4 o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Osceola and the other Seminole chiefs, then prisoners of war. The 

 letters embodying the observations made during these journeys 

 in which thirty -eight tribes sat to him for their portraits on 

 the tribes and country furnished the illustrations and text for the 

 book, Illustrations of the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the 

 North American Indians, which passed in England through more 

 than twenty-five editions, and of which more than sixty thousand 

 copies were sold. 



Mr. Catlin's chief object on these journeys was to observe the 

 Indian as a man, and to perpetuate the representation of the kind 

 of a man he was. He watched him in every aspect, caught him 

 in every mood, studied him in every relation, and put him down, 

 on canvas or in his notes, as he found him. He enjoyed and im- 

 proved, to the full extent of his power, opportunities which have 

 occurred to few so ready to make a record of them, and will never 

 occur again to any one, of becoming familiar with the red man in 

 his natural, unsophisticated state, with the intention of making 

 mankind, as far as possible, a sharer in his privileges. 



Most of the places he visited, the names of many of which 

 have become familiar to us, and which now seem commonplace, 

 were then away out beyond the bounds of civilization, and visited 

 by the ordinary tourist, if visited by him at all, with an appre- 

 hension not unlike that with which he would now start out for 

 Central Africa. The Indians knew little of the white man, and 

 his inventions were strange and mysterious to them. Thus, the 

 people on the Yellowstone had never seen or heard of a steam- 

 boat, and at some places were at a loss what to do or how to act 

 at the sight of one. 



The art of portrait-painting was new to the savages, and the 

 strange, whimsical, and superstitious notions which they con- 

 ceived of Mr. Catlin's operations were the source of many curious 

 incidents. The portraits produced great excitement in the vil- 

 lages, with intense interest in the personality of the artist. The 

 people pronounced him the greatest medicine-man in the world, 

 for he made living beings ; they said " they could see their chiefs 

 alive in two places ; those that he had made were a little alive : 

 they could see their eyes move, could see them smile and laugh, 

 and if they could laugh they could certainly speak, if they should 

 try, and they nrust therefore have some life in them." The 

 squaws generally agreed that " they had discovered life enough 

 in them to render my medicine too great for the Mandans ; say- 

 ing that such an operation could not be performed without tak- 

 ing from the original something which I put in the picture, and 

 they could see it move, could see it stir." Then the cry went 

 around that the artist was a dangerous man; "one who could 

 make living persons by looking at them, and at the same time 



