Catlin! The Medicine Painter

George Catlin is driven by an audacious vision: to travel beyond the settled American frontier and create a permanent visual record of the Native peoples whose cultures and traditional ways of life he believed would soon be swept away by westward expansion.

Convinced that he had only a brief opportunity to preserve their likenesses, customs, ceremonies, and daily lives, Catlin leaves behind the comforts and expectations of eastern society. He journeys into a vast and often dangerous world of rivers, plains, trading posts, military outposts, and tribal villages. Armed with brushes, canvases, determination, and an unshakable belief in the importance of his mission, he paints the faces, clothing, games, hunts, ceremonies, and everyday experiences of the people he encounters.

But Catlin's undertaking is far more complicated than the creation of art. His travels place him at the intersection of cultures increasingly divided by commerce, disease, government policy, ambition, misunderstanding, and violence. He must earn the trust of those he hopes to paint while confronting his own motives, prejudices, fears, and desire for recognition.

Based on the life and travels of the celebrated nineteenth-century artist, Catlin! The Medicine Painter is a sweeping work of historical fiction about art, ambition, cultural collision, and the struggle to preserve a world already beginning to disappear. Charles Durham brings the American frontier to life through richly drawn characters, historical detail, and an intimate portrayal of a man determined to capture on canvas what history was in danger of losing forever.