American Art Collaborative

George Catlin may have painted Broken Arm, a member of the Plains Cree tribe, in St. Louis, at the same time the Light passed through the city on his way to Washington (see 1985.66.474). Broken Arm wears over his temples a pair of “hair pipes,” Bahamian conch shell ornaments distributed in the 1830s by white traders on the Upper Missouri. (Truettner, The Natural Man Observed, 1979