590 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 60 



Many of these little pictures (most of them about 9i/^ by 61/^ inches) 

 prepared for the Schoolcraft volumes from the sketches in Eastman's 

 portfolio are happily extant. "The Falls of St. Anthony" from the 

 Minneapolis Public Library is much superior to the story-illustrating 

 version published in The Iris for 1852, the original of which is 

 among the watercolors in the James Jerome Hill Reference Library 

 in St. Paul. "Old Fort Mackinac," from the Minnesota Historical 

 Society, is signed and dated 1851. "Hunting Buffalo in Winter," 

 "Herd of Buffalo," "Nadowaqua," and "Mackinac" are among the 

 Eastmans in the Ayer Collection at the Newberry Library. "Win- 

 nebago Wigwams," dated 1850, is in the collection of the Peabody 

 Museum. 



The largest collection of these watercolors is that of the Hill Ref- 

 erence Library [21]. Two of these — "Itaska Lake" and "Chicago in 

 1820" — were painted after sketches by Schoolcraft. One Indian 

 genre piece pictured "Emigrants Attacked by Comanches." Another 

 showed "Pawnees Torturing a Female Captive." Seventeen more 

 watercolors recorded many details of life among the northern Indians 

 whom the artist knew so well. Here we can see a permanent "Dakota 

 Village" with figures in natural groups, and a temporary encamp- 

 ment with tepees placed by the riverside, "Dakota Encampment." 

 We can observe them dancing the Dog Dance, the Beggars Dance, 

 and sitting in council (pi. 4). A warrior shouts "The Death Whoop" 

 over a freshly scalped enemy, or we see an "Indian Doctor Concocting 

 a Pot of Jtledicine" (pi. 5), or "Indian Medas [priests or magicians, 

 not medics] Secretly Showing the Contents of Their Medicine Sacks 

 to Each Other." Many of the pictures are more domestic: one illus- 

 trates the manner in which a Dakota sat, another shows a nude 

 woman ceremonially "Protecting the Cornfields from Vermin." In- 

 dians are seen "Spearing Muskrats in Winter," gathering wild rice, 

 and working at an "Indian Sugar Camp." 



In some instances we are able to compare the watercolor witli the 

 on-the-spot pencil sketch that preceded it. Tlie pencil sketch of 

 "Mackinac," with the fort on tlie bluff and the town sprawling out 

 on the lakeshore, has been faithfully reproduced in the watercolor by 

 the same title (pi. 6), but tlie topographical effect has been relieved 

 by the addition of a number of small figures appropriately grouped 

 in the foreground. 



One painting, now lost, represented by a plate in "The Indian 

 Tribes of the United States," is a landscape worth rediscovery : tlie 

 "Valley of the St. Peters." Among many scenes of Indian life, en- 

 gravings preserve in some degree Eastman's representation of tlie 

 Dakotas at "Ball Play on the Ice" on the St. Peters River (pub- 

 lished first as an etching by the American Art Union in 1850), 



