On November 9, 1833, the Numak'aki (Mandan) warrior and chief Mató-Tópe (Four Bears) visited the makeshift painting studio kept by painter Karl Bodmer at Fort Clark, a trading post located on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota.[1] He had arrived with a delegation of Native leaders, at least in part to see the portraits of Native men and women that Bodmer had brought with him. As Bodmer paged through his portfolio of watercolors, Mató-Tópe recognized several sitters. Two days later, on November 11, Mató-Tópe brought Péhriska-Rúhpa (Two Ravens), a neighboring Minitari (Hidatsa) village chief, to look over the portraits and admire the sitters that the two men knew.
So began Mató-Tópe’s fifty-five visits to Bodmer’s studio over the course of the winter of 1833–34.[2] Bodmer was a Swiss watercolorist and printmaker who, along with his brother, had previously made a living selling bound travel albums of vedute, or landscape views, to tourists in the Koblenz region of the Rhine.[3] Touring North America since July 1832, Bodmer, as well as his German patron Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied and Wied-Neuwied’s hired hand David Dreidoppel, had gotten stuck at Fort Clark with the seasonal freeze of the Missouri River. Stranded, the three men set up shop in their sleeping quarters (fig. 1). They collected specimens and Native-crafted objects, recorded weather patterns, visited Native villages, and hosted Native elders and warriors while Bodmer carried out a portraiture project with the area’s Native residents.
Wied-Neuwied left an extensive record of journal entries detailing these snow-bound months. Filled with details that reflect the scientific and travelogue interests of Wied-Neuwied—histories of people and places, language lists, temperature readings, sketches of scenes and dress, species names and measurements—these entries present the men’s quarters as a shared space between the European party’s own activities and those of their Native sitters. On the one hand, Bodmer ran a standard artist’s studio, where he hosted sitters and housed his ever-growing portfolio. On the other, the newly constructed lodging also served as a workshop space for multiple artists’ production, with Native warriors stopping by to draw their own portraits, a commissioning house that sponsored Native artists and their work, and a gallery where Native village residents brought their friends and families to view finished works, as Mató-Tópe did in early November.
Surrounding all of this activity were patterns of exchange. Exchange was central to the artistic activities of the Fort Clark space, as likenesses, painted images, art supplies, and objects changed hands. But Wied-Neuwied’s journal entries demonstrate a much larger pattern of exchange, one that also involved the sharing of knowledge, language, hospitality, customs, and food. In this essay, I argue that to understand Bodmer’s artistic output, as well as that of his Native sitters, one must understand its embedded position within these larger surrounding patterns of exchange. Such behaviors were part and parcel of the North American region historically controlled by the French—what the French termed the pays d’en haut, or “upper country”—and what historians know as the Middle Ground.
