War Dance of the Sauks and Foxes

Philadelphia: F.W. Greenough, 1838. unbound. very good. J.T. Bowen. View. Lithograph with original hand coloring. Page measures 14" x 19.25". Some toning and a few chips to lower right corner. Some tape residue along top and bottom edges. Scene from the folio edition of McKenney and Hall's "History of the Indian Tribes of North America". As Superintendent of the Indian Trade Bureau, Thomas McKenney wanted to document the rapidly disappearing culture of the American natives. He activated the project, sponsored by the War Department, by commissioning writer James Hall and Charles Bird King, a renowned American portraitist. King painted the prominent Indians (truncated) while they visited Washington D.C. as treaty delegates. Most of the original oil paintings were destroyed by fire in the Smithsonian Museum in 1865. These lithographs, published 1842-58, are all that remain and are still hailed as one of the best visual records of influential Native Americans of the nineteenth century. This war dance scene served as the frontispiece to the "The Indian Tribes of North America" and also to one of the earliest western travel books, "Travels in North America during 1834, 1835, and 1836" (Volume 2), by Charles Augustus Murray. One of many Native American portraits in our collection. (Inventory #: 213779)