Smithsonian American Art Museum
Chin-cha-pee, Fire Bug That Creeps, Wife of Pigeon's Egg Head
George Catlin, born Wilkes-Barre, PA 1796-died Jersey City, NJ 1872 · 1832
George Catlin painted Chin-cha-pee, wife of the Assiniboine warrior Pigeon’s Egg Head (see 1985.66.179), at Fort Union, in 1832. Catlin described the woman as “fine looking . . . in a handsome dress of the mountain-sheep skin, holding in her hand a stick curiously carved, with which every woman in this country is supplied; for the purpose of digging up the . . . prairie turnip.” (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 1, no. 8, 1841; reprint 1973)
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