Seth Eastman’s West: October ‘96 American History Feature

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BY PATRICIA CONDON JOHNSTON
A SERIES OF WATERCOLORS BY SETH EASTMAN, THE FOREMOST NINETEENTH-CENTURY PICTORIAL HISTORIAN OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, IS NOW ACCESSIBLE TO THE PUBLIC.

In late 1994, the James Jerome Hill Reference Library in St. Paul, Minnesota, sold its collection of 56 Seth Eastman watercolors depicting Native American life on the Western frontier to W. Duncan MacMillan, a director of Cargill, Inc. of nearby Wayzata. The largest extant collection of Eastman watercolors, the paintings had been in the library since its completion in 1920, and before that, in Hill’s personal library at his Summit Avenue home in St. Paul.

This stunning collection comprises paintings prepared mainly for Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s gigantic six-volume work, Information Regarding the History, Conditions, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, which was published between 1851 and ‘57. Monumentally important as American art, the paintings are also paramount to an understanding of Dakota and Ojibwa life in Minnesota in the 1840s. In addition to the Minnesota paintings, the collection includes works based on Eastman’s experiences in Texas and his visits to other parts of the country; landscapes drawn from nature; maps relating to Native American ethnography and history; and depictions of Indian artifacts.

Widely regarded as the foremost pictorial historian of the American Indian in the nineteenth century, Eastman was a career army officer and talented artist with a keen eye for cultural detail. Assigned to frontier duty, including a seven-year stint at Fort Snelling in Minnesota, Captain Eastman recorded such things as winter villages, temporary summer encampments, and Indian burial grounds; courtship and marriage customs; and medicine men concocting potions and ministering to the sick, as he set out to preserve a visual record of even the most commonplace activities of everyday Indian life, which was then undergoing rapid change.

For many years, the paintings were kept largely under wraps, locked in a safe at the Hill Library, which more recently was moving away from its original mission as a general reference library toward becoming a more specialized facility that focused on business. The decision to sell the artworks, which was severely criticized in the local press, was predicated on the library’s changing needs and budgetary concerns. Proceeds from the sale were added to the library’s endowment to support general operations.

With the Eastman paintings now in private hands, however, they will be more accessible to a wider public than was previously the case. MacMillan, also president of the Afton Historical Society Press in Afton, Minnesota, has already published a lavish, coffee-table book–Seth Eastman: A Portfolio of North American Indians–showcasing the collection. Publication of the book was celebrated with an exhibition of the paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the artworks will also travel to other museums throughout the country.

”Not everything you touch has to make money,” said MacMillan. “I didn’t want to see the collection broken up and scattered. . . . It seemed to me that if it was possible to acquire them, we could keep them together on behalf of the people of Minnesota. The Eastmans are an extraordinary resource and legacy.”

Born in Brunswick, Maine, on January 24, 1808, Seth was the eldest of 13 children of Robert and Sarah Lee Eastman. A gentleman devoted to scientific pursuits and a talented inventor, Robert hoped to send his firstborn son to Maine’s Bowdoin College, where he had friends among the faculty, but young Seth had a dream of his own. Enamored with soldiering–a great-great-grandfather, Captain Ebenezer Eastman, had taken part in the reduction of the Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1745–the lad at length persuaded his father to allow him to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. Sixteen years old when he entered the Academy in July 1824, he spent five fruitful years there, preparing to be both a military man and an artist.

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