Transatlanticism and the Old Indian

Throughout the nineteenth century, cultural conversations about Indian life in America flowed back and forth across the Atlantic. They were frequently implicated in debates about the Anglo-American relationship and the political status quo of the United States, and they were nourished by emigration and travel. They were also sustained by a steady transatlantic traffic of literary and pictorial representations of Native American tribes. The Indian Gallery, which the American traveler and showman George Catlin set up in the Egyptian Hall in London in 1840, opens a window unto the British fascination with Indian tribal life. Catlin showcased Indian artifacts collected during his travels in the American Plains in the 1830s, including buffalo hides, tobacco pipes, arrows, eagle headdresses, drums, shell beads, tomahawks, and a twenty-five-foot-tall wigwam. Intermittently, he hired small groups of North American Indians (two groups of Ojibwa in 1843–44 and 1845–46, respectively, and a group of Iowa in 1844–45) who demonstrated the use of many of these objects and performed war dances and other tribal rites. The heart of Catlin’s collection was a set of around three hundred portraits of members of Plains tribes, painted by Catlin himself and exhibited with brief notes on the sitters’ biographies and his or her tribe. Many of these portraits of “interesting but dying people,” as Catlin put it, showed aged chiefs. ¹ Visitors could gaze at the likeness of “Eh-toh’k-pah-she-pée-shah: the Black Moccasin; Chief; over a hundred years old; sits in his lodge, smoking a handsome pipe” or come face-to-face with “Pash-ee-pa-hó,” described as “a very venerable old man, who has been for many years the first civil chief of the Sacs and Foxes.” ² Catlin presented some of these chiefs as living embodiments of frontier history: “Wee-tá-ra-shá-ro from the tribe of the Paw-ne-picts” is introduced as “an old man” who “embraced Colonel Dodge, and others of the dragoon officers, in council in his village, and otherwise treated them with great kindness, theirs being the first visit ever made to them by white people.” ³ The laconic comment “(since dead)” that closes some of these biographical notes adds to the impression that these chiefs, and the tribes they represent, belong to a quickly vanishing past.