Mr. Catlin was born in Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and was for some years a practising lawyer. He removed to Philadelphia, and, upon meeting with a delegation of Indians, resolved to employ his talents as a painter in the best school, by painting man in the simplicity of his nature. Accordingly, he made arrangements to spend the most of his time among the Indian tribes of the Western country. His enthusiasm in his work arose to the height of an intense passion. He studied every phase of Indian life, nothing seeming to have escaped his attention. Withal, he was an ardent admirer of the Indian character; and he says, "No Indian ever struck me, betrayed me, or stole from me a shilling's worth of my property, that I am aware of." In another place he says, with a touching pathos, "They are fast travelling to the shades of their fathers, towards the setting sun." In his "Notes on the American Indians" he has portrayed a complete picture of the Mandans, giving the minutest details, so that the reader can study them as well from his two volumes as if he were daily living among them,--indeed, better than if he wished to visit them at present, they have been of late years so much reduced by the ravages of that fearful scourge, smallpox. After Mr. Catlin visited them, this disease was introduced by one of the steamers of the Fur Company, which had two cases aboard. One reason assigned why so many perished was, that the Mandan villages were surrounded by the hostile Sioux. Many destroyed themselves with knives and guns, while others dashed their brains out against rocks, by leaping from the ledges. When the disease was at its greatest height, there was one incessant crying to the Great Spirit. The bodies lay in loathsome piles in their wigwams, and there remained to decay or be devoured by dogs. Some became crazed, and plunged into the coldest water when the fever was raging, and died before they could get out. Mat-to-toh-pa, "Four Bears," great chief of the Mandans, watched his tribe, wives, and children die about him, then starved himself, dying on the ninth day, his body prostrate over the remains of his kinsmen. Their numbers are now so reduced that the last statistics give them four hundred only.