Historical Portrait
Mrs. American Horse
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 woman in traditional dress, who probably performed with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.
About this photograph
This cabinet card portrait by Oxford & Dillhoff shows an Oglala Lakota woman the record identifies only as Mrs. American Horse. The archive notes she probably performed with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, though it does not specify dates or details of that involvement.
The Oglala are one of the seven divisions of the Lakota. In 1889 Congress broke up the reservation guaranteed by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, creating Pine Ridge and smaller reservations in what is now South Dakota and opening much of the land to white settlement.
Buffalo Bill's Wild West, which toured from 1883, hired hundreds of Native performers, many from Pine Ridge. The shows staged Indian attacks and dealt in stereotype, yet they also offered wages, travel, and space for language, dress, and ceremony that federal assimilation policy was working to eliminate on the reservations.
Photographs like this one were almost always made by non-Native photographers for commercial or ethnographic purposes, and the sitters had no say in how the images were used. Records from this period routinely name the photographer while leaving the subject unidentified or labelled only by nation. Where a name was never recorded at the time, it is usually lost.
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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