Ward’s reputation was established with his large cast of The Indian Hunter, 1866, the first statue to be placed in Central Park. That statue was modeled after a smaller bronze, of which the museum’s sculpture is one of about fifteen known examples, all dated 1860. They are among the earliest American bronzes. Although Ward traveled to the Dakotas to study Native American life and physiognomy between his creation of the half-lifesize statuette and the statue in Central Park, the differences between the two sculptures are minor: in the outdoor Indian Hunter the arm holding the bow is slightly raised, the aboriginal quality of the face emphasized, the animal skin reduced, and shape of the base made rectangular rather than oval. Ward based the general pose of The Indian Hunter on the famous classical Borghese Gladiator (Musée du Louvre, Paris), which he may have known from a plaster cast. This bronze demonstrates Ward’s skill at infusing a figure with an animated realism that was new to American sculpture. The surface of the man’s body is highly polished, and extensive chasing developed texture in other areas. Ward contrasts the textures of the man’s smooth skin, the coarse, thick hair of the pelt, and the soft, curly fur of the dog. Moreover, the poses are those of suspended animation as the hunter stalks his prey, momentarily holding back his dog to concentrate on the quarry. Ward’s choice of subject matter was important to the work’s success. Mid-nineteenth-century artists had only recently turned to the Native American as a subject. Articles such as "The Indian in American Art" in the 1856 issue of The Crayon encouraged them to depict his character before he disappeared. Ward’s teacher, Henry Kirke Brown, had been the first to do so in bronze, and Ward first modeled this figure while still in Brown’s studio. Some of the approximately fifteen known casts of the statuette of The Indian Hunter bear the mark of the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company, New York, and others that of the Gorham Company, Providence, R.I.; yet others were cast by unknown foundries. Three larger than life-size casts are recorded (see Sharp, Ward, pp. 147-49 for list of known examples).

Until 1893, when historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the western frontier closed, the nation had perceived itself as an ever-expanding geographical entity. The frontier moved westward as the forests of the Adirondacks, Catskills, and Alleghenys of the eastern seaboard were cleared and inhabited. Euro-American settlers pushed across the continent, through the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, until they reached the Pacific Ocean. Although the actual travels of explorers, government surveyors, and settlers can be traced through the changing locales in landscape paintings, such depictions were to a certain extent idealizations. In the romantic-realist tradition of the Hudson River school, artists emphasized the primitive character of the wilderness and presented the newly cultivated farmlands as agrarian oases divinely blessed by rainbows and golden mists.
Artists and writers promoted nature as a national treasure. However, the wealth of the land was measured in commercial as well as aesthetic terms. Railroads and axes appear in paintings as symbols of civilization, yet they also were instruments of destruction.
According to some, the nation was preordained by God to span the continent from coast to coast. In 1845 the editor John O’Sullivan coined the term “Manifest Destiny,” referring to the country’s duty to annex western territories and exploit their resources. The same railroad tycoons and land developers who promoted such a policy also commissioned artists to paint epic scenes of the American landscape. Manifest Destiny ignored the rights of Native Americans, who had inhabited the region long before European settlers arrived. Consequently, it is not surprising that Native Americans are absent from, or stereotyped in, most of the painted views of the land they called their home. The West seen in most nineteenth-century paintings was largely one of the imagination.