Charles M. Russell has long been recognized for his action-packed paintings, drawings, and sculpture of cowboys, fur trappers, Native American buffalo hunters and warriors, and other heroes of the Old West. Russell's best-known works capture the excitement and deadly risk of men battling nature and one another in a majestic landscape of mountains and plains. Less well known are Russell's hundreds of depictions of western women. As renowned author and art historian Ginger K. Renner observed thirty-five years ago, no other artist of the West devoted more of his time and talent to the portrayal of women. But few have followed Renner's lead - until now. Lavishly illustrated with full-color illustrations, Charles M. Russell: The Women in His Life and Art presents groundbreaking essays essential to understanding the role of western women in Russell's art. This volume is both a tribute to the women who nurtured Russell's artistic development and a landmark in the study of the role of women in a genre all too often identified almost exclusively with a masculine world. The catalogue essays examine the exhibition's theme from four unique perspectives. Joan Carpenter Troccoli provides an over view of the works in the exhibition and the social, cultural, and personal values that influenced them. Emily Crawford Wilson explores Russell's interest in the feminine ideal, tying it to wider artistic trends of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jennifer Bottomly-O'looney describes Russell's friendship with Ben and Lela Roberts, who introduced the artist to Nancy Cooper, the woman who would become his wife and indispensable business partner. Thomas A. Petrie employs extended excerpts from Nancy's unpublished biographical memoir to illuminate the Russells' marriage, a relationship sustained by affection and mutual respect, as well as shrewd creative and marketing decisions.

In a forty-year career as an oil and gas investment analyst and as an investment banker and strategic adviser on petroleum-sector mergers, acquisitions, and financings, Thomas A. Petrie has witnessed dramatic changes in the business. In Following Oil, he shares useful lessons he has learned about domestic and global trends in population and economic growth, a maturing resource base, variable national energy policies, and dynamic changes in geopolitical forces - and how these variables affect energy markets. More important, he applies those lessons to charting a course of energy development for the nation as the twenty-first century unfolds. By the 1970s, when Petrie began analyzing publicly traded securities in the energy sector, the petroleum investment market was depressed. The rise of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) pushed energy to the center of the national security calculus of the United States and its allies. Price volatility would continue to whipsaw global markets for decades, while for consumers, cheap gasoline prices soon became a fond memory. Eventually, as Petrie puts it, finding oil on Wall Street became cheaper than drilling for it. Petrie uses this dramatic period in oil business history to relate what he has learned from ""following oil"" as a securities analyst and investment banker. But the title also refers to energy sources that could become available following eventual shrinkage of conventional-oil supplies. Addressing the current need for greener, more sustainable energy sources, Petrie points to recent large domestic gas discoveries and the use of new technologies such as horizontal drilling to unlock unconventional hydrocarbons. With these new sources, the United States can increase production and ensure itself enough oil and gas to sustain economic growth during the next several decades. Petrie urges the pursuit of cleaner fossil fuel development in order to buy the time to develop the technical advances needed to bridge the nation to a greener energy future, when wind, solar, and other technologies advance sufficiently to play a larger role.