Creativity Quote by George Catlin

Catlin’s compliment is doing double duty: it flatters the Crow while quietly reassuring the white reader that these are “safe” Indians. Words like “handsome” and “gentlemanly” sound generous, but they’re also a translation device, squeezing a Native nation into Victorian categories of respectability. “Gentlemanly” doesn’t describe Crow life on its own terms; it measures them against a Euro-American ideal of posture, dress, and manners. The praise is conditional, a stamp of acceptability granted by an outsider with the power to describe and circulate images.

The line’s real work happens in “civil and friendly.” “Civil” isn’t just about politeness; it echoes “civilization,” the era’s catch-all justification for removal, missions, and assimilation. By emphasizing that they “have been always reputed” friendly “since the first acquaintance,” Catlin leans on a colonial timeline where Native peoples enter history at the moment they are encountered, and their value is indexed to how accommodating they are to newcomers.

Context matters: Catlin was an artist-ethnographer of sorts, touring the West to paint what he feared was a vanishing world, then exhibiting those portraits to Eastern audiences hungry for frontier spectacle. His phrasing markets the Crow as both noble and manageable: aesthetically pleasing, socially legible, politically nonthreatening. It’s admiration with an agenda, a soft-focus humanization that still keeps the camera—and the authority—in the settler’s hands.