598 REPORT OP NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1890. 



proved himself a guide and interpreter of unusual value, and made the 

 stay of his guest both pleasant and profitable. The latter arrived at 

 the time of a most important rite of the Mandans, the whole of which 

 he was permitted to witness and the like of which he never saw before 

 or after. Thin rite I shall refer to at length before the close of the lec- 

 ture. Mr. Kipp, too, undoubtedly spoke well of his Indian friends. I 

 have often observed on the frontier that white men who have lived long 

 with any particular tribe of Indians acquire a greater sense of loyalty 

 to such tribe, that they hate its enemies, love its friends, souud its 

 praises, and maintain its superiority to all other tribes. Had Catlin 

 had opportunities of witnessing the great ceremonies of other nations 

 under the conduct of guides as well informed as Mr. Kipp, he would 

 not perhaps have considered the Maudaus so superior to other tribes as 

 he represents them in his writings. It was this people which he se- 

 lected as the subject of his origiu theory. By a series of arguments 

 and conclusions which we would now call "jumping," but which passed 

 muster in the science of half a century ago, he estab isned to his own 

 satisfaction that the Man dans were descended from certain Welshmen 

 who sailed in ten ships under the direction of Prince Madoc from North 

 Wales in the early part of the fourteenth century. Although his 

 theory has little value in the light shed by modern investigation, it con- 

 trolled all his opinions, distorted mauy of his statements, and has trans- 

 mitted its evil influence through the works of a host of compilers and 

 book-makers, many of them of high fame in the scientific world, down 

 to the present day. So much for some of the unfavorable influences of 

 his environment. 



There are various portraits and pictures of our subject extant. One 

 appears in his notes on Travel in Europe. Mr. Thomas Donaldson, in 

 his recent work,* presents three, and in his own works the artist often 

 includes sketches of himself. The plate facing page 701 in Donaldson's 

 work is a copy of a picture painted by the artist's own hand when he 

 was twenty-eight years old. He is represented b.y his contemporaries 

 as a person of medium height, slender, well formed, very graceful, and 

 of a complexion so decidedly dark that some of his friends thought 

 he might possibly claim for his own, a little of the blood of that race 

 to whose study he had devoted a life-time. 



In PI. cxxx is shown one of Catlin's sketches of himself in the 

 prime of his activity and usefulness. It represents him in 1832, at the 

 age of thirty-six, seated at a feast in the lodge of Mah-to-toh-pa or 

 Pour Bears, then second chief of the Mandans, dressed in his buck- 

 skin hunting suit. According to the etiquette of the place and time, 

 he eats alone out of a wooden bowl, while his host fills the calumet for 

 him to smoke after his meal, and the women of the household act the 

 part of spectators. 



* "The George Catlin Indian Gallery in the U. S. National Museum (Smithsonian 

 Institution), with Memoir and Statistics," in Smithsouiau Report for 1885. 



