While working in the engineering corps in New York’s Central Park, Edward Kemeys observed an artist at work in the zoo and was subsequently inspired to pursue animal sculpture. In 1872–73 he made his first of several trips west, living with Native Americans and trappers, and he based his work on his hunts and studies of wild animals in their natural habitats. Kemeys’s sculptures express the newly developed national interest in the extinction of certain species of wildlife, which were already endangered by westward expansion.