Historical Portrait
Brings Plenty
Archive record
1 photograph : gelatin silver print ; sheet 13.8 x 10 cm, mount 16.6 x 11 cm (cabinet card format) | Photograph shows portrait of a Native American Oglala Lakota man in traditional dress, who performed with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.
About this photograph
The archive record identifies the sitter as Brings Plenty, an Oglala Lakota man who performed with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. The photograph was made by Oxford & Dillhoff in 1902.
William F. Cody toured Buffalo Bill's Wild West from 1883 and hired hundreds of Native performers, many from Pine Ridge. The shows staged Indian attacks for white audiences and relied on stereotype, but they also paid wages and permitted travel while allowing language, dress, and ceremony that federal policy was then suppressing on reservations.
The Oglala are one of seven divisions of the Lakota. The Great Sioux Reservation guaranteed by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty was broken up by Congress in 1889, creating Pine Ridge and other reservations in present-day South Dakota.
Photographs of Native people from this period were almost always made by non-Native photographers for commercial sale, government work, or ethnographic study. Sitters rarely controlled how the images were used. Catalogue records often name the photographer while leaving the subject unidentified or labelled only by nation.
The cabinet card format, with its mounted print, was standard for studio portraiture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Compiled from the catalogue record and reference notes on the formats and events involved. The archive record above is the primary source.
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