4 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 134 
Anthropologists customarily refer to this primitive work as picture 
writing, a term which aptly expresses the major motive for its crea- 
tion. The painter was more concerned with recording a memorable 
event by this pictorial shorthand than with the aesthetic appeal of 
his creation. He was more historian or biographer than artist. 
GEORGE CATLIN AMONG THE MANDAN, 1832 
George Catlin (pl. 4, fig. 1), spent the summer of 1832 on the 
Upper Missouri. He traveled upriver on the first steamboat to ascend 
the Missouri to Fort Union, stopping briefly at Fort Clark, the 
American Fur Company’s post at the Mandan villages. He returned 
downstream by skiff, stopping over at Fort Clark for a period of two 
or more weeks. During that period the amazingly energetic Catlin 
created more than 4o pictures. Half this number were portraits of 
Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Indians in the neighborhood of Fort 
Clark. The remainder were landscapes. 
Catlin was a self-taught artist whose forte was portraiture. He 
possessed a remarkable ability to catch a likeness of his sitter with 
a few swift, bold strokes of his pencil or brush. Catlin’s own account 
of his journey repeatedly referred to the Indians’ delight and amaze- 
ment at his ability to transfer their faces to canvas. They had seen 
nothing like this realistic portraiture before. (Catlin, 1841, vol. 1.) 
Catlin was less skilled in rendering the human body. His interest 
in the details of Indian costume and ornament usually was secondary 
to his keen desire to record faithfully the heads and faces of his 
subjects. Not infrequently, he exaggerated or omitted important 
details of dress. (Ewers, 1956, pp. 495-498). Nevertheless, Cat- 
lin’s very practice of painting from a model may have been a novelty 
in method of rendering the human figure that impressed some of 
his Indian sitters who had been familiar only with the generalized 
representations of humans created by native picture writers. 
CARL BODMER AMONG THE MANDAN, 1833-34 
Carl Bodmer, on the other hand, was a meticulous draughtsman 
thoroughly trained in the best European traditions of drawing from 
the model. The German scientist Prince Maximilian zu Wied care- 
fully picked young, Swiss-born Bodmer (he was only in his early 
twenties) to accompany him on his travels in America for the pur- 
pose of making drawings that would illustrate his own scientific 
observations. The exacting scientist expected his artist’s record to 
be no less accurate in every detail than would be his own writings. 
