SAMUEL SEYMOUR McDERMOTT 503 



June 10, 1822, Long wrote to Colonel Roberdeau, in charge of the 

 Topographical Bureau of the Army, that the artist had then com- 

 pleted about 60 of liis drawings and that 20 had been selected for the 

 English edition. Nineteen days later in another letter to Roberdeau, 

 Long expressed considerable exasperation with his artist: "Since 

 writing my last, Seymour has done nothing. I cannot get him to 

 complete the Drawings for our Book. A strange infatuation seems 

 to have seized him — and I know not when to expect his recovery." 

 The outcome of this affair is cloudy. Long evidently had hopes of 

 using many pictures, but both the American and the English editions 

 came out very sparingly illustrated. The Coe Collection views 

 already mentioned comprise 5 of the unpublished finished pictures, 

 but what became of more than 40 others is still a mystery. 



In 1823 Long set out on the exploration of the country above Fort 

 Snelling. Whatever had been the difficulties over the finished sketches 

 for the James account of the western expedition, Seymour again went 

 out as "Landskip Painter." Our knowledge of his work done on 

 this journey is derived from William H. Keating's official "Narrative 

 of an Expedition to the Source of the St. Peter's River, Lake Winne- 

 jeek. Lake of the Woods &c. &c. performed in the year 1823 . , . under 

 the Command of Stephen H. Long, Major U. S. T. E." There we 

 find 11 plates and a few references to other drawings by Seymour. 



The party moved west from Philadelphia through Wlieeling and 

 Zanesville. In Piqua on the Miami they stopped for a day to examine 

 the mounds and then proceeded to Fort Wayne. There they were 

 interested in the Pottawatamies, and there "Mr. Seymour took a 

 likeness of him [Metea] which was considered a very striking one" 

 by all who knew him. One cannot, however, offer much praise for 

 that head as it is reproduced in plate 3 of the first volume. Keating 

 described this cliief as about 40 or 45 years old : "He has a forbidding 

 aspect, by no means deficient in dignity; his features are strongly 

 marked, and expressive of a haughty and tyrannical disposition . , . 

 he is characterized by a low, aquiline, and well-shaped nose . . . his 

 forehead is low and receeding . . . His hair . . . indicates a slight 

 tendency to curl . . ." (Keating, 1824, vol. 1, pp. 89-90) . One would 

 almost doubt that Keating and Seymour had been looking at the same 

 Indian. 



From Fort Wayne the expedition moved on to Fort Dearborn and 

 then to Prairie du Chien. Wennebea, a Sauk whom they now met, 

 Keating described as "a young and good looking Indian .... of a 

 lively, cheerful disposition ... to us he was always uniformly polite 

 and obliging" (ibid., vol. 1 p. 190). Perhaps so. But Seymour's por- 

 trait sketch of him is no better either as a likeness of its subject or as 

 a detailed delineation of an Indian warrior in costume than was that of 



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