BALCH— THE ART OF GEORGE CATLIN. 153 



Catlin, as no other artist, makes the Indians a part of their surround- 

 ings, a part of the wild Hfe of the plains, of the forests, of nature; 

 he makes them a living part of their environment. His pictures 

 place before us the Indians in the chase, in the dance, in the tepee, 

 in fact in all the incidents of life. He shows us in an unexcelled 

 way how people who lived by hunting with stone weapons obtained 

 their livelihood ; and he makes it clear that killing bisons and grizzly 

 bears was anything but child's play to a man armed with a stick 

 tipped with a pointed stone. 



Catlin looked at the Indians with a friendly eye. He lived with 

 them for years, he admired them as models and as characters, in- 

 deed one might say that he loved them. The usual idea that the 

 Indian is a lazy, good-for-nothing individual, who lets his squaw 

 work and slave for him, is really a libel and is dispelled by Catlin. 

 It is formed from the Indians on reservations, who received their 

 beef and blankets from government agents. When the Indian was 

 corralled and the bison exterminated, the Indian's occupation was 

 gone. The real Indian provided meat and skins for his family ; food 

 and the materials for clothing and teepees. To obtain meat and 

 skins from deer, bison and grizzlies with a flint-headed arrow was 

 enough for any man ; it took his time and strength. When he 

 hunted day after day and week after week and year after year, in 

 good and bad weather, in sunshine and sleet, in cold and heat, he 

 considered and he considered rightly, that he was entitled to have 

 his food and his clothing prepared for him at home. He did not 

 go downtown to deal in finance, nor did he stand up in a store to 

 sell millinery, but in his native conditions he was just as much a 

 business man as any American of to-day, and just as much entitled 

 to find a good dinner at home in the evening with his dress clothes 

 laid out nicely brushed, as our hardest worked lawyer or physician. 



It is a godsend for the history of the American Indians that 

 Catlin was never taught to draw, that he lacked the opportunity of 

 studying and learning to paint like everyone else. If he had been 

 trained in the schools of the day, probably he would have developed 

 the what might be termed rather grandiloquent style of some of the 

 so-called Hudson river school. Fortunately he did not. For as a 

 result of being self-taught and of living most of his life in the wilder- 



