THE CATLIN COLLECTION OF INDIAN PAINTINGS. 605 



Awake. He was so called because within the sounds of his eloquent 

 voice sleep was impossible. 



In PI. cxliv is seen the sad face of tbe young Seminole lighter, 

 Osceola, who made himself notorious in the third decade of this cen- 

 tury, and ended his sanguinary career a prisoner at Fort Moultrie, 

 when but little over thirty years of age. 



The picture to the left is from Catliu's cauvas, painted while the sub- 

 ject was a prisoner. The picture on the right is from a bust in the 

 National Museum which bas for its basis Osceola's death-mask. An 

 interesting difference is to be observed between these two pictures. 

 Osceola, on his father's side, was the grandson of a Welshman, and as 

 such inherited the name of Powell. In Catliu's portrait the European 

 element in the features is more pronounced. In the bust from the 

 death-mask it is the Indian element which is the more prominent. 

 This is largely due no doubt to the shrinkage of the tissues of the face 

 during the fatal illness, which caused the eyes to sink and the bony 

 frame of the physiognomy to become more marked. 



Among the portraits are two of Keokuk (one on foot, as shown in 

 PI. cxlv and one on horseback), a celebrated iSauk chief, from whom 

 the present city of Keokuk, in Iowa, is named, and whose bust now 

 occupies a place in the Capitol; one of Black Hawk (PI. cxlvi), whose 

 name is given to one of the severest wars our pioneers ever experi- 

 enced, agaiust whose forces Abraham Lincoln served in his youth as a 

 volunteer private; and many others of great historic value. 



1 now come to consider four pictures in the gallery which have given 

 rise to more controversy and comment than all the rest of the work 

 combined, and which were at once his glory and his misfortune. These 

 are his pictures of a certain religious ceremony of the Man dans called 

 Okeepa. They were his glory because in them he depicts one of the 

 most extraordinary rites that the eye of civilized man has ever wit- 

 nessed, and because they were the first pictorial representations ever 

 made of the esoteric work of an Indian medicine lodge. His descrip- 

 tion of these rites is no less wonderful and faithful than his pictures. 

 They were his misfortune because the scenes he described and painted 

 were so unusual that they were discredited by his jealous scientific 

 contemporaries, and such doubts were cast upon his work as to inter- 

 fere with the sale of his gallery in France, and later in the United 

 States. Mr. Schoolcraft was the official ethnographer in those days, 

 and his dictum seemed to settle all questions. In his immense six- 

 volumed compilation entitled " Information respecting the History, 

 Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States," 

 he generally ignores the great work of Catlin, but he publishes a letter 

 dated June 28, 1852, by a "colonel" who was superintendent of Indian 

 affairs in those days. The letter of this "colonel" indicates through- 

 out a most superficial second-hand knowledge of the subject of which 

 he treats, and the only reference he makes to Catiin's labors is iu the 



