August 26, 2025 • 51 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
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
(00:22):
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
(00:56):
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
(01:17):
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
(01:38):
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
(01:59):
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,
(02:19):
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.
(02:41):
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,
(03:04):
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
(03:25):
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
(03:45):
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
(04:06):
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.
(04:29):
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
(04:50):
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
(05:13):
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
(05:37):
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
(05:59):
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
(06:20):
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,
(06:43):
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
(07:05):
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
(07:28):
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,
(07:48):
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
(08:11):
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
(08:32):
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
(08:54):
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
(09:18):
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
(09:39):
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
(10:03):
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.
(10:26):
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.
(10:50):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:36):
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
(12:00):
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
(12:22):
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
(12:46):
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
(13:07):
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
(13:31):
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
(13:52):
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
(14:15):
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
(14:38):
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
(15:00):
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,
(15:25):
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.
(15:49):
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
(16:13):
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.
(16:36):
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
(16:58):
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
(17:18):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:01):
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
(18:22):
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
(18:43):
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.
(19:05):
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.
(19:28):
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
(19:51):
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
(20:13):
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,
(20:35):
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
(20:58):
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
(21:19):
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
(21:41):
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
(22:05):
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
(22:29):
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
(22:51):
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
(23:12):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:55):
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
(24:17):
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
(24:39):
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
(25:02):
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
(25:23):
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
(25:44):
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
(26:04):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:45):
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
(27:07):
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.
(27:29):
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,
(27:52):
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
(28:12):
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
(28:33):
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
(28:54):
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
(29:15):
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
(29:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
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
(30:31):
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
(30:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
That there was hacking on each other.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Yeah, that was a shock to me.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
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
(31:52):
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
(32:15):
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.
(32:35):
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
(32:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
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.
(33:46):
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
(34:07):
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
(34:29):
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
(34:53):
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
(35:17):
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
(35:39):
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
(36:01):
national park, but he does get credit for being the
first person to ever propose one in America.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
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
(36:28):
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
(36:55):
crimes aren't investigated, you know, they their own system of
government prevails in their area. Sentinel Island in the Pacific.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Nicaragua has one where it's.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
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
(37:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
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
(38:10):
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
(38:32):
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,
(38:53):
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
(39:17):
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
(39:41):
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
(40:02):
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
(40:23):
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
(40:44):
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
(41:07):
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
(41:32):
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
(41:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:10):
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.
(42:32):
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
(42:52):
renditions of native peoples.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
You know.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Uh huh.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
Everything that goes on like little chores.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
It was just like it's just stick it all over
the place.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
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
(44:08):
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
(44:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
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
(45:13):
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
(45:34):
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
(45:55):
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
(46:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
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
(46:53):
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
(47:16):
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
(47:38):
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
(48:01):
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
(48:24):
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
(48:48):
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
(49:08):
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
(49:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (49:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
Absolutely, and when.
Speaker 3 (50:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:13):
It was born from sympathy.
Speaker 3 (50:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
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
(50:45):
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
(51:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (51:25):
Well, Dan, thanks man, look forward to the next episode.
Speaker 1 (51:27):
Oh thank you, Steven Randall, appreciate it.
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
(00:22):
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
(00:56):
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
(01:17):
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
(01:38):
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
(01:59):
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,
(02:19):
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.
(02:41):
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,
(03:04):
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
(03:25):
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
(03:45):
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
(04:06):
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.
(04:29):
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
(04:50):
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
(05:13):
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
(05:37):
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
(05:59):
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
(06:20):
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,
(06:43):
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
(07:05):
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
(07:28):
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,
(07:48):
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
(08:11):
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
(08:32):
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
(08:54):
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
(09:18):
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
(09:39):
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
(10:03):
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.
(10:26):
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.
(10:50):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:36):
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
(12:00):
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
(12:22):
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
(12:46):
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
(13:07):
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
(13:31):
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
(13:52):
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
(14:15):
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
(14:38):
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
(15:00):
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,
(15:25):
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.
(15:49):
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
(16:13):
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.
(16:36):
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
(16:58):
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
(17:18):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:01):
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
(18:22):
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
(18:43):
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.
(19:05):
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.
(19:28):
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
(19:51):
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
(20:13):
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,
(20:35):
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
(20:58):
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
(21:19):
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
(21:41):
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
(22:05):
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
(22:29):
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
(22:51):
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
(23:12):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:55):
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
(24:17):
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
(24:39):
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
(25:02):
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
(25:23):
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
(25:44):
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
(26:04):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:45):
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
(27:07):
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.
(27:29):
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,
(27:52):
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
(28:12):
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
(28:33):
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
(28:54):
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
(29:15):
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
(29:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
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
(30:31):
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
(30:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
That there was hacking on each other.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Yeah, that was a shock to me.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
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
(31:52):
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
(32:15):
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.
(32:35):
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
(32:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
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.
(33:46):
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
(34:07):
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
(34:29):
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
(34:53):
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
(35:17):
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
(35:39):
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
(36:01):
national park, but he does get credit for being the
first person to ever propose one in America.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
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
(36:28):
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
(36:55):
crimes aren't investigated, you know, they their own system of
government prevails in their area. Sentinel Island in the Pacific.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Nicaragua has one where it's.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
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
(37:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
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
(38:10):
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
(38:32):
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,
(38:53):
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
(39:17):
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
(39:41):
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
(40:02):
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
(40:23):
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
(40:44):
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
(41:07):
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
(41:32):
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
(41:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:10):
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.
(42:32):
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
(42:52):
renditions of native peoples.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
You know.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Uh huh.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
Everything that goes on like little chores.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
It was just like it's just stick it all over
the place.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
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
(44:08):
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
(44:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
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
(45:13):
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
(45:34):
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
(45:55):
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
(46:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
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
(46:53):
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
(47:16):
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
(47:38):
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
(48:01):
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
(48:24):
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
(48:48):
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
(49:08):
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
(49:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (49:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
Absolutely, and when.
Speaker 3 (50:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:13):
It was born from sympathy.
Speaker 3 (50:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
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
(50:45):
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
(51:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (51:25):
Well, Dan, thanks man, look forward to the next episode.
Speaker 1 (51:27):
Oh thank you, Steven Randall, appreciate it.
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.