George Catlin, Outline Map of Indian Localities in 1833

Catlin produced this detailed folded map depicting locations of Native American tribes found throughout the United States in 1833. This is an early edition of this map published in London in ca. 1841. The map names many different Native American villages and marks them with a teepee. The map extends well into Canada, and locates Canadian Native American villages. The Western portion of the United States is mostly blank and contains erroneous information in the Great Basin region derived from Fremont’s map, including an east-west flowing river. Texas is shown as independent with its northern and western border extending well into the Rocky Mountains into areas of present-day New Mexico and Colorado. Of special interest on this map, is the depiction of the grazing range of the North American buffalo, which extends throughout the entire plains region and even into Mexico. The entire Midwest north of the Arkansas River and Texas is labeled “Hostile Ground”, most likely owing to the terrible reputation of the Comanche and Apache tribes, and their wide mobility in this area and the greater Southwest. This map was published in Catlin’s Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (second edition) around 1841 in London, which was an important record of the customs of every North American tribe that he encountered in the West. A later edition was bound into Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Showing the Operations, Expenditures, and Condition of the Institution to July, 1885 – Part II, and was published at the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C. in 1886.

George Catlin was born in Pennsylvania and was fascinated with Native American culture and artifacts from a young age. During the 1830s, Catlin lived for years among the various 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 Indian Gallery included more than four hundred painted portraits and scenes of tribal life, from which the illustrations for his books were drawn. 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’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. Catlin was invited to Washington, D.C. at the invitation of Joseph Henry to work in the Smithsonian. The nearly complete surviving set of Catlin’s first Indian Gallery, painted in the 1830s, is now part of the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. George Catlin died on December 23, 1872, aged 76 years in Jersey City, Hudson County, New Jersey.

Ref.: Wagner-Camp-Becker 84:14; French, Valerie, Tooley’s Dictionary of Mapmakers A-D, p.244.