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. This small pen-and-ink drawing appeared in the book at the head of a chapter detailing Mr. and Mrs. Strahorn’s travels through British Columbia in 1893, subtitled “Five Hundred Miles of Canoeing.” Mrs. Strahorn vividly described their excursions by canoe along the Fraser River, frequently accompanied by Indians in their native canoes. Her account of the teeming waters of the river during the salmon spawning season, when the great numbers of struggling fish actually lifted the smaller canoes out of the water, is particularly noteworthy. Russell’s drawing depicts a type of sea-going canoe that was more often found on the coastal waters and inlets; the type of canoe that traveled the inland rivers was of a slightly different shape. The term “pirogue” refers to a dugout canoe, which all of these were. The word, though French, actually derives from the Spanish word piragua, which itself is of Caribbean origin.