Ep. 09: Catlin’s and Bodmer’s “Time Machine Visuals”

00:00:01
Speaker 1: In the eighteen thirties, two talented painters, George Catlan 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 Florey’s 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 Catlan’s and Bodmer’s time machine visuals. 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 back country. During that narrow window and 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. 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 Niak 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 a top cutbank pass and an unintentional glacide 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, or got struck by lightning amongst the peaks 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. Nayak 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 bearshit. 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 eighteen thirties or eighteen forties. The two time machine guys I think are the very best for setting me down in their time and in the places they saw are George Catlan and Carl b 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. Sometime in the past half century, George Catlan managed to be modestly rediscovered. That’s something of a miracle for a nineteenth 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 no Catlan’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 Go enough to know that he cut off his ear. Cocktail party conversation may not get at exactly why this Western art was so passionate about Indians and the Dutch Ones so committed to slicing and dicing his anatomy. But Catlan does have name recognition. In Catlan’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 Catlan’s mission as a painter, which was obsessive enough to have inspired Hermann Melville in developing the character of Captain Ahem. Because Catlan wrote as well as painted, we know a lot about that obsession, which he described this way. 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 fact simile 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 Catlan’s case, romance was so embedded that he struck his peers, fellow painters who also went West, like Alfred Jacob Miller, John James Audobon, 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 Catlan used it, and so did Audobon, who was on the Missouri River a decade after Catlan. Bodmer actually advised European friends to avoid Catlan’s exhibition, The Indian Gallery, which in the eighteen forties was the first traveling Western show ever to tour Europe. As for Audubon, he wrote of Catlan, I pity him. He could have been an honest man. What did criticism like this mean? Was George Catlan, 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 teps, its rivers and maces and bad lands, truly dishonest in what he portrayed, or his competitors just expressing jealousy as the success he enjoyed with a European tour. Envy I think, especially in the case of Audubon and bober had something to do with it, But there may have been something else going on. I believe Catlan saw the West both with his eyes and with his heart, by which I mean he had an empathetic sensitivity. Catlan 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 Catlan 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 Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania, in seventeen ninety six, and as a young man, trained as a lawyer in Connecticut, like most of us do. By his mid twenties, it changed his mind about his future and found that his true bliss lay in painting, in visual representations of the world. 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, 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 Finnimore Cooper, and Henry David Thoreau already were at work on a body of literature that would wrap the story of wild nature, Indians, and westering adventuring into the country’s new definition of itself. What Catlan and his contemporaries were witnessing were the stirrings of American Romanticism. Romanticism had begun in Europe, and it was another one of its exports, but in Catlan’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. So people living in close proximity to nature were especially graced Thereau, as always was a quick study. Is not nature rightly read that for which she has commonly taken to be the symbol? Merely? He wrote, isn’t 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 our noble savages that had a rockier trajectory in a country trying to displace the natives. When Catlan 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. Catlan thus was willing to make two conceptusizations that set him apart from most of his American contemporaries, who were interpreting Romanticism quite differently. For one, in eighteen thirty two, Catland found the Great Plains and entirely deserving an even inspiring romantic landscape. 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. Catlan’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 eighteen thirty two George Catlan painted the curvaceous, shadow filled plains as a soul melting country to my eye, like a fairy land. He wrote, journeying up the Missour aboard a fur Company steamboat, the Yellowstone. Catlan executed one romantic landscape painting after another two Catlans. I’ve always lingered over to penetrate time and visually experience the west of the eighteen thirties. Our Big Bend on the Upper Missouri above Saint Louis, and the brick Kilns clay bluffs above Saint Louis. These are horizontal, romantic landscapes. Catln’s time machine visuals make abundantly clear that the three predominant characters of the nineteenth century West were its remarkable landscapes, the most picturesque and beautiful 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 Catlan was the first American to call for the creation of a Western National Park. Here’s how he put that, 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. It was Catlan’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 part 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 present des and hold up to the view of her refined citizens in the world in future ages. A nation’s park containing man and beast in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty. Exactly here is where Catlan 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 Catlan’s time machine visuals and study the great portraits he painted of these Missouri River peoples, the Blackfeet leader Buffalo Bull’s Backfat and his wife Crystalstone Eagle Ribs. One of the extraordinary men of the Blackfoot tribe, Catlan said, the crow four wolves, who carries himself with the most graceful and manly mien. 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, Catlan 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. This is where George Catlin was most exposed, and his empathetic heart does not resemble Alfred Jacob Miller’s or Autumn’s, or it seems, the universal and not very sympathetic heart of nineteenth 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 Catlan, yet he struggled to have his work recognized and most likely was jealous of Catlan’s successes with his fellow Europeans. But the Americans, Miller and Audubon saw the same northern plains and native people Catlan did, yet a different alchemy played out for both of them. True American noble savages weren’t Indians, but euro American’s gone native like Daniel Boone, are the mountain men Miller promoted for that role. As for Audubon, who sneered at Catlan’s infatuation with Indians. He seems to have believed that the iconic American child of nature should be John James Ottobon. So Audubon toured Europe with flowing hair, dressed in fringed buckskins to present the Old worlders a non Indian American noble savage. My other candidate, 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 paid a record, in full color splendor, of almost all he saw in the eighteen thirties West. His name was Karl Bodmer. Before I described 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 seventy 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 are camp scenes. I’m a writer, but I didn’t write down many of those things. Visuals of the world are precisely what Bodmer, who had barely turned twenty four when he started up the Missouri River in the year eighteen thirty three, 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 Catlan, 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 from the naturalist adventurer Prince Maximilian of vd nuID, one of the great Alexander von Humboldt’s prize 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, 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 loopwarm 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. And the Missouri River in eighteen thirty three thirty four 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 Saint 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 keel boats as far as Fort Mackenzie, within sight of the Rockies, decided maxim on the Missouri. 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 Catlan, who painted so rapidly 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 Karl 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 spends slow, deliberate time and good light with a book like Karl Bodmer’s America. The range of the guy’s skill is breathtaking. 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 un expected 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 eighteen thirties life it’s hard to recreate, even in Yellowstone or in Western movies. As for what the country looked like, the first time I saw Bodmer’s great finished watercolor landscapes, the white castles of the Missouri, the first chain of the Rocky Mountains above Fort Mackenzie, and most particularly view of the bear Paw Mountains from Fort Mackenzie, I thought he captured the early West, with its immense feel of uninterrupted space and an unmarred, pellucid black 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 Palm Mountains is one of 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 aricaras, hedatsas Mandans, Krees, Ascentiboins, Blackfeet. He rendered them all and with a discipline and attention to detail that made Catlan seem an eager amateur by comparison. During the course of Maximilian’s and Bodmer’s Missouri adventure, they spent five weeks among the Blackfeet Ascentiboins in Kreese at Fort Mackenzie, where Bodmer did some of his most remarkable work among Indians that ca Akatlin didn’t even visit, Although the following year Catlan 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 eighteen thirty three, and here they spent the winter, giving Bodmer an opportunity for one of the most haunting visual portrayals in the early West. 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 eighteen thirty three thirty four. Though the Mandans and their great leader Manta Tope 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 eighteen thirty seven. 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 eighteen thirty six, 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 aquatchans of Bodmer’s watercolors was staggering, exceeding the annual income of all but the very wealthy in Europe. In the eighteen forties, Maximilian offered Bodmer the chance to accompany him on an expedition to the Caucasus Mountains and Asian Russia. Bodmer refused. He followed that in eighteen forty six by turning down a chance to join a government sponsored expedition to Egypt. No interest in Egypt. Jealous of George Catlan’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 vanished 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 one by Victor Hugo. Carl Bodmer died in Paris in eighteen eighty three, exactly half a century after his time in the West. In the mid twentieth century, Pulitzer Prize winning Western writer Bernard de Vodo rediscovered Bodmer and reacquainted native peoples with him. Descendants of the Indian people’s Bodmer once painted, then utilize 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 eighteen thirties West has been far more widespread, though, simply by providing those of us farthered along in history with a remarkable visual record of what the West was once, like, Bodmer has enabled generation sense 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 Maximilian wrote to a friend in Europe, if only I could show you mister Bodmer’s portfolio, how many times would you exclaim, Oh, excellent, beautiful, beautiful. He now has seventy pages of sketches from which you will be able to travel very vividly. Just so, I think, for almost two hundred 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 nineteenth century American West. What a gift to pass on to the future.

00:30:09
Speaker 2: So, Dan, we’ve been working on a couple 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 Man, I kept bumping into Catlan 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 signed George Catlin, and it was a letter that had sent to the editors of this paper. And so I think 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 it wasn’t.

00:31:14
Speaker 3: That there was hacking on each other.

00:31:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a shock to me.

00:31:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, because for me, for me, Catlan 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 this was sort of.

00:31:31
Speaker 1: All that, right. Yeah, Yeah, you know, he’s he’s uh, he’s a pretty startlingly obscure figure for a lot of people, given how present he was in the nineteenth century. As you say, you can kind of just read, you know, some eighteen thirties newspaper article and uh be shocked by the fact. Well, George Kallin 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 into newspapers in the East, along with his hastily quickly done watercolors to illustrate them, and he assemble those ultimately in a book. So’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 artists, who is also a feature in this particular episode, and especially John James Ottobon, you know, I mean, they kind of ink of Catlan as this quack figure and they say very unkind things about him. You know. Evidently, one of the common words of Progrium back in the nineteenth century was humbug oh, which.

00:33:13
Speaker 3: I thought was strictly you know, Ebenezer screws. Other people would run around seeing humbug too. I had no idea. Yeah that was a Charles Dickens bring him back.

00:33:24
Speaker 1: Yeah it sounds like Dickens, but it actually predates Dickens. Because George Catlan got in a lot. He hits this humbug. You know, he’s just that was just a bunch of bullshit. He was. He’s a complete loser and uh, you know, and then Oudoban 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 Audubun so because one of the episodes is going to be about Autobun and I talk about this a little bit. Ottoman was not generous about other people. He tended to be kind of jealous of everybody else whoever made any kind of accomplishments. So that can be discounted a little bit. But Carl Bodmer in Europe, because Catlan is the guy who he’s the first American who has a traveling exhibit of the West in Europe in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, and a ton of Europeans who end up coming to America acquire their fascination with the West by going to George Catlan’s Indian Gallery. And I mean Catlan 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 yet even Bodmer, who is a European himself, encouraged his friends not to go see Catlan’s show. So Catlan was clearly a guy who is 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 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 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. Catalan 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 front idea about a national park, but he does get credit for being the first person to ever propose one in America.

00:36:06
Speaker 3: I thought about that in your episode, and I had read that about Catlan before, and it seemed like like an outlandish idea until I thought about this. Around the world, there are a handful example of examples of kind of what he was talking about. 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, they their own system of government prevails in their area. Sentinel Island in the Pacific.

00:37:03
Speaker 1: Nicaragua has one where it’s.

00:37:06
Speaker 3: It’s like you’re within a broader geopolitical bound but there is a place where like native culture. The difference there is what makes those places work is that you don’t visit. Yeah, you know what I mean. So this idea that it would be like for people to come see that people will 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 because when you go look, you’re going to bring disease and you’re going to bring ideas. 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.

00:37:49
Speaker 1: No, that’s true, And I mean I know you know this because you’ve traveled everywhere and seen these and yeah, that’s been a fairly recent trend with national parks. National parks obviously got interpreted in a vert a different way than Catlan proposed, 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, but not the native people there. And of course what 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 Catlan was proposing in eighteen thirty two. But he does have this idea pended to his proposal that enlightened and civilized people see it, would go see and get to see what see these people live, just the way he had gotten to do in the eighteen thirties. But he’s you know, as I tried to say in that episode, I think one of the reasons he comes in for 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 rousseaul notion of the noble savage living in a state of nature Catlan. For Catlan, these native people are the noble savages. For a lot of Americans, we sort of translated that into well, it’s actually a wide American who lives like an Indian. Daniel Boone, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, the mountain men, those are the noble savages are in you know, John James Ottoban’s viewpoint, he was the noble savage who would go to Europe and present himself to the European ends as here is on America and living in a state of nature, a true noble savage. But not the Indians. And that became that, I think, that critical breakpoint between a lot of the other people of his time in Cantlon and even Bodmer, you know, in 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 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 eighteen thirties. But what made bodmer a sort of a modern phenomenon is Bernard Devoto’s discovery of him. When Bernard Devoto was writing across the Wide Missouri, he discovered Bodmer’s work and realized this was the most authentic Western work of Indians and wildlife in 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 one of the films for My Youth, a man called Horse used one of the wonderful wild turkey headdresses that Bodmer portrayed among the Accentiboins, and they actually reproduced that headdress in that particular yeah, off his painting and they do the same thing and dances with wolves. They use a lot of a lot of his work to recreate the Indian attire and all that. So it’s uh, 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 serve only develop a good sense of what the West in the early nineteenth century was liked from the literature, But the visual, I think is and that’s why movies work so well these days.

00:42:10
Speaker 3: This isn’t a question, but rather a comment of what you’re talking about is dealing in these eras when there’s no photography, you’re really at the mercy and understanding of time. You’re at the mercy of oftentimes one or two illustrators, 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 Legs, I was very interested in early Great Legs history and the French like the fifteen hundreds early sixteen hundreds, terrible terrible art where they would kind of draw these pictures of like everything that goes on. Yeah, and they would draw native peoples and they’d like grotesque renditions of native peoples.

00:42:55
Speaker 1: You know.

00:42:55
Speaker 3: Oh no, I’ve seen these, and I would always have the idea that like I wasn’t drawn obviously was not drawn to the history because I couldn’t escape how the French drew it.

00:43:06
Speaker 1: Uh huh.

00:43:06
Speaker 3: I’m like, that doesn’t look cool. No, No, like some like Catl and you look at cat like man, that looks awesome, you know what I mean, Like, I’ll go there.

00:43:16
Speaker 1: Catlan and Bottomer 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 and yeah.

00:43:27
Speaker 3: Everything that goes on like little chores.

00:43:29
Speaker 1: It was just like it’s just stick it all over the place.

00:43:31
Speaker 3: There’s nothing to drew in about it. You know, in your head, you like if you went back in time, it would all look like that drawing.

00:43:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, that stuff is closer to like the drawings from the colonial period of these animals that don’t look like animals, Jeffes, that don’t look like trees.

00:43:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, a buffalo that looks like a lion, and yeah, all that sort of stuff. Yeah. Well, these guys were, you know, Catland, especially Bomber. I mean, these guys were, They were incredible. 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 have been like to go up the Missouri River and see the White Cliffs and so you know, as I said later in the 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 Bottomer paintings with me. Yeah, I shot photographs of them and printed them up in color and took them along. Took about fifteen of them along and just kind of rode along in a canoe and held these paintings up. And I mean, 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.

00:44:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, getting back to Catlan and Native people, I think, and this isn’t unique to the West, but oftentime, 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. There’s some people that are obviously like there’s the sum 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 Catlan in particular, one could read 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.

00:46:31
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, Rand, 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 eighteen thirties, when Catlin and Bodem are 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 has its story, 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. 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. Fact, what they appeared to be closest to are the languages of Asia, not of the Middle East. And therefore, by the eighteen thirties 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 those scientific arguments that’s at the time that Catlin and Bodma are doing all this work, you know, But to give you an idea of Catlan’s commitment to what he thought by creating a park with Native people and it would have been a great good for Native people. Catlan 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 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 trying 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 shunt 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 an argument that you’re hard pressed to find anybody else of the time making. And so you know, as I’ve said in that the script for that episode, I kind of think that it’s these ideas that get Catlan in trouble with a lot of his contemporary Yeah, but if you’re.

00:49:44
Speaker 3: Going to condemn Catlan’s thing as being, you know, viewing Native people strictly as an other wanting to like make museum exhibits out of them, I don’t think it’s really fair to do it that way because you have to look look at it in the context of what everybody else was saying at the time.

00:50:03
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and when.

00:50:04
Speaker 3: You compare it to what everybody everybody else’s idea, it was like it was revolutionary, you know, I mean, and it was born like from from from sympathy.

00:50:13
Speaker 1: It was born from sympathy.

00:50:14
Speaker 3: And you 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.

00:50:22
Speaker 1: And Jackson’s idea. Jackson’s idea was the same thing that the liberation societies for manumitted African slaves was, which is, we’re going to 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 going to designated a piece of the United States, Oklahoma, 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 Catlan 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 Native people in the eighteen thirties.

00:51:25
Speaker 3: Well, Dan, thanks man, look forward to the next episode.

00:51:27
Speaker 1: Oh thank you, Steven Randall, appreciate it.