Historical Portrait
Conquering Bear and White Coyote
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 two Native American Oglala Lakota men in traditional dress, who performed with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.
About this photograph
This cabinet card portrait of Conquering Bear and White Coyote was made by the Oxford & Dillhoff studio. Both men were Oglala Lakota performers with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
The Oglala are one of the seven divisions of the Lakota. From 1883 William F. Cody toured Buffalo Bill's Wild West, which hired hundreds of Native performers, many recruited from Pine Ridge.
The shows staged Indian attacks for white audiences and traded in stereotype. They also paid wages and allowed travel, language, dress, horsemanship and ceremony that federal policy was then suppressing on the reservations. What that employment meant remains debated.
Photographs of Native people from this period were almost always made by non-Native photographers for government work, commercial sale, expositions or study. Sitters rarely controlled how the images were used. Catalogue records often name the photographer while leaving subjects unidentified or labelled only by nation.
The Great Sioux Reservation guaranteed by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty was broken up by Congress in 1889, creating Pine Ridge and several smaller reservations in present-day South Dakota and opening the rest to settlement.
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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