George Catlin, Buffalo Bull, Grazing, 1844

The American bison, or . . . buffalo, is the largest of the ruminating animals that is now living in America; and seems to have been spread over the plains of this vast country, by the Great Spirit, for the use and subsistence of the red men, who live almost exclusively on their flesh, and clothe themselves with their skins . . . The buffalo bull often grows to the enormous weight of 2000 pounds, and shakes a long and shaggy black mane, that falls in great profusion and confusion over his head and shoulders; and oftentimes falling down quite to the ground. The horns are short, but very large, and have but one turn, i.e. they are a simple arch, without the least approach to a spiral form, like those of the common ox, or of the goat species. George Catlin made this sketch on the Upper Missouri in 1832.

Beginning in 1830, artist-explorer George Catlin made five trips to the western frontier. He was inspired to go west by the idea that America’s native people and its great herds of buffalo would soon melt away in the face of advancing civilization. His published works provide us with the most authentic anthropological record of these already vanishing people.

Catlin’s Gallery included more than four hundred painted portraits and scenes of tribal life, from which the illustrations for his books were drawn. Shortly after taking his “Gallery” to England for an extended period, Catlin self-published the first of the many editions of the North American Indian Portfolio (1844). The lithographic stones and printing were completed by the British firm Day & Haghe.

The record Catlin created is unique, both in the breadth of information and in the depth of the sympathetic understanding that his images demonstrate. Catlin described the American Indian as “an honest, hospitable, faithful, brave, warlike, cruel, revengeful, relentless—yet honourable, contemplative, and religious being.” He saw no future for either the Indian way of life or his very existence, and with these thoughts always at the back of his mind, he worked against time, setting himself a truly punishing schedule, to record what he saw. Catlin’s study remains one of the most widely circulated works on American Indians written in the nineteenth century, and the illustrations are valued for their highly important visual documentation of indigenous Indian life in the American West.

Refs.: Howes C-243; McCracken, no. 10; Sabin no. 11532, Wagner-Camp-Becker, no. 105a-1. Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 1, no. 31, 1841; reprint 1973)