John Hauser was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1859. He began his formal art training at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and later at the McMicken Art School. In 1901, he was “adopted” as a Sioux and named “Straight White Shield.” For twenty years, Hauser and his wife traveled through the West and to New Mexico and Arizona, recording through drawing and painting the vanishing way of life of the American Indian. He specialized in portraiture of Western Indian people. He died in 1913 in the Clifton area of Cincinnati.