Sitting Bull, the renowned Hunkpapa Lakota leader, is depicted here in a full-length standing profile pose on a cabinet card photograph by David Francis Barry, one of the foremost photographers of Plains Indian leaders and figures of the American West. Barry operated studios across the northern Plains and later West Superior, Wisconsin, producing an extensive body of portraits of Native leaders, military officers, and frontier subjects throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s. This image dates to Barry's West Superior period, as confirmed by the imprint on the mount.

Sitting Bull stands in three-quarter profile facing left, wearing a magnificent full trailing war bonnet of eagle feathers extending down his back, a belted dark tunic, and trousers. He holds a ceremonial lance or staff horizontally at waist height with a spherical head, and a beaded bandolier bag with fringe and cross motifs hangs at his side. A fringed blanket is draped over a bench to the left, and a decorative studio prop cabinet anchors the right background.

Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake, c. 1831 to 1890) was the principal Hunkpapa Lakota holy man and war chief whose leadership at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 made him the most recognized Native leader of his era. The mount recto is printed "Sitting" with "Bull's" added in manuscript, and the verso bears a penciled notation reading "1000." Barry's imprint reads "D. F. Barry, West Superior, Wis."

From the collection of James Lee Soffer