George Catlin, coal-region painter, inventor of 'Indian Gallery' he took to Paris...

When I was a child, a favorite family excursion was a visit to the Reading Museum and its surrounding park, where my sisters and I liked to feed the ducks, throwing stale bread from the foot bridges into pretty shaded streams. We also wandered in the museum, in those days an old-fashioned kind of place, with yellowed walls and dimly lit displays.

Upstairs there was an art gallery, where I saw my first painting by the French painter Corot, a bank of willows dipping their branches into the River Seine, a small painting but powerful enough to awaken in me an early fascination with all things French.

Downstairs, behind glass, in display cases that filled the center of the gallery, sat or stood American Indians, as we called them in those days, life-sized mannequins in native dress, surrounded by the artefacts that were the tools of their daily life. Along the walls, there were displays of arrowheads, beads, pottery, coins, too many objects, all too small, to hold the interest of a child like me.

The museum was never crowded and this gallery was a quiet place, where the mannequins, frozen in time, indifferent to the faces pressed close to the glass, mournfully tended fires or raised an arrow in the direction of an invisible prey.

I haven’t visited the Reading Museum in many years and I do not know if those Indian mannequins still haunt the first-floor gallery, silent reminders of a way of life destroyed. Enclosed in glass, unreachable, untouchable, they are reminders of a time when such exhibits represented a kind of Noah’s ark, keeping alive the last vestiges of a dying civilization in the face of Manifest Destiny.

One man responsible for such exhibits was George Catlin, Wilkes Barre native, painter of native American life, explorer, ethnographer, entrepreneur and showman, originator of the type of display I saw at the Reading Museum as a child.

Born in 1796, raised in what was still the wilderness of the Wyoming Valley, where only twenty years earlier, a bloody battle had taken place between the Oneidas and American soldiers, George Catlin was raised on tales about the Indians that had once inhabited his family’s land. An avid hunter even as a child, he roamed fields and woods with his single-barrel shotgun, shooting at small game, hoping to one day bring down his first deer.

On one such outing, aiming at the coveted deer, the boy heard a shot before he had the time to fire and saw the deer fall to the ground. From the brush emerged an Indian who tied its feet together and threw it on his back, smiling at young Catlin before he disappeared among the trees.

The man, an Oneida who was camping near the Catlin farm, had walked all the way from Lake Cayuga, in New York state, to visit the ground where his ancestors had fallen in battle. After smoking a peace pipe with George’s father, he shared his venison with the family, congratulating young Catlin on his hunting skills.

Was it that incident, recorded by Catlin in his memoirs, that planted the seed, that gave him the fever, to go West, to live among the Indians, especially the Iowas and the Ojibwas, to record in vivid detail every aspect of their way of life? Destined by family tradition to be a lawyer, a gentleman farmer, a pillar of the community, responsible for the welfare of the growing city of Wilkes Barre, he gave it all up to study painting. Then, rather than paint the popular society portraits of his day, he devoted brush and palette to the feathers and war paint of the great warriors of the American plains.

When he was 32-years-old, in 1828, Catlin began defining the project that would become his “Indian Gallery,” a testimony to the native Americans among whom he lived while recording their lives. At that time, the idea of collecting Indian artefacts was not new. In fact, the US Department of Indian Affairs had an extensive collection and even invited Indians to Washington to perform native dances and display their skills.

Yet, the West remained a land of conquest and when Andrew Jackson entered the White House in 1828, collecting took a backseat to an upsurge in warfare. For Catlin, this became an opportunity to pursue a passion, born in childhood, that would continue to the end of his life. Through painting and collecting, he hoped to salvage the remnants of a slowing dying part of humanity.

A year later, he headed West, where he painted, collected, and befriended his subjects. After creating a substantial body of work, he returned East, joined by some of his Indian friends, hoping to solicit public interest in his living and artistic testimony, but the interest was just not there. At a time of aggressive westward expansion, Indians were the enemy and few Americans wanted to pay to see Catlin’s museum, the Indian Gallery.

But on the other side of the Atlantic, in London and Paris, Catlin found his public. In 1841, speaking in front of the Royal Institution in London, he proclaimed his desire to create a “museum of humanity,” devoted to all human races and animal species in decline. At Egyptian Hall, an immense exhibition space, he displayed his painting and his collections, while live Indians formed “frozen theatrical groups,” holding the same pose for hours.

Loading his collections, living and inanimate, on a boat, moving on to Paris, he took that city by storm, attracting the artistic and intellectual elite, impatient to rub elbows with the “savages,” hoping to catch a glimmer of the purity of primitive life.

Between 1839 and 1850, Catlin successfully travelled Europe with his “museum of humanity,” but then he went bust. When he had set out on his expedition, the word “museum” was still a kind of “catch-all” term, that took in circus sideshows, wax museums, exhibits of “living specimens,” as well as the serious art collections that were beginning to take form at the British Museum in London or at the Louvre. By the end of the decade, “serious” museums had won out and the European public had grown tired of Catlin’s travelling show, preferring universal expositions, like the World’s Fair that took place in London’s Crystal Palace in 1851.

Catlin died penniless in 1872, still sketching Indian life, devoted to his Indian Gallery to the end. In 1879, his collections were saved from destruction by the Smithsonian Institute. Not until 2002, in Washington D.C., was there an exhibit worthy of Catlin’s work and of his mission to preserve the last vestiges of the cultures of the native American peoples he loved.