504 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



the heights above Fort McKenzie. Restless Catlin probably could not 

 have worked so deliberately even if he had had the time. 



Perhaps, though, had Catlin known that an artist of Bodmer's tech- 

 nical skill and infinite patience was to follow him up the Missouri in 

 the very next year he might have painted fewer pictures in greater and 

 more precise detail. Bodmer, however, was well acquainted with Cat- 

 lin's strengths and weaknesses as an artist as well as his coverage of 

 Upper Missouri subject matter. Maximilian's account of his party's 

 sojourn in St. Louis before traveling upriver tells of their visit to the 

 country home of Maj. Benjamin O'Fallon, Indian Agent and friend of 

 Catlin : "We found at his house an interesting collection of Indian arti- 

 cles, and a great number of Indian scenes by Catlin, a painter from New 

 York, who had traveled in 1831 [sic] to Fort Union" (Maximilian, 

 1843, p. 111). 



Possibly it was owing to Maximilian's and Bodmer's prior knowl- 

 edge of Catlin's work that there were so few duplications in the subject 

 matter of Catlin's and Bodmer's Upper Missouri pictures. Probably 

 fewer than a dozen Indians posed for both artists. Comparison of the 

 portraits of Buffalo Bull's Back Fat, head chief of the Blood Indians, 

 by Catlin in 1832 (pi. 20, fig. 1) and Bochner in 1833 (the lithograph 

 here reproduced, pi. 20, fig, 2, is a very good copy of the original water- 

 color which I have seen) illustrates the different styles of the two 

 artists. Nevertheless, the modern critic cannot say which is the better 

 likeness of that great chief. They look very much like two views of 

 the same face. 



From the scientific viewpoint Catlin's and Bodmer's Upper Mis- 

 souri pictures complement one another very nicely. Bodmer spent 

 a month at Fort McKenzie, near the mouth of the ISIarias River 

 (in present Montana), farther upriver than Catlin had traveled. 

 He sketched scenes in the great summer encampments of the Black- 

 foot tribes and a large series of Piegan, Blood, and North Blackfoot 

 portraits. Catlin met and painted a few Blackfoot Indians at Fort 

 Union far from their home camps. On the other hand, he created 

 many more Crow and Sioux portraits and scenes in Sioux life than 

 did Bodmer. Although Catlin never saw the country west of Fort 

 Union portrayed in a number of Bodmer's landscapes, the former 

 painted many views on the Missouri downstream from Fort Union 

 which Bodmer did not attempt. Bodmer wintered at Fort Clark 

 and pictured winter life and ceremonies of the nearby Mandan and 

 Hidatsa. Catlin depicted the important midsummer Okipa among 

 the Mandan and self-torture in the Sioux sun dance, neither of which 

 Bodmer witnessed. Together, the artistic endeavors of George Cat- 

 lin and Carl Bodmer in 1832-34 on the Upper Missouri are of unique 

 ethnological importance. They comi)rise the largest, most colorful, 



