Catlin visited the quarry in 1836, traveling overland from Fort Snelling against the objections of Yankton Dakota who controlled access to the site and discouraged outside visitors. He was the first white artist to document the location, and he collected samples of the stone that were later analyzed by Boston mineralogist Charles T. Jackson, who named the mineral catlinite in his honor. The painting was made in the wake of this trip, part of the body of work Catlin assembled from his journeys across the upper Missouri and northern plains between 1830 and 1836. By this date he was actively building his Indian Gallery for public exhibition, having concluded that traditional Plains lifeways were rapidly disappearing.

Catlin (1796–1872) trained as a lawyer before turning to portraiture and then to his self-assigned project of documenting Native peoples west of the Mississippi. The pipestone canvas belongs to the core Indian Gallery collection that he toured in the United States and Europe, struggled to sell to Congress, and ultimately lost to creditors; it was acquired by the Smithsonian after his death through the bequest of Joseph Harrison’s widow in 1879. The quarry site Catlin recorded was designated Pipestone National Monument in 1937, and his painting remains the earliest pictorial record of a place that figured into the broader nineteenth-century documentation of the trans-Mississippi West initiated by Lewis and Clark a generation earlier.

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Catlin witnessed the O-kee-pa in the Mandan village of Mih-tutta-hang-kusch, near present-day Stanton, North Dakota, during the summer of 1832, while traveling up the Missouri aboard the American Fur Company steamboat Yellow Stone. He was among the few outsiders ever to observe the ceremony in full; the Mandan population was nearly destroyed by the smallpox epidemic of 1837, and the ritual was effectively ended within a generation of his visit. The Bull Dance was the public portion of a rite concerned with the renewal of the buffalo herds and the reenactment of Mandan origin narratives. Lewis and Clark had wintered with the Mandan in 1804–1805 at Fort Mandan, roughly fifty miles downstream, but did not record the ceremony itself.

The painting is part of Catlin’s Indian Gallery, the body of more than 500 portraits and scenes he produced during his travels among Plains and Woodlands peoples in the 1830s. After decades of touring the Gallery in the United States and Europe in an unsuccessful effort to sell it to Congress, the works were acquired by the railroad investor Joseph Harrison and donated by his widow to the Smithsonian in 1879. Catlin later expanded his Mandan material into the 1867 monograph O-kee-pa: A Religious Ceremony, which remains the principal ethnographic source on the rite and for which this canvas serves as the key visual document.

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Catlin reached Fort Union in June 1832 aboard the steamboat Yellow Stone on its second annual voyage upriver, an event that opened the upper Missouri to regular steam navigation. He stayed several weeks as the guest of Kenneth McKenzie, the trader who ran the post, and used it as a base to paint portraits of Assiniboine, Crow, Cree, Blackfeet, and Plains Ojibwe visitors who came to trade. The site lay roughly twenty-five miles below the spot where Lewis and Clark had camped in late April 1805, on their outbound journey, and again in August 1806 returning east. By the time Catlin arrived, the fur trade had transformed the confluence from the unsettled landscape the captains described into the principal commercial hub of the northern plains.

Catlin (1796–1872), trained as a lawyer in Pennsylvania before turning to portraiture, undertook five trips into Indian country between 1830 and 1836, producing the roughly five hundred paintings that became his Indian Gallery. The 1832 Missouri trip yielded his most ambitious body of work, including the Fort Union views and the portraits made there. The painting is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Indian Gallery, the bulk of which entered the Smithsonian in 1879 through the gift of Joseph Harrison’s widow, after Catlin had failed for decades to sell the collection to the U.S. government. The Fort Union images remain among the earliest visual records of the upper Missouri trading frontier that succeeded the expedition’s reconnaissance.

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The portrait was made in the summer of 1832 at the Mandan villages near the mouth of the Knife River in present-day North Dakota, the same villages where Lewis and Clark had wintered in 1804–1805 at Fort Mandan. Catlin had traveled up the Missouri aboard the American Fur Company steamer Yellow Stone, reaching Fort Clark and the Mandan towns in July. Four Bears sat for him there. Catlin regarded him as one of the most distinguished men he met on the upper Missouri and produced both this full-dress portrait and a second image showing him in war costume. Five years later, in 1837, the smallpox epidemic brought up the river by steamboat killed Four Bears and nearly the entire Mandan nation, giving Catlin’s 1832 portraits unintended documentary weight.

The painting belongs to Catlin’s Indian Gallery, the body of roughly 500 portraits and scenes he produced during his Missouri and Plains travels of 1830–1836 and exhibited in American and European cities through the 1840s. After decades of failed attempts to sell the collection to the U.S. government, the Gallery was donated to the Smithsonian in 1879 by the widow of Joseph Harrison, the Philadelphia industrialist who had acquired it from Catlin’s creditors. The portrait is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Together with Karl Bodmer’s 1834 drawings of the same sitter, it remains a primary visual record of Mandan leadership in the generation after Lewis and Clark.

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The site depicted is the burial place of Sergeant Charles Floyd, the only member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to die during the journey. Floyd succumbed on August 20, 1804, near present-day Sioux City, Iowa, almost certainly from a ruptured appendix, and the captains buried him on a prominent bluff overlooking the river, marking the grave with a cedar post inscribed with his name and rank. Catlin passed the spot in 1832 during his ascent of the Missouri aboard the steamboat Yellow Stone, the same voyage that produced the bulk of his Plains Indian portraits and landscapes. By the time of his visit, the marker had been disturbed and the mound partially eroded, and Catlin recorded the location both in paint and in the narrative he later published in 1841 as Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians.

Catlin (1796–1872) had abandoned a legal career in the 1820s to document Native peoples of the American interior, and his 1832 trip up the Missouri yielded the core of what he called his Indian Gallery. Floyd’s Grave belongs to the landscape subset of that body of work, scenes recording specific places along the river rather than ethnographic subjects. The painting is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Catlin collection acquired from the artist’s widow’s estate in the late nineteenth century. The image has been frequently reproduced in Lewis and Clark scholarship as one of the earliest visual records of the Floyd burial site, which was subsequently lost to erosion and reinterred several times before the present obelisk was erected in 1901.

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The painting dates from Catlin’s 1832 ascent of the Missouri aboard the American Fur Company steamboat Yellow Stone, which carried him as far as Fort Union, established two years earlier at the mouth of the Yellowstone River in present-day North Dakota. He spent several weeks there in the summer of 1832 sketching Assiniboine, Crow, Blackfeet, and Plains Cree visitors to the post and observing communal buffalo hunts on the surrounding plains. Lewis and Clark had passed the same river junction in April 1805 on the outbound leg of their expedition and again in August 1806 on the return, and the site remained a key geographic marker for the fur trade Catlin documented a generation later. He worked up many of the Fort Union subjects into finished oils during the winter of 1832–1833 in St. Louis.

Catlin (1796–1872) trained as a lawyer before turning to portraiture and, in 1830, committing himself to recording Native peoples of the trans-Mississippi West. Buffalo Chase, Mouth of the Yellowstone belongs to his Indian Gallery, the roughly 500-painting body of work he exhibited in American and European cities through the 1830s and 1840s. After decades of financial trouble, the core of the Gallery entered the Smithsonian in 1879 through the bequest of Joseph Harrison’s widow and is now held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The buffalo-hunt subjects in particular have been frequently reproduced in publications on the Upper Missouri and the Lewis and Clark route.

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The view derives from Catlin’s residence at the Mandan villages near Fort Clark in the summer of 1832, three decades after Lewis and Clark wintered among the same people in 1804–1805 at Fort Mandan, roughly sixty miles upriver. Catlin’s documentation acquired unintended weight after the smallpox epidemic of 1837 reduced the Mandan population to a remnant and destroyed the village world he had recorded. He painted this bird’s-eye composition between 1837 and 1839 while assembling his Indian Gallery for exhibition in eastern cities and, soon after, in London and Paris.

Catlin (1796–1872) trained as a lawyer before turning to portraiture and, in the late 1820s, to the project that defined his career: a visual ethnography of Native peoples west of the Mississippi. The Mandan paintings, made possible by his ascent of the Missouri aboard the American Fur Company steamer Yellow Stone, are among the most historically consequential works in that body. The canvas is part of the large Catlin holdings at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, acquired through the 1879 gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr., whose husband had rescued the Indian Gallery from creditors in 1852. The image has been reproduced widely in Lewis and Clark scholarship as the closest surviving depiction of the kind of settlement the captains described in their winter journals.

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