600 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1890. 



basis. We need not marvel when we learn tbat in his later years, 

 without any extensive book study, he became a good practical geologist. 

 In this picture (PI. cxxxin, Fig. 1) he gives us a striking representa- 

 tion of the peculiar billowy hills which are so characteristic of the loess 

 deposits of the Missouri Valley in western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. 

 These are the hills of loess of ] 832, with their smooth, grass-clad sides 

 and their scanty groves in the ravines ; such, too, they still seemed when 

 last I saw them, fourteen years ago; but a change even then was com- 

 ing over them ; prairie tires were at an end and small shrubs were ris- 

 ing above the grass. These are perhaps good sized saplings to-day. 

 So the forest Avill spread and soon the beautiful clear-cut outlines of 

 these billowy slopes will no more have power to inspire the artist's 

 hand. 



In this, as in a hundred other cases, tbe pictures have, for us, a high 

 historic value as fixing an irrevocable past. They show us landmarks 

 of the West which have long ago disappeared, such as old trading 

 posts of the Indian country ; Fort Union, which stood forty years at the 

 mouth of the Yellowstone, but the lines of whose foundation walls can 

 scarcely be traced to-day. 



Floyd's grave, the place of interment of the only man who died on 

 Lewis and Clarke's famous expedition in 1804, is shown in PI. cxxxin, 

 Fig. 2. Is there any trace of the once lonely mound now in the busy 

 environs of Sioux City f* Does the pole still stand, as Catlin shows it, 

 over Blackbird's grave (PI. cxxxiv, Fig. 1), the last instance of a se- 

 pulchral mound built in historic times, showing that our modern Indians 

 were mound builders'? The self-reared monument of Julien Dubuque, 

 the first white man who worked the Upper Mississippi lead-mines, a cen- 

 tury ago, stood perfect still in Catlin's day, a stone hut with door of 

 lead and cross of cedar (PL cxxxiv, Fig. 2) ; but, thirty-five years ago, 

 I have seen it level with the ground. Such are some of the many ob- 

 literated land-marks reared by human hands that Catlin's pencil has 

 perpetuated. 



But works of nature, the landmarks erected by the eternal elements; 

 can these be obliterated J ? Have they any past which the artist can 

 preserve for the coming generations'? Let this picture decide. Here 

 are the falls ot St. Anthony (PL cxxxv, Fig. 1), as they roared to an unten- 

 anted solitude in the year 1835, when George Catlin visited and sketched 

 them. Who would recognize any identity between that fair wild scene 

 and the falls of St. Anthony of to-day (PL cxxxv, Fig 2). 



A very large proportion of the paintings in this collection is devoted 

 to Indian games and hunting scenes (PL cxxxvi. Fig. 1), and these rep- 

 resent from a scientific point of view the most valuable part of the whole 

 collection, with the exception of the four scenes of the great Maudan 



*>Siuce this Avas -written I have learned that (the grave being endangered by the 

 gradual falling away of the edge of the bluff) the people of Sioux City have recently 

 removed the remains of tSergeaut Floyd further back from the river on the same hill. 



