Three-quarter-length studio portrait albumen cabinet card of an unidentified Apache man holding a rifle. Tucson, Arizona Territory: H. Buehman, [ca. 1880s]. Series title "Arizona Illustrated" and Buehman's imprint to mount recto.

A powerful territorial Arizona portrait showing an Apache man before a plain studio backdrop and wielding a long gun. He wears a cloth head covering, white shirt, and dark buttoned vest, combining Native and Euro-American elements of dress characteristic of many late 19th-century studio portraits from the Southwest.

Henry Buehman (1851-1912), German-born and trained in photography from his youth, arrived in Tucson in the 1870s and established what became one of Arizona Territory's most important photographic studios. The Arizona Historical Society records that he worked first for another Tucson photographer before establishing his own business in 1875. He subsequently produced portraits, landscapes, mining scenes, military subjects, and extensive documentation of Native communities throughout the territory.

The "Arizona Illustrated" mount dates the photograph within Buehman's commercial program of presenting the people and landscape of the territory to a national audience. Other surviving Native American cabinet photographs are known on mounts bearing the same "Arizona Illustrated" designation.

[Native Americans, Apache, Arizona Territory, American West, Indian Scouts, Frontier History] [Photography, Early Photography, Historic Photography, Albumen Photographs, Cabinet Cards, Henry Buehman, Arizona Photography]