Behind Every Man: The Story of Nancy Cooper Russell

C. M. Russell’s “best booster and pardner”

After Nancy Cooper married Charlie Russell in 1895, she helped turn a journeyman cowboy and ranch hand who sketched and sculpted in his spare time into a full-time artist who sold and exhibited all over the globe.

In Behind Every Man: The Story of Nancy Cooper Russell, Joan Stauffer offers the first biography of the person whom Charles Russell called “the best booster and pardner a man ever had.”

Stauffer’s portrait, evoked in the voice of its subject and based on a decade of research, offers readers both a complete life story of Nancy Russell and creative insight into her thoughts and feelings.

Stauffer reveals that Nancy and Charles’s union created a practical synergy. Always an advocate for her husband, a steward of his art, and a liaison to his admirers and critics, Nancy’s greatest contribution may have been the inspiration she provided Charles. “I done my best work for her,” the cowboy artist once remarked.

Joan Stauffer has performed her one-woman stage presentation of the life and times of Nancy Cooper Russell more than a hundred times before enthusiastic audiences across the country. A former chair of the Board of Directors of the Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she was honored in 1983 with the Oklahoma Governor's Award for Community Service. Stauffer lives in Tulsa. Her late husband, Dale, assisted in the research for this book.