Ep. 09: Catlin’s and Bodmer’s "Time Machine Visuals" | The American West

Landscapes, wildlife, and Native people dominated the fascination with the early American West, but imagining that world is not easy. Fortunately, two talented and committed painters, one American and one European, left the future a rich and varied body of “Time Machine Visuals” of the Missouri River West in the 1830s. George Catlin was a Pennsylvanian whose life’s work was to be the historian of Native people. Catlin was a Romantic who believed preserving the West’s landscapes, animals, and Indian peoples was essential to the future. Karl Bodmer was the supremely talented painter on a Prussian prince’s 1833-4 journey up the Missouri, whose marvelous paintings have enabled modern Native people and Hollywood to re-discover the early West. Both men are celebrated now for their visual portrayals of a lost world. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck https://www.instagram.com/velvetbuckwine. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  In the 1830s, two talented painters, George Catlin and Carl Bodmer, journeyed into the West and left the future a marvelous body of artwork. Time machine visuals that enable us now to form an evocative sense of the early West and its primary characters. I'm Dan Flores and this is The American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the season that calls us home. A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters, and wildlife. Enjoy responsibly.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Catlins and Bodmers Time Machine Visuals.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  A few years ago, when high summer burned its brief, bright flame in Montana's Glacier National Park, a friend and I loaded up our backpacks and headed off for the Northern Rockies backcountry.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  During that narrow window-in-glacier between July high water and late-August snow, you can ford the rivers on sunny mornings and sleep under star-spangled mountain skies. So my buddy and I spent four days backpacking across the park from its western boundary to Blackfeet lands on its eastern one.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  In my mind's eye, those four days still emerge in fair detail: the adrenaline surge of crossing the Flathead River with a full backpack, the thunder and spray of Nyack Falls, miles of slogging through neck-high huckleberry bushes in the best grizzly habitat left on Earth, and high-elevation nights with stars polished to brilliance. There was also the technicolor panorama from atop Cut Bank Pass and an unintentional glissade down a snowfield, which could have ended badly had I not pulled out a stand-up slide into second base from a past life. No one drowned in the Flathead River, was rushed by a grizzly, toppled off a glacier,

• 3:25Speaker 01

  or got struck by lightning amongst the peaks.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Beyond my memories, I preserve this adventure the way we all do now: with photographs. What still photographs lack in recreating the past, of course, is the ability to engage all the human senses. Nyack Falls is a marvel in my shots of it, but since this backpack predated smartphones, the falls stand mute in my photos. They're crashing thunder, now irretrievable. I have one photo from day two, a fresh grizzly scat in our trail, but I only dimly recall the primary sensory effect, which naturally was the redolent, earthy scent of half-hour-old bear shit.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  It's fortunate that we humans evolved to be such a visual species, though, because I can still conjure a sense of this boundary-to-boundary hike and glacier purely from images. That knowledge helps me put aside any disappointment that when we try to reach back in time and touch the early West, our best time machine for that engages just one sense: the visual record. A record left to us by artists who were adventurous and talented enough to make us believe sometimes that we're standing there beside them in the West of the 1830s or 1840s. The two time machine guys, I think, are the very

• 4:55Speaker 01

  best for setting me down in their time and in the places they saw are George Catlin and Carl Bodmer. Let me tell you a little bit about each of them and why time perusing the images they left the future just might be ours you don't have to deduct from your allotted span on Earth.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Sometime in the past half-century, George Catlin managed to be modestly rediscovered. That's something of a miracle for a 19th-century man whose lifetime work was once stored away in a boiler factory, then forgotten and left to nearly ruin there. But nowadays, most people interested in the West and its story know Catlin's name and might have a hazy notion of his career, even if the depth of understanding is about on a par with having heard of Van Gogh enough to know that he cut off his ear. Cocktail party conversation may not get at exactly why this Western artist was so passionate about Indians and

• 6:05Speaker 01

  the Dutch one so committed to slicing and dicing his anatomy, but Catlin does have name recognition.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  In Catlin’s case, name recognition probably has more to do with his subject matter than with his life. Americans have a powerful fascination with Native people. From the time of the Boston Tea Party down to the last Grateful Dead concerts, Americans have been cross-dressing as Indians and sometimes even calling on the Native story to help figure out our national identity. So, most of us are prepared to understand Catlin’s mission as a painter, which was obsessive enough to have inspired Herman Melville in developing the character of Captain Ahab. Because Catlin wrote as well as painted, we know a lot about that obsession, which he described this way:

• 6:56Speaker 01

  “I sat out alone, unaided and unadvised, resolved, if my life should be spared, by the aid of my brush and pen, to rescue from oblivion so much of the Indians’ looks and customs as the industry and ardent enthusiasm of one lifetime could accomplish.” He wrote that he sought to record nothing less than “true and facsimile traces of individual life and historical facts.” He put that phrase in italics to emphasize it. That goal seems noble, maybe more than a touch romantic. In Catlin’s case, romance was so embedded that he struck his peers, fellow painters

• 7:40Speaker 01

  who also went west, like Alfred Jacob Miller, John James Audeman, and, yes, Carl Bodmer, as a fraud. Humbug was the favored one word put down. Miller, who had visited some of the same tribes shortly after Catlin, used it, and so did Audeman, who was on the Missouri River a decade after Catlin. Bodmer actually advised European friends to avoid Catlin’s exhibition, the Indian Gallery, which in the 1840s was the first traveling Western show ever to tour Europe. As for Audeman, he wrote of Catlin: “I pity him. He could have been an honest man.”

• 8:25Speaker 01

  What did criticism like this mean? Was George Catlin the first person to devote his life to showing the world the West, its prairies, its great herds and their predators, its villages of graceful teepees, its rivers and mesas and badlands truly dishonest in what he portrayed? Were his competitors just expressing jealousy at the success he enjoyed with a European tour? Envy, I think, especially in the case of Auden and Bodmer, had something to do with it. But there may have been something else going on. I believe Catlin saw the West both with his eyes and with his heart, by which I mean he had an empathetic sensitivity.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Catlin obviously had a keen and discerning eye, but more than anything else, he was sympathetic to native people at a time when that was not a common reaction for many Americans. Nothing Catlin ever did was easy, and that may be one of the reasons he was able to empathize with others. He was born in the Wyoming Valley near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1796, and as a young man trained as a lawyer in Connecticut. Like most of us do, by his mid-20s, he changed his mind about his future and found that his true bliss lay in painting, in visual representations of the world.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  So he attached himself to the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia, studying to become a history painter in the tradition of European academic style. At the same time, he fashioned a sort of starving artist's existence, painting miniature portraits, a skill he would fall back on many times in his life among the Indians. As he learned about art, he also absorbed the heady world of Philadelphia at a time when America was blooming and starting to embrace a sense of America as separate from Europe, even exceptional.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Catlin was lucky enough to find himself in sync with America's new view of itself, even capable of articulating a version of that Europeans could love. The United States was hungry for some way to identify itself as distinct from the old world, and America's wild, natural world, along with its indigenous inhabitants, neither of which characterized Europe, seemed to offer the best chance for them. As Catlin and other Americans studied painting, writers like William Bartram, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Henry David Thoreau already were at work on a body of literature that would wrap the story of wild nature, Indians,

• 11:12Speaker 01

  and Westering adventuring into the country's new definition of itself. What Catlin and his contemporaries were witnessing were the stirrings of American Romanticism. Romanticism had begun in Europe, and was another one of its exports, but in Catlin's age, it took on an American life of its own. One element of Romanticism that landed on fertile soil here was the new idea that wild nature wasn't the haunt of demons or hobgoblins at all, but in fact was the freshest manifestation of God.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  So people living in close proximity to nature were especially graced. Thoreau, as always, was a quick study. "Is not nature rightly read that for which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?" he wrote. "Is it nature, in other words, the deity itself?" That idea's deep internalization in the American psyche explains a lot of big-picture American history, like national parks and our wilderness system, both of which were global firsts. As for the idea that humans living in a state of nature were blessed, are noble savages,

• 12:36Speaker 01

  that had a rockier trajectory in a country trying to displace the natives. When Catlin made his first great western journey up the Missouri River in his quest to become “the historian of the Indian,” as he put it, his eyes saw the Great Plains clearly, and his romantic heart perceived the resident natives as living in a divine state of nature. Catlin thus was willing to make two conceptualizations that set him apart from most of his American contemporaries, who were interpreting Romanticism quite differently. For one, in 1832, Catlin found the Great Plains an entirely deserving and even inspiring romantic landscape.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Most of the rest of America followed the European tradition and searched for romantic country in the Catskills or the Rockies, vertical terrain that reached to the divine heavens, which the horizontal Yellow Plains decidedly didn’t. Catlin’s painter contemporaries back east were thoroughly immersed in the mountain as the be-all and end-all of romantic scenery. So how interesting it was that in 1832, George Catlin painted the curvaceous, shadow-filled plains as a soul-melting country. “To my eye, like a fairyland,” he wrote.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Journeying up the Missouri aboard a fur-criminy steamboat, the Yellowstone, Catlin executed one Romantic landscape painting after another. Two Catlins I’ve always lingered over to penetrate time and visually experience the West of the 1830s are Big Bend on the Upper Missouri above St. Louis and the Brickkilns, clay bluffs above St. Louis. These are horizontal Romantic landscapes. Catlin’s Time Machine visuals make abundantly clear that the three predominant characters of the 19th century West were its remarkable landscapes, “the most picturesque and beautiful

• 14:43Speaker 01

  shapes and colors imaginable,” he said, “a blessed native people, and a diverse and charismatic wildlife.” Finding himself among those three, but with a gnawing anxiety about what was coming in the future for all of them, led him to a logical conclusion. George Catlin was the first American to call for the creation of a western national park.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Here's how he put them.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  And what a splendid contemplation, too, when one who has traveled these realms and can duly appreciate them, imagines them as they might in future be seen by some great protecting policy of government, preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness in a magnificent park.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  It was Catlin's next bold step that I think shows why he suffered attacks from some of his contemporaries. He went on to argue that in such a park, the world could see for ages to come, the native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse with sinewy bow and shield and lance amid the fleeting herds of elks and buffaloes. What a beautiful and thrilling specimen for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world in future ages, a nation's park, containing man and beast in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Exactly here is where Catlin broke ranks with most of his contemporaries. Most Americans expected Indians to melt away, to perform a vanishing act in a civilized America. Andrew Jackson's administration was already removing Indians from the East. But if you engage Catlin's time machine visuals and study the great portraits he painted of these Missouri River peoples, the Blackfeet leader, Buffalo Bull's back fat, and his wife, Crystal Stone, Eagle Ribs, one of the extraordinary men of the Blackfoot tribe, Catlin said, the crow, Four Wolves, who carries himself with the most graceful and manly mean.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  They tell another truth of Romanticism. All these people were noble children of nature. When he wrote of them in his classic book, Letters and Notes on the North American Indians, Catlin compared them to the ancient Britons, or to the Greeks of Homer's literature. In their wildness and romance and color, as he put it, America's native people were worthy of admiration and by all that was right and romantic, they ought to endure in America.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  This is where George Catlin was most exposed and his empathetic heart does not resemble Alfred Jacob Miller's or Audubon's or it seems the universal and not very sympathetic heart of 19th century America. The Swiss Carl Bodmer, whose time machine visuals I want to take up next, knew damn well he was a much better painter than Catlin, yet he struggled to have his work recognized and most likely was jealous of Catlin's successes with his fellow Europeans. But the Americans Miller and Audubon saw the same northern plains and native people Catlin did, yet a different alchemy played out.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  For both of them, true American noble savages weren't Indians, but Euro-Americans gone native, like Daniel Boone or the mountain men Miller promoted for that role. As for Audubon, who sneered at Catlin's infatuation with Indians, he seems to have believed that the iconic American child of nature should be John James Audubon. So Audubon toured Europe with flowing hair, dressed in fringed buckskins to present the old worlders a non-Indian American noble savage.

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• 21:19Speaker 01

  My other candidate for Archdruid of the Early Western Time Machine was not American but Swiss. And like Catlin, what he did, so critical to a visual species like us, was to paint a record in full-color splendor of almost all he saw in the 1830s West. His name was Carl Bodmer.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Before I describe Bodmer's wondrous talents and the grand adventure that elicited them, let me make the visual case just a bit better. On our Glacier Park traverse, my buddy and I both kept journals, fairly full written accounts. Yet the 70 or so photos I shot stand as a far more potent way for me, or for someone else, to relive the experience. I notice when I read it now that my journal mostly captures my daily emotional states. But the visual record retrieves what the country looked like, the shape we were in, how other hikers appeared, the reactions of wildlife, our camp scenes.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I'm a writer, but I didn't write down many of those things.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Visuals of the world are precisely what Bodmer, who had barely turned 24 when he started up the Missouri River in the year 1833, was able to bring to an early West that's now a ghostly apparition: the baseline world beneath all the subsequent change. It's our great fortune down the timeline that Bodmer, who is even more obscure than Catlin, brought to his adventure both the prodigious energy of youth and a talent that far outstripped that of any other painter in the West until the Civil War and after. Bodmer's good fortune was the adventure itself, which came as a gift of patronage

• 23:11Speaker 01

  from the naturalist adventurer Prince Maximilian of Veed Nuied, one of the great Alexander von Humboldt's prized pupils. At the time he met Maximilian, Bodmer was training with an artist's uncle in Prussia and getting by as a painter of rivers and castles. Maximilian, for his part, had already made a two-year trek to Brazil and was planning his next great adventure to "the interior regions of the Missouri in Northern America", as he put it. Brazil had taught Maximilian an important lesson. He wrote a colleague, "I would want to bring along a draftsman, a rarity which will not be easy to find. He must be a landscape painter,

• 23:55Speaker 01

  but also able to depict figures correctly and accurately, especially the Indians." Bodmer's reaction to the prince's offer: "I do not doubt that there are many painters who would accept the prince's conditions without objection to be able to go on an interesting journey." A lukewarm reaction, maybe, but there was a reason. Essentially, Bodmer's life became the story of this one fortuitous offer. Later in his life, post-America, he had a somewhat successful career in France as a painter of animals and forest scenes. But in terms of fame and an enduring reputation, Bodmer today is pretty much a one-hit band,

• 24:40Speaker 01

  and the Missouri River in 1833-34 is the hit. Maximilian not only gave Bodmer his one major trip abroad, it was a trip that took him farther into darkest North America than any artist had gone until then. When they arrived in St. Louis, the gateway to the West, Maximilian began to waffle about whether to explore the southern of the northern West. The Santa Fe Trail was now open, and stories he heard about New Mexico were compelling. But a fur company offer of a Missouri River Passage aboard steamboats and keelboats as far as Fort McKenzie within sight of the Rockies decided Maximilian on the Missouri.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  From his uncle, who had studied with some of Switzerland's most prominent artists, Bodmer had learned some valuable time machine lessons. In contrast to Catlin, who painted so rapidly he sometimes had brushes in both hands, Bodmer was dedicated and careful, often spending an entire day on a single piece. The simple truth is that Carl Bodmer could paint the Western trifecta, landscapes, animals, and native people, better than just about anybody else who went west. For the full-time machine effect, sometimes spend slow, deliberate time and good light with a book like Carl Bodmer's America. The range of the guy's skill is breathtaking.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  While he's most famous now for his Indian portraits, and I adore his landscapes, he probably was best of all portraying wildlife. His portraits of the grand creatures of the West are unexpected and remarkable. Bodmer's bison, whooping crane, coyote, vulture, bighorn sheep, pronghorns, mule deer, elk, all come across in an effortless and observant perfection. Two of his finished watercolors of wildlife, Landscape with herd of buffalo on the Upper Missouri, and Buffalo and Elk on the Upper Missouri, are scenes from 1830's life it's hard to recreate even in Yellowstone or in Western movies.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  As for what the country looked like, the first time I saw Bodmer's great Finnish watercolor landscapes, the White Castles of the Missouri, the first chain of the Rocky Mountains above Fort McKenzie, and most particularly, view of the Bear Paw Mountains from Fort McKenzie, I thought he captured the early West with its immense feel of uninterrupted space and an unmarred, pallucid blue atmosphere, better than anything I'd ever imagined. Every time I look at those pieces, I still think that, from a standpoint of pure nostalgic emotion at what has been lost, Bodmer's view of the Bear Paw Mountains is one of

• 27:37Speaker 01

  the truest western landscape paintings of all time. But the body of work that keeps Bodmer's name alive is his marvelous portfolio of the Indians of the Upper Missouri, Erycaras, Hidatsas, Mandans, Cree's, Assiniboines, Blackfeet. He rendered them all, and with a discipline and attention to detail that made Catlin seem an eager amateur by comparison. During the course of Maximilian's and Bodmer's Missouri adventure, they spent five weeks among the Blackfeet, Assiniboines, and Cree's at Fort McKenzie, where Bodmer did some of his most remarkable work among Indians that Catlin didn't even visit, although the following

• 28:22Speaker 01

  year Catlin would return the favor by painting southern plains Indians Bodmer never saw. There were other regrets. Maximilian's original plan was to winter at this rude outpost and penetrate the Rockies the following spring. As European alpinists, he and Bodmer were fascinated by mountains, and there the Rockies were, so tantalizingly close. But hostilities between the Blackfeet and their enemies discouraged that choice. Somewhat reluctantly, the Europeans returned downriver to the Mandan villages that autumn of 1833. And here they spent the winter, giving Bodmer an opportunity for one of the most haunting visual portrayals in the early West.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  What they couldn't know was that there, among the Mandans, Bodmer was preserving for the future the appearance and vitality and lived experiences of a people who would all be dead within three years. In the winter of 1833-34, though, the Mandans and their great leader, Monta Toppé, had no inkling of their fate. Bodmer's methodical work habits now captured scenes, ceremonies, material culture, and confident happy faces that turned out to be horrifyingly fragile when smallpox stalked the river shores in the year 1837.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  As it turned out, Bodmer really was a one-hit wonder. Nothing in his subsequent long life indicates that he had any desire for additional historic adventures. He settled in Paris in 1836, and with Maximilian's help, was able to put on an exhibit of his Scenes of the West. The reception was disappointing. Efforts to get a published version of the Missouri River Adventure into print were also difficult. The price of the printed version with complete aquatents of Bodmer's watercolors was staggering, exceeding the annual income of all but the very wealthy in Europe. In the 1840s, Maximilian offered Bodmer the chance to accompany him on an expedition

• 30:34Speaker 01

  to the Caucasus Mountains and Asian Russia. Bodmer refused. He followed that in 1846 by turning down a chance to join a government-sponsored expedition to Egypt. No interest in Egypt? Jealous of George Catlin's successes with his book and traveling exhibit of Indian and Western scenes, Bodmer decided that what he really wanted to do was to throw himself into portraying the animals of what he called "the primeval German forest" before they vanish entirely from the face of the earth. Eventually, he relocated from Paris to an art colony in Cologne, where he spent his life painting animals, publishing books, and illustrating books for others, including

• 31:17Speaker 01

  one by Victor Hugo. Carl Bodmer died in Paris in 1883, exactly half a century after his time in the West.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  In the mid 20th century, Pulitzer Prize winning Western writer Bernard de Vodto rediscovered Bodmer and reacquainted native peoples with him. Descendants of the Indian peoples, Bodmer once painted, then utilized his time machine visuals to help them recover their ancestors, their clothing, customs, and history. Hollywood has done the same in a variety of films, including Dances with Wolves. I think the most powerful use of Bodmer's portfolio from the early 1830s West has been far more widespread, though. Simply by providing those of us farther along in history with a remarkable visual record of what the West was once like.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Bodmer has enabled generations since to experience that world. Canoeing down the wild and scenic stretch of the Missouri River, I've taken copies of Bodmer's works along to compare to what's there now and to study and wonder by firelight. As Max Megan wrote to a friend in Europe, "If only I could show you Mr. Bodmer's portfolio." How many times would you exclaim, "Oh, excellent, beautiful, beautiful." He now has 70 pages of sketches, from which you will be able to travel very vividly. Just so, I think.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  For almost 200 years now, George Catlin's and Carl Bodmer's time machine visuals have enabled untold thousands of us from another century to travel very vividly indeed. Not just from Europe to America, but back in time and into the early 19th century American West. What a gift to pass on to the future.

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• 35:59Speaker 00

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• 36:06Speaker 03

  So Dan, we've been working on a couple of projects lately, one on the mountain men we just released in January, and now we're working on one on the buffalo hide hunt. And in the mountain men, I kept bumping into Catlin, references to Catlin, obviously, like he's this figure that captures this moment in time. And then the other day I was reading old newspapers, and I read this fantastic description of a hunt, you know, and I get to the end of it, and it's signed George Catlin. And it was a letter that he'd sent to the editors of this

• 36:47Speaker 03

  paper. And so I think my, one thing that's always struck me about him is just how prolific he was. And in my mind, he's sort of this faceless wealth of information, this fountain of information from the West. But I thought was, at least for me, I was interested by your descriptions of sort of the interpersonal rivalries that these guys had. Because

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wasn't aware that they're always hacking on each other.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was a shock to me. For me, Catlin is kind of just like this, this very even keeled, sort of tell it like it is, you know, almost like a Walter Cronkite type figure. But this was sort of

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, and all the dudes are like, he ain't all that.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, you know, he's, he's, he's a pretty

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Startlingly obscure figure for a lot of people, given how present he was in the 19th century, as you say, you can kind of just read, you know, some 1830s newspaper article and be shocked by the fact, well, George Catlin submitted this piece. And his famous book, Letters and Notes, which is in two volumes, by the way, on the North American Indians, essentially, that's what that book is. It's these sort of newspaper-length stories that he was sending in to newspapers in the East, along with his hastily, quickly-done watercolors to illustrate them, and he assembled

• 38:22Speaker 01

  those ultimately into in a book. So, he's, he should be probably a lot better known than he is, but you're right, one of the things that is true of his career is that a lot of the other painters of the time, Alfred Jacob Miller, Bodmer himself, the Swiss artist who is also a feature in this particular episode, and especially John James Audubon, you know, I mean, they, they kind of think of, of Catlin as this quack figure, and they say very unkind things about him, you know?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Evidently, one of the common words of probrium back in the 19th century was humbug.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Oh, which I thought was strictly, you know, Ebenezer Scrooge. Other people would run around saying humbug, too. I had no idea. I thought that was a Charles Dickens.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Wish you'd bring it back. Yeah, it sounds like Dickens, but it actually predates Dickens, because George Catlin got it a lot. He, it's humbug, you know? He's, he's just, that was just a bunch of bullshit. He was, he's a complete loser, and, you know, and then Audubon says that strange thing about him, he could have been an honest man. I feel sorry for him. He could have been an honest man. Now, I will say about Audubon, so because one of the episodes is going to be about Audubon, and I talk about this a little bit. Audubon was not generous about about other people. He tended to be kind of jealous of everybody else who ever made any kind of accomplishments.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  So that can be discounted a little bit, but Carl Bodmer in Europe, because Catlin is the guy who he's the first American who has a traveling exhibit of the West in Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, and a whole ton of Europeans who end up coming to America acquire their fascination with the West by going to George Catlin's Indian Gallery. And I mean, Catlin took three or four native people with him, sort of like, you know, Buffalo Bill did with his Wild West. I mean, he took native people with him and they did ceremonies on stage and and yet even Bodmer, who is a European himself, encouraged his

• 40:43Speaker 01

  friends not to go see Catlin's show. So Catlin was clearly a guy who was maybe a little too successful in winning over followers, and yet, at the same time, he did something pretty remarkable. I mean, he went up the Missouri River with the fur trading companies, usually on their steamboats. That was a safe way for these these people who wanted to go west to travel. And he basically painted portraits of half the people, half the native people in the West. And of course, he is famous among conservationists these days because he's the first American

• 41:28Speaker 01

  to ever call for a national park. He wants the government to create a national park on the Great Plains, but what he wants is a different kind of national park than we think of today. I mean, we created national parks in Yellowstone and Glacier and kindly invited the native people to leave. Catlin wants a national park where it's all about the native people still practicing their original culture and hunting the animals they hunted. And so he has a different idea about a national park, but he does get credit for being the first person to ever propose one in America.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  I thought about that in your episode, and I had read that about Catlin before. And It seemed like like an outlandish idea until I thought about this. Around the world, there are a handful of examples of kind of what he was talking about.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  You go like the, there's autonomous zones. So along the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan, you have what they call the tribal areas or autonomous zones. In Brazil, near the Brazil border with Colombia, you have autonomous zones. Which are like hunter gatherer groups doing their own government. They're living within a geopolitical boundary, but their crimes aren't investigated. You know, their own system of government prevails in their area.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  Sentinel Island in the Pacific.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Nicaragua has one.

• 43:01Speaker 00

  Where it's, it's like you're within a broader geopolitical bound, but there is a place where like native culture.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  The difference there is what makes those places work is that you don't visit.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Do you know what I mean? So this idea that it would be like for people to come see, that people would be able to go and see all this, right? And then the biggest challenge today with creating these autonomous tribal areas is that we now know you can't go look. Cause when you go look, you're going to bring disease and you're going to bring ideas. And, and some people think it's like overly paternalistic on the part of the governments. But it winds up being that it's like, you don't visit.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  No, that's true. And I mean, I know you know this because you've traveled everywhere and, and seen these. And, uh, yeah, that's been a fairly recent trend with national parks. National parks obviously got interpreted in a different, a different way than, than Catlin proposed.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  And then we exported the idea of the national park around the world. So there are places like Kruger National Park, for example, in South Africa, where the idea was to get the native people out of the park. Because European and American tourists seeing the park would not want to see the native people. They would want to see the landscapes and the animals. Yeah, but not the native people there. And of course, what the the zones you're describing were sort of a reaction against that, where the idea is to remove the native people. And so, yeah, it's back in the direction of what Catlin was proposing in 1832.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  But he does have this this idea appended to his proposal that enlightened and civilized people Could go see it. Would go see and get to see what see these people live, just the way he had gotten to do in the 1830s. But he's, you know, as I I tried to say in that that episode, I think one of the reasons he comes in for the the kind of derogation that he does is because he's more sympathetic to native people than most other Americans are at the time. And we have a kind of a different, a lot of Americans come to a different interpretation of the European notion, the Rousseau notion of the noble savage, living in a state of nature.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Uh, Catlin, for Catlin, these native people are the noble savages. For a lot of Americans, we sort of translated that into, well, it's actually a white American who lives like an Indian. Daniel Boone. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, the mountain men, those are the the noble savages. Or in, you know, uh, John James Audubon's viewpoint, he was the noble savage who would go to Europe and present himself to the Europeans as here is an American living in a state of nature, a true noble savage, but not the Indians. And that became that, I think, that critical

• 46:06Speaker 01

  breakpoint between a lot of the other people of his time and Catlin, and even Bodmer. You know, and Bodmer's thing, I don't know what you guys thought about that part of it, but to me, his big role is, I mean, he not only is able to, to paint landscapes and animals and people in a remarkably realistic way. So it's kind of a time travel thing to experience the West of the early 1830s. But what made Bodmer a sort of a, a modern phenomenon is Bernard de Vodot's discovery of him. When Bernard de Vodot was writing Across the Wide Missouri, he discovered Bodmer's work and realized this was the most authentic Western

• 46:50Speaker 01

  work of Indians and wildlife and landscapes he had found and kind of turned Bodmer into this, this official historian that native people attempting to reacquire their cultures and especially Hollywood, trying to do films that would more realistically portray native people. They turned to Bodmer. You know, I mean, uh, one of the films, uh, from my youth, A Man Called Horse.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Used one of the wonderful wild turkey headdresses that Bodmer portrayed among the Assiniboines. And they actually reproduced that headdress in that particular film.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  Off his painting, yeah.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, off his painting. And they do the same thing in Dances with Wolves. They use a lot of, a lot of his work to recreate the Indian attire and, and all that. So it's a, you know, as I was trying to say, these, these guys give us this kind of visual time machine of being able to go back and, and see the West. Lewis and Clark write about it. And you can certainly develop a good sense of what the West in the early 19th century was like from the literature, but the visual, I think is, you know, it's why movies work so well these days.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  This isn't a question, but rather a comment of, of what you're talking about is dealing in these eras when there's no photography. You're really at the mercy and understanding a time. You're at the mercy of oftentimes one or two illustrators.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  And it gets in your head that it looked that way. And when I was a little kid, I was growing up in the Great Lakes. I was very interested in early Great Lakes history. And the French, like 1500s, early 1600s, terrible, terrible art.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Where they would kind of draw these pictures of like everything that goes on.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  And they would draw native peoples and they'd like grow grotesque renditions of native peoples. You know?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Oh no, I've seen these.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  And I would always have the idea that like I wasn't drawn, I honestly was not drawn to the history because I couldn't escape how the French drew it.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  I'm like, that doesn't look cool.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  It just would be in your head.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great way to.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  But then like someone like Catlin, you look at Catlin, you're like, man, that looks awesome. Do you know what I mean? Like, I'll go there.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Catlin and Bodmer both, man, you know, so this is a very different art than those guys who would do a page and sort of put animals all over it and yeah.

• 49:23Speaker 00

  Like everything that goes on, like little chores.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  You just stick it all over the place.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  There's nothing that drew you in about it, you know, in your head, you're like, if you went back in time, it would all look like that drawing.

• 49:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, that stuff is closer to like the drawings from the colonial period of these animals that don't look like animals, trees that don't look like trees.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, a buffalo that looks like a lion and yeah, all that sort of stuff. Yeah, well, these guys were, you know, Catlin, especially Bodmer, I mean, these guys were, they were incredible.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  So it really is a way to sort of, you know, if you're interested in that sort of thing, and I always have been, just like you were interested in the Great Lakes, I've always been interested in trying to recreate. So what was this like? What was, what would it have been like to go up the Missouri River and see the White Cliffs? And so, you know, as I said later in that script, I mean, one of the things I did first time I went down the wild and scenic Missouri and went through the White Cliffs section, I took Bodmer paintings with me.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah?

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I shot photographs of them and printed them up in color and took them along, took about 15 of them along and just kind of rode along in a canoe and held these paintings up. And I mean, he was, yeah, he was really good at portraying that landscape. So that's one of the, that's one of the things that gave me the idea for a piece like this is knowing how accurately he did it.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Getting back to Catlin and native people.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  I think, and this isn't unique to the West, but oftentimes when people are looking at the past, they're sort of viewing individuals' beliefs on a spectrum of how enlightened they are versus how backwards they are, right? And one of the things that I've picked up just in reading about this period is it's the thinking about Native people and Native cultures at the time is so multi-dimensional. You know, there's some people that maybe celebrate Native culture, but they believe that they're going to go extinct.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  There's some people that are obviously like, there's some that, you know, don't view it positively and want to wipe out Native people. There's some people that are trying to sort of taking a paternalistic attitude and trying to save them. And then even in the realm of science, you know, like you mentioned in the last episode, questions about whether Indigenous people in the Americas were part of a separate creation, whether they were a separate, you know, or they're part of the same race or species. I wonder if you can sort of get into where like Catlin in particular, one could read

• 52:14Speaker 03

  his idea of having parks with people in them as being very backwards. But in terms of the context, you know, it's sort of hard to make a judgment value about that, right?

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, Randall, that's all excellent points, no doubt about it. Yeah, it's complicated. And there are people with a lot of different approaches to it. I mean, and we're still debating by the 1830s, when Catlin and Bodmer in the West, I mean, we're still debating, I mean, this is the same decade when Joseph Smith writes the Book of Mormon, which is, you know, a postulation of the old idea that who Native people are are actually Hebrews from the lost tribes of Israel who found their way to the Americas. I mean, that's what the Book of Mormon basically posits as its story.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  And that was an early explanation for who Indians were when Europeans first came over. Well, who are these people? Because they don't appear anywhere in our stories.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Why are there people here who we know nothing about? And this was the best guess was that, well, there are some tribes from the lost tribes of Israel who left and disappeared, and maybe that's who this is. But by in terms of science, by that same decade, though, there were already people who were doing linguistic studies of tribal languages and beginning to argue that these tribal languages don't seem to have any relationship to Hebrew at all. In fact, what they appear to be closest to are the languages of Asia, not of the Middle East.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  And therefore, by the 1830s, there's already, you know, there are already people who are saying, well, it looks like maybe native people must have come from Asia and not from somewhere in the Middle East or Europe. That's kind of one of the scientific arguments that's at the time that Catlin and Bob are doing all this work. You know, but to give you an idea of Catlin's commitment to what he thought by creating a park with native people, and it would have been a great good for native people. Catlin is one of the only people I have ever read about who personally went in, went to the White House and got an audience with Andrew Jackson

• 54:47Speaker 01

  and tried to talk Andrew Jackson out of removing Indians in the East to the West. I mean, he actually tried to engage with a president of the United States who was not about to, of course, stop removal, and tried to make the case that you shouldn't do this. And the reason he thought that Jackson shouldn't do it, he said, "We all should be growing up around native people. We shouldn't shut them off to somewhere else and hide them away from the rest of us. We should all have native people around us." And, you know, that's, again, a kind of a, an argument that you're hard pressed to find anybody else of the time making. And so.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  You know, as I've said in that, the script for that episode, I kind of think that it's these ideas that get Catlin in trouble with a lot of his contemporaries.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, but if you're gonna condemn Catlin's thing as being, you know, viewing native people strictly as an other, wanting to like make museum exhibits out of them, like, I don't think it's really fair to do it that way because you have to look at it in the context of what everybody else was saying at the time.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  And when you compare it to what everybody, everybody else's idea, it was like, it was revolutionary. Do you know what I mean? And it was born like from, from, from sympathy.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  It was born from sympathy?

• 56:10Speaker 00

  And you can look at it now and find all these ways to tear it apart, but you gotta be like, well, if you're gonna do that, then you better compare what some, what Jackson's idea was.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  And Jackson's idea, Jackson's idea was the same thing that the liberation societies for manhumited African slaves was, which is, we're gonna send them back to Africa. We don't want them to remain here. If they're free now, they go. And so we acquire a piece of West Africa, Liberia, and send, start sending former slaves back to Africa. And Jackson's idea with native people was essentially the same thing. We're gonna designate a piece of the United States, Oklahoma.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  Not where they live.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  The Indian Territory. And we're gonna put them all there so we can get them out of the rest of the, rest of the country. And Catlin is one of the few voices that's arguing against that. So, yeah, absolutely. Given the context of the time. This guy is a raging liberal trying to defend the rights of, of native people in the 1830s.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, Dan, thanks, man. Look forward to the next episode.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you, Stephen, Randall. Appreciate it.

• 57:42Speaker 00

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