North American Indians [Paperback]

From 1831 to 1837, George Catlin traveled extensively among the native peoples of North America—from the Muskogee and Miccosukee Creeks of the Southeast to the Lakota, Mandan, and Pawnee of the West, and from the Winnebagos and Menominees of the North to the Comanches of eastern Texas. Studying their habits, customs, and modes of life, he made copious notes and numerous sketches of ceremonies, buffalo hunts, symbols, and totems. Catlin’s unprecedented fieldwork culminated in more than five hundred oil paintings and his now-legendary journals, which, as Peter Matthiessen writes in his introduction, “taken together... constitute the first, last, and only ‘complete’ record of the Plains Indians ever made at the height of their splendid culture, so soon destroyed by traders’ liquor and disease, rapine and bayonets.”

• A one-volume edition of Catlin's journals

• Illustrated with more than fifty reproductions of Catlin's incomparable paintings

Letter No. 1
Wyoming, birth-place of the Author. His former Profession—First cause of his Travels to the Indian Country—Delegation of Indians in Philadelphia—First start to the Far West, in 1832. Probable extinction of the Indians. Former and present number of—The proper mode of approaching them, and estimating their character.

Letter No. 2—Mouth of Yellow Stone, Upper Missouri, 1832
Mouth of Yellow Stone. Distance from St. Louis—Difficulties of the Missouri—Politeness of Mr. Chouteau and Major Sanford—Fur Company's Fort—Indian Epicures—New and true School for the Arts—Beautiful Models.

Letter No. 3—Mouth of Yellow Stone, Upper Missouri
Character of Missouri River. Beautiful prairie shores. Picturesque clay bluffs. First appearance of a steamelâ