■ GEORGE CATLIN — EWERS 499 



"Wi-juii-jon, the Pigeon's Egg Head," should be "Ah-jon-jon, The 

 Light," as I have given it in the caption to plate 11, figure 2. 



Most of the scenes in Indian life which Catlin actually witnessed 

 were hurriedly painted. Yet the action in many of them is good. 

 (See the dances and ceremonies pis. 14, 16, 17.) Catlin certainly did 

 not understand everything he saw Indians do. But at times his sec- 

 ondary action is excellent. In his pencil drawing of a Blackfoot 

 medicine-man, dressed in a grizzly-bear skin, doctoring his patient 

 (pi. 15, fig. 1), Catlin shows a number of Indian onlookers trying to 

 hide their astonishment by placing their hands over their mouths. 

 This was typical Indian behavior under the circumstances. It shows 

 the acuteness of Catlin's observation of the witnesses as well as the star 

 performer in that dramatic action outside Fort Union in 1832. Cat- 

 lin's oil painting of this action pictured only the medicine-man 

 (pi. 15, fig. 2). The more interesting and meaningful elaboration 

 was drawn (though possibly not for the first time) in 1852. 



No series of his paintings was more severely criticized in Catlin's 

 own time than those portraying the Mandan Okipa ceremony which 

 he witnessed in 1832. D. D. Mitchell, Superintendent of Indian Af- 

 fairs, declared two decades later that these scenes "existed almost 

 entirely in the fertile imagination of that gentleman [Catlin]" 

 (Schoolcraft, 1851-1857, vol. 3, p. 254). Sure of his ground, Catlin 

 countered by publishing an entire illustrated volume, "0-Kee-Pa, a 

 Religious Ceremony and Other Customs of the Mandans," in 1867. 

 His written descriptions and pictures of this ceremony were upheld by 

 the intelligent fur trader, James Kipp, in whose company the artist 

 had witnessed the ceremony (Kipp, 1873). Catlin's painting of the 

 most dramatic episode in that ceremony, the self-torture, appears as 

 plate 16. 



At times, however, in his haste to record on canvas what he saw, 

 Catlin resorted to shortcuts which left him open to criticism. Audu- 

 bon, on seeing the Mandan earth lodges near Fort Clark in 1843, 

 commented : "The Mandan huts are very far from looking poetical, 

 although Mr. Catlin has tried to render them so by placing them in 

 regular rows, and all the same size and form, which is by no means 

 the case. But different travellers have different eyes." (Audubon, 

 1897, vol. 2, p. 10.) 



The outlines of Catlin's Mandan and Arikara earth lodges (pi. 12, 

 fig. 1) are much more half -globular than those structures actually 

 were. Likewise Catlin employed an artistic convention of simplified 

 triangles, all about the same size, to denote the tipi villages of nomadic 

 tribes. He failed to indicate the considerable range in the size of 

 tipis in a camp, owing in large part to variations in family numbers 

 and wealth. 



