THE FOLIO SOCIETY

‘I was luckily born in time to see these people in their native dignity, and beauty, and independence’

In Philadelphia in the 1820s, George Catlin, a lawyer turned portrait artist, encountered a delegation of Great Plains Indians on its way to Washington, DC. Awestruck by their grandeur and dignity, he declared that ‘nothing short of the loss of my life shall prevent me from visiting their country and becoming their historian’. Between 1832 and 1839, Catlin travelled the eastern Plains, from Minnesota and the Montana border to Texas and South Carolina, learning the ways and the languages of the Sioux, Crows, Kickapoos, Pawnees, Delawares and Iroquois, among many others. He created a pictorial gallery of Indian people and customs that is now one of the wonders of 19th-century art, and wrote a fascinating and authentic prose account. Taken together, Catlin’s records constitute what is described by introducer Peter Matthiessen as ‘the first, last and only “complete” record of the Plains Indians ever made at the height of their splendid culture’.

Catlin immersed himself in the lives of the tribes, sketching and recording their symbols, totems, weapons and clothing, and customs like the sweat-lodge, the buffalo hunt and the rain dance. In upper Missouri he was the only white man ever to befriend the Mandans, a tribe distinguished by their blue eyes and prematurely silver hair. He saw extraordinary feats of horsemanship among Comanchee warriors, witnessed a marriage ceremony between one young warrior and four wives, and spoke to the Puncah chief Smoke, who ‘with the method of a philosopher, predicted the certain and rapid extinction of his tribe’.

Catlin had a deep and abiding respect for the Indian tribes, and his book is a moving and prescient tribute to a people already ‘travelling to the shades of their fathers, towards the setting sun’. This edition combines the highlights of Catlin’s prose and his renowned paintings.