American Art Collaborative

George Catlin described this youth as a “Chinook boy, of fifteen or eighteen years of age” whose head had never been flattened. The young man’s true identity has been the subject of some speculation. A similar image of a Chinook boy appears in McKenney and Hall’s three-volume study, The Indian Tribes of North America (1933). That boy (or young man), whose name was Stumanu, toured Atlantic Coast cities in 1838 and 1839. (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 48, 1841, reprint 1973; Truettner, The Natural Man Observed, 1979