A man stands in profile, his glossy black hair hanging loosely past his shoulders complemented by his dark complexion. He does not make eye contact with the viewer. Instead, his gaze drifts to the right— his attention caught by something in the distance beyond our view. In his left hand, he holds a large peace pipe—notably sketched and unfinished—filled with tobacco with smoke gently wafting from the bowl. His stationary pose suggests a moment of contentment as the viewer can almost imagine the scent of tobacco lingering in the background.

Most strikingly, Karl Bodmer’s 1833 painting of a Piegan Blackfoot Man focuses on a painted bison robe tightly draped over the entirety of the man’s body, which reveals in great detail, a series of small images marking his martial accomplishments. A stampede of horse hooves, empty bows, flintlock muskets, and enemies bloodied from battle populate the painted robe. These pictographs, made almost exclusively by men, stand as visual shorthand for personal accomplishments. The Piegan man’s name was unrecorded by Bodmer, but his identity and social status is visually referenced by his clothing. Among numerous Plains tribes, painted bison robes represented a communion of human and animal realms thought to ensure future successes in battle.

Karl Bodmer’s paintings and drawings of Indigenous nations, representing more than 400 images, constitutes one of the first detailed pictorial ensembles focused on Native life and culture along the Upper Missouri River, a region that would later be encompassed within the American West. Bodmer accompanied German naturalist Prince Alexander Phillip Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied’s 1832 -1834 expedition of the Upper Missouri River. They traveled nearly 5,000 miles, which provided ample opportunities for Maximilian to take copious field notes and Bodmer to visually record multiple thriving Indigenous communities. The images offer a historically unique testimony of Indigenous self-fashioning and agency in the early 1830s. Thus, this essay situates Bodmer’s portraits of Native individuals into a wider history of their artistic representations during the first half of the nineteenth century, repositioning the Swiss artist within a visual culture that he simultaneously emulated and transformed.

However, one of Bodmer’s first encounters with Native culture was not in the Western territories, but in Philadelphia, a few weeks reaching the United States in July 1832. Charles Willson Peale’s museum, which first opened to the public in 1782, had been the first national gallery dedicated to art, science, and natural history in the country. Examples of Native American material culture displayed by Peale included decorated buckskin shirts, silver gorget necklaces, war bonnets, wampum, tomahawks, and household items such as ceramic vessels and wooden feasting bowls. Many of the Indigenous-produced artworks were provided through government-sponsored scientific expeditions like those of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1804-06) and Stephen H. Long (1819-20). In that context, Maximilian considered that Peale’s museum was a valuable visit to build his knowledge of Native American material culture, adding that the collection was, “well worth seeing are the costumes and articles of finery of various peoples, including the North American Indians, of whom several complete figures (face and hands of wax) are very interesting. Chiefs, with headdresses made from the feathers of the war eagle, painted, and with necklaces made from the claws of the grizzly bear present a strange sight.”

Bodmer was also able to refine his drawing skills by studying portraits of American Revolutionary officers lining the walls of the galleries as well as private collections to prepare for his travels westward.

When Maximilian and Bodmer reached St. Louis in March 1833 to gather supplies for their journey along the Missouri River, they also interacted with an array of local artists, travelers, and government officials. The city’s importance in the 1830s resulted from its strategic location at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, which made it a central hub for transportation and trade. The livelihood of Francophone merchants, Anglo-American immigrants, enslaved African individuals, and local Native community members such as the Ponca, Omaha, Quapaw, and Sac and Fox depended on the economic success of the fur trading business. Maximilian’s journals capture the activity of an industrial city, noting the development of roads, canals, and powerful steamboats accelerating the migration of Euro-American settlers.

William Clark helped solidify St. Louis’s position as a major center for trade as well as serving as the principal negotiator to manage the complex diplomatic relationships with Indigenous groups. He served as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, carrying the responsibility to issue trading licenses, gather cartographic information about the American West, and support Euro-American travel through the region. Clark kept many cultural items from his 1804 exploration, adding to it through gifts from visiting Native delegations throughout his term as Superintendent. William C. Preston, a South Carolina State Representative, who visited Clark in 1819, described his collection as, “adorned with ornamented and painted buffalo robes, numerous strings of wampum, every variety of work of porcupine quills, skins, horns, claws, bird skins, numerous and large Calumets, arms of all sorts, saddles, bridles, spears, powder horns, plumes, red blankets, and flags.”(1) In turn, Clark’s collection arguably influenced Maximilian and Bodmer, suggestively informing their own sensibilities about the aesthetic design of Indigenous material culture.

While in St. Louis, Maximilian and Bodmer also had the opportunity to review sample sheets of Thomas McKenney and James Hall’s three volume publication History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1836-1841). Maximilian described the book’s value as, “The most important work of this kind ever to be published is now appearing: a book with 120 color lithographed portraits of the famous chiefs of all the Indian tribes.” The lithographs illustrated by Henry Inman were based upon Charles Bird King’s original oil paintings of Native delegations visiting Washington D.C. between 1821 and 1841, which the Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas McKenney had commissioned from the artist. The Native American delegations had lengthy meetings with President Andrew Jackson and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun to negotiate treaties and land disputes, which gave King time to paint the leaders.

King’s portraits of Native men (and later, Inman’s lithographs) monumentalize their subject, as seen in the 1825 portrait of Oto leader Shaumonekusse (Fig. 1). He wears a bison horn headdress and bear-claw necklace, symbolizing his bravery and prominence within the tribe. A silver peace medal adorns his chest featuring the likeness of President James Monroe, the fifth President of the United States (1817–1825), symbolizing his political alliance with the United States government. King drew upon his European artistic training to represent Native subjects, placing them close to the picture plane, as well as using controlled lighting, and delicate brushwork to render details of their regalia in a realistic manner. His sensitivity to the sitter’s physical characteristics is evident in Shaumonekusse’s face where the modeling of light and shadow cascades over his high cheekbones. Inman’s corresponding lithograph of Shaumonekusse compacts his likeness within an empty white space, which appears remarkably similar to Bodmer’s future watercolors (Fig. 2). The vacant space on the printed page surrounding the Oto leader suggests a place for contemplation about the subject as well as bridging the distance to the small text below stating Shaumonekusse’s name and tribe. The white space of the page functions to frame the central subject akin to a microscope delicately revealing the details of its focus.

Confronted with the challenge of combining art and science, Bodmer’s images invite methodical observation, the type of close looking fitting to Maximilian’s scientific inquiry, whose goals were collecting, comparing, and classifying Indigenous cultures, landscapes, fauna, and flora. Sustained observation went beyond mere vision to one of insight. The introspective qualities that Bodmer’s imbued his sitters with are present in full-length portraits such as Sih-Chidä. The artist represents the Mandan man in profile as he stares into the distance with a beaded bison robe wrapped tightly around his body to block the frigid winter air. His pose and alert eyes suggests his sentinel duties, one of the many roles he served within his community. A cluster of raven, magpie, and owl feathers atop his head, along with heel trailers made of otter fur lined in red cloth, represent insignia of the military unit known as the Dog Society. Bodmer rendered Sih-Chidä’s personal belongings with extraordinary detail, even showcasing a small tear on his robe that had been mended by his wife. The portrait skillfully shows Bodmer’s ability to sketch the young man’s expressive features and reflect upon the emotional character of his presence.

Over the winter of 1833 and spring 1834, Sih-Chidä visited Maximilian and Bodmer’s residence at Fort Clark a total of thirty-two times and frequently stayed overnight.(2) Bodmer established a close rapport with Sih-Chidä during his frequent visits, bonding with their shared artistic activities and similar ages. Sih-Chidä even invited the European men to his earth lodge and provided dinner prepared by his wife. His attentiveness to their company, a lavish display of food, and sharing a tobacco pipe together fostered a sense of community among the men.

This type of personal relationship contrasted with the sentimentalized work of George Catlin, who was one of the first American artists to paint Native individuals within their ancestral homelands. Catlin’s portraits were often romanticized, amplified by his increasing anxiety about the fate of Native American communities. This approach reflects more of his personal vision than the objective reality of his subjects. Catlin’s journals, along with those of contemporaneous writers and politicians, reflect the belief that Native communities were simply destined to vanish; their culture weakened as Anglo-American settlers progressed ever more through Western territories. Driven by this feeling, Catlin claimed to have visited fifty tribes west of the Mississippi, from present-day North Dakota to Oklahoma, between 1830 and 1836 in order to create an extensive visual record of Native culture.

For example, traveling along the Missouri River in 1832, Catlin painted over 135 works in fewer than ninety days and amassed nearly 200 paintings in five months.(3) He was largely self-taught, which may have limited the range of his artistic skills. Since he aimed to document as many tribes and aspects of Native American life as possible, his paintings often featured similar compositions and an awkward understanding of bodily proportions. Many of his paintings focus on a bust portrait or half figure set against a flat, neutral background, underscoring the prominence of the face rather than accompanying personal details.

Catlin’s 1832 portrait Stu-mick-o-súcks, Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat, Head Chief, Blood Tribe establishes the Native man as a formidable leader dressed in impressive regalia (Fig. 3). The lower half of his face is marked with red paint, intensifying the viewer’s scrutiny upon his facial features. He wears an elaborate long sleeve deerskin tunic decorated with a large, quilled medallion, beaded epaulets, and hair locks streaming down his shoulders. He also holds a pipe with a beaded stem resting against his torso representing him as a spiritual leader for his community. His dress is imbued with power, not only marking his past martial achievements, but also an indication of future victories, notable by the hair locks donated by family members to symbolize his desire to protect his community. His self-assured gaze and serious pose holds the viewer’s attention, lending a reverent dimension to the image accentuating its own sense of gravitas.

Bodmer and Maximilian were introduced to Catlin’s collection of Native portraits by William Clark’s nephew, Major Benjamin O’Fallon, who was storing some of the paintings while Catlin was traveling to Britain and France. Yet, Catlin’s paintings act as a formal public statement about the artist’s ability to capture the livelihood of a seemingly disappearing culture, whereas Bodmer’s portraits create an intimate scene for the viewer. Catlin’s sitters become representative of a Euro-American rhetoric about the “vanishing Indian”, where Native livelihood seemingly fades in the wake of modernity. Catlin’s collection of paintings advances this mythology by representing Native leaders as mere relics of history, rather concentrating on their individualized personalities and as active contributors to their community. Catlin’s fixation on his subject’s countenance with particular emphasis to their eyes belies the importance of their personal regalia. Bodmer’s attention to Native clothing implies a sensory experience as the viewer drifts over the supple buckskin, smooth beads, and coarse animal fur. In fact, many of Bodmer’s sitters negotiated their portrait during the painting process, selecting their own clothing and being able to review their likeness on paper, which became especially central in cases when a sitter initially refused to pose for the artist. Hidatsa leader Awaschó-dichsas, for instance, relented to have his portrait painted only if he could face away from the artist. With his back to the viewer, he reveals the decorated surface of his painted bison skin outlined with wolf tracks. Furry wolf tails are attached to the moccasins, perhaps further identifying himself with the hunting power and agility of the animal. In most cases, Native responses to Bodmer’s portraits ranged from wonder, and sometimes fear, to the acknowledgement of the artist’s faithful observation.

Bodmer was a meticulous draftsman, producing portraits remarkable for their sensitivity to an individual’s presence and with keen attention to details of their regalia, jewelry, and weapons. His technical virtuosity and candid portraits were comparable with no other artist documenting the American West in the early nineteenth century. Bodmer’s drawings are a threshold into a Native worldview and self-representation in the long lives of Great Plains communities.