Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of North American Indians; Volume I

George Catlin's North American Indians is still one of the most readable books about the Indians of the Plains, capturing, as it does, the tribes when they were still in touch with their most important traditions.  It has also become an invaluable historic and ethnographic document for study of the American West.  The Mandan tribe, which Catlin so carefully set down, disappeared in a small-pox epidemic only five years after his visit.  Other tribes changed radically, their traditional mode of life seen only in Catlin's notes and illustrations.  As Marjorie Halpin says in her introduction, "...we can share the feeling of gratitude he expressed when he said, 'I was luckily born in time to see these people in their native dignity, and beauty, and independence'"