Buffalo Hunt on the Platte, Titian Ramsay Peale, Size: N/A, Year: 1873, Museum: MONAThe artwork Buffalo Hunt on the Platte is artwork that shows us Indians on horseback, during a buffalo hunt on the Platte River with beautiful trees and mountain ranges in the background and a village full of tepees as well as a bare dusty ground with a few old buffalo skulls. The artist uses a variety of dark colors, in the buffalo, grass, the shading under the mountain range and on some of the horses. The light colors are used in the reflection of the water, the light blue sky and clouds and the tepees. The artist used an overall light coloring scheme to get the full advantage of the picture itself, to be able to understand the meaning of the picture.
The purpose of the picture is to show and understand a “ritual” buffalo hunt that took place often with groups of Indians. Indians used buffalo as a way of life. They used everything from a buffalo, from the meat for food, the hide for tepees and clothing to keep them warm in the winter months, to the bones for weapons, tools, eating utensils, bowls, etc…The Indians lived by using the environment, by using their surroundings, vegetation, buffalo, water and their knowledge to survive in a sometimes harsh and rough environment.
When people think about Indians, most think of the bad ones, such as in Indians VS cowboys and how the Indians were mean and gruesome. Dances with wolves is a famous movie that shows some Indians were not only nice and helpful but would do anything for anyone, and when talking about environment and living off the land, white people would many times kill buffalo and leave them rot, as an Indian would kill buffalo for their everyday needs. So Indians were very successful at how they managed to live off the natural environment and survive. “Anticipating scores of artists who would pay indirect tribute to the plains Indian-Buffalo connection by showing the material culture that buffalo had made possible, Peale was also the first to depict the distinctive conical hide tepees of the Plains Indians”. The quote talks about how a buffalo’s materials made an Indian basically be able to survive and make their tepees out of the buffalo’s hide.
Title: ‘Flying Buffaloes’: Artists and the Buffalo hunt
Author (s): Brian W. Dippie
Source: JSTOR : Montana: The magazine of Western History, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 2-19.
