George Catlin, Buffalo Hunt, Surround, 1844

After the preliminaries of the chase have been gone through, as described in the former plate, and the hunting party have reached the vicinity of the herd, scenes like the one represented in this illustration often occur. On one occasion I was invited by the Indians to ride out and witness their attack on a herd of buffaloes, near one of their villages on the Upper Missouri, in the summer of 1832: I sat on my horse and witnessed a scene of this kind; a mode of attacking the buffaloes which they call Wa-rahs-took-kee, a surround.  – George Catlin

During the 1830s, Catlin lived for years among several North American Indian tribes, studying their ways. His published works provide us with the most authentic anthropological record of these already vanishing people.

A young lawyer turned portraitist, George Catlin traveled west from his home in Pennsylvania in 1830 to fulfill his dream of recording on canvas the North American Indians and their way of life. It was his desire, he said, to paint “faithful portraits of their principal personages, both men and women, from each tribe, views of their villages games, etc., and [to keep] full notes on their character and history. I designed, also, to procure their costumes, and a complete collection of their manufactures and weapons, and to perpetuate them in a Gallery Unique, for the instruction of the ages.” (Wagner)

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.