Indian Peace Commission staff regularly posed for Alexander Gardner, including its secretary, Ashton S. H. White (seated, second from right), who appears in at least five Laramie views. The commissioners posed as a group only once for an orchestrated photograph, although several had prior experience sitting for Gardner. Gardner’s Civil War acquaintance General William T. Sherman, now commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, was one of three active military appointees to the commission, which Congress convened in July 1867 to negotiate peace and to inaugurate “some plan for the civilization of the Indian.” Sherman initially expressed impatience with his civilian colleagues, who wished for a peaceable solution. Finally deciding there was “little difference whether [the Indians] be coaxed out by Indian commissioners or killed,” he identified common ground with his less hawkish counterparts: the forced concentration of North American Indians on defined reservations.