Timeline
The life and career of Art of the American West, 1830–1909
George Catlin goes to St. Louis, where William Clark becomes his mentor; St. Louis is the base for his five trips of 1830-1836, during which he visits some fifty tribes
Catlin travels more than 2,000 miles up the Missouri to Fort Union, painting Mandan, Hidatsa, Crow, Assiniboine, Blackfeet and other nations, and calls for 'a nation's Park'
Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied and Karl Bodmer sail for America on May 17, landing in Boston on July 4
In April Maximilian and Bodmer leave St. Louis up the Missouri, reach Fort McKenzie, and winter at Fort Clark beside the Mandan villages
Alfred Jacob Miller travels to the Rocky Mountains with Sir William Drummond Stewart, reaching Fort William and the Green River
Smallpox carried up the Missouri by an American Fur Company steamboat kills about 90 percent of the Mandan in 1837-38
Catlin returns east and tours his Indian Gallery to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and New York; Congress declines to buy it
Catlin takes the Indian Gallery to Europe (London, Brussels, Paris); the German edition of Maximilian's Travels, with Bodmer's plates, begins to appear
Catlin publishes his two-volume account of the manners, customs and condition of the North American Indians, with about 300 engravings
The English edition of Maximilian's Travels in the Interior of North America, with 81 aquatints after Bodmer, begins publication (1843-44)
Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio of 25 plates is published
Two Catlin portraits are shown at the Paris Salon and praised by Charles Baudelaire
Debts force Catlin to give up his original Indian Gallery of 607 paintings to Joseph Harrison; from 1852 to 1857 he travels in South and Central America
Albert Bierstadt travels west with Frederick W. Lander's survey party
Bierstadt exhibits The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak at the Tenth Street Studio Building and spends seven weeks in Yosemite Valley with Fitz Hugh Ludlow
President Lincoln signs the Yosemite grant; Lander's Peak hangs opposite Church's Heart of the Andes at New York's Metropolitan Fair
Lander's Peak sells for $25,000, the highest price yet paid for an American painting
Thomas Moran joins Ferdinand V. Hayden's Yellowstone survey as a guest artist, alongside photographer William Henry Jackson
On March 1 President Grant signs the act creating Yellowstone National Park; the government buys Moran's Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone for $10,000
Catlin dies in Jersey City on December 23, after working in a studio in the Smithsonian 'Castle'
Joseph Harrison's widow gives Catlin's original Indian Gallery to the Smithsonian
Frederic Remington makes his first trip west, to Montana
Remington's first full-page Harper's Weekly cover under his own name appears on January 9
Bierstadt paints The Last of the Buffalo, his last large canvas
Remington models The Bronco Buster, his first sculpture
Charles Schreyvogel's My Bunkie wins the Thomas B. Clarke Prize at the National Academy of Design
Remington dies in Ridgefield, Connecticut, on December 26
The American Museum of Natural History acquires the surviving paintings of Catlin's Cartoon Collection
Paul Mellon gives 351 works from Catlin's Cartoon Collection to the National Gallery of Art