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. Russell’s illustration recounts a lively scene that occurred at the stage station at Big Butte, Idaho, during a journey down to Salt Lake City. When Mrs. Strahorn was shown the room in which she would be staying for the night with the stationmaster’s wife. The man casually remarked that the room was “now quite safe,” because a large rattlesnake had been discovered in the room only a short time before that. A dog that was good at catching them had been shut in the room with the snake, and the sounds of a lively scuffle could be heard. Finally the door was opened to reveal the snake lying dead in the center of the floor; the dog, which had been bitten during the fight, rushed out the door and hightailed it into the nearby woods. Mrs. Strahorn was told that the furniture “looked as if a cyclone had demolished it,” but order was soon restored. Apparently the dog reappeared after a few days, none the worse for wear.