Art of Fact or Fiction: The Dilemmas of George Catlin

George Catlin (1796-1872) was the first and perhaps the most famous painter of North American Native-Americans; while the rest of the country thrilled to popular novels and colonial captivity narratives (in which Native Americans kidnap settlers; these were more or less true stories) which depicted Native Americans as cruel, rapacious, and surprisingly noble in their villainy, Catlin was one of the few (and probably the only) Americans to accept Native American culture on its own terms rather than on European terms. Catlin knew second-hand the reality of the captivity narratives: both his mother and grandmother had been kidnapped by Native Americans. His response, however, was considerably different than his fellow countrymen. Catlin began as a lawyer, but turned to portrait painting as his first love. However, when he encountered a group of Far West Native American braves, he resolved to paint and study Native American culture to rescue it from "oblivion." He, like most of his contemporaries (and Andrew Jackson above), believed that the Native Americans were doomed to extinction; he wished to record the culture before it vanished. So began an epic journey through the midwest and the west from 1829 to 1838, travelling across the frontier and living among some 48 separate tribes while he painted their portraits, over six hundred, in fact. He published plates of these paintings along with a fairly thorough documentation of what he encountered in 1842 in Notes and Letters on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians.

The selection you've been asked to read is a campfire story he relates in one of his letters; Catlin is narrating the story to his French trapper friend, Ba'tiste. I've chosen this story from his vast collection of writing for it represents best what Catlin felt about the Native Americans and why they were doomed to extinction. Remember: you are reading the European-American voice most sympathetic to the plight of the Native Americans and the consequences of the conquest of America by Europeans. What is the moral tenor of the piece? Why does Catlin portray Wijunjon as a fool? What is Catlin trying to say about the ultimate fate of the clash between Native American and European-American cultures? Who's to blame in this narrative?

While descending the river in a Mackinaw boat, from the mouth of Yellow Stone [the Yellow Stone River], Wi-jun-jon and another of his tribe who was with him, at the first approach to the civilized settlements, commenced a register of the white men's houses (or cabins), by cutting a notch for each on the side of a pipe stem, in order to be able to show when they got home, how many white men's houses they saw on their journey. At first the cabins were scarce; but continually as they advanced down the river, more and more rapidly increased in numbers; and they soon found their pipe-stem filled with marks, and they determined to put the rest of them on the handle ...