The Red Man’s Bones: George Catlin, Artist and Showman by Benita Eisler (review)

George Catlin is one of the most important artists of the America West, and Benita Eisler, who has also written on Byron, Chopin, George Sand, and Georgia O’Keeffe, has produced a highly readable biography of him. Catlin, who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, was educated in law. While perfunctorily pursuing his legal career, Catlin taught himself to paint and achieved modest success with a portrait of New York governor DeWitt Clinton and, a few years later, purportedly, a miniature portrait of Sam Houston (now at the Sam Houston Memorial Museum in Huntsville). America was a much smaller country then, and it was relatively easy for him to meet and become friends with a number of artists, including Thomas Sully and Charles Bird King, who painted more than 140 Indian portraits for Thomas McKenney’s Indian Gallery in Washington, D.C. Catlin gave up his law career and headed to St. Louis in 1830, hoping to be able to document the lives of the Plains Indians, whom he, like many other observers, feared would become extinct within a few decades. General William Clark, veteran of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and commissioner of Missouri Territory, encouraged and assisted him in his dream.

In spring 1832, Catlin made his first trip up the Missouri River on the steamboat Yellow Stone, all the way to Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone River. He returned by canoe with two experienced navigueurs, sketching and painting all the way. Catlin made several more western trips—in the spring of 1834 to Indian Territory (and possibly across the Red River into Texas) and to the pipestone quarry in southwestern Minnesota in 1836—before heading to New York with his paintings and collection of Indian artifacts to begin exhibiting his Indian Gallery. In spring 1838 he proceeded to Washington, D.C., hoping that Congress would pay for the acquisition of his collection.

When Congress failed to act, he took the gallery to London, where he rented Egyptian Hall and set up a magnificent Crow tipi in the center of the gallery, which he surrounded with 485 paintings and several hundred costumes, weapons, and utensils of all kinds. Admiring crowds initially buoyed his spirits, and he published his two-volume book, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, in 1841 and, four years later, Catlin’s North American Indian Portfolio. But the admiring crowds dwindled, and his books were so expensive that he was unable to sell enough to recover their cost. Attempting to avoid bankruptcy, he teamed up with P. T. Barnum in 1844 to add twelve Iowa Indians to his exhibition in a tableau vivant. He moved on to Edinburgh in the spring of 1843 and to Paris in the spring of 1845. It was also at this time that Catlin, desperate for cash, became the agent for company promoting immigration to Texas, even investing some of his own money.

Catlin died in 1872, and his collection of paintings eventually wound up in what is today the Smithsonian American Art Museum. By then he had lost the collection to railroad tycoon Joseph Harrison, who had made his money building locomotives and rolling stock for the Russian railroad and had loaned Catlin money with the collection as collateral. When Harrison died in 1874, his widow donated it to the Smithsonian. Catlin’s reputation has increased every decade since.

Eisler relied on solid scholarship for this biography, but a few bothersome errors have, nevertheless, crept into the text. When Catlin’s friend Joseph Chadwick left to join the Texas Revolution, Sam Houston was not governor of Texas, nor had Texas been engaged in a “bloody two-year war” (201) with Santa Anna. Presidio La Bahía is not “located at the mouth of the Brazos River on the Texas coast” (204), and Chadwick died in the Texas Revolution, not in...