Introduction by James Gilreath; Abbeville Press/Library of Congress; 31 plates.
During his journey through the wilderness of the American West, George CatHn encountered a world so untamed that many people back East refused to believe what he saw. In 1830 he had abandoned his wife and family in Pennsylvania and ventured west to paint the Native Americans who had intrigued him since childhood. Catlin was on a mission, he said, to identify “some branch or enterprise of the arts, on which to devote a whole life-time of enthusiasm.” He found it at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, painting Plains Indians.
Catlin produced over three hundred oil paintings in six years of living with the Indians and studying their habits, and he captured many of the activities and customs that distinguished their culture. He depicted buffalo hunts, traditional dances, and even the Comanches’ primitive game of lacrosse, in which, he noted in a detailed description of the painting, “five or six hundred youths, with chastened and oiled limbs, and with empty stomachs” took to the field to prove their skill and strength. Because many players wagered much of their personal property on the outcome, they were often willing to risk their lives for victory. With so much at stake, wives involved themselves by chasing and whipping their husbands to increase their performance. Moreover, games could last an entire day because a hundred goals were needed to win. Catlin painted this and other Indian rituals at a time when his contemporaries were producing only static portraits.
In an effort to capitalize on his work, Catlin transformed his paintings into a hand-painted book of lithographs in 1844, calling it North American Indian Portfolio. This portfolio has now been reproduced in a full-color facsimile of Catlin’s thirty-one original lithographs. James Gilreath’s introduction to these superb reproductions traces Catlin’s life and hints at his motivation: Catlin, he writes, “was the type of person whose sense of self-esteem was determined by the feeling that he was an active participant in some cosmic idea or movement that could change history.” Guaranteeing the Indians’ survival became Catlin’s movement, and he was the first artist to do field work among their tribes. Whether painting a wild-eyed Blackfoot stepping over a buffalo’s back to escape death or a group of Sioux dancing in bearskins, Catlin let his admiration for the Plains Indians show through his art. Catlin’s own descriptions accompany each lithograph and testify to the extent of his knowledge and respect for the Indians’ life-style.
Catlin fought hard to save Native American culture and managed to capture much of its glory before the government began herding the Indians into reservations. The westward tide of white settlement could not be stopped, of course, but Catlin did much to preserve the distinct identity and heritage of the Indians. His pictures endure as a powerful reminder of a special culture that once dominated the West.
Prison Life among the Rebels
Recollections of a Union Chaplain
Edited by Edward D. Jervey; Kent State University Press; 94 pages.
The Reverend Henry S. White of Providence was a fervent abolitionist. Appointed chaplain of the 5th Rhode Island Artillery in 1863, he endeared himself to the men with his energy and passionate devotion to the Union cause. His zeal underwent a severe test, however, when Rebels took him prisoner in North Carolina the following spring.
As a chaplain White was spared the worst horrors of Confederate prison life, but his experiences in Rebel custody (written up for a church paper after his release and collected here) were harrowing enough. Teen-aged sentries gleefully shot prisoners on the slightest provocation, or none at all, as the quickest way to earn a promotion. Half-naked men driven insane by hunger, lack of shelter, and atrocious sanitary conditions pleaded with guards to put them out of their misery. White spent only a day at Andersonville, yet his description of that earthly hell is thorough, concise, and very chilling.
Through it all the chaplain’s faith in God and the cause of emancipation was unshaken. In the officers’ prison at Macon he busied himself by holding services, ministering to the sick, and invoking divine assistance on the Union side, much to the displeasure of the Rebels. He also functioned as a sort of walking theological seminary, disputing the alleged scriptural basis for slavery with anyone who would listen. (Like Socrates, who had a similarly friendly narrator, he never loses an argument.)
The famous ingenuity of Civil War soldiers is in evidence: half a canteen, perforated with tiny holes, serves as a sieve for coarse, infested cornmeal; the larger bits, inedible, are burnt and used to brew ersatz coffee. And White’s fierce anti-Confederate bias always shows. Except for the women of Dixie, with whom he seems to have been quite smitten, he has nothing but scorn for everything Southern, from architecture and military ethics down to the peaches of Georgia (“much inferior ... to the New Jersey fruit”).
White is an engaging character, and if his narrative contains little new for someone acquainted with Civil War prison life, it very seldom drags.
Veteran’s Day
A Viet Nam Memoir
by Rod Kane; Orion/Crown; 314 pages.
Rod Kane is not a historian—his account of the Vietnam War chronicles few of that conflict’s actual events—yet Veteran’s Day is nonetheless an affecting historical document. Kane went to Vietnam in September 1965 as a combat medic for the airborne infantry. His father had fought in the Second World War and his uncle had been a paratrooper in Korea. “I was raised to be a soldier of Christ,” he writes. Kane saw action in the central highlands near An Khe and treated troops in forgotten hamlets in the Happy Valley and the Ia Drang. He was nineteen.
A year later Kane returned to the United States, bitter but relieved to be alive. On his first day back he was refused a drink in a local tavern. “You’re gonna have to wait almost a year ‘fore you can drink in this state, young fella,” the bartender told him. Home life was not much better. His brothers, both of whom would later serve in Southeast Asia, waited for their draft notices with resignation and dread. His father, a troubled alcoholic, offered little support to a son who was desperate for companionship and succor. He turned to the memory of dead friends in Vietnam, writing them letters and drafting responses. “I didn’t have anyone to talk with when I got to the States,” he writes. “I kept [them] alive so I could express what was going on with me.”
What followed for Kane was a series of low-paying jobs and empty relationships punctuated by bouts with alcohol and drugs. Involvement with the antiwar movement briefly motivated him, but Kane continued to spiral downward, finding relief only in the journal he had kept since Vietnam. Readers of Roger J. Spiller’s article “Shell Shock” (page 74 of this issue) will recognize the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder in Kane’s account of his life after Vietnam, but it took the author fifteen years to recognize that he needed help. He found it in a support group at the Washington, D.C., Veterans’ Administration Hospital. There Kane made friends he could talk to. “It is good,” he writes, “to see eye-to-eye with so many others.”
Veteran’s Day culminates in the opening of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1982, an event Kane and his fellow veterans looked forward to with hope and despair. “IJ ain’t gonna change nothin’,” one of them said. Yet on the day, veterans found themselves greeting one another with smiles, hugs, and pride. “Welcome home,” everyone said.
It isn’t history in the traditional sense, but Kane’s memoir provides a powerful coda to any reader’s study of America’s involvement with Vietnam.
