340 



PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



then from Fort Gibson, Ark., on his horse " Charley," without 

 a road or a track, rode to St. Louis, a distance of five hundred 

 and fifty miles, guided by his pocket compass, and swimming 

 the rivers as he met them. In 1835 he ascended the Mississippi 

 to the Falls of St. Anthony, saw the Mississippi Sioux, the 

 Ojibways and Saukees or Sacs, and descended the river again 

 to St. Louis in a bark canoe with one man, steering with his own 

 paddle. In 1836 he made a second visit to the Falls of St. 

 Anthony, steaming from Buffalo to Green Bay, ascending the 

 Fox and descending the Wisconsin Rivers, six hundred miles 

 in a bark canoe to Prairie du Chien, and thence by canoe four 

 hundred and fifty miles to the Falls of St. Anthony. Thence 

 he ascended the St. Peter's to the " Pipestone Quarry " on the 

 Coteau des Prairies, and descended the St. Peter's in a canoe, 

 with a companion, to the Falls of St. Anthony, and from them 

 a second time to St. Louis in a bark canoe, nine hundred miles. 

 In 1837 he went to the coast of Florida to see the Seminoles 

 and Euchees, and in the same year made a voyage from New 

 York to Charleston to paint Osceola and the other Seminole 

 chiefs, then prisoners of war. The letters embodying the ob- 

 servations made during these journeys to which thirty-eight 

 tribes sat to him for their portraits on the tribes and country 

 furnished the text for the book, Illustrations of the Manners, 

 Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, which 

 passed in England through more than twenty-five editions, and 

 of which more than sixty thousand copies were sold. 



Mr. Catlin's chief object on these journeys was to observe 

 the Indian as a man, and to perpetuate the representation of 

 the kind of a man he was. He watched him in every aspect, 

 caught him in every mood, studied him in every relation, and 

 put him down, on canvas or in his notes, as he found him. 

 He enjoyed and improved, to the full extent of his power, 

 opportunities which have occurred to few so ready to make a 

 record of them, and will never occur again to any one, of be- 

 coming familiar with the red man in his natural, unsophisti- 

 cated state, with the intention of making mankind, as far as 

 possible, a sharer in his privileges. 



Most of the places he visited, the names of many of which 

 have become familiar to us, and which now seem commonplace, 

 were then away out beyond the bounds of civilization, and 

 visited by the ordinary tourist, if visited by him at all, with 



