George Catlin - Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, Volume I: 1 (Native American)

Mah-to-toh-pa, Four Bears

1. Catlin painting Plate 64, a portrait of Mah-to-toh-pa.

LETTERS AND NOTES ON THE

MANNERS, CUSTOMS, AND CONDITIONS OF THE

NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS

Written during Eight Years Travel (1832-1839) amongst the Wildest Tribes of Indians in North America

by

George Catlin

with an Introduction by MARJORIE HALPIN and over 250 Photographic Reproductions of Paintings in the Catlin Collection of the United States National Museum

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOLUME

I

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

NEW YORK

Copyright 1973 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved under Pan American and International Copyright Conventions.

Published in Canada by General Publishing Company, Ltd., 30 Lesmill Road, Don Mills, Toronto, Ontario.

Published in the United Kingdom by Constable and Company, Ltd., 10 Orange Street, London WC 2.

This Dover edition, first published in 1973, is an unabridged republication of the work first published in London in 1844. This edition contains an introduction by Marjorie Halpin, which was first published in 1965 by The Smithsonian Institution in Catlins Indian GalleryThe George Catlin Paintings in the United States National Museum, and is reprinted by special permission of the Smithsonian Institution. Two hundred fifty-seven of the line drawings have been replaced by photographs of the original paintings (see Publishers Note).

International Standard Book Number: 978-0-486-14531-0

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-92763

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dover Publications, Inc.

180 Varick Street

New York, N. Y. 10014

PUBLISHERS NOTE

THIS edition of Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians is the first to contain both the complete text and photographic reproductions of 257 of Catlins original oil paintings. The artist-author had prepared these oils over a period of years expressly to illustrate his written report. The first edition of the work was issued with simple line cuts or cartoons derived from the original paintings, photography then still being in its infancy. The first-edition line illustrations have been retained here only where we have not been able to locate the corresponding oil painting, or where a corresponding oil never existed. A comparison between the line sketches that have been retained and the richly detailed paintings that now form the bulk of the pictorial matter will fully justify our procedure. Surely this is the way Catlin would have illustrated his major work had it been possible at the time.

The plate numbers in this book are the numbers that Catlin assigned to each illustration in the original edition of the work. In many cases these plate numbers are not consecutive, and some numbers are skipped entirely. Today most authorities refer to Catlin paintings by the number which Catlin assigned to his works in 1840 when he prepared a catalog of the exhibits in his Indian Gallery. In the interests of scholarship, we have also indicated Catlin Catalog Numbers in the list of plates.

In this project we have been fortunate to enjoy the cooperation of the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, which now houses as one of its principal treasures the worlds largest collection of Catlins oil paintings. With one exception, the paintings reproduced here are from this magnificent collection. In addition, the introduction to this edition originally appeared in a Smithsonian Institution publication (see opposite page for bibliographical details). The publisher and editor wish to thank Mr. Joshua C. Taylor, Director of the National Collection of Fine Arts, for his interest and cooperation. We also want to express our appreciation to the officers of the University of Pennsylvania Museum for supplying the photograph for .

INTRODUCTION

... I sat out alone, unaided and unadvised, resolved, (if my life should be spared), by the aid of my brush and my pen, to rescue from oblivion so much of their primitive looks and customs as the industry and ardent enthusiasm of one lifetime could accomplish.

GEORGE CATLIN, ca. 1842

GEORGE CATLINS PAINTINGS comprise the first important pictorial record of the Plains Indians and their then little-known homelands west of the Mississippi River. Catlins Indian Gallery, as the dedicated artist himself called it, consisted of hundreds of portraits of Indians, scenes of Indian life, and landscapes of a wilderness scarcely changed through millennia. In his notebooks and on canvas, the young Pennsylvania lawyer captured much of an America that was swept away a century ago by the westward-pressing settler.

Catlin made these dramatic paintings on a series of journeys into largely unmapped Indian country between 1830 and 1836. For the first time, Americans in the eastern states saw the Pawnees, the tall Blackfeet and Crows, the Sioux, and the wild Comanches. They saw wide prairies teeming with buffalo, the turbulent Missouri River, and the giant grizzly bear. They saw villages of hundreds of graceful tepees and peered into the dim interiors of comfortable earth lodges, and witnessed the four-day torture ceremony of the Mandans.

The Plains Indians of Catlins portraits were still proud and dignified, unlike their cousins on eastern reservations. Freed by the acquisition of the horse from the restrictions of hunger and scarcity, they were riding the crest of a new richness and power.

But they, too, were fated to lose in the encounter with western civilizationand George Catlin knew it. Art may mourn when these people are swept from their earth, he wrote, and the artists of future ages may look in vain for another race so picturesque in their costumes, their weapons, their colours, their manly games, and their chase....

Abandoning a promising career in the east as a portrait and miniature painter, he left at the age of thirty-three to begin an odyssey among the western Indians and to fulfill his self-imposed destiny as their pictorial historian. Writing of it later, he said that there was something in expressibly delightful in the... resolve, which was to bring me amidst such living models for my brush. And his resolve never wavered. Through danger and illness, poverty and sacrifice, he stuck single-mindedly to his cause.

He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on July 26, 1796, the fifth of the fourteen children of Putnam and Polly Sutton Catlin. The following year his family moved forty miles away to a farm on the banks of the Susquehanna River in New York, where he spent his boyhood. The early part of my life was whiled away..., somewhat in vain, he once wrote, with books reluctantly held in one hand, and a rifle or fishing-pole firmly and affectionately grasped in the other. He could not know it then, but the skills he acquired as a boy were to stand him in good stead later when he crossed the Plains alone on a horse, or paddled down the Missouri River, making camp each night in the wilderness.

He first became interested in Indians as a child. Although they no longer roamed the wooded valley where he grew up, he found the silent traces of their former occupation in the ground and he heard the tales the older settlers told of Indian massacres and Indian murders, which must have provided strong fuel for a young boys imagination. These stories were especially vivid for Catlin, since his own mother had been captured by Indians during the famous Wyoming (Pennsylvania) Massacre of 1778.