xplorers
were sent out by President Jefferson in 1803, immediately on the
completion of the Louisiana Purchase, to get a better knowledge of the
northern portion of the vast territory recently acquired, with a
particular view to developing the fur-trade and to opening a route to
the Pacific. All these ends were accomplished with a degree of success
that made the enterprise one of the greatest achievements in our
history. The explorers, having ascended the Missouri in their boats,
and finding themselves, as winter came on, near the Mandan villages,
{322} decided to remain there until the spring. Accordingly they
passed the winter, 1803-4, among these interesting tribesmen. It being
a part of their prescribed duty to keep full journals of all that they
experienced or saw, they have left extended accounts of the people and
their customs.

Thirty-four years later George Catlin, a famous artist and student of
Indian life, who spent many years in traveling among the wild tribes of
the West and in describing them with pen, pencil, and brush, came among
the Mandans. He was so much impressed with them as a singular and
superior people that he remained among them a considerable time,
painted many of their men and women, studied and made drawings of some
of their singular ceremonies, and devoted a large part of his two
volumes to a highly interesting account of what he saw among them.

Catlin certainly was wholly free from the silly prejudice expressed in
the familiar saying, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." His two
volumes, "The North American Indians," furnish "mighty interesting
reading." As we accompany him in his long journeys by canoe and on
horseback and read his descriptions of the tribes he visited and the
warriors and chiefs he learned to know, and of whom he has left us
pictures, it is a satisfaction to feel that we are traveling with a man
who looked on the Indian as a human being. Sometimes we are inclined
to suspect that, in the enthusiasm of his artistic nature, he idealized
his subject and viewed him with a degree of sentiment as remote from
the truth in one direction as {323} was the hostile prejudice of the
average white man in the other. We know that he either did not see or
purposely ignored certain aspects of Indian life, notably the physical
dirt and the moral degradation.

When he comes to the Mandans, this disposition to make heroes of his
subjects fairly runs away with him. No language