Catlin, the traveller, was born in Wyoming, on the Susquehannah: he was
bred to the law, but after he had practised two or three years, he sold
his law library, and with the proceeds commenced as painter in
Philadelphia, without either teacher or adviser. Within a few years, a
delegation of Indians arrived from wilds of the far west in
Philadelphia, “arrayed and equipped in all their classical beauty--with
shield and helmet--with tunic and manteau, tinted and tasselled off
exactly for the painter’s palette. In silent and stoic dignity, these
lords of the forest strutted about the city for a few days wrapped in
their pictured robes, with their brows plumed with the quills of the
war-eagle,” and then quitted for Washington city, leaving Catlin to
regret their departure. This, however, led him to consider the
preservation by pictorial illustrations of the history and customs of
these people, as a theme worthy the life of one man; and he therefore
resolved that nothing short of the loss of life should prevent him from
visiting their country, and becoming their historian. He could find no
advocate or abettor of his views; still, he broke from all connexions of
family and home, and thus, firmly fixed, armed, equipped, and supplied,
he started, in the year 1832, and penetrated the vast and pathless wilds
of the Great Far West--devoted to the production of habitual and graphic
portraiture of the manners, customs, and character of an interesting
race of people who were rapidly passing away from the earth.
Catlin spent about eight years in the Indian country, and, in 1841,
brought home portraits of the principal personages from each tribe,
views of their villages, pastimes, and religious ceremonies; and a
collection of their costumes, manufactures, and weapons. He was
undoubtedly the first artist who ever started upon such a labour,
designing to carry his canvass to the Rocky Mountains. He visited
forty-eight different tribes, containing 400,000 souls, and mostly
speaking different languages. He brought home 310 portraits in oil, all
painted in their native dress, and in their own wigwams; besides 200
paintings of their villages, wigwams, games, and religious ceremonies,
dances, ball-plays, buffalo-hunts, &c.; containing 3000 full-length
figures; together with landscapes, and a collection of costumes and
other artificial produce, from the size of a huge wigwam to that of a
rattle. It was for a time expected that the collection would have been
purchased by the British Government, and added to the British Museum,
but the opportunity was let slip; and thus did we lose these records of
a race of our fellow-creatures, whom we shall very shortly have swept
from the face of the globe.