Ee-tów-o-kaum, Both Sides of the River, Chief of the Tribe

George Catlin, born Wilkes-Barre, PA 1796-died Jersey City, NJ 1872 · 1836

George Catlin probably painted Ee-tów-o-kaum, chief of the Mahican tribe, at Green Bay (in today’s Wisconsin) in 1836. In Letters and Notes, his extensive writings on his travels and visits to Native American tribes across the West, Catlin described the Mahican as a “once powerful and still famous tribe, residing . . . in the territory of Wisconsin,” where they settled after leaving New York in 1833. He painted the chief at “full length, with a psalm-book in one hand, and a cane in the other . . . [he] is a very shrewd and intelligent man, and a professed, and I think, sincere Christian.” (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 47, 1841, reprint 1973; Truettner, The Natural Man Observed, 1979)