In 1821 Rindisbacher, then a teenager, emigrated with his family from Switzerland to a remote farming settlement in Red River Colony near present-day Winnipeg. 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 that portray the lives of European settlers and Indigenous peoples like the Assiniboine, 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. Before his untimely death at 28, he produced from a settler’s point of view an important historical record of the lives of Assiniboine, Chippewa, Cree, and Lakota peoples.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023).