West of The Imagination; 101; The Romantic Horizon

You You You

You You This is a story about artists, image makers, who created an enduring myth of the American West.

They portrayed the drama of the settlement of the country from Missouri to California. But there is no one account of the story. The great western epic was captured and recounted in a series of archetypal images recognize the world over. Artists helped fashion the myth we know today. They revealed her romantic horizon and an historical drama. This is the west of the imagination.

A time and a place that will never die. And these are the people who created it and fixed the images in our minds eye. Music Early last century, American and European romantics dreamed of a west they had never seen. Here they believed nature would be serene and pure. This would be a land people by noble savages. A Garden of Eden. Yet very little was actually known about the great country west of the Mississippi River.

The citizens of the new United States had only vague ideas based mostly on tales of fritrators and men who had searched for a northwest passage. There were rumors about mountains of crystal, rivers of fire, seven lost cities of gold. But America at the dawning of the 19th century was still a dark and mysterious continent. Music The most serious student of the west was the president himself, Thomas Jefferson. But even he was convinced that primeval beasts inhabited the hinterland. Huge shaggy creatures that some called mastodon.

Jefferson was determined that the west should be explored. And his personal secretary, Captain Mary Weather Lewis, to lead a major scientific expedition that would cross the continent. Lewis was sent to Philadelphia to prepare for his grand venture by studying the latest methods of scientific observation. So it is that our story starts not on the fringes of the unknown but here. And what was then the intellectual capital of the nation. Lewis spent much of his time next door to Independence Hall in a museum which must have looked something like this. It was a giant menagerie on natural history collection. Jefferson had instructed him to make careful notes on everything he'd see on his journey. Every species of animal and bird, every aspect of the natural world.

This was the finest place to study what was then known. One of Lewis's teachers and the proprietor of this fantastic museum was an artist, Charles Wilson Peel. Peel was also a dedicated naturalist. I must not be wanting in my duty to those ladies and gentlemen who honor me with their attendance at the appointed time for the delivery of my lectures. If the number be ever so small, if the obligation on me is great to the few for their confidence. Peel's fascination with the natural world was catching. Lewis became intrigued with the idea that everything he discovered out west would fit perfectly into what Peel described as the great chain of being. Let us now contemplate that infinite variety of animals, each formed in such fantastical and yet most proper ship.

Each supporting its peculiar rank to keep the necessary balance that maintain millions of beings in life. All depend more or less on each other for the support of the whole. Each class is vivified and multiplied without end. Together manifesting a grand system of universal order throughout a world of various matters. Peel's enthusiasm for scientific investigation had been heightened by something extraordinary that had happened in the summer of 1801 and made him a hero. Early that spring, rumors reached him that a farmer in upstate New York had unearthed giant bones from a mysterious skeleton. His own painting of its excavation was intended as a celebration of a scientific method of discovery.

Peel built a massive water wheel to drain the pit and uncovered a complete American mastodon, a new world link in the great chain of being. Back in Philadelphia, he reassembled the creature, called it a mammoth and painted this grand self-portrait showing himself unveiling the monster to the American public. The discovery of the mammoth gave a huge impetus to American exploration. Overnight, it became a symbol of American greatness. Even parties were held in its honor. There was a popular fashion from mammoth jokes. People ate mammoth meals. Peel himself loved to host special parties at the Philosophical Society.

There, with great seriousness, his scientist friends would sit down and proceed to eat their way through a good part of the great chain of creation. A great deal of the wine would be drunk, and after the final dish had been served, there'd be proud toast. Gentlemen, a toast to the biped animal man, made peace, virtue, and happiness be his distinguishing character. To the American people, to the Constitution of the United States, to the friends of peace, to the arts and sciences nursed in this genial soil and fostered with tender care. This was a supreme moment of self-confidence for American science. To the present company, may their second birth from the womb of the beast be followed by every blessing in life. It was in this heady atmosphere that Mary Weatherloo was trained for his western expedition.

What the naturalist taught him above all was a delight in precise measurement. After dinner, they'd often settle down to trace the features of one of their party. Now, if you could chart a human face with such exactness, would it not be a grand plan to chart the continent? These were rational men, born of their age, but a new spirit of romanticism infused their speculations as they considered the wonders that lay undiscovered in the West. Louis fulfilled his appointed task, with Captain William Clark and about 50 men, he embarked from St. Louis in 1804. On their famous expedition, they traversed the continent, following the great Missouri and Columbia rivers across the plains and the Rockies to the Pacific.

Their own map modestly entitled a map of a part of the continent of North America was proof of their success. It sparked interest and speculation, but its mysterious hieroglyphics, its black lines of rivers and chains of mountains couldn't possibly capture the scale of the land. Louis and Clark witnessed this scene near the headwaters of the Missouri River, but they made no pictures. It wasn't until 13 years later that a government expedition employed artists to record what they saw. Samuel Seymour painted this encampment a major Stephen Long's expedition in 1819, sent by the War Department to explore the Great Plane. This artist gave us the first known view of the Rocky Mountains, rising like a pale white cloud in the sky.

Titian Peale, the son of Charles Wilson Peale, painted an Indian and buffalo in one of the first archetypal western paintings. He also sketched the steamboat that carried them to the heart of the continent. For a serious painter, the call of the west was now irresistible. Back in Washington, Indian delegations visited the Great White Father, and were portrayed by the famous painter Charles Bird King. After seeing one such delegation en route to Washington, an artist named George Catlin decided the course of his life's work. He was to become one of the greatest painters and historians of the American Indian. The following account has been compiled at the request of a number of friends of mine.

From series of letters and notes written by myself during my residence and travels amongst the wildest and most remote tribes of the North American Indians. In Philadelphia, I had closely applied my hand to the labors of my art for several years, when a delegation of noble and dignified Indians suddenly appeared in that city. They were arrayed and equipped in all their classic beauty. They were tinted and tassled off exactly for the painter's palette. In silent and stoic dignity, these lords of the forest strutted about the city, wrapped in their pictured robes. They attracted the gaze and admiration of all who beheld them. After they departed, I reflected long and deeply until I came to the following conclusion. The history and customs of such a people are themes worthy of a lifetime, and I resolved that nothing short of the loss of my life would prevent me from visiting their country and of becoming their historian.

So Catlin set off for St. Louis, where he sought passage in the very first steamboat bound for the Indian country of the Upper Missouri. In the spring of 1832, he boarded the side wheeler Yellowstone, and his great adventure commenced. Over 2,000 miles they steam passed Indian lookouts through the pristine lamp. Catlin kept a diary and noted his arrival at Fort Union. I arrived at this place yesterday on the steamer Yellowstone after a voyage of nearly three months from St. Louis. The American fur company have erected here for the protection against the savages, a very substantial fort, 300 feet square, with bastions armed with ordnance. There are encamped about the fort, a host of wild, incongruous spirits, chiefs, warriors, women and children of different tribes, and in the midst of them am I, snugly and scanced in the bastion of the fort with my paint pots and canvas.

In June of 1832, Catlin was lucky to the surprise of many of the fur traders of the fort, a chief of the Blackfeet arrived. Buffalo bulls back fat, and his retinue. The head chief of the Blackfoot Nation is a good looking and dignified Indian about 50 years of age and superbly dressed. While sitting for his picture, he has been surrounded by his braves and also gazed upon by his enemies.

It is a curious scene to witness when one sits in the midst of men brought together peaceably for the first time in their lives, knowing full well that within a few weeks or days they may visit death and destruction upon each other. This was a moment of truth. No Indian painted in this fashion. Would the Blackfeet chief recognize himself? Would he like the result? The result was a triumph for George Catlin and ensured that the summer would be successful.

He painted dozens of portraits and the Indian encampment outside Fort Union as a happy memory of a good time in a green land. And then he set off in a small boat along the Missouri to search for other subjects and other forts. Catlin knew he was the first man to record these scenes. Here I am in full possession of nature's undisguised models, models of such elegance and beauty that I feel an unceasing excitement, certain that I am drawing knowledge from the true source. Faced with such startling subjects, he took special pains to mix and match colors and to get the details of the costumes just right.

Eagles Ribs was a Blackfeet warrior who posed with his spear and eight scalps taken from unfortunate trappers. The medicine bags contained tokens of powerful magic. Buffalo horns meant that he was among the bravest of the brave. This was mint, a young man dan girl whose beauty and serenity caught Catlin's eye. A medicine man clothed in the skin of a yellow bear danced the last rights over a dying brave. Catlin saw this and captured the mystery of the event in this strange portrait. Each one of these paintings is also a significant historical document. They were supplemented by Catlin's own detailed notes about costume, weapons and body paint.

As a result of the precise details, Catlin's paintings have become priceless. They represent the first ethnographic record of Indian life on the plains. Catlin also painted the catastrophic effects of civilization on these people. In his travels, he'd run into a man called the light. He was dressed in a frot coat, drinking whiskey and sporting an umbrella as a trophy from a trip to the east. Catlin painted the light in his two guises as the full blood warrior and as the civilized delegate recently back from Washington. This dual personality soed such distrust among his people that they later killed him. Catlin felt a certain sense of destiny about what he was doing. He was right. He came to the upper Missouri just in time.

The white man arrived in steamboats, bringing blankets and whiskey and something invisible and horribly lethal. Smallpox. An epidemic spread from camp to camp, decimating the Indians. Catlin's portrayals of the Mandan are records of a banished tribe. Chief Matota Pei was one of their leaders. Five years after Catlin painted this picture, Matota Pei was dead and so were 95% of his people. Beyond Fort Union was a wilder, grander Missouri than George Catlin ever saw or imagined. Catlin had traveled 2,000 miles from St. Louis, past trading posts in the land of the Sioux, the Omaha, the Mandan, and the Ascina boy, to Fort Union.

But the very next year, two Europeans went even further. They pushed up the river by steamboat and keelboat, past Fort Union. To the farthest outpost of the American fur company, Fort McKenzie in the land of the warlike Blackfeet. The leader of the expedition was a Prussian explorer, Prince Maximilian Veed. He traveled to darkest North America in 1832. He took with him a young Swiss painter, Carl Bodmer, who made a sketch of their Atlantic crossing. The prince in his mind's eye had a vision of America that looked like this. On the banks of the Fox and War Bash rivers in Indiana, he found it briefly.

But they were amazed to find how quickly civilization and its technology were encroaching. The prince kept the journal, meticulously describing everything they saw. At St. Louis, he diagrammed the junction of the Missouri and Mississippi, and made careful notes on a high-level delegation of sock and fox Indians. But their adventures really started when they moved up the Missouri. Like George Catlin, they traveled on the steamboat Yellowstone. They were stranded more than once on treacherous sandbars. Then beyond Fort Union, beyond the territory that Catlin had explored, the banks of the river grew wilder and stranger.

Here, Bodmer started to paint watercolor landscapes more evocative than any Catlin had attempted. The It took five weeks to travel more than 500 miles upstream beyond the fort.

Then, just before they reached Fort McKenzie, their keelboat was boarded by a band of warlike Indians. It was a precarious moment, the chief's threatened, the prince offered gifts and with a favorable wind escaped to the safety of the fort. There, without warning, 600 a synaboin wire is attacked a nearby black-feet camp. Bodmer watched from safe inside the fort, but in his painting, he places the viewer right in the midst of battle. In the remaining summer weeks, peace returned. The prince set off to interview Indians down river and Bodmert painted incredible portraits of their distinguished leaders.

This is distant bear, a black-feet medicine man, who looks out upon mysterious horizons. This man was known as the Maker of Rhodes. He became the prince's chief informant on the Hadatsa tribe. Matotape, the Mandan chief who had befriended Catlin, was also painted by Bodmert, but this time very differently as a warrior. The yellow hand, imprinted on his chest, signifies captured enemies. This is two ravens, in the ceremonial headdress of a Hadatsa dog dancer. No painting by Bodmert captured the nobility and power of the American Indian, better than this.

Bodmert's paintings had a magical effect upon the Indians. He and the prince were privileged to witness scenes of Indian ceremonial life. Bodmert painted the medicine signs that called the buffalo. In the bison dance of the Mandans, they watched as warriors danced up the spirit of the great peace. That year, the snows came unexpectedly soon. The Missouri froze solid. They found they couldn't travel out.

At Fort Clark, the prince and Bodmer lived through the coldest winter in memory. The paints and brushes froze. Food was short. The Indians moved to lodges, built low among the trees to escape the wind. That winter, Bodmert produced his greatest landscape painting with an immense grey horizon and the Indians crossing the frozen Missouri. At last, the ice melted. The prince and his artist returned gratefully to civilization and with them they brought paintings that had never been equal. Three years later, in Paris, Karl Bodmert began work on a lavish portfolio containing 81 fine aquatents, summing up what the two men had experienced.

These images were to open the eyes of the world to American Indian culture. In the 1830s, the whole west was becoming a magnet for artists, but there was a subtle change in emphasis. Instead of the fur companies providing artists support, the U.S. Army increasingly entered the picture. The year after Prince Max's voyage, George Catlin decided to join a military expedition headed for the southwest across the prairie of what is now Oklahoma. On the fourth day of our march, we discovered a large party of command shoes at several miles distance sitting on their horses and looking at us, the blades of their lances glistening in the sun.

Colonel Lodge ordered the command to halt while he rode forward with a staff and a white flag. The Indians stood their ground until we were within half a mile of them and could clearly observe all their movements. Then one of their party galloped out in advance on a wild spirited horse. All eyes were fixed upon this little fellow and he well knew it. He at length met the flag of the regiment looking the bearer full in the face. The rest of the party, seeing him received in this friendly manner, started toward us like a black cloud and were soon gathered round us. The pipe was lit and passed around and a talk was held. When we started, we were fresh and ardent for the incidents that were before us. Our feelings were buoyant in light and green prairies and the clear blue sky were an earthly paradise to us. Then came our tug of war, not with the Indians, but with disease and despair.

It was cholera. Catlin and most of the expedition felt desperately ill. Convinced he was going to die, Catlin trained his assistant to paint in the hopes that he'd carry on his work. At last, when we reached this fort, Gibson, I was almost gone. Here I heard the relentless and mournful sound of muffled drums passing six or eight times a day beneath my window. From my bed, I saw each poor fellow lowered to his silent grave. Catlin survived his brush with death. He was yet to make his most dramatic contribution as the self-proclaimed historian of the Indians. In the meantime, a motley array of entrepreneurs, romantics, and self-styled adventurers were trekking westward in his footsteps.

One such character was Captain William Drummond Stewart, a hero of the Napoleonic Wars and a dedicated Scottish sportsman. Not to be outdone by the noble Prince Max, the captain hired his own artist. This was Alfred Jacob Miller, a portrait painter who'd never been anywhere wilder than New Orleans. This unlikely pair joined a fur company caravan in the spring of 1837. They crossed the great grass ocean of the plains, and paused at Fort Laramie, an important trading center for Indians and trappers alike. Miller's painting is the only picture of the Fort in its early years. Then they pressed on to the very heart of the Rockies. To Alfred Jacob Miller, this land was like a garden of the gods. In his painting called The Lost Greenhorn, one has the feeling of a romantic stunned by the immensity of space.

Meanwhile, the fearless captain Stewart had found what he'd come for. Buffalo. Miller painted it all, sometimes portraying scenes described to him by trappers, sometimes drawing from his own experience. The best time for painting was a twilight, when the buffalo appeared as mysterious silhouettes against a pale sky. In the mountains, there was a band of characters every bit as wild as the Indians.

One of the first white women to cross the Rockies in 1838 described them as emissaries of the devil, worshipping their own master. These were the mountain men. Miller painted them as a race of Daniel Boons, who came from the east, and yet seemed to have become more like the Indians than some of the Indians themselves. They had learned to communicate in the universal language of signs. It was not uncommon for a trapper to pay a fortune in guns and horses for an Indian bride. Many of them had stronger ties to the tribes of the Crow or the Shoshone than they did to the fur companies that employed them. Here in Miller's view lived natural man in a happy garden of Eden, a land of earthly yet innocent delights. It was in this society that Miller and Stewart made their camp, and here the artist painted the eighth annual fur trade rendezvous.

The rendezvous was a magnificent trade fair, where trappers and Indians alike sold pelts to the fur company in the heart of the mountains. Though it had been established mostly for business, the rendezvous was remembered by Miller as a three week back an hour. This is quite a Parisian blowout, although wow! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!

Late at night, after the dancing and carousing, Miller painted campfire scenes. He described a remarkable storyteller with the name of Black Harris. This man recounted a perilous hair-raising escape from a party of Black-feet Indians. Others bragged of hand-to-hand combat with grizzly bears, or told of strange boiling rivers to the west. At the edge of the firelight, in the dancing shadows, fact and fiction blurred together. But for a romantic artist, this was no problem. It was the wild, unfettered life that was being honored in the paintings of Alfred Jacob Miller. The only artist ever to experience first hand, the ways of the mountain men. Within a decade, the beaver were trapped out, and the fur trade forts became military outposts on the new Oregon Trail.

By 1841, the west of the mountain man in the Indian seemed above to disappear. The question was, how to preserve its memory. It was George Catlin, more than any other, who had resolved to dedicate his life to showing the Wild West of America to the world. Close to 500 paintings, as well as several thousand weapons, ornaments and costumes, comprise what came to be known as Catlin's Indian Gallery. Real live Indians, when Catlin could get them, added to the splendor and excitement of the show. They were advertised as the performers of the Tablo Vivant, or living scenes, in which they would dance and sing and enact various scenes of their native life. Catlin had toured this show to New York, Washington, Philadelphia and Boston, and got mixed reviews.

He then tried to sell his entire collection of the United States government for the staggering sum of $60,000. He was turned down. So he decided to wrap up the exhibition and ship the whole thing to Europe. He installed it in London's fashionable Egyptian hall, and here, at last, his show was a resounding success. It's a big work. It's amazing. The London Morning Chronicle published a review of Catlin's efforts. What Catlin has seen in the prairies, he sets forth with all the wildness and freshness of nature about it.

An easy, conversational style, plentifully sprinkled with Americanisms, gives a peculiar charm to his descriptions, which are not merely lifelike, but life itself. Of course, there were critics, including none other than Alfred Jacob Miller. After visiting the exhibition in London, he wrote, rather peevishly, there is in truth a great deal of humbug about Mr. George Catlin. Charles Dickens, the celebrated English author, found the whole thing rather amusing. He observed, Mr. Catlin, in all good faith, called upon his civilized audiences to take notice of the Indian's perfect symmetry and grace at the exquisite expression of their pantomime. Whatever the reviews, good, bad, or satirical, Catlin managed to create quite a sensation. In 1845, he moved his exhibition to France, where the Indians performed for his majesty, King Louis Philippe.

The King even commissioned some paintings from Catlin. Then, blow by blow, everything went wrong. Catlin's wife died in Paris, followed shortly by his young son. Eight Ojibwe Indians attached to the show also died of smallpox and Brussels. The audiences were dropping off, too, and Catlin got deeply into debt. In 1852, his entire collection was sold off to an American locomotive manufacturer. He feared it would never be seen by the public again. As an old man, Catlin tried to repaint from memory of what he had lost.

He retired to a Garrett in Brussels, and drew up his final account of the Indian life. Of all his experiences, the one that haunted him the most had occurred on his first journey up the Missouri some thirty years before. Here, he had witnessed the most sacred of the Mandan rituals. Only through his paintings and writings do we have any idea of what it was like. The Ojibwe ceremony continues four days and nights for the purpose of conducting the young men through an ordeal of torture which entitles them to the respect of the chiefs. In the mystery lodge, the young men are seen lying their bodies covered with clay. They fast and thirst for four days and nights.

The cutting scene is on the fourth day. One young man is hanging up by splints run through the flesh of his shoulders and is turned round by another with a pull until he faints. Others are in the midst of other tortures while the chiefs and dignitaries of the tribe look on. After the young men have been tortured, they are led out with buffalo skulls hanging on their flesh. Then they drag him with his face in the dirt till the weights tear out. Then they drop him and he lies there until the great spirit gives him strength to rise.

By 1870, the West that George Catlin saw and painted as a young man was gone. In his own lifetime, whole tribes advanced and the landscape itself had changed. In his final years, Catlin recalled his vision of the passing frontier. The West, the vast and vacant wilds which lie between the truddin' haunts of savage and civil life. Upon its boundless plains, I have viewed man in the innocent simplicity of nature. I have seen him happier than kings or princes can be with his pipe and his little ones about him.

I have seen him set fire to his teepee and smooth over the graves of his fathers. I have seen him retreat from the civilized approach which came with all its vices like the dead of night. And I have seen as often the hustling, whistling, hopping and exultant white man who, with the first dip of the plowshare, makes trespass upon the bones of the valiant dead. And I have seen the skull, the pipe and the tamahawk rise up from that ground together in interrogations that the sophistry of this world can never answer. I have seen that splendid juggernaut of civilization and beheld its sweeping desolation. And I've held converse with the happy thousands beyond its influence,

who has not yet reamed if it's a prince. In the end, Catlin won his battle for recognition. The Smithsonian Institution invited him to take up residence and his cherished dream of having his work exhibited there came true in 1871. He died the following year. His works are his most eloquent epitaph. Alfred Jacob Miller's paintings, long forgotten, were rediscovered in the 1930s and established the mountain man as an early hero of the Western.

Carl Bodmer's paintings have graced a series of national exhibitions in recent years and enhanced our understanding of Native Americans. Together, the perception and imagination of these three artists have given us a vision, a picture of the early American West that will never fade. This program is made possible by the Neldicee and H.J. Lutcher's Stark Foundation, owner and operator of the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas, and Neldicee Stark.

Thank you very much.