Seventh Generation
George Catlin (1796-1872)

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Perhaps the most significant relative in the Soule family is George Catlin, "Portrayer of the West." He was a fourth cousin of Curtis Otis Mansfield, through his mother, Olivia Catlin. Both George and Olivia were descendants of John and Mary (Marshall) Catlin. The following article about George appeared in the August 1978 issue of MD magazine (illustrations are not original to the article).

BEGINNINGS. The first of 14 children of Putnam Catlin and the former Polly Sutton, George Catlin was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on July 26, 1796. His father, a lawyer who gave up the profession for farming because of poor health, had enlisted in the Revolutionary Army at 13 and had his discharge papers signed by George Washington. His mother, daughter of early settlers in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, had been captured by marauding Indians as a child during the "Wyoming Massacre" of July, 1778, but had been released unharmed.
George was still an infant when the family moved to a new home on the banks of the Susquehanna River. By the time his parents sent him at 21 to study law in the school of Reeve and Gould in Litchfield, Connecticut, his father's birthplace, Catlin had shown a talent for drawing and painting.

ARTIST. At the end of two years, the young lawyer returned to Pennsylvania but showed more interest in painting than practicing law. He soon gained attention as an amateur portrait painter and before long completely gave up law for a career in art. He moved to Philadelphia and hung out a shingle: "George Catlin: Miniature Painter."
The Pennsylvania Academy of Art exhibited four of his miniatures in 1821, six the following year. During the winter of 1822, a delegation of Indians en route to Washington stopped in Philadelphia to visit Peale's Museum, a collection of painting of commanders and events of the Revolution by Charles William Peale. On seeing the Indians in the splendor of their regalia, Catlin decided that nothing short of losing his life would prevent him from visting their country and becoming their historian. He soon began painting on canvas, and the leading artists of the Pennsylvania Academy, Thomas Sully, John Neagle, and Peale and his sons, made him the first recipient of the title "Pennsylvania Academician."
Catlin moved to New York State in 1824 and painted several portraits of Governor DeWitt Clinton, who commissioned him to do a series of drawing of the Erie Canal, published in an official book at the opening of the canal in 1825. A year later he did his first Indian portrait, that of the famous Seneca orator Red Jacket, in Buffalo. At a party at the governor's mansion in Albany, he met Clara Bartlett Gregory, whom he married in 1828. Portrait commissions came in a rush, bbut he rejected many in order to do Indian studies at nearly reservations of Senecas, Oneidas, and Tuscaroras. At Red Jacket's request, he did his full-length, life-sized portrait standing at the brink of Niagara Falls.

ADVENTURER. In 1830, ignoring the pleas of his wife and parents, Catlin set out on his perilous venture beyond the Mississippi, stopping first in St. Louis with letters of introduction to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, General William Clark, the co-leader of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition to the Northwest in 1804. For two years, using St. Louis as a base, Catlin made trips, first with Clark, then alone to Indian council meetings, where he painted portraits of Kee-o-Kuk, Black Hawk, and other chief.
Early in the sping of 1832, through his friendship with Pierre Chouteau, Jr., the western manager of John Jacob Astor's powerful American Fur Company, Catlin secured a place on the steamboat Yellow Stone, which left St. Louis for a tip up the Missouri River to Fort Union, the company's most distant trading post, 2000 miles away. After the first thousand miles, the boat made slow progress. To save time in reaching the first major stop, Fort Pierre, Chouteau led a small party on a 200-mile overland trek, which Catlin joined, rifle in hand, but not neglecting his stetchbooks and canvases

At Fort Pierre, set in the midst of the warlike Sioux, he painted a portrait of the great hunter One Horn in a skin wagwam. It amazed and frightened other chiefs who came to see it, and they bestowed on their visitor the title Ee-cha-zoo-kah-wa-kon, the Medicine Painter. But Sioux medicine men asserted that One Horn could not sleep at night because in the picture his eyes were always open. With great persuasion Catlin overcame the objections and soon other chiefs clamored to be painted. A new uproar occurred when he proposed doing a portrait of a woman, but the chiefs finally yielded.
When Catlin for the sake of variety painted a profile portrait of Chief Little Bear, an onlooker sneered, "Little Bear is but half a man." This led to a fight in which Little Bear was fatally wounded, and war then broke out among the rival bands encamped around the fort. Traders within the fort prepared their defenses and arranged for a quick departure of the Yellow Stone, with Catlin aboard. He risked returning only four months later, after he learned that peace had been restored and no steps would be taken to punish the painter.
At Fort Union, Catlin's portraits were so much in demand by the Blackfoot and Crow chiefs that guards armed with spears stood at the doo of his studio inside the fort to protect him from the throng. He sketched the elaborate rites of Blackfoot medicine men, joined hunting parties of the Blackfeet, Crows, and Assiniboines, covering himself with a wolfskin to approach closely to buffalo to sketch them.

DOWNSTREAM. For the return trip, Catlin Traveled in a small skiff with two seasoned trappers off for a holiday to St. Louis. Among the tribes they visited, the artist's experience with the Mandans was unique. His portraits of tw chiefs provoked alarm among the tribesmen who said that through his "magic" they ahd seen the leaders alive in two places at the same time. After a white fur agent persuaded the tribe that the stranger was doing good, they allowed him to witness and record tribal ceremonies, including a sacrificial rite to the Great Spirit. Catlin's pictorial and written documentation was invaluable, since the tribe was soon killed off by smallpox.
Further down the river, the frontiersmen in a desperate 24-hour race for their lives eluded one of the few hostile tribes, the Arikaras, who had sworn vengeance against all white men after two of tehir tribe had been killed by trappers.
After spending two winters with his wife in Pensacola, Florida, recovering from the rigors of his adventures, Catlin obtained official permission to accompany an expedition of the First Regiment of Mounted Dtagoons across the southern plains to the Rocky Mountains. He met the regiment at Fort Gibson on the Arkansas River, and while awaiting its departure did paintings of Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Seminoles, and other tribes that had been removed from the East by the government.
During the westward trek, a severe outbreak of fever sharply reduced the ranks of the regiment. About 30 men, including Catlin, too weak to continue, were left at a Comanche village. Feeble from his illness, he nonetheless set out on his horse, with a pair of buffalo robes, a coffee pot and tin cup tied to his saddle, half a boiled ham with salt, pistols in his belt and fowling piece in hand, to ride 540 miles across the roadless prairie to St. Louis. Although he had to be helped into the saddle, Catlin was determined not to part with his horse, considered the finest and most spirited animal in the regionk and he could not bear the heavy expense of shipping him 1600 miles by boat.
To regain his health, he and his wife again wintered in Florida, and in 1835 she accompanied him to Fort Snelling. A year later Catlin's final trip into Indian territory took him, in the face of warnings and threats by Sioux warriors, to the forbidden site of the Pipestone Quarry, source of the red clay used in Indian ceremonial pipes. In his honor the clay has been named catlinite.

GALLERY UNIQUE. During his exhibition of his Indian Gallery, Catlin appealed for understanding and fair treatment for the North American Indians. He declared: "All history on the subject goes to prove, that when first visited by civilized people, the American Indians have been found friendly and hospitable. Nowhere, to my knowledge, have they stolen a sixpense worth of my property, though in their countries there are no laws to punish for theft. I have visited 48 different tribes, and I feel authorized to say that the North American Indian in his native state is honest, hospitable, faithful, warlike, brave, cruel, relentless--and an honorable and religious human being."
Kee-o-kuk, the famous chief of the Sacs and Foxes, on a visit to New York attended Catlin's lecture wife his wife and 20 leading members of the tribe who yelled with delight at the sight of the portrait of their chief on his war horsse, whereupon Kee-o-kuk apologized for their noisy enthusiasm. Catlin said many persons had questioned the exactness of his picture, being unwilling to believe thaat any Indian on the frontier could own so fine an animal.
After a resolution was introduced in Congress to purchase his collection for a national museum, Catlin took his exhibition successively to Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston, gaining considerable support. Senators Henry Clay and Daniel Webster endorsed his proposal for a national museum, but Congress failed to act, and the discouraged artist took his exhibits abroad.

EXILE. Catlin embarked for England in the fall of 1839 with eight tons of freight, consisting of 600 paintings, several thousand Indian costumes, weapons, and other paraphernalia. His exhibition opened in London at Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, in Feburary , 1840, and was a huge success.
In October of the following year he published his two-volume Letters and Notes of the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians, illustrated by 400 line drawings he made after his paintings. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert headed a long list of distinguished subscribers. The Royal Institute, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Royal Historical Society invited him to lecture, and he was much in demand socially.
At the crest of his success, his wife and their two young daughters arrived from New York. During the third year of the exhibition at Egyptian Hall, attendance dwindled, and Catlin toured other British cities with the show. A group of Ojibway Indians arriving at Liverpool offered to join the show, and he returned to London to reopen at Egyptian Hall with "real live American Indians." They were also taken to Buckingham Palace for a command performance before the queen. To offset declining income from his exhibition, Catlin issued a portfolio of 25 colored reproductions of his paintings.
Planning to return to the United States in 1845 after a visit to France, he took his family (another daughter and a son had been born in England) and the troupe of Indians to Paris, where King Louis Philippe welcomed them at the Tuileres palace. Among the visitors to the public exhibition, which was a great success, were Victor Huge, George Sand, and Alexander von Humboldt.
Before Catlin could complete arrangements for the homeward voyage, his wife became ill and died of pneumonia, leaving him stunned. Louis Philippe invited him to set up his Indian Galley in the Salle de Séance of the Louvre, where the Indians danced for royalty. The King ordered 15 Indian paintings for the Palace of Versailles. At the invitation of the King of Belgium, Catlin took the Indians to Brussels, where several became ill and had to be hospitalized. Eventually three died and the otherss returned home. Catlin bore all expenses, which severely depleted his resources.

After his return to Paris, his three-year-old son died of pneumonia. Throughout his ordeals Catlin continued his appeal to Congress, which approved a bill in 1846 to establish the Smithsonian Institution, but owing to the Mexican War it look no further action to buy the Indian Gallery. Catlin completed the 15 paintings for Louis Philippe, who promptly ordered 29 more on the exploits of the 17th-century French explorer La Salle. The artist spent nearly a year on the new paintings, then delivered them with an urgent request for payment, amounting to little more than $100 each, but never received a sou. During the uprising that overthrew Louis Philippe in 1848, a revolutionary mob broke into Catlin's apartment in the place de la Madeleine and destroyed several paintings with bayonets. The artist fled to England with his children and the Indian Gallery.
To sustain himself and his daughters, he hastily wrote and published late in 1848 a two-volume book, Eight Years' Travel and Residence in Europe. He also did a series of pencil drawings, Souvenirs of the North American Indians, now in the New York Public Library, and made an agreement with an English patron to paint 55 copies of his original paintings at the price of £2 each with an additional allowance of two shillings for each frame. He also borrowed heavily on teh security of his Indian Gallery, still counting on its purchase by Congress. In the final vote on a bill for its purchased in the 1852-53 session, it lost by one vote, that of Senator Jefferson Davis of Kentucky.
Catlin faced disaster as his creditors clamored for payment. A wealthy American, Joseph Harriman, owner of the world's largest locomotive building plant in Philadelphia, paid off enough of the debts to get control of the Indian Gallery and hurriedly shipped it to Philadelphia. Everything else was seized, including the furnishings in the artist's rooms. Members of his wife's family arrived to take his daughters back to the United States.

PERSONALITY. Of medium height, thin and wiry, with dark complexion and black hair, George Catlin could have passed for an Indian after his face became weather beaten, except for his blue eyes. He bore a long scar on his left cheekbone from a boyhood accident, when a tomahawk thrown in practice by a playmate glanced off a tree and struck him. He was sociable, made friends readily, and never became bitter, even after the worst setbacks. In one of his tributes to the Indians, he wrote: "How I love a people who don't live for the love of money." Modest and restrained, he often ignored challenges by scientists of his observations, but finally wrote O-Kee-Pa after his account of the Mandan tribe had been questioned in a publication subsidized by the United States government.
Both in exploration and follow-up studio work, he seemed indefatigable. He worked rapidly and is believed by some experts to have painted as many as half a dozen portraits in an Indian village in a single day. Generally agreed is that his later copies do not measure up to those done from life.

LAST YEARS. Inspired by stories of lost gold mines in Brazil, at 56 and nearly deaf, he launched into a new adventure. He took passage to Venezuela, crossed into Brazil, finally abandoned his futile search for gold and set out to paint the Indian tribes of South America. With Caesar Bolla, an escaped slave from Havana who served as his man Friday, he traveled up the Amazon by canoe to its source, crossed the Andes to the Pacific coast, sent south to Tierra del Fuego. Later the pair traveled up the Pacific coast to the Aleutian Islands and across to Siberia. On their return, they reached the Gulf of Mexico, crossed by boat to Yucatán, where they finally parted.
Catlin returned to Paris, then moved to Brussels and set up a studio in which he made replicas of earlier paintings. He did most of them on heavy cardboard with outline pen drawings, very likely transferred from the engravings in his Letters and Notes, then filled in the outlines lightly with oil paints. He also wrote and published three more books, Life Amongst the Indians, O-Kee-Pa, and Last Rambles Among the Indians.
In 1870 at the age of 74 he returned to New York and opened a large exhibition at the Sommerville Gallery of "Catlin's Indian Cartoons," consisting of the replicas made in Brussels, 150 paintings done in South America, and other works. It was not successful, but afterward he sent the exhibition to the Smithsonian Institution at the invitation of its director, Joseph Nenry, an old friend who vainly appealed to Congress to purchase it. After a severe illness in October, 1872, Catlin moved to Jersey City, New Jersey, to be near his daughters. He died there December 23, 1872.
The Smithsonian Institution later received as a gift from the heirs of Joseph Harrison the original Catlin Indian Gallery, heavily damaged through improper storage, but since restored. The Catlin Cartoon Collection remained in the possession of the artist's daughters until 1912, when the American Museum of Natural History bought it.

SUMMING UP. The most realistic and memorable record of Indian culture before the age of photography.

The following letter (April 22, 1861) from George Catlin, written from Ostende, Belgium, to his daughter Louise, then 19, is reproduced in Posterity: Letters of Great American to Their Children, Lawson, Dorie McCullough. New York: Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., 2004.

My Dear, Sweet Little Louise,

Your affectionate and beautiful letter came to me yesterday, and I lose no time in answering it, to tell you what pleasure it has brought me: this I shall scarcely be able to do for there are many things which language was note made perfect enough to express or explain.
One of these things is the paternal and filial affections which connects parents and children together--when like cords, they are stretched, bit not snapped, by distance and long absences.
My dear child, I have read your affectionate latter over and over, with tearss in my eyes, and I thank you for every line of it. It is so tender--so loving--so devotional. My conduct has broken your hearts, but my lovely children I pray to God that He may help you to forgive me. He is my witness that I have done the best I could under cruel and painful circumstances. You can imagine somewhat of the shame, the pain, the anguish of an ffectionate and loving parent so long separated from those that he most loves--that he idolizes, but you can never know the whole of it. The labours and successes and misfortunes. I made a fortune for you since I saw you, but I lost it again. I have seen much and I have done much--I have traveled much, and for the last year and a half I have suffered much--I have stood upon the crater of two volcanos in the Koriak Mountains of Siberia. I have been to the Aleutian Islands, & Kamchatka, traced the Pacific Coast to the mouth of Columbia--asended that and crossed the Rocky Mountains to Santa Fe--from that to Matamoras, by the Rio Colorado--from that to Cuba--to the Amazon, (the second time) to Venezuela to Bolivia--to Perou--to Equador--to Central Ama--to Yucatan--Palenque to Uxmal &c&c. The expenses of traveling in foreign lands are enormous, & I have had nothing but my own hands with the talent which the Almighty gave me (perhaps for that purpose) to pay my way. You can imagine, my dear child that I have travelled to a disadvantage--that my life has been a rough one, & that I have had to labour hard and constantly, to go through what I have done. I have had no time for pleasure or enjoyment, save those which my labours and the thoughts of my dear little children have affrorded me. If my life had been thrown away in idleness or dissapations udring these long years of absence there would be no excuse for me. I would be a monster, and I should have no right to ask forgiveness of my dear little angels, but I have been constantly at work, and still am so, even when lying on my back, or hobbling about on Crutches.
I know by my recollections of your early taste as well as by the graceful and prettily formed lines in your letter that you have a talent for the Art; and I believe (yes, that you can "help me") I think I am preparing enough for your delicate little fingers to work on for a long time, if you are disposed to do so, and for the benefit of yourself and your dear sisters, when I shall be dead and gone. These things I intend to bring to you before long, if our Country is not deluged in blood which I am any day afraid to hear of.
Your sweet and pretty little postcard came safe in your letter, as well as one from Clara, & one from Libby in her letter from Cincinnati. Oh how pretty they look to me--and how they accuse me. Clara told me in her last letter that both you and she had written me before, but I never have recd those letters, nor can I account for them. I have now but two traces from your little fingers on earth--the one in your composition in French, on La Morgue--and the other, the affectionate letter which I recd yesterday. I came to Ostende about 10 days since, having been in London for a few days, hobbling about on one Crutch. I have now no appearance of any further volcanic affairs in my knees, but I am still a cripple. And such I fear I shall be for the remainder of my days. I suffer considerable pain at times, and mostly in the night, when one should suppose I should be most at east. While I hobble about in the open air, and keep in motion, I get along tolerably well, but after sitting for a while it is hard starting. I am giving myself pain in walking, in order to prevent a crooked leg.
Libby wrote me that Mr. Dudly Gregory had been very ill--this I am sorry to hear, but I hope he has greatly recovered. I shall always sympathize deeply and tenderly with such any afflictions amongst those who have been so kind to my little daughters. How long I shall be in Ostende I know not--it matters little where I am now, as I require but little space and am solely occupied in writing. And there is such a splendid promenade here on the parapet between the town and the beach--in teh sea air, that I believe it may be the best place I could be in. Letters addressed to me at present, to Porte Restard, Ostende, Belgique will be sure to reach me. Give my love to dear, dear little Clara, and tell her that I will answer her letter in a few days. Remember me affecgtionately to all those so kind to you and rest assured gthat I have never for a moment lost that love that I always had for my dear little girls.

Your affectionate parent
Geo. Catlin