2 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 134 
nearly a century later, the Mandan were repeatedly visited by white 
traders, explorers, and some Government officials. Several traders 
are known to have lived among these Indians for a number of years 
during that period. But no one skilled in drawing or painting in the 
traditional, realistic nineteenth-century style of western European 
culture is known to have practiced his art in the Mandan villages 
prior to the visit of George Catlin in the summer of 1832. Mandan 
Indian painting remained in the aboriginal tradition until that time. 
The origin of the Mandan painting tradition is lost in antiquity. 
La Verendrye, the French explorer-trader, observed, when he was in 
the Mandan villages on the Missouri in 1738, that these Indians 
traded painted buffalo robes to neighboring Assiniboin. (La Veren- 
drye, 1890, p. 19.) However, the oldest example of Mandan paint- 
ing that has been preserved (which is also the earliest dated specimen 
of the figure painting of any Plains Indian tribe) is a painted buffalo 
robe collected by the American explorers Lewis and Clark in 1805. 
This robe is preserved in the collections of the Peabody Museum of 
Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University, Cambridge, 
Mass. (See pl. 1.) Lewis and Clark included it among the collection 
of ethnological materials which they sent to President Jefferson from 
the Mandan villages on April 5, 1805, before they embarked on their 
overland trek westward to the Pacific. They reported that the paint- 
ings on this robe portrayed a battle fought between Mandan warriors 
and enemy tribesmen about the year 1797. (Lewis and Clark, 1906, 
vol. I, pp. 281-288.) So this robe must have been painted within the 
period 1797-1805. 
This is a most interesting example of the aboriginal style of paint- 
ing employed by men who were the delineators of heroic deeds of 
the tribe or of individual warriors on the inner surfaces of buffalo 
robes. The painting comprises a composition of 44 foot warriors and 
20 mounted men in combat. Their weapons include 15 trade guns 
and a pistol in addition to a larger number of native-made offensive 
and defensive weapons—bows and arrows, lances and shields. All 
the figures, human and animal, are heavily outlined in a very dark 
brown, almost a black. Some of the outlined forms are filled in with 
dark brown, blue green, reddish brown, or yellow. 
Careful examination of individual figures delineated on this speci- 
men reveals some of the characteristics of the traditional native art 
style. An enlargement of one of the human figures on this robe 
(pl. 2), clearly illustrates the characteristic style of human figure in 
this composition. The head is a featureless, almost circular knob 
with pendent, conventionalized hair. The neck sits upon a separately 
