Historical Portrait
Makes Good
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 photograph was taken by Oxford & Dillhoff and shows an Oglala Lakota man identified in the archive as Makes Good, who performed with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
The Oglala are one of the seven divisions of the Lakota, the westernmost group of the Sioux. The Great Sioux Reservation established under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty was divided by Congress in 1889 into Pine Ridge and several smaller reservations in what is now South Dakota, with the remaining land opened to settlement.
Buffalo Bill's Wild West, which toured 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 heavily on stereotype, but they also provided wages and permitted aspects of culture that federal assimilation policy was actively working to eliminate on reservations, including traditional dress, language, horsemanship and ceremony.
Photographs of Native people from this period were almost always made by non-Native photographers working for government surveys, commercial purposes, expositions or ethnographic projects. Sitters rarely had control over how their images were used. Archive records commonly name the photographer while leaving subjects unidentified or identified 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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