I love history......In school its the only thing besides Algebra that I got A's in..

I have studied a great deal about the early travels of explorers,and pioneers,but the one I enjoyed more than any of the others was,George Catlin....

The stories he documented about the Indians he came in contact with during his journeys to places where some Indians had never seen white men before.

The stories are fascinating,and his paintings also
If you like good reading about a real person that without his artwork,and the journals of his travels we would have little knowledge of how these tribes lived,or what they looked like before the settlers arrived.

When George Catlin's mother was seven, she and her family were briefly captured by Indians in a Revolutionary War battle. Her experience combined with his own later frontier encounters caused young Catlin to grow up steeped in American Indian lore. Initially Catlin practiced law, but in 1823 he abandoned it for a career in painting. His art took a new direction after he saw a delegation of American Indian chieftains in Philadelphia in the late 1820s. He resolved "to use my art and so much of the labors of my future life as might be required in rescuing from oblivion the looks and customs . . . of native man in America."

After 1830, Catlin embarked on several western tours, traveling with traders, soldiers, and explorers. Along the way, he took notes and made hundreds of paintings and sketches, both landscapes and portraits, in an effort to faithfully document the American Indian tribes he encountered. Later, he spent several years exhibiting his paintings, attracting huge crowds, both in the United States and Europe, who were eager to satisfy their curiosity about the "savages" of the New World. Catlin, and others like him, were mistaken in believing that American Indian culture would disappear altogether. Nevertheless, events made it necessary for most American Indians to dramatically alter their way of life. Catlin's work gives us some idea of what American Indian life might have been like prior to contact with Europeans


Here are 6 examples of his work.















Dixie