THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 719 



me into this remote region, three thousand five hundred miles from my native soil, 

 the last two thousand of which have furnished me with almost unlimited models, 

 both in landscape and the human figure, exactly suited to my feelings. I am now in 

 the full possession and enjoyment of those conditions on which alone I was induced 

 to pursue the art as a profession, and in anticipation of which alone my admiration 

 for the art could ever have been kindled into a pure flame. I mean the free use of na- 

 ture's undisguised models, with the privilege of selecting for myself. If I am here 

 losing the benefit of the fleeting fashions of the day and neglecting that elegant 

 polish which the world say an artist should draw from a continual intercourse with 

 the polite world, yet have I this consolation, that in this country I am entirely di- 

 vested of those dangerous steps and allurements which beset an artist in fashionable 

 life, and have little to steal my thoughts away from the contemplation of the beautiful 

 models that are about me. If, also, I have not here the benefit of that feeling of emu- 

 lation which is the life and spur to the arts where artists are associates together, yet 

 am I surrounded by living models of such elegance and beauty that I feel an unceas- 

 ing excitement of a much higher order — the certainty that I am drawing knowledge 

 from the true source. My enthusiastic admiration of man in the honest and elegant 

 simplicity of nature has always fed the warmest feelings of my bosom and shut half 

 the avenues to my heart against the specious refinements of the accomplished world. 

 This feeling, together with the desire to study my art independently of the embar- 

 rassments which the ridiculous fashions of civilized society have thrown in its way, 

 has led me to the wilderness for a while as the true school of the arts. 



I have for along time been of opinion that the wilderness of our country afforded 

 models equal to those from which the Grecian sculptors transferred to the marble such 

 inimitable grace and beauty ; and I am now more confirmed in this opinion since I 

 have immersed myself in the midst of thousands and tens of thousands of these knights 

 of the forest, whose lives are lives of chivalry, and whose daily feats, with their 

 naked limbs, might vie with those of the Grecian youths in the beautiful rivalry of 

 the Olympian games. 



No man's imagination, with all the aids of description that can be given to it, can 

 ever picture the beauty and wildness of scenes that may be daily witnessed in this ro- 

 mantic country; of hundreds of these graceful youths, without a care to wrinkle or a 

 fear to disturb the full expression of pleasure and enjoyment that beams upon their 

 faces ; their long black hair, mingling with their horses' tails, floating in the wind, 

 while they are flying over the carpeted prairie and dealing death with their spears 

 and arrows to a band of infuriated buffaloes ; or their splendid procession in a war 

 parade, arrayed in all their gorgeous colors and trappings, moving with most exqui- 

 site grace and manly beauty added to that bold defiance which man carries on his 

 front, who acknowledges no superior on earth, and who is amenable to no laws ex- 

 cept the laws of God and honor. 



In addition to the knowledge of human nature and of my art, which I hope to ac- 

 quire by this toilsome and expensive undertaking, I have another in view, which, if 

 it should not be of equal service to me, will be of no less interest and value to poster- 

 ity. I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are 

 now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the ap- 

 proach of civilization; their rights invaded, their morals corrupted, their lands wrested 

 from them, their customs changed, and therefore lost to the world, and they at last 

 sunk into the earth and the plowshare turning the sod over their graves ; and I have 

 flown to their rescue, not of their lives or of their race (for they are "doomed" and 

 must perish), but to the rescue of their looks and their modes, at which the acquisi- 

 tive world may hurl their poison and every besom of destruction, and trample them 

 down and crush them to death ; yet, phcenix-like, they may rise from the " stain on a 

 painter's palette," and live again upon canvas and stand forth for centuries yet to 

 come — the living monuments of a noble race. For this purpose I have designed to 

 visit every tribe of Indians on the continent, if my life should be spared, for the pur- 



