4 1/16 x 6 in. albumen photograph on cardstock mount (spots of discoloration to image, with surface soil throughout, and wear to mount edges and corners). Verso bears various pencil inscriptions including "by Alex Gardner / 1872," and "Red Cloud."

Red Cloud stands wearing a single feather in his hair, a wool trade cloth blanket with wide beaded blanket strip around his waist, and moccasins on his feet. He holds a beaded pipe bag in one hand. Image catalogued in Frank H. Goodyear III's Red Cloud: Photographs of a Lakota Chief (Plate 7, p. 21). 

Red Cloud traveled to Washington, DC in the spring of 1872 to meet with President U.S. Grant concerning his frustration with the Fort Laramie Treaty (1868). Despite assurances that the United States government would remove all military forts on the Great Sioux Reservation and uphold the Lakota's hunting rights, a new fort had been erected on Lakota territory. Before his meeting with the President, Red Cloud agreed to sit for Mathew Brady and then visited Gardner's studio two days later. Red Cloud's attempts at peaceful negotiations with Grant continued through the 1870s and 1880s, and he journeyed to Washington numerous times to lobby on behalf of his people.