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Illustrations of the Manners, Customs, & Condition of the
North American Indians. With Letters and Notes, Written during
Eight Years of Travel and Adventure among the Wildest and
Most Remarkable Tribes Now Existing. By George Catlin.

Published by Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly, London
(1876)

Original Color Lithographs (chromolithographs) over 140 years old!
Sheet size: approximately 6 1/8 x 9 3/8 inches
[also available are the 1845 black & white engravings]

George Catlin's paintings comprise the first important pictorial record of the Plains Indians and their then little-known homelands west of the Mississippi River. "Catlin's Indian Gallery," as the dedicated artist himself called it, consisted of hundreds of portraits of Indians, scenes of Indian life, and landscapes of a wilderness scarcely changed through the millennia. In his notebooks and on canvas, the young Pennsylvania lawyer captured much of an American that was swept away a century ago by the westward-pressing settler.

Catlin made these dramatic paintings on a series of journeys into largely unmapped Indian country between 1830 and 1836. For the first time, Americans in the eastern states saw the Pawnees, the tall Blackfeet and Crows, the Sioux, and the wild Comanches. They saw wide prairies teeming with buffalo, the turbulent Missouri River, and the giant grizzly bear. They saw villages of hundreds of graceful teepees and peered into the dim interiors of comfortable earth lodges, and witnessed the four-day torture ceremony of the Mandans.

The Plains Indians of Catlin's portraits were still proud and dignified, unlike their cousins on eastern reservations. Freed by the acquisition of the horse from the restrictions of hunger and scarcity, they were riding the crest of a new richness and power.

But they, too, were fated to lose in the encounter with western civilization—and Catlin knew it. "Art may mourn when these people are swept from the earth," he wrote, "and the artists of the future ages may look in vain for another race so picturesque in their costumes, their weapons, their colours, their manly games, and their chase...."

[ref.: "Letters and Notes..." introduction by Marjorie Halpin (Dover, 1973).]

George Catlin
as painted by William Fisk, 1849

"I sat out alone, unaided and unadvised, resolved, (if my life should be spared), by the aid of my brush and my pen, to rescue from oblivion so much of their primitive looks and customs as the industry and ardent enthusiasm of one lifetime could accomplish."

GEORGE CATLIN, ca. 1842

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Plates 3-4

Fort Union, 1832

View of the Missouri River, filled with snags and rafts formed by trees which have been undermined by the falling alluvial banks

$95

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Plates 5-6

Beautiful prairie bluffs above the Poncas

Prairie bluffs

$95

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Plates 9-10

Batiste and Catlin running buffalo

Wounded buffalo

$95
[note light smudge lower margin]

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Plate 11

Stu-mick-o-sucks, Buffalo's Back Fat, head chief

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Plates 12-13

Grandson of Buffalo's Back Fat

Eeh-nis-kin, Crystal Stone, wife of Buffalo's Back Fat

$95

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Plate 14

Pe-toh-pee-kiss, Eagle's Ribs

$275
(available framed only, shipping likely higher than what checkout system charges)

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Plate 15

Wun-nes-tou, White Buffalo

$300
(available framed only, shipping likely higher than what checkout system charges)

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Plates 24-27

Chah-ee-chopes, Four Wolves

Oo-je-en-a-he-ha, Woman Who Lives in a Bear's Den

Dunk-pits-a-hoe-shee, Red Bear

Paris-ka-roo-pa, Two Crows, the Younger

$95

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Plates 28-31

Wi-jun-jon, Pigeon's Egg Head

Chin-cha-pee, Fire Bug that Creeps, wife of Pigeon's Egg Head

Bro-cas-sie, He Who Has Eyes Behind Him (also known as Broken Arm)

Tow-ee-ka-wet, wife of He Who Has Eyes Behind Him

$95

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Plate 32

Pipe Dance

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Plates 33-34

Greater Wonder, a Cree woman carrying her baby in her robe

Assiniboin woman and her child

$95
[note crease in lower right corner]

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Plates 35-36

Sha-co-pay, The Six, chief of the Ojibbeways

Wife of Sha-co-pay

$95

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Plates 37-38

The "Brick Kilns," Clay Bluffs above St. Louis

The "Brick Kilns," a Far View

$95

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Plates 41-42

"The Grand Dome"

Community of prairie dogs

$95

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Plates 43-44

Solitary clay bluff

"The Three Domes," a group of clay bluffs above the Mandans

$95

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Plates 45-46

Distant view of Mandan village

Interior of a Mandan lodge

$95

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Plates 50-53

Mah-tahp-ta-ha, He Who Rushes through the Middle

Seehk-hee-da, Mouse Colored Feather

Sha-ko-ka, Mink

Mi-neek-e-sunk-te-ca, Mink

$95

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Plates 55

Mah-to-he-hah, Old Bear, a medicine man

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Plate 57

Mandan boys in sham fight

$95

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Plates 58-59

Rainmaker

Tchung-kee game

$95

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Plate 60

Mandan archery contest, "The Game of the Arrow"

$95

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Plate 61

Mandan horse racing on a race course in back of the village

$95

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Plate 65a

robe of Mah-to-toh-pa

$95

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Plate 65b (Figures 1-4)

robe of Mah-to-toh-pa

$95

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Plate 65c (Figures 5-7)

robe of Mah-to-toh-pa

$95

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Plate 65d (Figures 8-11)

robe of Mah-to-toh-pa

$95

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Plate 66

Interior of a Mandan medicine lodge

$95

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Plate 69

Eh-ke-nah-ka-nah-pick, the Last Race

$95

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Plate 72

Eeh-to-k-pah-shee-pee-shah, Black Moccasin, an aged chief

$95

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Plate 73-74

Ee-a-chin-che-a, Red Thunder, son of Black Moccasin

Seet-se-be-a, Midday Sun

$95
[tear in right margin, well outside image area]

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Plate 75

Green Corn Dance of the Hidatsa