The concept of Native Americans as a dying race has been popular
throughout American history, and it was revived in the early twentieth
century.  Many painters of the time depicted Native Americans in a way
which suggested nostalgia for the way of life the Indians had lost.  In
this 1922 oil painting by John Innes, an elderly Indian is looking at a
buffalo skull, while the ghosts of hunters and buffalos--symbols
representing the lost Native American way of life--appear in the sky above
him.  In the course of the nineteenth century, certain tribes became
extinct or suffered severe depopulation as a result of disease, conquest,
and poverty, but it was a common misconception among whites that the
Indians were vanishing as a whole.