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. Mrs. Strahorn wrote that she and her husband Robert were detained by a small band of Indians south of Spokane Falls in the late Autumn of 1880, while they were attempting to ride overland to reach a riverboat for safe passage before the first freeze-up. At the Indian’s insistence, she had to doctor a sick woman before they were allowed to leave the camp. Russell’s illustration shows what happened next. Finally released by the Indians, Mrs. Strahorn and her husband rode furiously over the back trail to the boat landing on the Snake River, only to find that they were too late—the boat had already departed from the landing.