Mató-Tópe (“Four Bears”), the Mandan chief who is the subject of another portrait in which he is elaborately dressed, appears here as the painted warrior. The hand painted on his chest signifies that he has captured prisoners; the barred stripes on his right arm represent other combat deeds. The wooden knife he wears in his hair is a replica of one he took from a Cheyenne during particularly fierce hand-to-hand fighting.

The split turkey feather atop his head and the painted owl feathers at the back symbolize an arrow wound and his membership in the Dog Society, respectively. Six brass-tipped wooden sticks in his hair represent past gunshot wounds.

According to Prince Maximilian, Mató-Tópe killed at least five chiefs in intertribal warfare. His immediately apparent strength of character and presence led Maximilian, George Catlin and others to write extensively about him, making him one of the best known Indian personalities of the early nineteenth century.

Bodmer painted this proud warrior and renowned chief in 1834, three years before he succumbed to the smallpox epidemic that decimated the tribes of the upper Missouri.

About Karl Bodmer

In 1832-34 German explorer-naturalist Prince Maximilian of Weid-Neuweid traveled the interior regions of North America to document what he referred to as vanishing cultures, the tribes of Native Americans who live in what was then a vast wilderness west of the Mississippi. Accompanying him was 23-year-old Swiss artist Karl Bodmer (1809-93), whom Maximilian employed to capture a “faithful and vivid picture” of American Indian people. During their journey, Bodmer painted chiefs and warriors from the same tribes -- and in some cases the same individuals -- that Lewis & Clark met on their journey nearly three decades before.

If you'd like to see and learn more about this fascinating body of work, click here to buy Karl Bodmer's America at Amazon.com