Worrall’s “Taking and Being Taken” depicts a buffalo unsetting a photographer’s picnic. It’s a topsy-turvy moment in which the Buffalo, then being exterminated on the American Great Plains, gets even (momentarily) by disrupting a hapless photographer.
Worrall’s satire is roughly contemporary with Kansan Brewster Higely, who wrote the pastoral poem “Oh, Give me a Home Where the Buffalo Roam” (1873 or 1876). Like many Americans of the time, Higely is oblivious to the threat of killing buffaloes to extinction. The poem, later set to music, is always considered an Edenic description of America’s wide-open spaces:
“Oh, give me a home where the Buffalo roam.
Where the Deer and the Antelope play;
Where never is heard a discouraging word,
And the sky is not clouded all day.”
Featured Image: Henry Worrall. “Taking and Being Taken [Buffalo Upsets Photographer’s Picnic].” In W.E. Webb. Buffalo Land: An Authentic Account of Discoveries, Adventures, and Mishaps of a Scientific and Sporting Party in the Wild West. Cincinnati and Chicago: E. Hannaford & Company, 1872
See Worrall, Henry. “Taking and Being Taken [Buffalo Upsets Photographer’s Picnic].” In W.E. Webb. Buffalo Land: An Authentic Account of Discoveries, Adventures, and Mishaps of a Scientific and Sporting Party in the Wild West. Cincinnati and Chicago: E. Hannaford & Company, 1872