This particular painting, which depicts bison being directed into a corral for slaughter, was one of fourteen that Paul Kane (1810–1871) produced for Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), who authorized and aided Kane’s travel through HBC territory. Simpson intended to display the paintings in a room he was designing as a “museum of Indian curiosities” and seems to have had a vested interest in the images Kane produced for him. Curiously, Kane’s field journal mentions nothing of his witnessing the actual hunt, just the pound containing the aftermath of a previous slaughter. The artist may well have relied on oral accounts of the event.