Folio Society Edition is beautiful. ( )

George Catlin spent several years journeying across the American West, chronicling the rapidly vanishing Native American tribes. This book is replete with not only his anthropological notes, but also reproductions of paintings he made, showing the visual splendor of these peoples. Of course, what he fails to acknowledge directly is that the Native Americans weren't just magically vanishing into thin air: they were vanishing thanks to the American imperial project of which Catlin was an integral part. Catlin rides out with the U.S. military to help put down some Native American groups on more than one occasion in here. There's a curious double project here on Catlin's part: both fascinated by the Native Americans, yet determined to see his people win out.

As for the book itself, it's hard reading if you yourself aren't interested in the ethnography of 19th-century Native Americans. Catlin visits a lot of different tribes, and his commentary soon becomes repetitive, often digressive and dull. He tries to liven things up on occasion, but he does this by including far more exclamation marks than should ever appear within a single sentence.

The original is obviously a defining book on the Native American Indian. ( )