These Indians first became known to white men through the expedition of the elder Vérendrye. They showed themselves hospitable and friendly to him, as they always have been to our race, and they aided his sons in their efforts to reach the Western Sea. Next we have quite full references to them in the journals of Lewis and Clark. These explorers 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.