American Art Collaborative

John Mix Stanley painted this portrait while at Fort Gibson, in the northeast corner of what is now Oklahoma. He first visited Fort Gibson in 1842 and returned two years later. All of the portraits he made there were destroyed by fire, except for this one. (Schimmel, “John Mix Stanley and the Imagery of the West in the Nineteenth Century.” PhD diss., 1983) This highly staged and idealized image shows the warrior posed dramatically on his stallion, which, suspended in the air, looks more like a rocking horse than a live animal