Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2013325 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 4.05 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 196 pages

From Booklist
This book about Indians is also the story of watercolorist Seth Eastman (1808^-75) and industrialist James J. Hill (1838^-1916). Assigned to Fort Snelling on what, in the early 1800s, was the frontier, Eastman captured the daily lives of the Ojibway and Dakota peoples in expressive works on paper that Hill later collected and housed in the library he established in St. Paul. The accompanying essays concentrate on the two white men, but the book's reproductions constitute an entirely different work. In them we see not the romanticizations of Indian life so many artists of the period give us, but the real lives of those people as they gather rice, fish through the ice, mourn their dead, and heal their sick. The drawing of a young woman serenely sitting, in the distinctively modest way of Ojibway women of the era, in the shade of a menstrual lodge while her village bustles in the background exemplifies the precious documentation Eastman made. Pleasingly composed and delicately colored, Eastman's works emphasize the ways of a people whose collective life would soon be radically changed. Patricia Monaghan