In 1821, Peter Rindisbacher immigrated with his family to a remote farming settlement in Red River Colony near present-day Winnipeg, Canada. Although the family battled hunger and flooding, the young Rindisbacher, with barely any formal art training, created some of the earliest drawings of the region, portraying the lives of European settlers and Indigenous peoples like the Assiniboine, Chippewa, Cree, and Eastern Sioux, whose ancestral homelands are part of the northern Great Plains.

Rindisbacher witnessed the bison hunts that were so critical to the region’s foodways and cultures, and he captured this subject in drawings that he later made into watercolors. After his death at 28, one of his buffalo hunt images was reproduced on a five-dollar bank note for the Republic of Texas.