THE PLAINS INDIAN — EWERS 537 



highly skilled artist who does not know his subject can impart to 

 his work. The picture shows a birchbark canoe in the foreground, 

 a village of tipis m the middle ground, and a background of high 

 mountains. Darley appears to have produced a handsome geograph- 

 ical and cultural monstrosity in which characteristics of the region 

 from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains are compressed into a 

 single scene (pi. 9) . 



Darley was on firmer ground when he followed Catlin and Bodmer 

 more closely. A few of his book illustrations are frankly acknowl- 

 edged as "after Catlin" (pi. 8) . 



Some of the most popular Currier and Ives prints of the 1850's and 

 1860's were western scenes, lithographed from very realistic drawings 

 executed jointly by German-born Louis Maurer and English-bom 

 Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, neither of whom had any first-hand knowl- 

 edge of Plains Indians. Maurer acknowledged that they learned about 

 Indians from the reproductions of Bodmer's and Catlin's works in the 

 Astor Library in New York City (Peters, 1931, p. 21) . 



Finally Catlm and Bodmer powerfully mfluenced those lesser, poorly 

 paid artists who anonymously illustrated a number of popular books 

 on Indians as well as school histories; these began to appear within 

 a very few years after the books of Catlin and Bodmer were published. 

 One can trace the progressive degeneration of truthfulness in illustra- 

 tion in the copies of these once popular books preserved in the Rare 

 Book Room of the Library of Congress. 



A prolific writer of popular books of the 1840-60 period was Samuel 

 Griswold Goodrich, who commonly used the pen name "Peter Parley," 

 and who claimed in 1856 that he had written 170 books of which 7 

 million copies had been sold. Goodrich had discovered Catlin by 

 1844, when he published History of the Indians of North and South 

 America; he quoted Catlin in the text and copied Catlin's "Four Bears" 

 in one illustration. Two years later Goodrich's The Manners, Cus- 

 toms, and Antiquities of the Indians of North America derived all of 

 its 35 illustrations of North American Indians from Catlin — 28 of 

 these being Plains Indian subjects. Finally, in Goodrich's The Amer- 

 ican GhiWs Pictorial History of the United States, first published in 

 1860, and adopted as a textbook for the public schools of Maryland 

 5 years later, the Indians of New England, Virginia, and Roanoke 

 Island are pictured living in tipis and wearing flowing-feather bonnets 

 of Plains Indian type, while 17th-century Indians of Virginia are 

 shown wrapped in painted buffalo robes and performing a buffalo 

 dance in front of their tipis. 



Impressionable young readers of popular liistories of the Indian 

 wars published in the 1850's also saw the conmion traits of Plains 

 Indian culture applied to the Woodland tribes. Jolin Frost's Indian 

 Wars of the United States from the Earliest Period to the Present 



