Seth and Mary Eastman

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Seth Eastman
Painting of Fort Knox, Maine
Born	January 24, 1808 (1808-01-24)
Died	1875 (1876)
Nationality	American
Field	Painting

Seth Eastman (1808-1875) and his second wife Mary Eastman (1818-1880) were instrumental in recording Native American life through Seth's paintings and Mary's prose and poetry. Seth built a reputation as a major illustrator of important books published in the 1850s on the subject of "Indian Tribes of the United States."^[1]

Having retired as a Brigadier General for disability during the Civil War, Eastman was reactivated to make paintings for Congress. Consequently, between 1867 and 1869, he painted a series of nine scenes of American Indian life for the House Committee on Indian Affairs.

Eastman continued his service in 1870 when he was commissioned by Congress to produce a series of 17 paintings of important fortifications in the United States for the meeting rooms of the House Committee on Military Affairs.^[2] He completed the paintings in 1875.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Early life and education 3 Career 4 Marriage and family 5 Mary Henderson 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life and education

Seth Eastman was born on January 24, 1808 in Brunswick, Maine, the eldest of 13 children of Robert and Sarah Lee Eastman. He persuaded his parents to let him go into the military. He was sixteen when he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York in 1824.^[3]

[edit] Career

Eastman made his career with the US Army. He was assigned to Fort Snelling (near what became Minneapolis) in 1830. The large installation had about 20 officers and up to 300 enlisted men, but it was very much in Indian territory. In his free time, Eastman learned Sioux and captured many scenes of American Indian life along the upper Mississippi River. He painted and sketched prolifically.

From 1833 to 1840, Eastman was assigned to West Point, where he taught drawing (used for mapmaking). In 1841 Eastman was appointed commander of Fort Snelling. While stationed there for several years with his family, he continued to study and paint Native American life. He learned much about the Sioux culture.

Hearing that Congress had authorized a study of Indians by explorer and former Indian agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Eastman asked to be assigned as illustrator. Finally in 1849 at age 41, he had the chance. Captain Eastman and his family settled in Washington, and he went to work on hundreds of pictures to illustrate the study.

It was a monumental work that for Eastman consumed five years. During that time, he completed some 275 pages of illustrations to accompany Schoolcraft’s six-volume Information Regarding the History, Conditions, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States. When Volume I came off the press in early 1851, Eastman could take just pride in his accomplishment. His precise and exquisitely executed illustrations of Indian life, painted almost entirely from his frontier sketches, proved that he was singularly the best-qualified person in the country to undertake this epic work.

^[4]

Near the end of his career, at the rank of Brigadier General, Eastman was commissioned by the House Committee on Military Affairs to paint seventeen images of important forts. These paintings were completed between 1870 and 1875. One controversial painting was Death Whoop was twice removed from display because of adverse comments, as it portrayed an Indian scalping a white man. The paintings were displayed again in the Capitol Building in the 1930s.

Seth Eastman used color and realism to depict Dacotah (Dakota), Sioux and other Native American scenes. His paintings were without the Anglo-centric stereotyping and dilution found in other paintings within that genre^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] Marriage and family

During his first, brief posting at Fort Snelling near what is now Minneapolis, Seth Eastman was married to Wakaninajinwin (Stands Sacred), the fifteen-year-old daughter of Cloud Man, a Dacotah (Santee Sioux) chief.

Seth Eastman left Fort Snelling in 1832, soon after the birth of his daughter Winona.^[5] He declared his marriage ended when he left. Winona also was called Mary Nancy Eastman. She married and had three children. Her husband and children also took the Eastman name.

Winona's eldest son Rev. John (Marpiyawaku Kida) Eastman was a Presbyterian missionary at Flandreau, South Dakota. Her second son Dr. Charles Eastman was the first Native American certified as a medical doctor. He earned his medical degree at Boston University. Working for Native American rights, Eastman was also the author of Indian Boyhood and several other books.

In 1835 Seth Eastman married again, to Mary Henderson, daughter of a West Point surgeon from Virginia. They met while he was teaching at West Point. They had five children together.

[edit] Mary Henderson

Mary Henderson was born in Warrenton, Virginia in 1818. She moved with her family to New York when her father was assigned as a surgeon at West Point, where she met and married Seth Eastman in 1835.

In 1841 Seth Eastman was given command of Fort Snelling, and he and his family lived there for years. This was when Henderson Eastman wrote Dacotah, or Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling, which Seth Eastman illustrated. Her efforts to record and preserve the local culture filled the years at Fort Snelling. Among the legends she collected was a version of the story of the death of the lovelorn Princess Winona.

As Henderson Eastman noted in her book Aunt Phillis's Cabin, she was a descendant of the First Families of Virginia (FFV).^[6] She defended southern slaveholding society in her best-selling book Aunt Phillis's Cabin: or, Southern Life As It Is (1852). One of numerous responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, it sold 20,000-30,000 copies, making it a bestseller. It was one of the best-known of the anti-Tom novels produced in that period.^[7] Mary Henderson Eastman wrote it when she and her husband were living in Washington, DC.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Seth Eastman at Artcyclopedia
• Seth Eastman: Painting the Dakota (PBS)
• Seth Eastman's Paintings of U.S. Army Forts, United States Senate Art Collection

• Works by Mary H. Eastman at Project Gutenberg
• Mary H. Eastman, Aunt Phillis's Cabin, University of Virginia