Potshot

48” x 84”

Vintage Ephemera Collage Board with Resin 

In the wake of the civil war, tensions reignited between North and South, fueled in part by Union control of Southern banks and political institutions. From this unrest emerged a wave of outlaws—figures like Jesse James, John Wesley Hardin, and Billy the Kid—who saw themselves as avengers of lost causes, robbing trains and banks filled with Federal funds. On the other side of the law stood legendary gunslingers and lawmen like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Wild Bill Hickok,

each fighting to bring order to the chaos.

At the same time, the U.S. Army clashed with Native tribes across the Great Plains and Southwest. Commanders such as George Armstrong Custer, George Crook, and Ranald Mackenzie led campaigns against Native leaders like Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo—resistance fighters defending their land and way of life.

To unify a fractured nation and push westward expansion, President Ulysses S. Grant leaned on the Homestead Act, offering free land to settlers willing to cultivate it. This move helped reduce sectional strife but intensified conflict with Native peoples, whose ancestral territories were carved into homesteads and rail lines.

In this era of boomtowns and buffalo hunts, of gold rushes and cattle drives, the West became both a symbol of freedom and a site of profound loss. Conflict over land, resources, and identity often ended at the barrel of a gun. In the backdrop, public figures like Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and Calamity Jane turned conflict into performance, mythologizing the very West that was still being won and lost. By century’s end,

the American bison teetered on extinction, and many Native cultures had been irreparably disrupted.