Seeing Through the Eyes of Maximilian and Bodmer: Review of The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied, Volume I: May 1832-April 1833. Edited by Stephen S. Witte and Marsha V. Gallagher.

Authors

Clay S. Jenkinson, Dakota Institute of the Lewis and Clark Fort Mandan Foundation

Date of this Version

Spring 2010

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 30.2 (Spring 2010), pp 135-137

Comments

Copyright © 2010 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

The German prince Maximilian of WiedNeuwied (1782-1867) traveled up the Missouri River in 1832-33 to study American Indian culture before it was fatally compromised by the encroachment of Euro-American civilization. Aware of the expansionist and industrial dynamics of the Jacksonian Era in the United States, Maximilian wanted to study what he regarded as the vanishing Indian while there was still time. The idea had come to him during his 1815-17 journey through Brazil. For the publication that followed, Reise nach Brasilien in den Jahren 1815 his 1817 (1820), Maximilian had provided his own illustrations. These were criticized, including by his artistically talented siblings. When he ventured to North America in 1832, Maximilian wisely brought with him a professional illustrator, the Swiss-born Karl Bodmer (1809-93). What Maximilian wanted was a body of illustrations of such precision that they would exhibit what we would call photographic fidelity and detail. He got that. What he could not have anticipated is that Bodmer would produce some of the finest art of the Missouri River bioregion and its inhabitants.

Heretical though it may seem in some quarters, the Maximilian-Bodmer expedition is in important respects more satisfying than the journals of Lewis and Clark. Thanks to the painstaking editorial work of Witte and Gallagher, we now, finally, 175 years after the fact, have the opportunity to explore Maximilian's journals comprehensively. What we discover there is a man of deep human sympathies, a brilliant observer of landscapes and peoples, an Enlightenment exemplar whose encyclopedic field notes were undistorted by America's imperial mission.