Many Indians of the West gradually reconciled themselves, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, to the encroachment of white settlements on their way of life. That was not the case, however, with the Sioux chief and medicine man Sitting Bull. A great warrior in his youth, Sitting Bull became the rallying point for Indians from several tribes of the northern Plains, who opposed the constraints that white westward migration threatened to impose upon them in the 1860s and 1870s. His hostility to any accommodations to white authority reached its climax in 1876, when a large band of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors under his aegis attacked a party of soldiers led by General George Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn and wiped them out.

Fleeing to Canada with a small following soon after, Sitting Bull later returned to the United States and lived his final years on a federal Indian reservation. But he remained bitter to the end and was eventually killed in a melee with reservation police, who had come to arrest him for his involvement with a new religious cult that allegedly was threatening to foment unrest among the Sioux.

German artist-correspondent Rudolph Cronau made the original drawing for this portrait at a meeting with Sitting Bull in the fall of 1881, shortly after the Sioux chief's return from his Canadian exile. Sitting Bull was being detained at the moment by the army at Fort Randall, prior to his resettlement on a reservation.