By Frank Boles
The Clarke Library recently acquired a copy
of George Catlin’s lithograph, “O-Jib-be-Ways,” a late addition to his American
Indian Portfolio. The acquisition was
made possible by the Alice C. Webb Memorial Endowment.
Catlin’s American Indian Portfolio, published
in London in 1844, is rightly hailed as a milestone in the visual
documentation of Native Americans. The Portfolio contains the results of
Catlin’s years of living with and traveling among the Great Plains Indians.
From 1832 to 1837, he traveled west and spent the summer months sketching
tribal people. Then, during the winter, he completed his pictures in oils. The
more than 500 paintings he created were unique, both in their breadth and also
in the sympathetic understanding that his images constantly demonstrate. A
selection of images from this body of work were published in the North American
Indian Portfolio in an effort to reach as wider audience.
Catlin was concerned about the question
of who his audience was, because his income came largely from ticket sales generated by
exhibiting his work. He spent from 1837 to 1852 touring the United States,
England, France, and Holland with his collection of paintings and examples of
Indian crafts, allowing the curious to view his exhibit for a fee. His exhibit
was sometimes augmented by members of Indian tribes who were also part of the
show.
Although all of the images found in the
original Portfolio are of Native people who lived west of the Mississippi
River, for individuals interested in Native American who lived east of the
Mississippi River, there is an important coda to this work. In the early 1870s,
the British publisher Chatto & Windus bought the copyright to the
Portfolio, as well as the original printing plates, and in approximately 1875
issued a reprint edition. To make the reprint more saleable, it included six
new images, for which printing plates had been created at the time the first
edition appeared but which had never been used. These six images included the
one acquired by the Clarke Historical Library, “O-Jib-be-Ways.”
How this image came into existence is a story
unto itself. The Ojibwas in Catlin’s image were not painted in America, but
rather in England. Victorian England’s fashionable elite developed a taste for
viewing “exotic” peoples – paying admission to see non-Europeans, dressed in
“native” clothing. In 1843, an enterprising showman found a group of Ojibwas
from the western end of the Great Lakes willing to leave their homeland and
sent them to England.
Catlin was also in London, where the profit
from showing his paintings had begun to decline seriously. Learning of the
Ojibwas, he decided to “improve” his show by renting the nine Native Americans
from their original manager for one hundred pounds sterling a month.
Subsequently they appeared twice a day in Catlin’s rented gallery space. London
newspapers reported that “the audience stood amazed and delighted with the
wildness and newness of the scene that was passing before them.”
The combination of the paintings and living
Ojibwa people made the exhibit a great success. The group was invited to appear
before Queen Victoria, to both perform for her Majesty and dine with the Queen.
The Queen later thanked her guests by sending them twenty pounds sterling and a
length of a plaid in the royal tartan, presumably to be made into blankets.
Catlin was quite sensitive to the charge that
he was exploiting the troupe merely to make money. He pointed out that they
were a people “with reasoning facilities and shrewdness like our own,” who had
a written contract. He added, “I have undertaken to stand by them as their
friend and advocate – not as wild beasts, but as men, laboring in an honest
vocation amid a world of strangers … for the means of feeding their wives and
little children.”
The portrait Catlin painted of the traveling
group includes includes symbols corresponding to individuals Totem or
signature. Catlin's descriptions and translations, printed on the work, are as
follows. "1.) An-que-wee-zaints, the boy chief. 2.)
Pat-au-ah-quat-a-wee-be, the driving cloud, war Chief. 3.) Wee-nish-ka-wee-be,
the flying Gull. 4.) Sah-man, tobacco. 5.) Gish-e-gosh-gee, the moon light
night. 6.) Not-een-a-akm, strong wind, interpreter. 7.) Wos-see-ab-e-neuh-qua,
woman. 8.) Nib-nab-e-qua, child. 9.) Ne-bet-neuh-qua, woman."
Catlin’s more than 500 original paintings
were eventually acquired by the Smithsonian Institution, but were destroyed in
a fire that swept the Institution’s building in 1865. What remains of his work
are the prints from the Portfolio.