718 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



tury had ripened into manhood, and when the application of steam, the 

 telegraph, and all of the most progressive of the economics and comforts 

 of our now every-day life had been fully developed. 



He saw the North American Indian of his enthusiastic youth and 

 manhood the lordly owner and pioneer of the plains, become the stub- 

 born warrior, resisting the inroad of the " Long Knives " from the East. 



In his time a nation grew from an infant to a man, and he saw before the 

 advancing columns of Anglo-Saxon life his " red men " beaten back, and 

 fruitlessly resist the white inroad, as the crumbling sands meet the roll 

 of the irresistible ocean. 



With a catholicity of spirit and opinion, born of his love for and 

 communion with nature, with his latest breath his lips spoke and his 

 heart beat for the wild man of the West — that wild man, who was 

 always to him a child of nature, persecuted by the whites and the vic- 

 tim of the spoliator, whose every-day life he had exalted in his art 

 and forever perpetuated by his writings. He has worthily preserved, 

 with pen and pencil, for all time, the story of this people. 



He threshed the wheat of much of American aboriginal life in the first 

 part of this century. In many cases others, traveling the same ground, 

 using the flail with loud and ponderous stroke, have since given the 

 world no grain and much chaff. 



Contemplating his labors and their results, surely George Catlin will 

 not be forgotten amongst men. 



MR. CATLIN'S MOTIVE FOR HIS INDIAN RESEARCHES. 



Mr. Catlin, while in Philadelphia, where he was located in 1829, saw 

 a band of wild Indians passing through en route to Washington on 

 treaty business. Their trappings and dress at once caught his eye. 

 Mr. Catlin's mind was on the subject of an ethnological and natural 

 history museum and collection early in 1824. His brother Julius, just 

 graduated at West Point, was his confidant. He developed to him his 

 plans. Julius was to be the geologist, mineralogist, and botanist of the 

 expedition. He was so impressed with this that he resigned from the 

 Army in 1826 and joined George in New York. At the end of two years 

 he was drowned at Eochester, X. Y., while on a business journey for 

 George. 



In a letter from Fort Union, mouth of Yellowstone Eiver, Dakota, in 

 July, 1832, he gives the reasons for his love of Indian art and accounts 

 for his enthusiasm on the subject: 



You will no doubt be somewhat surprised on the receipt of a letter from me so far 

 strayed into the western world, and still more startled when I tell you that I am here 

 in the full enthusiasm and practice of my art. That euthusiasm alone has brought 



