In the winter of 1883, the photographer H. H. Bennett decided to spice up his descriptive catalogue of stereo views with something new. Several years earlier, a simple listing of his photographs--mostly landscape views of the area surrounding the Wisconsin River Dells--brought the small-town studio photographer considerable renown and enhanced sales. Now, after a sluggish business year, Bennett sought to recapture some of the trade that he saw slipping west with the frontier. Perhaps his imagination was triggered by a visit with Buffalo Bill Cody who, as the local paper put it, was "attracted by Bennett, the man who shoots with a camera as well as Buffalo Bill does with a rifle." Maybe it was the particular success of one photograph taken ten years earlier--of "Wah-con-ja-z-gah (Yellow Thunder), a Warrior chief"--that led Bennett to take a slightly new promotional approach. Whatever the reason, the spice that Bennett used to flavor his photographic business relied on the region's Native Americans--the Ho-Chunk nation. Images such as that of Wah-con-ja-z-gah were vital to building the photographer's reputation and to shaping ideas about American Indians for non-Native viewers. This article traces the beginning of this significant relationship that unites American Indians, tourism, and photography. It begins with the belief that photographs of Native peoples reveal more about the photographers who created them, and the circumstances of their creation, than about the photographed themselves. The author is less interested in questions of verisimilitude--are the camera's subjects "correctly" dressed? are the photographs "accurate" representations of Native life?--than in "image construction": the aspects of the dominant white society represented in photographs of American Indians. This article examines what Robert Berkhofer has called "the white man's Indian," or popular image of American Indians in white society. (Contains 19 figures and 118 notes.)