The Results
Illustration - Detail from Tableaux 48

In 1833 Prince Maximilian, a German nobleman, and Karl Bodmer, a Swiss artist, embarked on a voyage of discovery along the Upper Missouri.

In the context of American cultural history it provided a remarkable opportunity as it happened just before the unspoiled West was to change irrevocably.

Maximilian and Bodmer arrived just in time.

Bodmer's depiction of the settlements visited, the extraordinary landscapes observed and his portraits of Blackfeet, Crow, Cree, Mandan, Hidatsa and Sioux Indians have never been surpassed.

His work is acknowledged as one of the finest records of Indian life over published. Yet only 3 years later, many of the fierce warriors who sat patiently before Bodmer had disappeared. Although they believed his drawings would protect them in battle, they weren't powerful enough to protect them from white man's diseases like smallpox, which virtually exterminated once mighty tribes like the Mandan.

Bodmer and Maximilian took their images home to Europe where Bodmer spent several years supervising the engraving and printing of them.

They were published in Paris between 1839 and 1843 and for many years Europeans had a truer picture of frontier America than Americans had themselves. But in 1948 Bodmer's original plates were rediscovered by an anthropologist at Castle Wied and finally found their way to the United States and into the safekeeping of the Joslyn Art Museum.

Now for the first time since their rediscovery a numbered edition of 125 prints has been pulled from each of the 81 original plates.

Alecto Historical Editions