In seven of his nine paintings Stieffel has executed his Indian subjects
in colorful detail and with some care. Although he apparently did not
know his subjects well enough to distinguish them by tribe, he does
depict them in typical dress of the period. Many of them are wearing
German silver ornaments of various designs about their necks, on strips
of flannel attached to their hair pigtail-like, or as arm bands. At
least four are wearing hair-pipe breast plates, a fact of interest to
ethnologists,[40] and several wear the comical, Puritan style, tall
black hats issued as annuity goods. The red and blue robes are of
trades-good flannel, as probably are the leggings. Two wear buffalo
robes with the skin side out and the hair side rolled over at the
shoulder.[41] Two, in the Fort Keogh picture (fig. 8) and the
Yellowstone River landscape (fig. 10), wear robes of the familiar,
colorfully striped Hudson Bay blanketing material. Arms are
conventional--bows, quivered arrows, and pipe tomahawks, with a
scattering of firearms. In the Yellowstone River landscape one
discrepancy should be pointed out--the canoe; the Northern Plains
Indians seldom used water transport, and then generally only in the form
of rafts.