Chapter 5: The 'Noble Savage' and the Artist's Canvas Summary and Analysis

Chapter 5 looks at how the historian might approach visual documents such as paintings and drawings. Many historians neglect the importance of visual documents, the authors claim, not giving them the same kind of importance given to other types of documents such as personal accounts and other records. As an example, the authors use paintings and drawings depicting Native Americans.

Prince Maximilian of Prussia was a somewhat eccentric nobleman who came to the American West in the 1830s to visit and learn about the Native Americans along the Missouri River. He traveled with a secretary and a young Swiss artist named Karl Bodmer. Bodmer painted portraits of several Native Americans on the trip, earning a reputation among the natives as being very talented in capturing accurate likenesses. The...