Video
George Catlin's Visit at Fort Union & The National Park -Idea-
Transcript
Catlin-- Catlin, I do like Catlin. He's not a hippie. No, Catlin's not a hippie. Does Catlin have a celebrity look alike? [LAUGHTER] I'd say, more Robert Redford. [MUSIC PLAYING] George Catlin first called for the creation of a nation's park. [MUSIC PLAYING] George Catlin begins as a painter. And every artist tried his hand at Niagara Falls. [MUSIC PLAYING] And nobody's come close. Catlin is a genius. He does the first bird's-eye view. The beauty of Niagara that they're coming to paint, the uniqueness of Niagara is changing before their very eyes. The world is losing Niagara to private ownership. When you're losing a place like Niagara Falls to privatization, privatization is certainly going to happen on the prairies and plains unless the government intervenes. [MUSIC PLAYING] Catlin agonizes that these great expanses of prairies and plains that the Indians now occupy will, eventually, be given to settlers back East. [MUSIC PLAYING] George Catlin moves into the West to paint the Indians. [MUSIC PLAYING] George Catlin, at the time he was here, does write about sitting on the breach of the cannon to keep his rear a little cool while he's making his paintings and drawings. Fort Union? It was a major, major outpost of the American fur trade. The Indians were camped around the Fort because they want the goods and they want to trade. [MUSIC PLAYING] But how was this going to last? The pioneers aren't stopping. The railroad is coming. Then there's, of course, the gold rush. Agonizing over the future of the natives, he proposes a nation's park containing man and beast and all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty. He puts it in New York newspapers, a great national park that is an Indian reservation that will take up the entire interior of the continent. He wanted to preserve both the wildlife and the people. The country is not prepared to listen to that. [MUSIC PLAYING] And then slowly this idea of having more protection of forest lands begins to gain credence, that if we don't set it aside, the loggers are going to get it. We'd better get to it first. So that's how we started to get parks. It's just that, a third of the continent-- no, that's not going to happen. The experiences of people like George Catlin here might have influenced the creation of America's greatest or best idea, which is actually a global phenomenon. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Description
A brave adventurer has the extraordinary idea of National Park Service while traveling the Missouri River. For most people, George Catlin is a foggy name in our public school textbooks' forgotten pages. Who was this man of mystery, and why is his work one of the greatest untold National Park Service stories?
Duration
3 minutes, 34 seconds
Credit
NPS / Harpers Ferry Center
Date Created
11/17/2017
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