GEORGE CATLIN

HE CAME

HE SAW

HE CAPTURED

THE RED MAN ON CANVAS

Not long ago a woman I know told me how once when she was roaming the hills in our part of Arizona she slipped and fell and slid downgrade a considerable distance. The experience, including a torn pair of levis, had been well worth the discomfort, she said, when she found she had landed beside a rare and perfect Indian arrowhead.

A young neighbor of ours once came to us in trembling excitement with the news that he had discovered a chipping ground "back there some place." He described his find in loving detail but cagily withheld its location, for he knew that scores of enthusiasts would have scrambled to share it with him, the way it was in the Gold Rush days.

What would these two have given, I wondered, they and thousands of other Indian-relic hunters, to have been with one George Catlin (1796-1872) on a day in 1855 when he stood beside the Gila River and observed a group of skilled Apache craftsmen fashioning by a secret process arrow and spear points such as our friends now collect? Arrowheads then had no historical significance. Nor were they mere objects of beauty. They were vital to tribal survival; and Catlin's description of their production constitutes but one of the final links in a chain of evidence he had been devotedly forging for years in a record of the American Indian which remains the most impressive and complete of its sort in existence.

From the time he was a nine-year-old boy growing up beside the Susquehanna River in New York (one-time homeland of the Oneidas and the Mohawks) to the day he died in Jersey City, a broken and defeated old man whose country had denied him recognition and, what to him was worse, had failed to appreciate the significance of his life work, George Catlin, explorer, artist, writer, collector, and showman par excellence, was consecrated to a single purpose, that of recording the spirit, ways of life, and physical likenesses of the American Indian before these should have been vitiated or destroyed by the alien civilization of the white man.

Catlin's mother, as a child, had been captured by the Oneidas during the Wyoming Massacre (so-called from a valley of that name near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania) and had come out of the experience unscathed either in body or in mind. His father, a veteran of the Revolution, had known Indians in his own youth and had been interested enough in them to familiarize himself with their language. But the first Indian George himself ever saw was a strikingly handsome and sympathetic Oneida named Onogongway, or "Great Warrior," who, as a boy, had been present at the Wyoming Massacre and who, years later, had returned from his distant Cayuga Lake home to the scene of his people's retreat, a place which now by fateful chance was on property owned by the Catlins.

Onegongway had made the long journey in hope of retrieving a fabulous "kettle of gold," part of the booty taken from the whites during the Massacre. He remembered where he had buried it after the battle and thought to retrieve it for his family's benefit.

The kettle, when found, turned out to be brass; but the effect of his meeting with the Indian upon the impressionable mind of young Catlin proved pure gold. Although fifty years were to pass before he would describe it in print, the memory of his early encounter with a truly "noble" red man played an important role in setting the course of Catlin's life.

When still in his early twenties, Catlin, having taught himself to draw and paint and having proven his considerable gift for this art, had cut short a promising law career to move to Philadelphia, then the home of some of America's most distinguished painters. Here he spent a great deal of time studying the eclectic collections in the Philadelphia Museum of Charles Willson Peale, including that master's series of Indian portraits. And here one day in the winter of 1822-23, according to Catlin's biographer, Loyd Haberly, "he found Peale's portraits walking the huge hall in the round and feathered fullness of life. Startled, he stared in awed admiration at the delegation of prairie chiefs who were being shown these wonderrooms on their way back from Washington to the western wilds."

At that moment, apparently, Catlin's hitherto halfconscious dream took sudden shape. He would, he decided, attempt to record in paint all the tribes then living between the Alleghenies and the Pacific. He would form a complete collection of Indian artifacts and of all the animals, plants, and other natural influences which had helped mold the Indian cultures. He would travel the country with this unique "Gallery and Museum" so that white Americans everywhere would learn to know and respect their red brothers; and in the end the collection would be purchased by the nation as a lasting memorial to the continent's original inhabitants.

It was an immense and seemingly impossible project; yet through good fortune and ill Catlin never relinquished his dedication to it, though the lives of his loved ones were lost because of it and the nation which was to have been the beneficiary of his legacy largely ignored it during the dreamer's lifetime.

In 1830 Catlin set out for St. Louis, then the gateway to the West, on the first of many expeditions in search of material. He was 34 years old. With all the territory he had set himself to cover, and with the numerous tragic problems life was to hold in store for him, it would be a quarter of a century before, in the spring of 1855, he would make his first and only trip to the west coast and the desert Southwest. When he finally achieved this goal (via South America and the Aleutians!) one of the most interesting places he visited was a large "Ghila Apáchee" village on the north bank of the Gila, probably a few miles east of the present site of Yuma. Here he was privileged to observe two distinctive Apache customs seldom, if ever, witnessed by white men before or since.

One was the "factory" in which arrow and spear-heads were being made, the other a shooting match for the training of warriors and hunters, an event which he described as rivalling in beauty and skill any national or international match he had ever seen. His host was Chief Belasoquána, "The Spanish Spur," a squat and much

tattooed but highly dignified personage celebrated for his battles with the Mexicans.

The chief had earned his name from a pair of huge spurs taken from a Spanish officer whom he had killed in single combat. The spurs he often wore as trophies, and when Catlin portrayed him he was garbed in a handsome buffalo robe decorated with the painted record of his victories.

Belasoquána's vanity was thus more conventionally displayed than that of another Gila Apache warrior, Eltono. Eltono, when asked to pose, tossed his weapons and every stitch of buckskin he was wearing to his three wives before the eyes of snickering onlookers and commanded the startled artist, "Paint me! My dress can always be seen."

By 1855 Catlin had assembled an astounding and heroic body of work including several thousand drawings, lithographs, paintings, and "cartoons" (a term he employed to distinguish his later paintings, done in a different technique, from the earlier ones produced in the 1830's) of well over a hundred different tribes in North and South America.

So he knew whereof he spoke when he wrote of the Apaches whom he visited at that time, "Their manufacture of flint arrow and spear heads, as well as their bows of bone and sinew, are equal, if not superior to the manufactures of any tribe existing."

The flint or obsidian "boulders" for the points, he tells us, were broken into the required shapes by a method which no "civilized artisans," even those provided with the best of tools, had ever been able to imitate. And even among the Apaches only certain highly skilled workmen were entrusted with this important job.

He describes the process in detail, emphasizing that the tools used were nothing more than a hornstone sledgehammer, the workman's hand, and a punch made of the incisor tooth of the sperm whale or sea lion, since these Indians had no metal.

"Erratic boulders of flint," he wrote, "are collected (and sometimes brought an immense distance), and broken with a sort of sledge-hammer made of a rounded pebble of hornstone set in a twisted withe, holding the stone, and forming a handle.

"The flint, at the indiscriminate blows of the sledge, is broken into a hundred pieces, and such flakes selected as, from the angles of their fracture and thickness, will answer as the basis of an arrow-head "The master workman, seated on the ground, lays one of these flakes on the palm of his left hand, holding it firmly down with two or more fingers of the same hand, and with his right hand between the thumb and two forefingers, places his chisel (or punch) on the point that is to be broken off; and a co-operator (a striker) sitting in front of him, with a mallet of very hard wood, strikes the under side, below each projecting point that is struck. The flint is then turned and chipped in the same manner from the opposite side; and so turned and chipped until the required shape and dimensions are obtained, all the fractures being made on the palm of the hand. "In selecting a flake for the arrow-head, a nice judgment must be used, or the attempt will fail: a flake with two opposite parallel, or nearly parallel, planes is found, and of a thickness required for the centre of the arrow-point. The first chipping reaches near to the centre of these planes, but without breaking it away, and each chipping is shorter and shorter, until the shape and the edge of the arrow-head are formed.

"Paint me," said Eltono, famous Apache warrior, "my dress can always be seen."

"The yielding elasticity of the palm of the hand enables the chip to come off without breaking the body of the flint, which would be the case if they were broken on a hard surface . . .

The punch is about six or seven inches in length, and one inch in diameter, with one rounded side and two plain sides, therefore presenting one acute and two obtuse angles, to suit the point to be broken.

"This operation is very curious, both the holder and the striker singing, and the strokes of the mallet given exactly in time with the music, and with a sharp and rebounding blow, in which, the Indians tell us, is the great medicine (or mystery) of the operation."

It was, however, the Apaches' "use of the bow from their horses' backs whilst running at full speed" that most excited his admiration during his visit to Belasoquána's village.

Expertness in archery was a vital skill to these Indians, he explained, not only in battle but in hunting, on which an important portion of their food supply depended.

Success depended upon the swiftness with which they could get their arrows onto the bowstring and off again and the accuracy with which they could aim from the backs of their racing mounts. In order to develop and maintain these skills they staged tremendously exciting shooting matches many times each year. The matches were competitive sporting as well as practice events and were followed by the awarding of prizes to the high scorers and a feast for all the contenders.

It was Catlin's good fortune that such a match should have been held during his three-day visit to the village.

As he described the scene, ten successive circular targets had been made on level ground by cutting away the turf. In each a central bull's-eye had been formed with white pipe clay. At the start of every round (there were ten in all) each warrior mounted, painted, and dressed in full war regalia, bare-shouldered and with a shield on his back grasped his short bow and ten arrows in his left hand.

The course was a circular one, a mile or more in length. In single file the riders galloped their horses around it as rapidly as possible, shooting an arrow into each target as they passed.

Wrote Catlin, "The rapidity with which their arrows are placed upon the string and sent is a mystery to the bystander, and must be seen to be believed. No repeating arms ever yet constructed are so rapid, nor any arm, at that little distance, more fatal. Each arrow, as it flies, goes with a yelp, and each bow is bent with a 'wuhgh!' which seems to strain its utmost sinew, and every muscle of the archer."

The description is eloquent, Catlin's “cartoon” painting of the contest even more so, and when one examines this and the comparatively few other records Catlin had time to make of our Southwest tribes in a day long before the fierce “hostiles” had been subdued, one must deeply regret that he was granted by fate no more than a brief stay in this part of the country.

The second half of George Catlin's life was a period of almost unbroken personal and professional misfortune. It had always been the artist's dream that his Indian Gallery and Museum the great paintings he had produced in the 1830's, and the historically invaluable tribal artifacts and “curiosities” he had at that time collected would be purchased by the government of the United States to be preserved in perpetuity for the edification of the American people.

In the fall of 1839, temporarily (as he still sanguinely believed) disappointed of his hope, Catlin took his collection and his “wild west show” to Europe for a series of exhibitions. Evidently he thought Congress might be frightened by the prospect of losing this intrinsically American treasure to a foreign purchaser; but not until years later, when his own financial straits had become desperate, did Catlin seriously consider disposing of the collection abroad.

Once, at the time of the establishment of a National Museum to be known as the Smithsonian Institution, Catlin's dream came within an ace of realization, but the outbreak of the Mexican War put an end to the then recommended purchase of the collection. Again, during its 1852-53 session, Congress had before it a Bill for the purchase of the Catlin Indian Gallery. Daniel Webster, one of its many prominent supporters, addressing the Senate, described the Gallery as being “more important than all the other drawings and representations on the face of the earth.” Its purchase, he declared, would be an “important public act.” Nevertheless, the Bill was defeated by a single anti-Indian vote!

Catlin had been confident of victory this time and had borrowed heavily against the Gallery, which he was then showing in London. Now his creditors descended mercilessly upon him, and he was threatened with its total loss until a wealthy American locomotive manufacturer, one Joseph Harrison of Philadelphia, came to the rescue, after a fashion. Himself a substantial creditor, Harrison paid off the most important debts against the collection and hastily shipped it to Philadelphia, where a large portion of it was to remain for many years, improperly and damagingly stored in the basement of the Harrison Boiler Works.

Indomitably, Catlin went on to create a new one, and when at last he returned to New York in 1870 (he was then 74 years old), he had duplicated (although in a different technique) most of the paintings in the original Gallery and had created many new ones, including those done in the 1850's in South America, the Aleutian Islands, the Far West, and the Southwestern United States. This new collection he called Catlin's Indian Cartoons. It, too, failed of purchase by the Smithsonian, and following the artist's death it was inherited by his daughters. In 1909, one of the daughters, Elizabeth Catlin, loaned the cartoon collection to the American Museum of Natural History in New York with an option to buy. Three years later the collection was acquired by the Museum. În 1959 a large group of the cartoons, among them those reproduced here, were sold to the Kennedy Galleries of New York.The original Indian Gallery, ironically enough, finally came into possession of the Smithsonian although not by official action when, on May 19, 1879, just seven years after George Catlin's death, the heirs of Joseph Harrison presented it as a gift to the nation. The official description of it, written by Thomas C. Donaldson in the National Museum's Annual Report for 1885, required 936 pages to unfold!

Note: There has been no space in this brief account to do more than hint at the full scope of Catlin's dramatic and moving career. Those who may wish to follow the story further are referred, as a start, to the following four books.

Haberly, Loyd. Pursuit of the Horizon: A Life of George Catlin, Painter and Recorder of the American Indian. New York. The Macmillan Company. 1948.

Ross, Marvin C. (Edited by). George Catlin: Episodes from Life Among the Indians, and Last Rambles. Norman, Oklahoma. University of Oklahoma Press. 1959.

Donaldson, T. The George Catlin Indian Gallery in the U.S. National Museum (Smithsonian Institution) with Memoire and Statistics. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution to July, 1885, Part II, pp. 265-939. Washington, D.C. 1886.

McCracken, Harold. George Catlin and the Old Frontier: A Biography and Picture Gallery of the Dean of Indian Painters. New York. The Dial Press. 1959.

YOURS SINCERELY SALT RIVER PROJECT:

The Salt River Project was beautifully presented in April ARIZONA HIGHWAYS. Please clarify one point. Am I correct in understanding no water from the Project serves Indian lands?

RECLAMATION HERO:

We writing people ask a lot of questions, and every once in a while we get an imporOnce I asked a man whom I had known was an important factor in many of the major developments of the previous halfcentury, how-come there had been practically no publicity about him.

"Mr. Morgan," he replied, "in every important business organization there are two kinds of people. There are window-dressers and there are those who do the work. I belong to the latter class."

When we are dealing with the stuff of which history is made, I wonder if we are justified in giving the whole play to the "window-dressers" and not even mentioning "those who do the work." And particularly if they are dead and on the way to being forgotten.

Your recent issue on the Theodore Roosevelt Dam, et al., was as usual-beautifully done. I don't blame Teddy, in the speech you quoted, for taking the credit for the Reclamation Act. Any politician that might have occupied that strategic spot would have done the same thing.

But the facts are that George H. Maxwell conceived and developed the whole idea, put on the campaign that pressured the Congress into passing the bill, and sold Roosevelt the idea of helping and signing the bill.

That campaign was about the cleverest public relations job in our national history. Maxwell went to McCormick, Deering, and other manufacturers of farm machinery, and pointed out that under the proposed Reclamation Act, millions of acres of desert would become fertile farm land thus creating a tremendous new market for farm machinery. They became enthusiastic supporters of the bill, wrote letters to all the members of the Congress they knew, urging its passage. Then Maxwell got them to write letters to all their distributors, urging them to do likewise. He followed these up and got them to enlist the help of the local dealers all over the country.

Pretty quickly, to the amazement of official Washington, a perfect torrent of letters urging the passage of the Reclamation Act poured in from every part of the United States.

OPPOSITE PAGE

"SPRING FLOWERS-WHITE MOUNTAINS" BY JOSEF MUENCH. 4x5 Linhof camera; Ektachrome daylight; f. 22 at 1/5th sec.; 6" Xenar lens; July. Photo was taken along a little stream in the White Mountains, near State 273 in the lovely high country of Eastern Arizona. Summer rains turn the mountain meadows into veritable flower gardens.

BACK COVER

"CEDAR WAXWING" BY HUBERT A. LOWMAN. 4x5 Brand-17 view camera; Ektachrome E-3, type B; f 12.7 at 1/5th sec.; 8" Ektar lens; February; 25 Weston meter reading (compensating for bellows extension, see below) ASA rating 32. Cedar Waxwings (Bombycillidae cedroum) are transient birds which may be seen in flocks across the entire southern United States during the cooler months of the year. Their chief food is fruit, both wild and cultivated. In the Southwest they find the red pyracantha berries extremely tempting and a flock will strip a bush in a few hours. This unfortunate little fellow had stunned itself by flying into the reflection in a view window. It could fly but preferred not to and willingly sat on its perch and watched the preparations to take its picture. Being late afternoon on a cloudy day there was no daylight, photographically speaking, and the light used was a 3200K bulb in reflector about 18" from the subject with Type B film. Due to the extension of the bellows to 14" with an 8" lens in the camera, the aperture was 1% stops wider than the meter reading indicated.

NIGHT LIGHTS

(From a Hilltop) Diamonds, rubies and emeralds, Amber of traffic light, Sapphire of neon and beacon Heaped in the bowl of night Like costly, precious jewels Of a jaded potentate, Who scoops up a careless handful To measure his royal weight, Then trickles them through his fingers, Tossing the last few down To roll like glittering dice Out to the limits of town.

The mountain tops are jagged With slim crags stretching high. They look like mighty fingers Reaching up to scratch the sky.

This sure is one of them lonesome nightsA lorn coyote singing; Moonlight splashed on stony heights Like alkali, white and clinging; Yucca ghosts; air sharp and chill To knife where a bedroll's tumbled; And a gray owl swooping still as still Where a careless hedgehog stumbled. City has noise and folks and lights This is one of them lonesome nights.

No cowboy walks; how indiscreet To be "caught dead" upon his feet! Or if he were, he'd say "Of course, You know I'm looking for my horse."

His eyes are dim who cannot see A mountain's purple majesty. His ears are deaf who cannot hear Love songs of birds in spring of year. His feel is numb who never seeks A mountain breeze to cool his cheeks. His soul is dead who gets no thrills From rocks and woods and templed hills. He who no wilderness has trod Has missed a chance to walk with God.

Green tree, uprooted from your native soil, You will not thrive. Though long I tend you, and though late I toil To keep alive Your roots beneath this earth-your roots that sense This is their tomb, And tall and straight you grow in recompense, You will not bloom. Green tree, we two are kindred. We will stand, Unblossoming, As aliens and strangers of the land, This second spring.