About this work
Across a vast, open prairie, two figures creep low to the ground, their bodies draped in white wolf skins, inching toward a herd of grazing buffalo that suspect nothing. The scene depicts the practice of Plains Indians disguising themselves as wolves by wearing wolf hides to get close enough to a bison herd to shoot them. The composition is horizontal and breathless — all stillness and tension, the figures almost dissolving into the pale earth while the dark, massive forms of the buffalo fill the middle ground. Catlin himself described the scene in unforgettable terms: the buffalo "stand unwittingly and behold him, unsuspected under the skin of a white wolf, insinuating himself and his fatal weapons into close company, when they are peaceably grazing on the level prairies." The palette favors the tawny golds and bleached whites of the Great Plains, punctuated by the dense brown silhouettes of the herd — a composition that feels at once documentary and quietly cinematic.
The original oil painting dates to 1832–1833 and is now held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. The image Catlin translated for the print market became Plate 13 from Catlin's *North American Indian Portfolio*.
The lithograph was printed by Day & Haghe in 1844 , published in London and hand-colored to imitate watercolors.
Among the first artists of European descent to travel west of the Mississippi, Catlin made five trips across the Great Plains during the 1830s, driven largely by the fear that Native cultures and the great herds of bison so important to them would soon vanish.
The painting depicts not just a hunting technique but the skill required to survive in this landscape and the deep knowledge of animal behavior and ecology that shaped Indigenous lives.
On the wall, this print commands a studied stillness. Its wide, spare composition suits a room with room to breathe — a study, a hallway with natural light, or a living space furnished in leather and natural materials. Catlin appealed to his audience with the thrill of the hunt, and the immediacy of his images is irresistible, drawing viewers into the scenes with unprecedented intimacy. It speaks to the collector drawn to American history not as myth but as witnessed fact — someone who wants a picture that holds a secret, a piece of intelligence passed down across centuries. The longer you look, the more the figures resolve out of the landscape, and the tension of the moment — predator, prey, the prairie wind — becomes entirely present.
