About this work
The scene is one of concentrated stillness before violence. A group of hunters moves low and tight through a cut in the earth — a ravine — using the land itself as concealment, closing in on a buffalo herd grazing unseen above the bank. The plate depicts the familiar mode of procuring meat practiced by voyageurs and hunters along the Missouri, who would run ashore where buffalo were discovered grazing on the banks and "cautiously steal up under cover of a bank or other protection" to take the fattest of the herd. Catlin renders the open plain in warm, tawny ochres and dusty greens — the vast flatness of the prairie pressing outward to the horizon — while the figures of the hunters are compressed into the shadowed cleft of the ravine, their silhouettes low and deliberate. The tension is spatial: all that empty sky and land above, all that human cunning and patience below. The immediacy of the image is irresistible, drawing viewers into the scene with unprecedented intimacy.
This lithograph with original hand-coloring comes from *The North American Indian Portfolio*, published in London in 1844.
In that year, Catlin published a carefully selected group of twenty-five images as lithographs in *Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio*, accompanied by twenty pages of his own text. By this point, Catlin had been living in Europe for several years, touring his Indian Gallery to London, Brussels, and Paris — and the Portfolio was in part a bid to reach audiences who would never see the paintings themselves. When first issued, the portfolio presented animated, colorful, sympathetic views of Native Americans that filled a profound void of imagery, bringing Europeans and Americans for the first time to visualize the people and customs of whom they had read so extensively.
When Catlin first traveled west in 1830, Congress had just passed the Indian Removal Act, and the forced migration of tribes — compounded by smallpox epidemics and relentless frontier expansion — was creating enormous pressure on Native cultures to adapt or perish. This print carries that urgency: it is documentary evidence as much as art.
Produced as a two-stone hand-colored lithograph , the horizontal format suits a wide wall — a study, a library, a den with natural light. The warm earth tones and the long, low horizon give it an innate calm that holds well in rooms furnished with leather, dark wood, or linen. It speaks equally to the collector drawn to the American West, the student of 19th-century history, and anyone who finds beauty in the idea of human patience meeting wild landscape. There is no heroic charge here, no drama of the gallop — only the quiet, formidable intelligence of hunters who knew the land well enough to disappear into it.
