Volume 4: 1926-Present 11.01.25 - Flipbook - Page 29
Harold McCracken stated in the 1957 book (the Charles M. Russell Book) that over
51,000 copies of Trails Plowed Under had been published. This is the very first copy
dated October 7, 1927 and signed by Nancy C. Russell. It took acquisition of 52 copies
of this book to end up owning the number one copy.
Between 1959 and 1985, one of the Buffalo Bill Museum’s most
distinguished, devoted, and generous trustees, William E. Weiss Jr.,
gave the Whitney Gallery a substantial number of Russell artworks.
Many of the pieces had been placed on loan since the gallery’s
inception in 1959 and were donated a few at a time throughout the
ensuing years. Weiss’s early gifts were composed of mostly oil
paintings and watercolors that had once belonged to a prominent
banker of Butte, MT, one Andrew “Andy” Jackson Davis Sr. and his
family. Davis had acquired a collection of forty-seven Russell works to
decorate his home. Eventually the pieces were passed down to his son
Andrew Jackson Davis Jr., also of Butte, whose widow sold them in
1956 to M. Knoedler & Co., a commercial gallery in New York City.
Weiss purchased the entire Davis collection in 1959.
William E. Weiss Jr.
ca. 1966
