526 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



by Muney, in 1841, and which has gone through more than twenty-five 

 dififerent editions. Mr Catlin said in 1868 that more than sixty thou- 

 sand copies of this work were sold. It was published in almost all civ- 

 ilized countries. The American editions usually contained wretched 

 illustrations, and in some cases the text was emasculated. A list of 

 all of the editions of tbis work is given in the chapter on bibliography 

 herein giving a full list of Mr. Oatlin's publications. 



Mr. Catltn's Ei^sume op his Eight Years with the North 



American Indians. 



At the conclusion of his second volume, " Catlin's ISTorth American 

 Indians," pages 223-266, Mr. Catlin epitomizes his eight years of ob- 

 servation of the ISTorth American Indians (1829-'38) as follows : 



Having finished my travels in the " Far West" for awhile, and being detained a 

 little time, sans occupation, in my nineteenth or twentieth transit of what in com- 

 mon parlance is denominated the frontier, I have seated myself down to give some 

 further account of it, and of the doings and habits of people, both red and white, 

 who live upon it. 



THE FRONTIER. 



The frontier may properly be denominated the fleeting and unsettled line extending 

 from the Gulf of Mexico to the Lake of the Woods, a distance of three thousand miles, 

 which indefinitely separates civilized from Indian population — a moving barrier, where 

 the unrestrained and natural propensities of two people are concentrated in an atmos- 

 phere of lawless iniquity that offends Heaven and holds in mutual ignorance of each 

 other the honorable and virtuous portions of two people which seem destined never 

 to meet. 



From what has been said in the foregoing epistles the reader will agree that I have 

 pretty closely adhered to my promise made in the commencement of them, that I 

 should confine my remarks chiefly to people I have visited and customs that I have 

 seen, rather than by taking up his time with matter that might be gleaned from books. 

 He will also agree that I have principally devoted my pages, as I promised, to an ac- 

 count of the condition and customs of those Indians whom I have found entirely be- 

 yond the frontier, acting and living as nature taught them to live and act, without 

 the examples and consequently without the taints of civilized encroachments. 



He will, I flatter myself, also yield me some credit for devoting the time and space 

 I have occupied in my first appeal to the world entirely to the condition and actions 

 of the living, rather than fatiguing him with theories of the living or the dead. I have 

 theories enough of my own, and have as closely examined the condition and customs 

 of these people on the frontier as of those living beyond it, and also their past and 

 present and prospective history; but the reader will have learned that my chief ob- 

 ject in these letters has been not only to describe what I have seen, but of those 

 things such as I deemed the most novel and least understood, which has of course 

 confined my remarks heretofore m ostly to the character and condition of those tribes 

 living entirely in a state of nature. 



THE INDIAN COUNTRY AND THE INDIANS. 



And as I have now a little leisure, and no particular tribes before me to speak of, 

 the reader will allow me to glance my eye over the whole Indian country for awhile, 

 both along the frontier and beyond it, taking a hasty and brief survey of them and their 

 prospects in the aggregate, and, by not seeing quite as distinctly as I liave been in the 

 habit of doing heretofore, taking pains to tell a little more emphatically what I think, 

 and what I have thought, of those things that I have seen, and yet have told but in 

 part. 



