SAMUEL SEYMOUR: PIONEER ARTIST OF THE PLAINS 

 AND THE ROCKIES 



By John Francis McDermott 



[With 16 platesj 



Of all the artists who penetrated our frontiers in the early decades 

 of the nineteenth century Samuel Seymour has remained the most elu- 

 sive. He should have found an important place in the pictorial record 

 of the western plains and the Upper Mississippi, for so far as we 

 know he was the first man with any artistic skill to travel through 

 those regions sketchbook in hand, and the first views of many famous 

 spots were no doubt those taken by him. Other men after him, more 

 energetic in pushing their fortunes or more fortunate in the preserva- 

 tion of their pictures, achieved considerable repute and left behind 

 them masses of identifiable work, whereas Seymour has been neglected 

 and almost forgotten. James Otto Lewis, who painted Indians in 

 Wisconsin and Minnesota in 1824-26, became well known through his 

 "Aboriginal Port Folio," published in 1835-36. George Catlin, who 

 did not ascend the Missouri until more than a decade after Seymour, 

 in later years won much publicity by his skillful showmanship ; 

 through his traveling gallery and his books he preserved for the future 

 a vast number of his subjects. Bodmer's record of the Missouri and 

 its Indians, done in 1833, saw extensive publication in the Atlas to 

 Prince Maximilian's "Travels in North America," first printed in 

 German in 1839-41, but very soon issued also in Paris and London 

 editions. Alfred J. Miller may not have made any great impression 

 on his time by his water colors of Sir William Drummond Stewart's 

 sporting expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1837, but the sketches 

 were preserved so that Miller is now represented by the most complete 

 series of pictures of one expedition known to exist today. The Kern 

 brothers in the 1840's and 1850's saw much of their work lithographed 

 in official publications of the records of the exploring parties they 

 accompanied. Even Father Nicholas Point, companion of De Smet and 

 strictly an amateur, though still largely unpublished, can yet offer us 

 several hundred sketches of western scenes in the 1840's. Only Sey- 

 mour, the first of them all, is sparsely represented in our files today. 

 The importance of Seymour is that he was the first artist to fill his 

 portfolio with sketches of scenery on the Missouri, the Platte, the 



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