That, however, was as far as Samman got. For some never-explained reason, the artist folded up his paints and pallet and simply quit. His abrupt exit left the murals in Doheny’s Indian Room languishing half-finished.

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Edward Doheny had previously purchased some of Charlie Russell’s paintings and drawings, and the two men knew each other as more than just passing acquaintances. In light of Russell’s high reputation as a Western artist at the time, one can’t help but wonder why Doheny hadn’t hired Russell to paint the entire set of murals to begin with. But in any event, Doheny and Russell hand-shook a deal for Russell to finish the murals, starting from where Samman had left off.

The manner in which Russell decided to complete the murals may offer a clue as to why Samman left the work unfinished — for, instead of painting a long single scene or two scenes on a mural as Samman had done, Russell started painting panoramically, using just about every subject matter that he had ever portrayed in earlier works. It is only a guess, but it is possible that Doheny had wanted this type of panorama with a variety of scenes crammed onto his 20-foot walls to begin with, rather than only a scene or two for each mural.

Edward Doheny may have been a friend and patron, but Charlie Russell was his own man, and he had his own ideas about what the murals should look like. Russell wasn’t about to let any part of those last two enticing, empty, 20-foot canvases go to waste. According to his stepson Jack, Russell started off by painting the basic scenes of the murals on two 20-foot-long by 28-inch-high canvases at his studio in Great Falls, Mont., loosely rolling them up on spools as he went.

And what scenes they were! Russell painted a roundup scene, complete with clouds of dust and plenty of rangy Longhorns, plus a distant herd and cowboys on the horizon. Then he painted a branding scene, and he followed that with a lone wolf skulking through the brush, a herd of antelope foraging in a meadow and a far-off stagecoach trailing a plume of dust beneath the peaks of snow-capped mountains.

Russell went on to depict a watchful grizzly bear hidden in the rocks, a pack train headed by a lone rider with a Winchester ready, some deer in a draw, and then a mining-camp scene with two miners panning for gold and another cooking grub, their horses grazing in the background. While Indians are the focus of the scenes done by Samman, there are no Indians in Russell’s murals. Perhaps Doheny didn’t want any more Indians in his Indian Room. In any case, Russell did what he did best, and that was to paint Western scenes.

The trouble was, Russell got so caught up in his masterpiece that he forgot all about time and space. When the Cowboy Artist finally got the rolled-up murals to California, ready to install, he discovered that he had used up all the space that had been allocated for him on the walls of Doheny’s Indian room and considerably more.

As a faded old mimeographed Doheny Library account of the story relates, when Russell unrolled his murals, he discovered that he had “painted his way around the second floor and up the stairs to the [floor of the] third floor.” The account goes on to say: “When he reached the placer-mining scene of the Gold Rush days he was hard up against the [second floor ceiling], and there was no more room for the oil wells [that Doheny had wanted as a depiction of the discovery of oil in California]. Mr. Doheny was disappointed and felt that his mural was a failure.”

Russell’s murals, it turned out, had barely gotten him out of the gold rush era, let alone into the 20th century and the birth of oil wells in California. But he was plumb out of room, both literally and figuratively. And that is as far as the mimeographed history from the Doheny Library goes.

But there is more to the story, as Maureen Duffany and Rita Faulders, past curators at the Doheny Library, have related in personal interviews with Lee Silva. Charlie Russell was, after all, a man of his word, and he took pride in his art. Russell celebrated and romanticized the Old West and wasn’t one who believed in progress. But he had promised Edward Doheny that the murals would end with the discovery of oil in California, and that was what Mr. Doheny would get. So Russell “fixed” the last mural his way, finishing the project just a few months before his death from heart problems in his Great Falls home on October 24, 1926. Presumably, Russell died satisfied that he had kept his word to Doheny.

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