RENO, NEV. — The  Coeur d’Alene art auction at the Peppermill Resort on July 25 realized $22.1 million in sales at the largest event in the field of classic Western and American art. Charles M. Russell (1864-1926) led the pack in the celebratory auction’s 30th year with “As Cochrane and Pard Leaped into Their Saddles, Cochrane Shot the Indian,” 1910, a watercolor on paper. The 14¼-by-17¼-inch work, signed lower left, sold for $1 Million accompanied by a first edition of Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage.

According to Rick Stewart, author and Russell historian, “In August 1910, while at his summer cabin, Bull Head Lodge, on Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park, Russell began work on a large commission to illustrate a book by a rather formidable woman named 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. The book eventually contained 350 illustrations, and 85 of them were provided by Russell: 17 watercolors and 68 pen and ink drawings.”

A complete report on this sale will follow.