American Art Collaborative

George Catlin painted this image of Bathes Her Knees, wife of the Cheyenne chief Wolf on the Hill, in 1832 at Fort Pierre, in present-day South Dakota. Catlin described her as “comely, and beautifully dressed; her dress of the mountain-sheep skins, tastefully ornamented with quills and beads, and her hair plaited in large braids, that hung down on her breast.” Catlin depicted Bathes Her Knees in an elegant dress of mountain-sheep skins embroidered with both quills and beads in the geometric designs favored by the Cheyenne. (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 32, 1841; reprint 1973