By late spring 1841, half of Eastman’s regiment was suffering from dysentery and fever brought on by maneuvers in the steamy Florida Everglades. Unwell himself, Eastman was sent to Norfolk, Virginia, to recover his health. In the fall, he was reassigned to Fort Snelling, where he remained for the next seven years. No longer the inexperienced officer he had been ten years earlier, he served on four occasions as commandant of the post.

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Eastman and his wife Mary raised five children–four sons and a daughter–at Fort Snelling, and from all accounts, he was a first-rate frontier officer. He had no fear of the Indians, seeing them as wards of the government to be treated fairly but firmly. Besides keeping peace on the frontier, Captain Eastman engaged in a personal crusade to preserve for posterity the customs of a race he thought to be dying, by assembling a pictorial history of the Dakota who inhabited the region.

Landscape artist Charles Lanman, who came upriver from St. Louis to Fort Snelling in the summer of 1846, was spellbound by Eastman’s collection, which by then already amounted to some four hundred drawings and paintings. It was, he said, “the most valuable in the country, not even excepting that of George Catlin.”

By the next year, Eastman was sending oil paintings to St. Louis, where they were exhibited in artist Henry Lewis’s studio. Ranking him “out of sight the best painter of Indian life the country has produced,” the Missouri Republican judged Eastman’s work “quite unlike the vast mass of Indian pictures it has been our bad luck to see.” Unlike most of his contemporaries, said the reviewer, Eastman stuck to the plain truth, producing masterful paintings that “one less conversant with Indian character . . . could never have painted.”

At the same time that Eastman’s Indian paintings were gaining national attention, he was angling for a new assignment. Congress had authorized the publication of a major study of the American Indian to be written by explorer and former Indian agent Henry Schoolcraft, and the post of illustrator for the book was still open. Eastman wrote to the Office of Indian Affairs requesting that he be appointed to the position. He also petitioned the secretary of war for a transfer to the Office of Indian Affairs.

While waiting for a reply, Eastman was transferred to Texas. On October 1, 1848, he and his family reluctantly boarded the steamboat Dr. Franklin at Fort Snelling for the trip downriver to St. Louis, en route to a new posting in Texas. From St. Louis, Mary Eastman and the children went east to her father’s home in Connecticut, while the captain followed his company into Comanche territory. When the War Department’s long-awaited decision finally reached Eastman in November, the answer was disappointing; he would not be assigned to the Schoolcraft project.

Baffled and angered, Eastman pleaded his case with friends in government, and his wife did the same. He declared his willingness to accept a leave of absence to work on the pictures, if a transfer could not be arranged. Writing to Minnesota territorial delegate Henry Sibley, Mary Eastman pointed out that “during the twenty three or four years Capt. E. has been in Service he [has] never had a leave (except for a few days) but the one which occurred during the Florida War, when he was very sick . . . . If Captain E. is not here in the Spring, it may be a great loss to him . . . one which he could not repair.”

Possibly as a result of Sibley’s support, Eastman eventually won a five-month furlough. By Christmas 1849, he had settled in Washington with his family and was working on the Indian pictures. As yet, there were no funds for an illustrator, and Eastman’s work was entirely speculative. Nonetheless, he plunged into the project, determined to win the long-term appointment that would be needed to complete the task. Finally, in February 1850, he received orders from the War Department that would allow him to complete the illustrations at his ordinary military pay. The monumental work, which comprised 275 pages of illustrations, consumed Eastman for five years.

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