THE PLAINS INDIAN — EWERS 533 



never produced because of his untimely death in 1809. Peale also was 

 to have furnished illustrations for this ill-fated work. Doubtless they 

 would have included accurate drawings of the Plains Indian costumes 

 and other artifacts sent or brought back by Lewis and Clark, which 

 Peale exhibited in his popular Philadelphia Museum. 



More significant factors in the early diffusion of the Plains Indian 

 image were the oil portraits of several members of an Indian delega- 

 tion from the Lower Missouri and Platte Valley tribes who arrived 

 in Washington late in the year 1821. Although Charles Bird King 

 painted these Indians for Thomas McKenney, Superintendent of 

 Indian Trade, he executed several replicas of these paintings that 

 were diffused more widely — one set being sent to Denmark, another 

 to London. The original portraits formed the nucleus of the National 

 Indian Portrait Gallery, which became one of Washington's popular 

 tourist attractions before it was almost completely destroyed in the 

 Smithsonian Institution fire of 1865 (Ewers, 1954). 



The most popular Indian in that 1821 delegation was Petalesharro, 

 a young Pawnee warrior. Pie was hailed as a hero during his eastern 

 tour because he had courageously rescued a Comanche girl captive 

 just as her life was to be taken in the traditional human sacrifice to 

 the morning star, an annual Pawnee ceremony. Petalesharro's por- 

 trait was painted by Jolin Neagle in Philadelphia, as well as by Kmg, 

 and Samuel F. B. Morse placed him in front of the visitor's gallery 

 in his well-known painting of "The Old House of Representatives," 

 executed m 1822. (See pi. 2.) All three paintings show this Indian 

 hero wearing a flowing- feather bonnet. They are, to the best of my 

 knowledge, the first of the millions of pictorial renderings of this 

 picturesque Indian headgear produced by artists and photographers. 



The popular novelist James Fenimore Cooper met Petalesharro 

 during that Indian's eastern tour. This meetmg was a source of m- 

 spiration to the author in writing The Prairie^ the only one of the 

 LeatherstocMng Tales to have a Great Plains setting (Keiser, 1933, 

 pp. 134-138) . In the living Indians of the Plains, Cooper recognized 

 the virtues he had imputed to his Woodland Indian heroes of an earlier 

 period in The Last of the Mohicans. Writing of the Indians 2 years 

 after that popular novel was published, he observed : "The majority of 

 them, in or near the settlements, are an humbled and much degraded 

 race. As you recede from the Mississippi, the finer traits of savage 

 life become visible." 



Cooper thought that Plains Indian chiefs possessed a "loftiness of 

 spirit, of bearing and of savage heroism . . . that might embarrass 

 the fertility of the richest mventor to equal," and he cited Petal- 

 esharro as a prime example (Cooper, 1828, vol. 2, pp. 287-288). 



Some of the distinctive traits of the Plains Indians were pictured 

 in illustrated books and magazines prior to 1840. The first published 



