Buffalo Hunt

Buffalo Hunt draws on one of the most dramatic spectacles in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, where live buffalo appeared in riding exhibitions and reenacted hunts. For many Native nations of the Great Plains, however, hunting bison had long been far more than spectacle. The animal was central to everyday life, providing food and materials for clothing, shelter, tools, and other necessities. By the time Buffalo Bill’s show was carrying these scenes around the world, the enormous bison herds of the nineteenth-century Plains had already been devastated. For millions of spectators, the Wild West offered a rare glimpse of an animal and a way of life that were rapidly disappearing. Ross’s painting compresses that complicated history into the charged, theatrical instant of the hunt.