GEORGE CATLIN — EWERS 493 



In the summer of 1832, for example, George Catlin spent exactly 

 86 days on the Upper Missouri from Fort Pierre northward (May 23 

 through August 16). During that period he traveled upriver to 

 Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone by steamboat and back 

 downstream by skiff. This travel averaged 18 miles per day. In ad- 

 dition he participated in buffalo hunts, watched prolonged and com- 

 plicated ceremonials (including the 4-day Okipa of the Mandan), 

 talked with officials and employees of the American Fur Co., and 

 gathered material for a series of popular travel letters for the Gom- 

 mercial Advertiser which he later expanded into the greater portion 

 of his 2-volume book of 1841. At the same time he created more 

 than 135 pictures — some 66 Indian portraits, 36 scenes in Indian life, 

 25 landscapes and at least 8 hunting scenes. Only a man of bound- 

 less energy, roused to a feverish pitch of creativity, could have per- 

 formed all these tasks in so short a period. Holger Cahill, the art 

 critic, who has examined the entire collection with me, expressed the 

 opinion that Catlin may have painted some of these Upper Missouri 

 pictures in a matter of minutes. Yet the series of paintings resulting 

 from this 1832 expedition comprise the most important part of his 

 oeuvre. 



In addition to his oils, Catlin apparently made rapid full-length 

 pencil or pen-and-ink sketches of many of his costmned Indian sub- 

 jects and sketchbook renderings of some of his scenes of Indian activ- 

 ities. He described his method of preparing the most controversial of 

 all his paintings, those illustrating the Okipa ceremony which he 

 was permitted to observe among the Mandan that summer, as follows : 



I took my sketch-book with me, and have made many and faithful drawings 

 of what we saw, and full notes of everything as translated to me by the inter- 

 preter ; and since the close of that horrid and frightful scene, which was a week 

 ago or more, I have been closely ensconced in an earth-covered wigwam, with 

 a fine sky-light over my head, with my palette and bruFhes, endeavouring faith- 

 fully to put the whole of what we saw upon canvas. ... I have made four paint- 

 ings of these strange scenes, containing several hundred figures, representing 

 the transactions of each day. (Catlin, 1841, vol. 1, p. 155.) 



Add to this at least 20 portraits of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara 

 Indians and a score or more of landscapes and scenes in Indian vil- 

 lages and we have the production of Catlin's short stopover in the 

 neighborhood of Fort Clark. Surely, there must have been days dur- 

 ing this stay when Catlin created more than a half-dozen pictures. 



Recent cleaning of a number of paintings in this collection has 

 revealed some of the tricks Catlin used to save time and shortcut his 

 field studies. He commonly painted the backgrounds of his landscapes 

 and scenes first. Then he drew his figures over the backgrounds. 

 In some pictures the figures are so thinly painted that the backgrounds 



