Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians.

Catlin’s highly sympathetic account of the peoples that he encountered on his expeditions was intended to alert America to value of their culture before they disappeared; “the tribes of the red men of North America, as a nation of human beings, are on the wane; that (to use their own very beautiful figure) ‘they are fast travelling to the shades of their fathers, towards the setting sun;’ and … the traveller, who would see these people in their native simplicity and beauty, must need be hastily on his way to the prairies and Rocky Mountains, or he will see them only as they are now seen on the frontiers, as a basket of dead game,—harassed, chased, bleeding and dead” (Letter I)Catlin toured the world with his “Indian Gallery,” the vast collection of paintings amassed during his 12 years of intensive ethnographical research. His accounts are probably the most reliable 19th-century source for native North American culture, and his images have become world famous as a record of a way of life that was fast disappearing even in the early 19th century. Originally published in 1841 by Catlin himself to accompany his show at the Egyptian Hall, this is one of the later issues in which all of the plates are in colour.

2 volumes, large 8vo. Original black cloth, title gilt to upper board and spine, block of mounted Indians to the upper board, top edge gilt. Coloured frontispiece to each, that of vol. II a map, and 174 other coloured plates in all, 2 other coloured maps, one of them folding. Bookplates of Verne S. Swan, violin maker and collector, and Frederick W. Putnam (1861–1934). Light toning, binding internally cracked in places, but no pages loose, cloth slightly rubbed, cloth to upper joint of vol. I split but the binding beneath sound, a very good set.