The Gift

Profile: Forerunner

The prolific artist, George Catlin, displayed an appreciation of the mythic qualities of a people already in tragic decline. Then living in Paris, a controversial figure, Catlin had vividly portrayed on his numerous canvases people descended from the North American continent's first inhabitants.

Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1796, Catlin had grown up on the edge of the frontier, and studied law, but his passions were painting and Indians. This happy conjunction produced, in 1826, a stunning portrait of the Seneca warrior Red Jacket. Nonetheless, Catlin decided not to become a portraitist, and moved to St. Louis, jumping-off place for "the West" at a time of determined expansion.

In 1832, he traveled by steamboat 2,000 miles up the Missouri River to Fort Union, at the mouth of the Yellowstone River. On the way, at Fort Pierre, Catlin painted the portraits of the Sioux (Dakota), the most warlike of the Plains tribesmen who had come to trade with the American Fur Company. Farther along, in Assiniboine country, he also painted the Crow, the as Blackfoot, and the Ojibwa.

Catlin captured colorful, spirited Indian rituals that would soon vanish. He returned down river by canoe, painting Hidatsas and Minitaris along the way, as well as Mandans, a tribe that would be eradicated by smallpox. Working under difficult circumstances with limited supplies and time, he traveled to Comanche country in 1834, and to the Red Pipestonc Quarry in what is now Minnesota in 1836. He was one of the first white people to see this quarry; the stone from which the pipes were carved, catlinite, bears his name.

The painter also traveled to Florida and Georgia. He produced more than 500 Indian portraits and sketches, and amassed both authentic artifacts and notebooks filled with details of Indian life. An exhibition known as "Catlin's Indian Gallery" opened in New York in 1837 to popular acclaim before Wild West shows gained popularity, but its success wasn't repeated in other American cities. The exhibition moved to London in 1839; Catlin published his first book on the subject of American Indians in 1841. Despite these accomplishments, Congress declined to purchase his collection, and Catlin spent his last years in undeserved obscurity.

Artist, explorer, observer of indigenous cultures, Catlin embodied the various concerns that would help characterize the Smithsonian. He was also a reformer, ahead of his time, known as "Indian-Loving Catlin" to critics, who viewed his subjects only as impediments to Manifest Destiny.

Catlin wrote, two years before his death, "I love a people who are honest without laws.... I love a people who worship God without a Bible.... I love a people who have never raised a hand against me.... I love the people who have never fought a battle with white men, except on their own ground...."

Also in 1846, the United States government found itself owning, stored away in the Old Patent Office a few blocks from the Mall, thousands of specimens and hundreds of charts, maps, and paintings brought back from an extraordinary around-the-world expedition. The voyagers had discovered the continent of Antarctica, and established claims on the West Coast of America. The leader, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, embodied another type that would contribute significantly to the Smithsonian's development: the government agent, charged with recording new facts and collecting new specimens in uncharted terrain, all the while pursuing the American dream of territorial expansion.

His great-uncle, John Wilkes, the English opponent of monarchy, had inspired the name of Wilkes-Barre, the town in Pennsylvania where George Catlin had grown up. Charles Wilkes, a scientist and career naval officer, set out in the summer of 1838 with a flotilla of six ships, the first maritime exploration sponsored by the government and part of a growing tradition the began with President Thomas Jefferson's dispatching Lewis and Clark westward in 1804 and included the Western explorations of Captain and later General Zebulon Pike.

Although the Wilkes expedition was organized in the interests of the American whaling industry, pure science also provided inspiration. With a complement of scientists and naturalists, Wilkes visited, among other exotic places, Fiji, Tahiti, Samoa, and Australia, and sailed enough of the coast of Antarctica to convince himself of the continent's existence.

But it was his reconnaissance of the Northwest Coast of North America and overland excursions to determine which westward-flowing rivers were navigable that meant most to the United States, and helped establish the 49th parallel as the country's Northern boundary. The loss of a ship-the Peacock-trying to cross the bar at the mouth of the Columbia River, for instance, indicated that better harbors should be sought in Puget Sound.

These explorations and the data amassed were invaluable, as were the charts brought back in 1842, but Wilkes and his men received little recognition. The significance of their journey escaped public notice, and English geographers rejected their evidence of a new continent at the bottom of the world. Furthermore, Wilkes was court-martialed for forcibly removing Confederate agents from an English ship during the Civil War, and, although he later rose to the rank of commodore, like Catlin he ended his years in relative obscurity.

The Wilkes expedition's collections-including 10,000 species of plants, 500 of birds, and more than 500 of fishes-first came under the auspices of the National Institute. There they were neglected and mismanaged by ignorant or careless curators, but they were destined for better treatment at the new Smithsonian Institution.

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