George Catlin was an American painter and traveller who spent much of his career studying the customs of Native Americans under threat from the expansion of the United States of America. He is most famous for his portraits of Native American leaders, many of which are now in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC.

Catlin was part of a generation of artists and historians who believed that Native Americans and Indigenous customs were destined to become extinct as the United States continued to expand its territory westward. They believed that these customs ought to be recorded and studed before they died out. Recording in the first letter of this, his 1841 account of his travels in the Great Plains, Catlin claimed to have been inspired to travel to the Indian Territory (the American name for lands held by Native Americans) after witnessing the arrival of a group of Native Americans ‘from the wilds of the “Far West” to Philadelphia while he was studying in the city.

Basing himself at St Louis, Missouri, Catlin spent eight years between 1830 and 1838 travelling in the Great Plains region. He visited over 60 Indigenous communities, many of whom had had little interaction with Europeans before. While there, he painted leaders and recorded the customs of different groups. Much of the first volume was dedicated to his travels in Yellowstone, where he learned about the Blackfoot nation and observed buffalo hunts, and his time living among the Mandan of North Dakota. Catlin would later publish an account of the sacred Okipa ceremony, being granted permission to witness it after painting a portrait of the Mandan leader, Mato-tope (‘Four Bears’), who was reportedly greatly impressed by his likeness (see RCIN 1022533). The second volume recorded other travels made along the course of the Mississippi River and into Texas, where he studied the customs of the Comanche. 

On his return to the United States, Catlin travelled across the country exhibiting his portraits and delivering lectures. In 1839, he began a tour of Europe, visiting Paris, Brussels and London. In London, the gallery was housed at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly and in 1841, he published his account of his travels which included around 300 line engravings of Catlin’s portraits and other pictures. This is Queen Victoria’s copy of the second edition and may have been the copy housed in her library at Buckingham Palace. A newspaper clipping loose in the first volume describes the visit of nine Ojibwe (Chippewa) to Manchester en route to an audience with the Queen, which was held at Windsor Castle in December 1843.