The period during which Sitting Bull appeared in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show — the summer of 1885, for approximately four months — has received significant attention in accounts of his later life, in part because it seems so incongruous with everything else about him and in part because it illustrates something important about how the American imagination related to Native leaders of the Indian Wars era.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was an elaborate touring entertainment that presented dramatized versions of frontier life — buffalo hunts, sharpshooting exhibitions, cavalry charges, and depictions of Indian attacks and army responses — to audiences in cities across the United States and, later, in Europe.

The show was enormously popular and was one of the primary vehicles through which many Americans formed their ideas about the American West, about Native people, and about the meaning of westward expansion.

Sitting Bull’s participation in the show was negotiated through an agent, with fees paid directly to him, and was limited to a single tour.