In early 1910 Russell agreed to provide illustrations for a book written by Carrie Adell Strahorn titled Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage: A Woman’s Unique Experience during Thirty Years of Path Finding and Pioneering from the Missouri to the Pacific and from Alaska to Mexico. That summer Mrs. Strahorn, a rather formidable and domineering character, rented a cabin near Russell’s summer retreat, Bull Head Lodge, in Glacier Park, Montana. For the remainder of the summer Mrs. Strahorn badgered and pestered Russell while he worked on the illustrations for the book, which turned out to contain more than 670 pages of text. Russell took the rest of the year to produce the majority of the 350 illustrations that accompanied the text. The book was published the following year in a handsome gilded edition by the Knickerbocker Press, a division of G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The Mrs. Corbet in Russell’s illustration was a legendary figure who kept a wayside station along the stage line to Helena, Montana. Travelers’ tales described her as a forbidding hostess, a large woman of fierce temperament who terrorized passengers into patronizing her establishment during their layovers. “It was reported as not an uncommon thing for her to go out with pistol in hand and command stage passengers to go to her table and eat meals that she had prepared for them,” Mrs. Strahorn wrote. This illustration depicts the story of one luckless patron who had the temerity to criticize the flavor of Mrs. Corbet’s coffee, for which he was summarily removed from her establishment by the ear.