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George Catlin

The artist knew that the Native Americans could not maintain their culture in the face of the white man's expansion across the continent.

“Oh! how I love a people who don’t live for the love of money,” George Catlin once exclaimed.

In words and pictures, George Catlin recorded the secret ceremony, a blend of mysticism and horrific cruelty, by which the Mandans initiated their braves and conjured the life-sustaining buffalo.

George Catlin painted a moving portrait of friend Joseph Chadwick just before his friend's untimely death in the Texas Revolution

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