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 had a low opinion of the town of Shoshone, Idaho, which she visited in 1883. “It seemed to call the roughest and toughest elements that it had been my lot to see, and I was ever in terror when any time had to be spent there,” she wrote. “Ten and fifteen arrests per day were common, and there was no other jail but a hole in the ground, with guards placed around the hole. There was a fight on the streets almost every hour of the day or night.”