Pencil underdrawing is visible in a number of places, especially in the figures at the center. There are places where Russell lavished a great deal of attention on detail, such as the beadwork or painted decoration on the Indians’ belongings. For this type of detail, Russell employed pure colors straight from the tube, applied with very small brushes. As with all of his watercolors from the period, Russell reserved areas of the white paper for transparent highlights, but at the same time he employed opaque touches of Chinese (zinc) white to achieve the same effects. The historian Richard White is among a number of scholars who have demonstrated that Indian warfare was much more than simply an individualized contest with traditional enemies. “Tribes fought largely for the potential economic and social benefits to be derived from furs, slaves, better hunting grounds, and horses,” White wrote in a ground-breaking article on the plains warfare of the Lakota Sioux. As he convincingly argued, native peoples went to war “because their survival as a people depended on securing and defending essential resources.” Russell often depicted historic events of intertribal warfare that he heard as oral accounts from the Indians themselves.