This historic photograph depicts William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody alongside a delegation of Pawnee scouts and chiefs, taken around 1885 during a tour of his world-famous “Wild West” show.
By 1885, the Indian Wars were drawing to a close, and Native Americans were being forced onto reservations. Buffalo Bill Cody, a former U.S. Army scout, realized that the global public had an insatiable appetite for the “Old West.”
He founded Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1883, hiring real cowboys, cavalrymen, and Native Americans to reenact frontier battles, horse races, and sharpshooting feats. To generate publicity and sell souvenir cabinet cards, Cody regularly took his performers to high-end photography studios, such as the famous William Notman & Son studio in Montreal, resulting in staged group portraits like this one.
For many Native American performers, joining Cody’s show was one of the few ways to legally leave the oppressive confines of government reservations. The show allowed them to travel the world, earn a relatively good wage ($50 a week for stars like Sitting Bull), and openly practice their traditions, wear their sacred regalia, and speak their languages at a time when the U.S. government was actively trying to assimilate them and erase their culture.
Concurrently, the performers were used to reenact their own defeats. They were often presented to white audiences as “noble savages” or bloodthirsty villains of the past to validate the narrative of American westward expansion.
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