The Red Man's Bones: George Catlin, Artist and Showman

The first biography in over sixty years of a great American artist whose paintings are more famous than the man who made them.

George Catlin has been called the “first artist of the West,” as none before him lived among and painted the Native American tribes of the Northern Plains. After a false start as a painter of miniatures, Catlin found his calling: to fix the image of a “vanishing race” before their “extermination”—his word—by a government greedy for their lands. In the first six year...