578 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 60 



Eastman rose to the rank of brevet brigadier general before he 

 retired, but his place in history is far more that of the artist than of 

 the military man. Best known now for his rendition of Dakota 

 Indian customs, he was a painter long before he undertook those 

 subjects. Born in Brunswick, Maine, on January 24, 1808, the eldest 

 son of Robert and Sarah Lee Eastman, he was appointed to the 

 United States Military Academy on July 1, 1824, and was graduated 

 and made a second lieutenant on July 1, 1829 [2]. During his years 

 at the Academy the drawing master was Thomas Gimbrede, and it 

 was perhaps under this French miniaturist and engi-aver that young 

 Eastman had his early instruction in painting. Caustic William Dun- 

 lap thought the prmts that Gimbrede publislied after his own draw- 

 ings showed "his utter want of skill or knowledge in the art" and 

 declared it "must have required uncommon talents ... to teach that 

 which he did not know" [3]. But Eastman somewhere learned both 

 to draw and paint. A self-portrait which D. I. Bushnell, Jr., dated 

 between 1829 and 1832 (on evidence of the uniform) is an early 

 demonstration of skill in likeness [4] . 



Assigned to the First Infantry, in the fall of 1829 the young officer 

 reported for duty with liis regiment at Fort Crawford (Prairie du 

 Chien) , Wis. His earliest extant drawing is a pencil sketch inscribed 

 "Miss. Eiver. Fort Crawford, Prairie du Chien, 557 miles above St. 

 Louis, Oct., 1829." It pictures the wooden fort constructed in 1816 

 and the straggling town just below it on the left bank of the Missis- 

 sippi. The lithograph of "Prairie du Cliien in 1830" in Heniy Lewis's 

 "Das Illustrirte Mississippithal" was based on tliis drawing. It was 

 possibly on his way up the river to Fort Crawford that Eastman 

 made the lost sketch of Cassville, Wis., that Lewis used for another 

 of his illustrations, "Cassville in 1829." 



From Fort Crawford Eastman was transferred early in the next 

 year to the great northwestern outpost. Fort Snelling, at the junction 

 of the St. Petei-s (now Minnesota) River with the Mississippi. There 

 he remained until he was assigned to topographical duty on November 

 25, 1831. On January 9, 1833, he was relieved and ordered to the 

 Military Academy to serve as assistant teacher of drawing. We can 

 be sure that in these early years in the West he was sketching scenes 

 and subjects, for all his life he had an urge to record what he saw, but 

 nothing is actually known of his art activities save for the sketches 

 mentioned. 



Eastman returned to the Academy to find his old teacher Gimbrede 

 dead. The post of teacher of drawing remained vacant until the ar- 

 rival of Charles Robert I^eslie from England late in the year. This 

 eminent and popular artist, however, did not find the position as at- 

 tractive as he had expected and was soon led to give up his place, sail- 

 ing once more for England in April 1834. 



