532 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1964 



Probing into history we find that the creation and clarification of 

 this image was a prolonged process to which many factors contributed. 

 Let us try to trace the development of this image from what appear 

 to be its earliest beginnings. 



THE FIRST PICTURES OF PLAINS INDIANS (1804^1840) 



Obviously before non-Indians could begin to picture Indians in 

 Plains Indian terms, they had to have fairly clear ideas of the appear- 

 ance of the Indians of the Great Plains and of those aspects of their 

 culture that typified their way of life. European explorers and 

 traders traversed considerable portions of the Plains in the 21/^ cen- 

 turies between Coronado's quest for the fabled city of Quivera on the 

 grasslands of Kansas in 1541 and the purchase of Louisiana by the 

 United States in 1803. Nevertheless, those Spaniards, French, and 

 Englishmen produced no popular literature about and no known 

 pictures of Plains Indians — either portraits or scenes of Indian life. 

 At the time of the Louisiana Purchase these Indians remained vir- 

 tually unknown to the peoples of Europe and the United States (al- 

 though a number of earlier explorers' and traders' accounts have been 

 published since that time) . 



The earliest known portraits of Plains Indians were made in the 

 cities of the East during the first decade of the 19th century. They 

 were likenesses of Indians whom President Jefferson urged Lewis 

 and Clark to send to the seat of government in Washington. They 

 were profiles executed by two very competent artists, who both em- 

 ployed versions of a mechanical device, known as a physiognotrace, 

 to accurately delineate the outlines of their sitters' heads. The French 

 refugee artist Charles Balthazer Fevret de Saint-Memin made por- 

 traits of some of the 12 men and 2 boys of the Osages who comprised 

 the first delegation of Indians from beyond the Mississippi. Thomas 

 Jefferson welcomed these Indians to the Presidential Mansion in the 

 summer of 1804, and enthusiastically termed them "the most gigantic" 

 and "the finest men we have ever seen" (Jackson, 1962, p. 199) . Saint- 

 Memin's most striking profile is that of the chief of the Little Osages 

 (pl.l,fig.l). 



Charles Willson Peale, prominent Philadelphia artist and museum 

 proprietor, cut miniature silhouettes of 10 members of a second Indian 

 delegation from the West. He sent a set of these profiles to President 

 Jefferson on February 8, 1806 (Jackson, 1962, p. 299). One of these 

 sitters was Pagesgata, a young Republican Pawnee from the Platte 

 Valley (pi. 1, fig. 2). 



After his return from the Pacific coast, Meriwether Lewis purchased 

 several originals or copies of Saint-Memin's Indian portraits. Un- 

 doubtedly he intended to reproduce them in an elaborately illustrated 

 account of the Lewis and Clark explorations which he proposed, but 



