The discovery of gold in southwestern Montana in 1862 brought a flood of prospectors to the region. Unfortunately, it also brought numerous conflicts with the indigenous native people who lived and roamed there. By the summer of 1864, the year that the Montana Territory was established, groups of prospectors and other travelers were being attacked by hostile Indians. Part of this activity was due to Indian pressure from the east; the Lakota Sioux were being gradually pushed out of the Dakotas into the traditional territories of the Blackfeet and Crow, both sworn enemies of the Lakota. A number of the Indian raids on the whites took place in the area where Russell was to spend his formative years almost twenty years later. Although the raids usually involved the theft of goods or horses, there were also some pitched battles.

Here Russell depicted one of those battles, between a group of men with pack animals and a band of hostile Blackfeet. The men are surrounded, and some are using the bodies of their fallen horses as defensive breastworks. A Blackfoot lies dead in the left foreground, while the other members of his party circle in the distance. Russell created a tight central composition in the classic “last stand” mode, which owed much to the published visual representations of the defeat of General George A. Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in July 1876. A man in the very center of Russell’s painting aims his rifle across the flanks of his horse directly at the viewer—placing the viewer, as Russell often did, on the side of the Indians.