George Catlin has been called the "first artist of the West," as none before him lived among and painted the Native American tribes of the Northern Plains. After a false start as a painter of miniatures, Catlin found his calling: to fix the image of a "vanishing race" before their "extermination"--his word--by a government greedy for their lands. In the first six years of the 1830s, he created over six hundred portraits--unforgettable likenesses of...