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. After several years of traveling and writing for the Union Pacific, Robert Strahorn determined to build railroad lines himself in Idaho, where he developed the towns of Hailey, Mountain Home, and Caldwell. The Strahorns became partners in a grand project to develop a resort near Hailey Hot Springs, in Sun Valley. In their first season of work there, they became stranded by a heavy snowstorm in early December. They and a small group of miners evacuated the area, making a slow and harrowing escape down out of the mountains through miles of open country in a blinding blizzard. Russell’s illustration shows them during their precarious journey.