"I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization"
About this Quote
Catlin’s sentence performs a familiar 19th-century trick: it mourns Native disappearance in the same breath that naturalizes the forces causing it. Calling Indigenous peoples “noble” and the land “trackless” and “boundless” isn’t neutral description; it’s aesthetic framing. The “red men” become part of a romantic landscape painting, like bison or sunsets, made legible for Eastern audiences who wanted their expansion with a side of elegy.
The key verb is “melting.” It turns dispossession into weather. People don’t get removed, starved, hunted, or legally cornered; they dissolve, quietly, “at the approach of civilization,” as if civilization were simply a sunrise. That phrase smuggles in an alibi: Catlin positions himself as a contemplative witness, not a participant in an economy of images that helped define Indigenous life as vanishing and therefore collectible.
Context matters. Catlin traveled widely in the 1830s painting portraits and scenes of Plains nations while U.S. policy accelerated removal, treaty-breaking, and settlement. His work is often read as preservational, even sympathetic, and there’s real fascination in his attention. Yet the subtext is paternalistic and proprietary: by casting Native peoples as “now spread” across empty immensities, he primes viewers to see the continent as available and the inhabitants as tragically out of time.
The line’s power lies in its double comfort: it lets the reader grieve and feel civilized at once. That’s the ideology of the “vanishing Indian” rendered as lyric observation.
The key verb is “melting.” It turns dispossession into weather. People don’t get removed, starved, hunted, or legally cornered; they dissolve, quietly, “at the approach of civilization,” as if civilization were simply a sunrise. That phrase smuggles in an alibi: Catlin positions himself as a contemplative witness, not a participant in an economy of images that helped define Indigenous life as vanishing and therefore collectible.
Context matters. Catlin traveled widely in the 1830s painting portraits and scenes of Plains nations while U.S. policy accelerated removal, treaty-breaking, and settlement. His work is often read as preservational, even sympathetic, and there’s real fascination in his attention. Yet the subtext is paternalistic and proprietary: by casting Native peoples as “now spread” across empty immensities, he primes viewers to see the continent as available and the inhabitants as tragically out of time.
The line’s power lies in its double comfort: it lets the reader grieve and feel civilized at once. That’s the ideology of the “vanishing Indian” rendered as lyric observation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Native American Sayings |
|---|---|
| Source | Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians — George Catlin, 1841 (primary work in which Catlin records observations on Native Americans). |
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