Catlin saw parfleches and more in person. Raised in the heart of New York State on the family farm, he set out in life to follow in the footsteps of his father, a successful attorney. But his passion to paint prompted Catlin to shelve his law books and take up brush and palette with a studio in Philadelphia. Though he initially concentrated on small portraits, one day he was awestruck by a delegation of Native Americans that passed through Philadelphia on their way to Washington, DC.
He recalled this incident in Letters and Notes on the North American Indians:
A delegation of some ten or fifteen noble and dignified-looking Indians, from the wilds of the ‘Far West,’ suddenly arrived in the city, arrayed in all their classic beauty—with shield and helmet—with tunic and manteau—tinted and tasseled off, exactly for the painter’s palette. In silent and stoic dignity, these lords of the forest strutted about the city for a few days, wrapped in their pictorial robes, with their brows plumed with the quills of the war-eagle.… Man, in the simplicity and loftiness of his nature, unrestrained and unfettered by disguises of art, is surely the most beautiful model for the painter—and the country from which he hails is unquestionably the best study or school of the arts in the world … and the history and customs of such a people, preserved by pictorial illustrations, are themes worthy the lifetime of one man, and nothing short of the loss of my life shall prevent me from visiting their country, and becoming their historian.
Catlin let go of miniatures and instead worked on detailing the history of Native Americans by traveling the West.
From 1832 to ’37 Catlin made forays into the West and Midwest, visiting dozens of tribes to record their lives on canvas. He spent time with the Blackfoot, Crow, Cree, Sioux, Mandan, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Osage, Chippewa, Sauk, and Fox. The artist produced more than three hundred portraits during his journeys, as well as a couple hundred related paintings. He marveled at the native languages, noting at one point that the Crow and Blackfeet speak completely different languages, that the Dakotas have a different language than the Mandans. His portraits of two Mandan chiefs on the Upper Missouri so impressed the chiefs that they named Catlin Teh-o-pe-nee Wash-ee, or medicine white man. Catlin’s words and paintings captured the Great Plains in its pre-development rawness and magnificence before settlers swept over it.
“In looking back from this bluff, towards the West, there is, to an almost boundless extent, one of the most beautiful scenes imaginable,” he wrote in 1832 as he gazed out from the Lower Missouri River. “The surface of the country is gracefully and slightly undulating, like the swells of the retiring ocean after a heavy storm. And everywhere covered with a beautiful green turf, and with occasional patches and clusters of trees.”
You can find such settings in some places today, but very few with bison on them.
Tatanka
Historically the buffalo had more influence on man than all other Plains animals combined. It was life, food, raiment, and shelter to the Indians. The buffalo and the Plains Indians lived together, and together passed away. The year 1876 marks practically the end of both.
—Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains
For many of us on our first, and perhaps only, visit to Wind Cave, Yellowstone, Badlands, Theodore Roosevelt, or other national parks or preserves with bison, that first glance of the animals in the wild can be startling and enamoring at the same time. It’s a fleeting connection with something truly wild that lives on the landscape as it has for tens of thousands of years. We ooh and ahh, take some photographs, and head down the road. End of connection.
Native Americans and bison, however, are intertwined, and always have been. Bison are iinii to the Blackfeet Nation, hotova’a or hotoaao’o to the Cheyennes, depending on the sex of the animal, and kúcu to the Utes. The Cherokee people know bison as ya-na-sa, while in the Pawnee language they are tarha, and in Navajo ayani. But regardless of what they are called, bison were, and continue to be, celebrated by these cultures. They not only gave life through their meat but they represented a linkage, a fastening with the earth and freedom that native cultures seek. Stories told by elders through the generations tell of bison coming from the underworld, from caves, caverns, and grottos winding deep into mountainsides. In South Dakota, on the western edge of the state that features the undulating pine country known as the Black Hills, you can walk right up to the narrow, rocky hillside crevice where, a Lakota creation narrative tells us, bison streamed out into the sunlight: hundreds and thousands of animals stretching across the prairie in a dark brown rising tide. These Pte-O-ya-te were “relatives, who provided humans with food, clothing, shelter, tools, medicine, and many other necessities.”42 The connection was further enforced by the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman, who taught the Lakota to be honorable, respectful, and self-disciplined.43 Not only did the Buffalo People stampede from that crevice which led to making Wind Cave a national park, but the Lakota view the air that rushes out of that small hole as “the breath of life.”44
Similar creation narratives have been handed down by native peoples across the West, telling of bison spewing forth from a cave in Texas and in the Crazy Mountains of Montana.45 The herd that spilled out of the Crazy Mountains “spread wide and blackened the plains,” according to Crow chief Plenty Coups. “Everywhere I looked great herds of buffalo were going in every direction, and still others without number were pouring out of the hole in the ground to travel on the wide plains.”46 Pawnee narratives also tell of spirit animals that live in caves, waiting for the time when they will be granted access to the surface.47
The depletion of the great herds in the nineteenth century deprived native peoples of food and shelter, and was also a spiritual loss. Bison represented the universe and superseded the arrival of humans. Unlike many of the whites who came west, native peoples viewed bison with honor and dignity. Just as Lakota and other native cultures believed bison had come from the underworld, they also believed they returned to that protective dwelling place after the whites decimated the great herds. A Kiowa narrative tells of a woman who woke one morning shortly before sunrise and went to a spring to get some water. As the growing predawn light began to illuminate the wafting mists filling the valley, she saw an old bison cow walk out of the vapors. Trailing her were more bison, some old and weary, some wounded, some young calves.
“As she watched, the old buffalo cow led the last herd through the mist and toward the mountain,” goes the traditional story. “Then the mountain opened up before them, and inside of the mountain the earth was fresh and young. The sun shone brightly and the water was clear. The earth was green and the sky blue. Into this beautiful land walked the last herd of buffalo, and the mountains closed.
“The buffalo were gone.”48
Even before President Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark west in 1804 to find out exactly what he had purchased from the French via the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, bison figuratively have been going into the mountain, literally heading toward their demise. Once the horse reached the Plains with Spanish conquistadors, native peoples’ ability to travel expanded. Before the horse, dogs had pulled the travois carrying family belongings. The arrival of the horse made it possible to carry more, carry it farther, and carry it more quickly. Horses enabled these peoples to become nomads, to follow the bison on their migrations and so always have food and shelter nearby. If winter’s snows made it difficult for horses to carry warriors all the way to the bison, the hunters could dismount, don snowshoes, and drive bison into drift-clogged ravines. There the snowbound bison met their fate at the hands of hunters with their lances.49
As went the bison, so too did the Native Americans. The prediction by William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the Union Army’s heralded Civil War generals, that the destruction of the great bison herds would directly impact Plains native peoples, proved
