Verner made the depiction of Aboriginal peoples in Canada his lifelong pursuit, inspired by the example of Paul Kane. Unlike Kane, however, he did not travel extensively, or even far, in the West. His most significant trip occurred in 1873 to northwestern Ontario and Manitoba, where he documented the assembly at the Lake of the Woods for the signing of Treaty No. 3 between the Dominion and the Saulteaux of the Ojibway Nation. During this trip, he may also have sketched the Sioux on the Assiniboine and Red rivers. This prairie scene shares similar motifs with Verner’s “Sioux Encampment, Red River” (1873, Glenbow Museum). By the time Verner painted the 1901 watercolour, however, he was living in London, England, where he continued to produce Native and buffalo landscapes and regularly send works back to Canada for exhibition. Perhaps this is the Sioux Encampment watercolour that was shown with the RCA in Toronto in the same year. Verner kept those 1873 sketches “his whole life, making paintings from them until well into the new century.” Though his sensitive attention to quotidian detail suggests direct representation, Verner combined and reused images, and derived others from Native displays (such as the Buffalo Bill show) and photographs.