“‘Ashort distance below [the rocks above the city of Alton, Missouri], a torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current of the Mississippi, boiling and sweeping and surging in its course logs, branches, and uprooted trees.’ This was the mouth of the Missouri, ‘that savage river’ which ‘descending from its mad career through a vast unknown of barbarism poured its turbid floods into the bosom of its gentle sister.’” 

—Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883), quoting the French explorers,”Joliet, the merchant and Marquette, the priest,” from their journal (1673). 

“The way, the only way to stop this evil [selling land to the white man] is for the red man to unite in claiming a common and equal right to the land, as it was at first and should be now—for it was never divided, but belongs to all. No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers. …Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?” 

—Tecumseh, Chief of the Shawnee, in an angry address to a joint meeting of whites and Native Americans (1810), transcribed at the scene. 

In the mid-eighteen hundreds, St. Louis, Missouri was America’s West Coast. Almost daily, long processions of slow-moving Conestoga wagons (nicknamed, prairie schooners) departed the town along deeply-rutted trails, plying ‘the amber waves of grain’, westward. With territorial expansion and settlement well underway, the levees and supply warehouses along the banks of the Mississippi River boomed. Population shift in search of ‘Manifest Destiny’ had converted this small 18th century trading outpost of a few hundred to a small, thriving city of more than 16,000 by 1840. The vast, once pristine river, flowing south to New Orleans, was a slow-moving liquid highway with an exit ramp just north of the town—the Missouri River—for those who would trace its winding and sometime tumultuous path onward to the Dakota territories, Montana and the vast newly-mapped mountainous regions of the Great Northwest. fine arts magazine 

Along the way, whether by established land routes or river passage, travelers would encounter pristine lands and Indian tribal communities, still largely untouched by Euro-American influences. These were the ancestral lands of the Missouris, Osages, Kansas, Dakota, Omaha, Arrapahoe, Crow, Boise and Nez Perces, to name a few. Viewed by many as an obstacle to territorial ambitions, others believed that settler and Native Americans could co-exist in the same natural domain. What proved to be antithetical to this concept of cohabitation was the notion of ‘land ownership’, a concept introduced by the new arrivals. While initially at the mercy of harsh natural elements and the hostile (or peaceful) intentions of nearby tribes, ultimately, settlement rights were assured by sheer numbers of new arrivals, a system of forts offering refuge from attack and the fire-power of the U.S. military to control and eventually eradicate the Indian threat. 

Two men from very different backgrounds, but with similar agendas, ventured to St Louis in the early 1830s, in the hopes of capturing the images and the stories of the Native American tribes that lay in the ‘vast unknown’ beyond the limits of civilization as they knew it. One was an American, George Catlin, with an itch for adventure and a limited budget; the other, a European painter, Karl Bodmer, in the employ of a wealthy German nobleman and traveling companion with a burning curiosity about the American West. Their approach to the task of capturing images of authentic America and its original inhabitants was very different, although they unknowingly shared the same long-range objective—that is, to record the new American landscape and its Indian culture as objective observers and then to report their findings to a curious, even disbelieving, world. 

To learn more about the two artists, George Catlin and Karl Bodmer, I contacted Mary Williams, owner of Mary Williams Fine Arts, in Boulder, Colorado, and an important purveyor of prints by each artist. She explained to me that both artists were very likely to be traveling on the Missouri River, in the Western territories, at about the same time. “It is ironic that their paths may have unknowingly crossed in pursuit of the same goal—to capture the image of the American Indian in his native habitat. The Plains Indian tribes and their unaltered lifestyle, at that critical moment in the 1830s, was on the verge of being tainted and eventually destroyed by the massive influx of settlers to the region. Within a few years, what they saw there would no longer exist. It became an irreplaceable record of a culture lost to progress”. 

Williams points out that certain images by both Catlin and Bodmer are well-known and easily recognizable by those familiar with art of the period and the genre. “However they worked in very different ways. Catlin traveled and painted in the region for several years…he was a true field painter and some of his lesser-known paintings have a spontaneous, unfinished feel. They are true records of events that were happening at the time, or near the time of the completion of the image. Bodmer, on the other hand, was sketching and taking notes for studio work that he would do much later, in his studio, first in Germany, then France. He lived and gathered data for what he and his patron, Prince Max, knew would be a series of complex and very high quality, hand-colored prints. The aquatint engravings they created was the most involved printing processes of the day. They rivaled in quality the John J. Audubon opus, The Birds of America.” 

George Catlin (1796-1872) was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Following a brief career as a lawyer, he produced two major collections of paintings of American Indians and published a series of books chronicling his travels among the native peoples of North, Central and South America. Claiming his interest in America’s “vanishing race” was sparked by a visiting American Indian delegation in Philadelphia, he set out to record the appearance and customs of America’s native people, “…to save from oblivion their primitive looks and customs”. 

Catlin began his journey in 1830 when he accompanied General William Clark on a diplomatic mission up the Mississippi River into Native American territory. St. Louis became Catlin’s base of operations for five trips he took between 1830 and 1836, eventually visiting fifty tribes. Two years later he ascended the Missouri River nearly 1800 miles to Ft Union, Montana, where he spent several weeks among indigenous people still relatively untouched by European civilization. He visited eighteen tribes, including the Pawnee, Omaha, and Ponca in the south and the Mandan, Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine, and Blackfeet to the north. There, at the edge of the frontier, he produced the most vivid and penetrating portraits of his career. Later trips along the Arkansas, Red and Mississippi rivers as well as visits to Florida and the Great Lakes resulted in over 500 paintings and a substantial collection of artifacts. 

When Catlin returned east in 1838, he assembled these paintings and numerous artifacts into his Indian Gallery and began delivering public lectures which drew on his personal recollections of life among the American Indians. Catlin traveled with his Indian Gallery to major cities such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and New York. He hung his paintings “salon style”-side by side and one above another-to great effect. Visitors identified each painting by the number on the frame as listed in Catlin’s catalogue. Soon afterwards he began a lifelong effort to sell his collection to the U.S. government. The touring Indian Gallery did not attract the paying public Catlin needed to stay financially sound, and Congress rejected his initial petition to purchase the works, so in 1839 Catlin took his collection across the Atlantic for a much-publicized tour of European capitals. Anticipating the Wild West shows of a later date, Catlin’s exhibit featured lectures and demonstrations of American Indian hunting, war, and weaponry, displays of artifacts collected during his travels in the West, and live performances by ‘Native Dancers from the Wilds of America.’ 

Catlin, always the showman and entrepreneur, initially attracted crowds to his Indian Gallery in London, Brussels, and Paris in 1845. The French critic Charles Baudelaire remarked on Catlin’s paintings, “M. Catlin has captured the proud, free character and noble expression of these splendid fellows in a masterly way.” But, the revolution of 1848 forced him to return to London, where he opened yet another exhibit. While touring abroad, Catlin’s wife and son both died, leaving him three daughters, whom he entrusted to the care of a brother-in-law in New York. 

Catlin’s dream was to sell his Indian Gallery to the U.S. government so that his life’s work would be preserved intact. His continued attempts to persuade various officials in Washington, D.C. failed. He was forced to sell the original Indian Gallery, now 607 paintings, due to personal debts in 1852. Industrialist Joseph Harrison took possession of the paintings and artifacts, which he stored in a factory in Philadelphia, as security. Catlin spent the last 20 years of his life trying to re-create his collection. This second collection of paintings is known as the “Cartoon Collection” since the works are based on the outlines he drew of the works from the 1830s. 

Despite his hardships, Catlin had managed to publish, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, in two volumes, in 1841 with about 300 engravings. Three years later he published 25 plates, entitled Catlin’s North American Indian Portfolio, and, in 1848, Eight Years’ Travels and Residence in Europe. From 1852 to 1857 he traveled through South and Central America and later returned for further exploration in the Far West. The record of these later years is contained in Last Rambles amongst the Indians of the Rocky Mountains and the Andes (1868) and My Life among the Indians (ed. by N. G. Humphreys, 1909). In 1872, Catlin traveled to Washington, D.C. at the invitation of Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian. Until his death later that year in Jersey City, New Jersey, Catlin worked in a studio in the Smithsonian “Castle.” Harrison’s widow donated the original Indian Gallery-more than 500 works-to the Smithsonian in 1879. 

The nearly complete surviving set of Catlin’s first Indian Gallery painted in the 1830s is now part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection. Some 700 sketches are in the American Museum of Natural History, New York City. 

Karl Bodmer (1809 –1893) was a Swiss painter of the American West. He accompanied German explorer, Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied from 1832 through 1834 on his Missouri River expedition. He was hired as an artist by Maximilian with the specific intent of traveling through the American West and recording images of the different tribes they saw along the way. 

Karl Bodmer was born in 1809 in Zürich, Switzerland. When he was thirteen years old, his mother’s brother, Johann Jakob Meier, became Bodmer’s teacher. Meier was an artist, having studied under the well-known artists Heinrich Füssli and Gabriel Lory. Young Bodmer and his older brother, Rudolf, joined their uncle on artistic travels throughout their home country. 

A major turning point in Bodmer’s life was his being contracted to the Prinz Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied. Known popularly to naturalists then, and even now, as Prince Max, this German aristocrat, having successfully led a scientific expedition to Brazil in 1815–1817, decided to embark on another such venture, this time to North America. 

By 1828, Bodmer had left his native Switzerland for the German city of Koblenz. It was there that he came to Prince Max’s attention. After delays, Bodmer, in the company of Prince Max and a huntsman and taxidermist, David Dreidoppel, set out for America in May, 1832. In a letter bearing that date, Prince Max wrote to his brother that Bodmer “is a lively, very good man and companion, seems well educated, and is very pleasant and very suitable for me; I am glad I picked him. He makes no demands, and in diligence he is never lacking.” 

Arriving in Boston on July 4th, the three encountered hardships and delays caused largely by a cholera epidemic in the eastern states that swept across the north to Michigan. Bodmer and his entourage traveled through several Eastern cities to and from their way west, stopping to record the attractions along the way, including scenes like Niagara Falls and a prison in Pittsburgh. It was not until October, 1832, that the three began their journey down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, arriving in Mt. Vernon, Indiana about midnight, ten days later. The next morning, the party made their way to New Harmony, Indiana. 

In his famous book chronicling the expedition, Maximilian Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, the Prince wrote, “I had been indisposed, as well as my huntsman, since I left Louisville, and was not in a mood properly to appreciate the fine, lofty forests of Indiana, the road through which was very bad and rough.” 

Prince Max had planned to spend only a few days in New Harmony, Indiana. But his stay “was prolonged by serious indisposition, nearly resembling cholera, to a four months’ winter residence.” The Prince devotes a whole chapter of his book to New Harmony, its environs, and to the work and personalities of two leading American naturalists who lived there, Thomas Say and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur. Lesueur was also a prolific artist. 

Unlike the Prince and the huntsman, Bodmer was not ill-disposed. Alone, he left Indiana at the end of December, and in January 1833, caught a steamboat at Mt. Vernon to New Orleans and spent a week with Joseph Barrabino, an Italian-American naturalist and friend of Say and Lesueur. Along the way, he visually recorded the details of river life and the people there. A fine pencil portrait of host, Barrabino, drawn by Lesueur, is preserved at the New Harmony Workingmen’s Institute, for example. Eventually, he reached St. Louis and was joined by the prince and others, where they readied for their image and specimen-gathering expedition into the wilds. 

When the 18-month expedition through the upper reaches of the Missouri River basin was complete, he returned to Germany with Prince Maximilian, then traveled to France. In Paris, he had over 400 drawings and paintings to select from and settled on eighty-one scenes from the expedition to be reproduced as aquatints, many being composites of several individual field studies. The Prince had these images incorporated into his book, which was published in London in 1839. Bodmer eventually settled in Barbizon, France, where he became a French citizen. At that point he changed his name to ‘Charles Bodmer.’ Today the majority of his original watercolors are located in three collections in the United States, with the majority of them located at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. They are recognized as among the most painstakingly accurate images ever made of Native Americans, their culture and artifacts, and of the scenery of the pristine ‘Old West’. 

“So,” Williams explains, “Catlin was responsible for creating a more far-reaching visual record, given that he spent more time—more than five years in the field—and painted more spontaneously; but more often than not, his work lacks the detail or skill-level of Karl Bodmer. Nevertheless, Catlin’s held a deep conviction that the communities of Indians he visited and lived with were truly endangered. This compassion is communicated in the body of work he left behind. Bodmer, on the other hand, was a European painter with an ethnographer’s interest in his subject. He and his sponsor both knew there would be a strong market for the scale of an atlas of fine quality (including images, diaries and a map of their experiences in America), that he would later create. His collection of aquatint engravings represents one of the finest and most detailed records of Native American dress and habits that exist today.” 

Williams goes on to explain, “Both artists’ work is critically important to the pre-photographic recordings of Native American life on the Plains. Sadly, their romantic and dramatic method of preserving visual history became obsolete with the invention of the camera, and the persona of the roving artist/adventurer would soon disappear. In looking back through the various records that these two men left behind, each offers us a legacy of information that is unparalleled, today. Within ten years of Bodmer and Catlin’s departure, smallpox would have wiped out much of the tribal communities in the region and their legacy would disappear forever.” 

By Richard Friswell, Executive Editor 

Visit the collection of original and high-quality print reproductions of George Catlin and Karl Bodmer at mary Williams Fine Arts, www.marywilliamsfinearts.com 

See the entire collection of paintings and prints by George Catlin at: www.georgecatlin.org 

Visit the Smithsonian Collection of George Catlin images at: http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/catlinclassroom/catlin_browsepagetribe.cfm?StartRow=1 

Bodmer is known today almost exclusively for his watercolor portraits of the American Indians they met and his views of the extraordinary Missouri Valley landscape through which they passed. But his position as Maximilian’s expedition artist meant that he was also engaged in the more mundane task of documenting the American fauna that was an equal part of the prince’s studies. Over the course of the three years, Bodmer produced finely executed and wonderfully detailed studies of the variety of animals the expedition countered. Sometimes drawn from the wild, but as often rendered from creatures shot as specimens, these works are given the same attention and care as Bodmer’s other paintings. Not as well known as the portraits and landscapes, these works were nevertheless a valuable record of the journey. A selection of animal studies from Omaha, Nebraska’s Joslyn Art Museum, extensive Maximilian-Bodmer Collection, was on view in 2007-8 and can be seen at: http://joslyn.org/exhibitions/Exhibition-Detail.aspx?e=f0d33187-88fe-4028-a77b-051705525743&i=11 

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Excerpt from, George Catlin, Illustrations of the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians (1848)

“On an occasion when I had interrogated a Sioux chief, on the Upper Missouri, about their Government – their punishments and tortures of prisoners, for which I had freely condemned them for the cruelty of the practice, he took occasion when I had got through, to ask me some questions relative to modes in the civilized world, which, with his comments upon them, were nearly as follow; and struck me, as I think they must every one, with great force.”

‘Among white people, nobody ever take your wife – take your children – take your mother, cut off nose – cut eyes out – burn to death?” No! “Then you no cut off nose – you no cut out eyes – you no burn to death – very good.’ 

“He also told me he had often heard that white people hung their criminals by the neck and choked them to death like dogs, and those their own people; to which I answered, “yes.” He then told me he had learned that they shut each other up in prisons, where they keep them a great part of their lives because they can’t pay money! I replied in the affirmative to this, which occasioned great surprise and excessive laughter, even amongst the women. He told me that he had been to our Fort, at Council Bluffs, where we had a great many warriors and braves, and he saw three of them taken out on the prairie and tied to a post and whipped almost to death, and he had been told that they submit to all this to get a little money, “yes.” He said he had been told, that when all the white people were born, their white medicine-men had to stand by and look on – that in the Indian country the women would not allow that – they would be ashamed – that he had been along the Frontier, and a good deal amongst the white people, and he had seen them whip their little children – a thing that is very cruel – he had heard also, from several white medicine-men, that the Great Spirit of the white people was the child of a white woman, and that he was at last put to death by the white people! This seemed to be a thing that he had not been able to comprehend, and he concluded by saying, “the Indians’ Great Spirit got no mother – the Indians no kill him, he never die.” He put me a chapter of other questions, as to the trespass of the white people on their lands their continual corruption of the morals of their women – and digging open the Indians’ graves to get their bones, etc. To all of which I was compelled to reply in the affirmative, and quite glad to close my notebook, and quietly to escape from the throng that had collected around me, and saying (though to myself and silently), that these and an hundred other vices belong to the civilized world, and are practiced upon (but certainly, in no instance, reciprocated by) the “cruel and relentless savage.” left, above: George Catlin, Du-cor-re-a, Chief of the Tribe and his family  (c. 1830), Winnebago, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.