[4] Louise Emerson's great-grandfather, Samuel D. Ingham (on her mother's side), was Secretary of the Treasury under Andrew Jackson, the U.S.'s seventh President (1829–1837).

[4] In 1923 and 1924, Louise Emerson spent her summers at the Ecoles d'Art Américaines at Fontainebleau, France, studying fresco painting with Paul-Albert Baudouin.

[4][10] Arnold Rönnebeck and Louise Emerson met in 1925[5] when both were summer guests at Los Gallos, the Taos, New Mexico compound of Mabel Dodge Luhan.

On the other hand, according to family lore, she did comment, "When everyone filed into the church, no one paid any attention to the bride because there was this American Indian sitting there with the ceremonial ribbons in his braids".

[11] Rönnebeck and Emerson subsequently set off on what they termed an "extended wedding trip" of the West that included stops in Omaha, Nebraska, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Los Angeles, California.

[4] Emerson frequently painted scenes from daily life, including her children, their friends, and even their teachers as models.

She also responded to local events that illustrated the lives of regional women, including painting a courtroom scene of a seventeen year old who murdered her husband when he divorced her.

[14][15] Many feared that if the Depression continued for very long, a generation of artists would be lost and a fatal blow would be dealt to American culture.

[16] Between 1937 and 1944, Emerson entered 16 competitions for mural commissions including the Department of Justice Building, Washington, D.C. (1936, 1941), Fort Scott, Kansas (1937), Phoenix, Arizona (1937), Worland, Wyoming (1938), Dallas, Texas (1940), Grand Junction and Littleton, Colorado (1940), Social Security Building, Washington, D.C., (1940 and 1942), Amarillo, Texas (1941), and Los Angeles, California (1944).

The approved design depicted a determined looking pioneer farming family in a Conestoga wagon pulled by oxen heading directly toward the viewer.

The Indians and the pioneer farming family were both historically dependent on the land and they are shown being displaced by the new, thriving and growing oil industry.

The mural has since been moved and installed in the downtown Casper, Wyoming Post Office in the Dick Cheney Federal Building.

[21] In Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theatre, Barbara Melosh describes this frequently used Section theme as the "comradely ideal".

She writes, "[Louise] Ronnebeck invokes the comradely ideal in the image of shared labor, and she emphasizes the physicality of work in the man's muscled arms and the woman's sturdy figure".

In January 1992, Emerson's son and daughter, who had modeled for the mural over 50 years earlier, unveiled it in a ceremony in Grand Junction's Wayne N. Aspinall Federal Building and Courthouse, where it remains today.

Besides her Section murals, Emerson was commissioned to execute many murals and frescoes in the Denver area, for locations including, Kent School for Girls (1933), Morey Junior High School (1934) (still extant but in deplorable condition), the City and County Building (1935), the Church of the Holy Redeemer (1938), the Bamboo Lounge at the Cosmopolitan Hotel (1938) and the Robert W. Speer Memorial Hospital for Children (1940) (still extant, also in deplorable condition).

[4][3] Her shortest lived mural was entitled The Nativity, painted on canvas and installed on the pediment of the City and County Building.