This is a page from a small ring-bound sketchbook that originally was part of the Nancy C. Russell estate. The sketchbook contains a small number of watercolor sketches depicting forest settings, probably done around Russell’s summer cabin, Bull Head Lodge, on Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park. There are also tentative pencil sketches—some of them limited to just a few lines—that may have been quickly done while outdoors. Perhaps the most interesting group of pages consists of a series of pencil studies of figures that would become part of the large mural that today adorns the wall of the Montana State House of Representatives in Helena. The mural was commissioned by the Montana legislature in February 1911, and by May of that year Nancy Russell wrote that her husband was “devoting his entire time to the mural.” The subject of the mural, more than twelve feet in height and twenty-five feet in length, depicts the party of explorers led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark encountering a group of Flathead Indians in September 1805 in a picturesque valley known as Ross’ Hole, just east of the Bitterroot Mountains. The mural was unveiled ahead of schedule on July 11, 1912, and was immediately hailed as a masterwork. Interestingly, in the mural itself Russell chose to make the Indians, not the white men, the dominant figures, and his decision is reflected in the number and type of figure studies that are contained in the sketchbook. Some of the sketches show how the artist refined the symbolic gestures of the central figures, while others appear to be studies of heads and bodies seen from below—an important consideration, since the mural would be placed high on the wall, well above the viewer’s head. Other drawings in the sketchbook are figure studies that have been covered with numbered squares—a method to facilitate the accurate transfer of a drawing to a much larger scale. Artists termed this procedure “squaring up,” and Russell seems to have learned how to do it during visits to other artists’ studios in New York. The quick, rather informal nature of both the watercolor studies and the drawings in this sketchbook is indicative of Russell’s normal working methods when he was conceiving ideas for pictorial compositions.