George Catlin, Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio

George Catlin, Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio: Hunting Scenes and Amusements of the Rocky Mountains and Prairies of America, from Drawings and Notes of the Author, Made During Eight Years of Travel Amongst Forty-Eight of the Wildest and Most Remote Tribes of Savages in North America, London: Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, 1844
Portfolio of twenty-five hand-colored lithographs on paper
Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Early Americas, Exploration and Navigation, Miami Dade College, MDC PC 2018.1.18

Among the first artists of European descent to travel west of the Mississippi, the American painter George Catlin (1796–1872) made five trips across the Great Plains during the 1830s. His ambitious project to document the Native Americans who lived there was fueled largely by the fear that Native cultures and the great herds of American bison or buffalo so important to them would soon vanish. This fear proved well founded; by the end of the nineteenth century, the bison were driven to the brink of extinction by commercial hunting, wanton slaughter, and disease, and the indigenous cultures of the Plains decimated, forcibly relocated, and confined to reservations by the United States government.

Visiting more than 140 tribes, Catlin painted hundreds of portraits and scenes of Native Americans, creating a picturesque yet rich record that remains a valuable source of information about Native life in the first half of the nineteenth century. He reproduced about 300 of his images as engravings in 1841 in the two volumes of Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, along with accounts of his travels and observations. In 1844, he published a smaller selection of twenty-five images as lithographs in Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio, with twenty pages of accompanying text. The example in the Jay I. Kislak collection is a rare first edition, first issue of this latter publication.

The two scenes from the portfolio pictured here show two moments from a buffalo hunt on horseback. Catlin’s romantic images capture the drama and excitement of the hunters’ feats of skill, demonstrating why his work so captivated the public then and now. Yet, despite their visual and narrative appeal, Catlin's scenes also form part and parcel of a history in which the documentation of Native Americans almost always preceded brutal campaigns to subdue and eliminate them, thereby making way for white settlement and "progress."