Indians in Council, California

Bierstadt made this in the early 1870s, during two years spent sketching in California and the Sierra Nevada. The transcontinental railroad had been finished in 1869, and settlers were pouring into country that had been Native ground for generations. Bierstadt was convinced that what he was looking at was, in his own words, rapidly passing away, and that it was his job to record his part of it. So alongside the enormous Yosemite panoramas that made his name, he filled sketchbooks with Native dwellings, dress, and weapons, and painted smaller scenes like this gathering of tribal leaders in council. It is oil on paper, barely 16 inches across, a world away from the room-sized canvases the public queued to see.