In 1972 I was allowed to photograph some of the major works, including the two Russell murals. And that was how, eventually, I learned about what I like to call Charlie Russell’s last legacy.

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The story of the Russell murals actually starts with another legend of a different sort — a man named Edward L. Doheny. Born on August 10, 1856, in Fond du Lac, Wis., Doheny had an instinct for prospecting and speculating that took him, as a young man, into the Southwest looking for gold and silver.

According to the late Arizona historian John Gilchriese, when Doheny was a down-on-his-luck hardscrabble prospector and miner during the early 1880s silver-boom days of Tombstone, Arizona Territory, he worked for $8 a day as a faro lookout for the legendary gambler-lawman Wyatt Earp. The two men would remain acquaintances for the remainder of their lives, getting together occasionally in Los Angeles in the 1910s and ’20s.

For more than 20 years, Doheny worked mining claims all over the West before he finally gave up the pursuit of the “yellow stuff” to try his luck drilling for black gold, a business that was in its infancy. Doheny was one of the first men to tap the riches of the vast oil fields in Southern California and in Mexico. And from 1892 on, he made so much money in the petroleum business that he couldn’t have spent it fast enough, even frivolously.

Doheny and his wife, Estelle, were fascinated by the American West, and they were grateful for what the West had done for them. By the turn of the century, they had begun building what was to become a fabulous collection of Western Americana — thousands of books on California and the West, photos, Currier and Ives prints and, most of all, paintings by practically every major Old West artist, living and dead.

The Dohenys literally filled their regal estate at No. 8 Chester Place in Los Angeles with books and artifacts. They expanded to include European art, and they even bought a rare copy of a Gutenberg Bible.

In time, Edward Doheny enjoyed the honor of having Doheny Drive, in Beverly Hills, named after him. He even managed to survive an infamous scandal of the 1920s, when transactions made by oilman Harry F. Sinclair — who had leased the vast federal oil lands of Teapot Dome in Wyoming — became the subject of a U.S. Senate investigation. Like Sinclair, Doheny also held leases to U.S. government oil reserves, namely at Elk Hills, in California, so he too had fallen under the investigative microscope.

The problem was that both Sinclair’s and Doheny’s leases were alleged to have been obtained illegally from Doheny’s old New Mexico mining friend, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall (1866-1944). In 1929 Fall was convicted of accepting bribes, sentenced to a year in jail, fined $1 million and forced to resign his cabinet position. Doheny and Sinclair were acquitted of any criminal charges involving the bribery of Fall, although Sinclair was later sent to prison for being in contempt of the U.S. Senate.

After emerging with only a hand-slap from Fall’s fall from power, and from what the history books have come to call the Teapot Dome Scandal, Edward Doheny went on amassing and spending his fortune. With all his millions of dollars of oil money, he could collect any darn thing he wanted.

Always something of a patriot, Doheny decided in the early 1920s that he wanted to decorate his “Indian Room,” which graced the second floor of his Los Angeles home, with a mural. The mural that Doheny envisioned would run continuously around the room, along the top of the four walls, and would be a panorama of American history — beginning with the landing of the Pilgrims and ending in the early 1900s with the discovery of oil in California.

Doheny commissioned German-born Detlef Samman (1857-1938), a fresco painter who had immigrated to the United States in 1881, to paint the continuous mural (actually four murals). With keen foresight, Doheny had Samman paint the murals on canvas that was attached to the walls, rather than paint them directly on the walls themselves, as Michelangelo had done at the Sistine Chapel. As Doheny wanted, Samman started with the Pilgrims, depicting their first meeting with the Indians on one mural. Samman then painted a second mural with two scenes on it — Indians hunting buffalo on the left and Indians playing a traditional recreational game on the right. Each mural was 28 inches high and 240 inches long.

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