Making Medicine was captured during the Red River War of 1874-1875, a military campaign by the U.S. Army to displace and forcibly relocate several Native American tribes of the southern Great Plains. The army imprisoned 72 people at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida; Making Medicine was among them. This small group of warriors produced an impressive number of striking and important drawings—more than 1,000 have been identified to date. The artists had a patron in the prison commander, Capt. Richard H. Pratt. A proponent of Native American education and assimilation, Pratt encouraged the men to draw by providing them with paper and colored pencils. Although Ft. Marion housed individuals from five tribes, the artists were all Cheyenne or Kiowa, the two nations that dominated the prison. Most of their drawings depict camp life, hunts, and battles, and some show scenes of prisoners interacting with teachers and soldiers.

The booklets they produced were given as gifts to visiting officers and sold to tourists for around two dollars a volume. The ledger book in which this drawing appears belonged to Francis Parkman (1823–1893), a historian best known for his multivolume history of the French and Indian Wars. Donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1956, along with the bulk of Parkman's personal papers, the book contains 28 drawings. Most are the work of Making Medicine or Bear's Heart, another Cheyenne warrior, known also by their Cheyenne names—O-kuh-ha-tuh and Nock-ko-ist.

Making Medicine, an eminent warrior, celebrated his people's life on the plains in many of his drawings, but after his release from Ft. Marion he followed Anglo-American laws and traditions for the remainder of his life. Baptized and given a Christian name in 1878, he spent several years recruiting students for Richard Pratt's Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Penn. In 1881, he returned to Oklahoma, where he served as an Episcopal deacon until his death in 1931.