The North American Indian Portfolio from the Library of Congress: Tiny Folio Edition: 26 - Hardcover

Karl Bodmer; George Catlin; Thomas L. McKenney; James Hall

9780789209061: The North American Indian Portfolio from the Library of Congress: Tiny Folio Edition: 26

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0789209063 ISBN 13: 9780789209061

Publisher: Abbeville Press, 2022

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Rare Book

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

James Gilreath, the former American History Specialist for the Library of Congress's Rare Book and Special Collections, contributed the introduction to this miniature volume, published in association with The Library of Congress.

Excerpt from: The North American Indian Portfolios

Introduction

For centuries the Plains Indians lived undisturbed and relatively isolated in the central part of what now is the United States. The various tribes, which included the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Sioux, Comanche, Kiowa, among others, were, with the exception of the Mandan, nomadic. Each followed the herds of buffalo that roamed the plains, only occasionally coming into contact with white trappers who traded pelts and other skins. The tribes relative isolation rapidly changed after the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804 sparked official United States government interest in the West. The country quickly began to realize the vast promise and resources of the West. As the West lured more and more interest from the government and private sources, interest in the American Indians grew apace. American settlers inexorably moved westward to find cheaper land, land the Indians thought belonged to them.

The range of attitudes about the Indians in the new republic reflected the intensity of the curiosity about them. At one end of the continuum, they were vicious savages who stood in the line of progress; at the other, they were noble savages, a pure people unaffected by corrupt civilization, an idea that traced its intellectual lineage deep into Western civilizations past. A people who had been self-sufficient and insulated from the white world came, in the nineteenth century, to find the world peering at them, and at times even using Indian cultures as laboratories to test social theories about the nature of natural man.

Artists trekked to the West to paint images for those unable to make the journey. An outstanding collection of these travel accounts and illustrated books is part of the Library of Congress's rich collection of Americana housed in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Fulfilling one of the Library's central missions—to document the printed, visual, and written history of this country—the images in this book constitute part of the archive of the American memory. The most significant printed images of the Plains Indians before the Civil War are those from the three books in this volume—Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of North America (Philadelphia, 1835-36), George Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio (London, 1836), and Prince Maximilian Alexander Philipp von Wied-Neuwied's Reise in das innere Nord-America in den Jahren 1832 bis 1834 [Travels in the Interior of North America between 1832 and l834] (Koblenz, 1839-41). Each of these three almost exactly contemporaneous books represents a radically different aspect of how Americans perceived the American Indian. These volumes are some of the most important sociological, historical, and ethnological studies of American Indians that also tell us much about the prevailing white attitudes toward the Indians. The differences among the three are readily apparent at a glance, in the style of illustration.

McKenney and Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of North America consists almost entirely of portraits—stiff and wooden—in which the subjects show little expression. The value of their work was in preserving likenesses of some of the most important Indians of their time. They revealed the novelty of the Indians to eyes more accustomed to European culture, conveying the idea that here is a people who do not look like us and whose geographical remoteness makes it unlikely that the viewer will have the opportunity to see them at first hand. They are exotic, unknowable, and perhaps a little frightening. At the very least they are curious, and a viewer might look at them as he would look at a book of illustrations of unusual plants or animals, which were also common at the time. In fact, the views of the Indians in McKenney and Hall's book are similar to ethnological studies, displaying only the surface of Indian culture...

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.