Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/420

406 Osceola and the other Seminole chiefs, then prisoners of war. The letters embodying the observations made during these journeys in which thirty-eight tribes sat to him for their portraits on the tribes and country furnished the illustrations and text for the book, Illustrations of the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, which passed in England through more than twenty-five editions, and of which more than sixty thousand copies were sold.

Mr. Catlin's chief object on these journeys was to observe the Indian as a man, and to perpetuate the representation of the kind of a man he was. He watched him in every aspect, caught him in every mood, studied him in every relation, and put him down, on canvas or in his notes, as he found him. He enjoyed and improved, to the full extent of his power, opportunities which have occurred to few so ready to make a record of them, and will never occur again to any one, of becoming familiar with the red man in his natural, unsophisticated state, with the intention of making mankind, as far as possible, a sharer in his privileges.

Most of the places he visited, the names of many of which have become familiar to us, and which now seem commonplace, were then away out beyond the bounds of civilization, and visited by the ordinary tourist, if visited by him at all, with an apprehension not unlike that with which he would now start out for Central Africa. The Indians knew little of the white man, and his inventions were strange and mysterious to them. Thus, the people on the Yellowstone had never seen or heard of a steamboat, and at some places were at a loss what to do or how to act at the sight of one.

The art of portrait-painting was new to the savages, and the strange, whimsical, and superstitious notions which they conceived of Mr. Catlin's operations were the source of many curious incidents. The portraits produced great excitement in the villages, with intense interest in the personality of the artist. The people pronounced him the greatest medicine-man in the world, for he made living beings; they said "they could see their chiefs alive in two places; those that he had made were a little alive: they could see their eyes move, could see them smile and laugh, and if they could laugh they could certainly speak, if they should try, and they must therefore have some life in them." The squaws generally agreed that "they had discovered life enough in them to render my medicine too great for the Mandans; saying that such an operation could not be performed without taking from the original something which I put in the picture, and they could see it move, could see it stir." Then the cry went around that the artist was a dangerous man; "one who could make living persons by looking at them, and at the same time