He participated in a parade in Washington in relation to Roosevelt's second inauguration. This landed him an audience with the President, in which he asked for the pardon of himself and his fellow prisoners of war. Roosevelt rejected him personally.
He was happy to parade him in front of the nation as a symbol of national unity though.
I have understood the parade to be supposed to symbolise that the hatchet was buried and that all peoples of the nation rallied behind the republican idea of America. But I'm by no means a historian - would love to hear a more enlightened take on it!
I guess it's also a period in which people were going crazy about Buffalo Bill's Wild West show - it's a strange period of history in which the glorification and mythification of the past started before the dust had even settled.
I suspect it could be from an old postcard, which might indeed have had some artistic retouching done to improve upon the original photograph. If so, the version hosted on Wikimedia might be more true to the original. :)
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