American Art Collaborative

George Catlin met Hair of the Bull’s Neck, a chief of the Comanche tribe, during his travels west in 1834. The Comanche village, he later wrote, “is composed of six or eight hundred skin-covered lodges, made of poles and buffalo skins, in the manner precisely as those of the Sioux and other Missouri tribes . . . This village with its thousands of wild inmates, with horses and dogs, and wild sports and domestic occupations, presents a most curious scene; and the manners and looks of the people, a rich subject for the brush and the pen.” (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 42, 1841; reprint 1973