EARLY “WHITE INFLUENCE’ UPON PLAINS 
INDIAN PAINTING 
GEORGE CATLIN AND CARL BODMER AMONG THE 
MANDAN, 1832-34 
By JOHN C. EWERS 
Planning Officer for the Museum of History and Technology 
U. S. National Museum 
Smithsoman Institution 
(With 12 PLATES) 
During their visits to the Upper Missouri in the years 1832-34 
the artists George Catlin and Carl Bodmer created some of the most 
authentic and best-known pictures of American Indians drawn or 
painted in the days before the development of photography. Their 
widely circulated originals and the published reproductions of their 
pictures have provided millions of viewers in this country and 
abroad, who never saw a Plains Indian, with a clear, accurate con- 
ception of the physical appearance and customs of those Indians as 
they appeared a century and a quarter ago. 
Anthropologists, historians, and art critics have been accustomed 
to regard these artists as interpreters of Indian culture. Yet there 
is another point of view from which their contribution may be con- 
sidered. While among the Indians they demonstrated their skill in 
handling an alien art style. They were in effect missionaries of the 
western European artistic tradition. To what extent was their ex- 
ample an influence upon native art? Might they not have been active 
as innovators in as well as observers of Indian culture? 
I believe that data are now available to demonstrate precisely that 
Catlin’s and Bodmer’s artistic example did influence the develop- 
ment of the painting styles of at least two prominent Mandan Indian 
artists who had rare opportunities to observe their artistic activity 
closely while these white artists were recording the native culture of 
their tribe. 
ABORIGINAL MANDAN INDIAN PAINTING 
From the time of the first known visit of white men to the Mandan 
villages in 1738 until the appearance of George Catlin among them 
SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS, VOL. 134, NO. 7 
