“Doomed to Perish”: George Catlin's Depictions of the Mandan

Abstract

In the spring of 1830 George Catlin, at that time a moderately successful portrait painter in Washington and Philadelphia, left his eastern practice for the frontier city of St. Louis. His objective, as he recorded later, was to paint Indians still “in a natural state.” In the third decade of the century little was known about life along the Missouri River, which was to be Catlin's principal destination. Pictures of native people living beyond the Mississippi could be counted on the fingers of two hands. Even the land itself was known only superficially, despite the Lewis and Clark report published a decade and a half earlier.In five trips in six years, from 1830 to 1836, Catlin produced for easterners a marked increase in visual information on the people living on or near the Missouri River. He made enough sketches during his five trips for a painting collection of more than 450 oil portraits and scenes. These pictures, which formed the basis for his traveling Indian Gallery, have often been called definitive views of Missouri and Upper Plains life in the early nineteenth century. Catlin has been called one of America's first ethnologists and recognized as a leading visual historian of Plains peoples. Despite that characterization, his work in light of the politics of nineteenth-century Indian affairs has hardly been examined. This is a significant scholarly omission given that in the spring in which Catlin made the decision to go West and in the city from which he departed, the most serious national discussion on the fate of Native Americans to date was in full sway.