George Catlin painted the American West when it was still what we often call the Old West, with a capital

O and a capital W. Catlin was an artist, a traveler, and a writer, but he's best known for his

paintings, particularly his portraits of Native Americans, which he produced during and around the 1830s.

Now, the 1830s, it should be noted, were a frontier period for the American West.

The Louisiana purchase had been signed a few decades previous in 1803, and through that deal, the United States government purchased

the majority of the central portion of the contemporary United States from Napoleon Bonaparte,

who was the emperor of the Kingdom of France at the time. This deal gave the still quite young

United States government control of all or portions

of the modern-day states of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota,

North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Louisiana, and a few pieces of what today

are the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. So essentially, all the land from the

Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains was added to the territorial borders of the United States because of this

deal, which doubled the geographic size of the country. The total population of this whole area

that was added to the country was only about 60,000 at the time. So a very large area, very, very few people. If you're curious, the Adams-onis

treaty, also known as the Florida Treaty, added Florida to the United States in 1819. Most of the

U.S. Southwest was added to the country's borders after the Mexican-American war that took

place between 1846 and 1848, which itself was a war fought because of the United States

annexation of the Republic of Texas the previous year in 1845. Alaska was added to the United States in 1867 as part of a treaty with Russia.

Russia was concerned that this land that they held would be taken from them by the United Kingdom

if war broke out between the two countries. So this deal allowed them to at least get something

for this large swath of land that they controlled. And Hawaii became a U.S. state,

relatively recently, in 1959, nearly 100 years after Alaska was added. So George Catlin lived at a time in which the United States

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