George Catlin

Born in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, George Catlin became the first American artist of stature to visit and depict the Plains Indians on his own volition, and he spent about eight years traveling among the 48 North American Indian tribes including to Alaska.  His sketches and paintings are the first and most important record of land west of the Mississippi River before white settlement.  Historian Robert Taft wrote that …”it can be said that Catlin was the great publicist” of the upper Missouri region as a result of his trip in 1832.