By the early 1830s, the idea of the “vanishing Indian” was not just romantic fantasy but a morbid foreshadowing of an indigenous doomsday. Anticipating there would be no “free Indians” roaming on the northwestern frontier of the expanding American republic, adventurers like the Yankee artist-author-showman George Catlin and the Prussian naturalist Maximilian von Wied, in company with the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer, risked their lives to document this primeval universe before it disappeared.
A retired military officer, von Wied had studied under Dr. Johann Gottfried Blumenbach at Göttingen University and was an experienced traveler who previously collected a mass of precious ethnographic, botanical, and zoological information during a two-year voyage to Brazil’s coastal region—fifteen years prior to his journey to the Missouri River. A major travel and trade route for hundreds of generations of indigenous Americans belonging to dozens of tribal nations, this long river meanders southeast from a high...
