Karl Bodmer's Hat: (and Some Missing New Orleans Drawings)

While traveling up the Missouri River in 1833, Prince Maximilian of Wied recorded just how important beaver were to the Plains economy. "Beaver: about 25,000 hides. These are separated into packs, each one weighing one hundred pounds; usually 60 large beavers (to) one pack." It should be noted that this was just one shipment.

The legendary Hugh Glass was one of the many frontiersmen who trapped beaver. In his journal, Travels in North America, 1933–34, Prince Maximilian mentions Hugh Glass three times. Glass hunted beaver and other game. Glass skinned them and sold the skins to many buyers, including the American Fur Company. This was the same company that owned the steamboat Yellow Stone on which Maximilian and Karl Bodmer sailed upriver. In the 1830s a beaver pelt was worth five dollars per pound in New York or London. The beaver skin was for many on the frontier the circulating medium of the country.¹

Before their encounter with beaver pelts on the Missouri, Prince Maximilian spent time recuperating from an illness in New Harmony, Indiana. It was then that Karl Bodmer, the artist hired by Maximilian, traveled on his own down the Mississippi River. In January 1833 Bodmer was in New Orleans arranging a shipment to Europe of specimens and artifacts that Maximilian had collected. Bodmer then returned to New Harmony.

Accounts vary as to how long Bodmer was in New Orleans. All agree, however, it was a stay of at least a week. Yet at that time Bodmer did more drawings of Baton Rouge then he did of New Orleans. Why did this upriver city interest him more than the bustling port of New Orleans?

Bodmer made his first studies of North American Indians on the lower Mississippi, but nothing documenting his New Orleans voyage was included in the picture atlas published by Prince Maximilian years later in Europe.

Fig. 1.

"Beaver Hut on the Missouri." Vignette XVII. Karl Bodmer (Swiss, 1809–1893), produced by Alecto Historical Editions, London, in 1991, from the original ca. 1840 printing plates.

Given the adventure down the Mississippi River and the dynamic city of New Orleans in the nineteenth century, it is interesting to speculate why there are no known sketches or watercolors by Bodmer from his New Orleans adventure.

The city may have been too crowded for Bodmer to do a drawing of the French Quarter, but certainly the view of the city as one approaches it on a steamboat, or as seen from across the river at Algiers, should have attracted the attention of Bodmer the artist. New Orleans does so even today for many photographers who visit.

Perhaps Bodmer never made it into what we know today as the French Quarter. In 1832–33, an epidemic of yellow fever and cholera killed one-fifth of the population of New Orleans. The memory of this epidemic might have kept him away. Bodmer probably heard about this epidemic during the week he spent with the Italian American naturalist Joseph Barrabino.

Or maybe New Orleans appeared to Bodmer as a European, even a French, city. He had already seen such cities in the Old World. He was not interested in depicting urban scenes like this.

Fig. 2.

Paris Beau hat. Robert Lloyd, Lloyd's Treatise on Hats: With Twenty-FourEngravings, 2nd ed. (London: Printed for the Author by F. Thorowgood, 9, Addle-Streel, Aldermanbury, 1819).

Bodmer had a somewhat romantic view of the American prairie and the Native Americans that inhabited it. This view was not inspired by New Orleans. Maybe the artist was more inspired upriver in Baton Rouge, where he stayed for three days and then moved on to Natchez, where he drew Native Americans for the first time. His drawings of the Choctaw, however, were not published in Maximilian's atlas.

Is it possible, because Bodmer was on his own in New Orleans without Maximilian looking over his shoulder, that he did a...