Book Description
From 1831 to 1837, George Catlin traveled extensively among the native peoples of North America—from the Muskogee and Miccosukee Creeks of the Southeast to the Lakota, Mandan, and Pawnee of the West, and from the Winnebagos and Menominees of the North to the Comanches of eastern Texas. Studying their habits, customs, and modes of life, he made copious notes and numerous sketches of ceremonies, buffalo hunts, symbols, and totems. Catlin’s unprecedented fieldwork culminated in more than five hundred oil paintings and his now-legendary journals, which, as Peter Matthiessen writes in his introduction, "taken together... constitute the first, last, and only ‘complete’ record of the Plains Indians ever made at the height of their splendid culture, so soon destroyed by traders’ liquor and disease, rapine and bayonets."

From the Publisher
A digital reproduction of the first edition in two volumes, unabridged, originally published in 1903. CD-ROM based reference material created from a 1903 two-volume set. Fully printable and text searchable. Windows and Macintosh compatible. System Requirements: Pentium processor-based personal computer Windows 95 or Windows NT Windows 3.1 16 MB of RAM available to Acrobat Reader 10 MB of available hard-disk space Macintosh and Power Macintosh Minimum Macintosh with a 68020 or greater processor, or Power Macintosh 12 MB of available hard-disk space Adobe Acrobat Reader3.5 MB of RAM (5 MB for Power Macintosh) available to Acrobat Reader Apple System Software version 7.0 or later recommended.

About the Author
George Catlin (1796-1873) abandoned his law practice to live among the Plains Indians of North America, acquiring their languages and studying their habits, customs, and mode of life. His huge collection of pictures, artifacts, and findings were exhibited around the United States and Europe to great acclaim. Peter Matthiessen was the cofounder of the Paris Review and is the author of numerous works of nonfiction, including In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Indian Country, and The Snow Leopard, winner of the National Book Award.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

George Catlin was an American painter and writer. In 1823 he gave up his law practice to pursue his self-taught art, painting portraits in Philadelphia, Washington, D. C. and Albany, New York. After meeting a tribal delegation of Native Americans from the Far West he became eager to preserve the vanishing tribes and customs of the Native Americans through his art.

Catlin traveled throughout the American West from 1832 to 1840. He sketched and painted hundreds of portraits, village scenes, religious rituals and games and wrote of his encounters with these fascinating people as he worked.