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Seth Eastman was an officer with a distinguished military career as well as a successful artist. Born in Brunswick, Maine, in 1808, Eastman was later appointed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1824. It was through his West Point training as a topographical draftsman that Eastman learned the techniques for accurately describing what he saw. Aware that native cultures were fast disappearing, Eastman chose to concentrate his skills on documenting the daily activities of the northern Native American tribes he encountered during his tenure in the military between 1824 and 1867. He visually recorded the Santee Dakota Sioux and Chippewa tribes of the trans–Mississippi West. Eastman spent seven years at Fort Snelling, located in what is now Minneapolis. He also served in Wisconsin, Florida, and Texas. Two tours of duty at Fort Snelling gave Eastman the opportunity to observe, absorb, and record the surrounding landscape, as well as the cultures of the Santee Dakota Sioux and Chippewa tribes, in over 400 paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Eastman viewed Native Americans as representatives of a culture with customs of its own, not “primitive savages”—a popular belief at the time. While many of his contemporaries, such as Carl Wimar, George Catlin, and Charles Deas, often depicted Native Americans in the heat of battle, Eastman was one of the few artists who represented Native Americans at leisure. His wife, Mary, accompanied him on his travels and kept a written record. In 1847 the Bureau of Indian Affairs transferred Eastman to Texas to make illustrations for Henry Schoolcraft’s Historical and Statistical Information Concerning the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States. In 1867 he was commissioned by the House Committee on Military Affairs to execute several paintings depicting military forts. The paintings remain on view in the Senate and House chambers in Washington, D.C. According to historian John Francis McDermott, Eastman spent more time
among the tribes of the trans–Mississippi West than any other
artist of his day and was one of the few to record the everyday activities
of nineteenth-century Native Americans. One scholar noted, “Seth
Eastman has given us the homely truth of the Indian world. More than
any other of the painters of his time he deserves the title of pictorial
historian of the Indian.”
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