Historical Portrait
Iron White Man & wife
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 and his wife, Cora Iron White Man, in traditional dress, who performed with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.
About this photograph
The record identifies this 1902 cabinet card portrait as showing Iron White Man and his wife, Cora Iron White Man, who performed with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. The photographers were Oxford & Dillhoff.
Buffalo Bill's Wild West, touring from 1883 under William F. Cody, employed hundreds of Native performers. Many were recruited from Pine Ridge. The shows presented staged Indian attacks for white audiences and relied on stereotypes, but they also offered wages and the chance to travel. They permitted the use of language, dress, and ceremony that federal assimilation policy was then suppressing on reservations.
The Oglala are one of seven divisions of the Lakota. The Great Sioux Reservation established under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty was divided by Congress in 1889, creating Pine Ridge and other smaller reservations in what is now South Dakota.
Most photographs of Native people from this period were made by non-Native photographers for government work, commercial purposes, or study. The subjects rarely had control over how the images were used. Catalogue records often name the photographer while leaving subjects unidentified or labelled only by nation.
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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