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. In 1888, while camping in the wild country of the Salmon River in Idaho, Carrie Strahorn reported meeting a party of prospectors who had been traversing the upper reaches of a canyon above the river. They related the details of a very difficult journey over nearly impassable terrain; at one point they had to build the windlass depicted here to hoist their pack animals from one rocky ledge to another. One of the animals was killed when it fell off one of the narrow ledges.