Minnesota Experience

(lively music) (birds singing) - [Narrator] In a time before photography, before treaties and reservations, an American Army officer renders a pictorial history of people living on the edge of the frontier.

He leaves behind vivid images of a culture and way of life that will never be seen again.

To his subjects, he is many things, mediator, storyteller, enemy, and relative.

Seth Eastman paints the Dakota.

(peaceful flute music) - [Announcer] "Seth Eastman: Painting the Dakota" is made possible by grants from the Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Anderson Foundation, Sarah and Beej Chaney, Mr. And Mrs. Peter Daitch, Judson and Elisabeth Dayton, the Hubbard Foundation, Mrs. Mark Stitzer, and the Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota community.

- [Lori] Seth Eastman's presence at Fort Snelling, I view as the beginning of the end for Dakota people.

- [Rena] I think Eastman was one of the best artists who painted the Indians.

- [Christian] He was not a casual visitor, but he was basing his depictions of other people's lives and cultures on a long-term experience.

- [Dakota Elder] Why is he here?

You know, why is this soldier here?

It means that we have been subjugated and as a painter, we have been captured.

(sobering music) - [Narrator] In the year 1830, the world's first passenger train leaves Liverpool, England bound for Manchester.

In France, the July Revolution inspires Ferdinand Delacroix to paint "Liberty Guiding the People."

In fashion, women's hemlines rise, sleeves grow enormous, and hats become extremely large.

In the United States, Congress passes the Indian Removal Act to move all Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River.

(Dakota flute music) In February, Second Lieutenant Seth Eastman travels north along the frozen Mississippi to lands held by the Dakota.

There, the Army enforces a border set between a Huron district of Ojibwe and a Sioux district of Dakota people.

Between them, at the head of steamboat navigation, stands Fort Snelling.

- It was the best fort in the American west.

I mean, there was nothing that could compare to this fort built of stone upon these high bluffs overlooking the confluence of the Minnesota and the Mississippi Rivers.

I mean, this is just an absolutely magnificent place.

- [Narrator] The officers enforce a strict class separation between themselves and the enlisted men.

While the sergeants direct the work of the soldiers, the officers take time for personal interests.

(rifle firing) Inspired by a virgin landscape, Eastman sketches at every opportunity.

Soon, he begins to draw the elm bark lodges along the riverbanks.

(paper rustling) The Dakota say they have always been here.

In a creation story, they call the place where the rivers meet the center of the world, where the first human being emerged from the earth.

(water splashing) (Carrie speaking in Dakota) - Respect these grounds that we walk on, the air that we breathe.

- [Narrator] Dakota elder Carrie Schommer pays her respect to the sight of her ancestors' village along the Minnesota River.

- And these places that I walk through now probably have memories of my relatives walking through here.

This was the village my great grandfather, Mazomanie, Iron Walker, and the whole, the Tiospaye, the extended families were gathered here.

- [Narrator] The concept of Tiospaye, of close knit, extended family groups was one that Eastman would come to know intimately.

Dakota friends called Seth Eastman, Chaska, meaning firstborn son, for on January 24th, 1808, Seth was the first of 13 children born to Robert and Sarah Lee Eastman.

Growing up in Maine, Seth wanted to be a soldier and in 1824 at age 16, he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

The Academy required all cadets to take a two year course in drawing.

Officers were needed who could render landscapes and maps.

- Drawing was the only way for an officer to quickly render a landscape, be it in battle, or be it just the topography of the land in order to learn how to move troops from point A and equipment from point A to point B.

- [Narrator] While Eastman was only a mediocre student, he proved an exceptional artist, a talent that would serve him well in the wilderness.

(thunder rumbling) (geese honking) At Fort Snelling, Eastman's early relations with the Dakota portray him as a volatile young man.

Indian agent Lawrence Tolliver records a disturbance in which Eastman angrily grabs a young Dakota man by the hair.

- To grab a Dakota man by the hair was a tremendously humiliating thing, and this being done in front of people from his community and his relations as well.

- [Narrator] Eastman explains to Tolliver that the man he attacked shot his dog.

The man later claims he was drunk at the time and offers his horse as compensation.

Eastman refuses the horse, but accepts the apology.

- [Thomas] And Major Tolliver commented that if officers of the Army were going to have relationships with the Dakota people in the area, that such incidents were bound to happen.

- [Narrator] Eastman's kinship relations with the Dakota begin in the spring of 1830.

At a nearby village, the third daughter of Cloud Man caught the lieutenant's eye.

Her name was Wakan Inajin-win.

- Wakan Inajin-win, stands sacred or in a spiritual way.

Yeah, that's a powerful, powerful name.

- Very special that they would name her that.

You know, wakan is a word that they use, translate in so many different ways.

It doesn't really mean holy, mysterious maybe, and then sacred to have that in your name.

You know, it's pretty special.

- [Narrator] Not much is known about Eastman's relationship, except that it produces a child.

Her mother calls her Winona, Dakota for firstborn daughter.

Agency records list her as Nancy Eastman.

- They just wanted a woman, and when their time was up and they left, they left the woman and whatever children she had for him.

So that was an, that more spoke more of what he was then what he, what the Indian people were.

- [Narrator] After two years at Fort Snelling, the Army reassigned Eastman to Louisiana.

He leaves his Indian wife and daughter.

Seth's Dakota grandson Charles Eastman later writes an account from his family's oral tradition.

On his last visit to his child, he writes, he pressed her to heart while tears ran down his noble young face.

- His grandson later wrote very positively about his grandfather, Seth Eastman, saying that Seth Eastman maintained an affection for his Indian daughter and provided for her.

He must have maintained enough contact to at least have his grandson be willing to speak positively about his grandfather, and yet there's not a lot of other documentary evidence that he really did take care of his daughter.

- [Narrator] Eastman's new duties last only a year.

On Christmas Eve, 1832, the drawing instructor at West Point dies suddenly.

The Army orders Eastman to New York and appoints him to the temporary position of assistant drawing instructor.

Eastman trains cadets in topographical drawing and writes a treatise on the subject.

Here he develops a system for representing a landscape with clarity and precision.

- Seth Eastman more or less came up with the idea that you are drawing from a bird's eyes perspective, looking down onto the landscape and came up with a set list of rules of how to identify topographical features.

We see that used throughout the cadet instruction in the mid-19th century.

- [Narrator] Eastman's interest in the professional art world grows with the arrival of the new drawing instructor, the renowned artist Robert Walter Weir.

- [David] Robert Weir was a very prolific artist.

He was also an artist that believed very much in going out and painting landscapes, painting outdoors, painting what he saw.

- [Narrator] Weir preaches the philosophies of what was later known as the Hudson River School, a group of artists who produce naturalistic, idealized landscapes of the American wilderness, landscapes which serve as a powerful metaphor.

- It was an attempt to portray the American wilderness as the virgin land, as the new Eden.

It had a moral connotation because the painters, as well as writers of the period, felt that the virgin land, i.e.

the United States, was uncorrupted by the vices of European societies, the commenting on its moral superiority.

- [Narrator] Mentored by Weir, Eastman becomes an established painter of oils.

The Academy of Design in New York City displays his work in their annual exhibitions.

Along with views of the Hudson River, Eastman unveils his first public images of Indians.

One is an oil of Fort Snelling.

In the foreground is a Dakota man returning from the hunt.

- You just see him from the back, and it's very much like a, a German romantic painting, which always has a figure.

Looking deep into the distance.

Indians seemed to enter his compositions as small romantic elements, small figures to give a life to the landscape setting.

It's almost as if the secondary focus then became the primary focus.

- [Narrator] In 1835, Seth Eastman marries 17 year old Mary Henderson of Virginia, daughter of the Academy's assistant surgeon.

- Mary Henderson Eastman is one of the most fascinating women of the 19th century, absolutely intriguing in every sense.

- She was very much a Southern lady.

She has the gentility that most of us associate with the South.

She is as well a very strong individual.

So today we'd call her a Steel Magnolia, I think.

- [Mary] In an enlightened country, woman is not considered as being only created to perform the household duties of wife and mother.

She is a companion in the highest sense of the word.

Her arm, like his, maybe towards the great purposes of life.

- She was not shy about making her opinions known.

Quite the contrary.

I think he must've been a little domineering.

- [Narrator] After seven years at West Point, the Army promotes Eastman to Captain and sends him to Florida and the Seminole war.

The duty is miserable.

Disease cripples the Army.

Eastman's Florida watercolors show the abandoned camps of an elusive enemy.

Eastman becomes ill and rejoins his family in Virginia to recover.

In September of 1841, Eastman returns to Fort Snelling as commander.

His wife, Mary, joins him with their three young children.

- [Mary] Before I felt much interest in the Sioux, they seem to have great regard for me.

The old men laid their bony hands on the heads of my little boys, admired their light hair, and said their skins were very white.

- An interesting aspect of what she found when she got to Fort Snelling was that Seth Eastman, like most of the officers at the fort who had been there before their white wives joined them, had an Indian daughter.

- There's really no written record of what Seth's relationship was with his daughter while he and Mary and his other children were here or what her relationship was with them, but it's not something that people of that time let out in public.

- [Narrator] Eastman faces a new military situation.

Lands east of the Mississippi have been taken by treaty.

The arrival of more settlers has increased the trade of liquor.

Sporadic warfare between Dakota and Ojibwe continues as the Army pushes more tribes to the west.

For Mary Henderson Eastman, the experience is one of culture shock.

- [Mary] They were so different from the Indians I had occasionally seen.

There was nothing in their aspect to indicate the success of efforts made to civilize them.

The yells heard outside the high walls of the fort filled me with alarm.

- She says that her first reaction was one of fear, but she got over that and she became very interested in them, in the Dakota and began to collect their stories and legends.

- I'll charm them and they'll come to me.

I will sing this very charming song, and they'll come to me.

- [Narrator] Mary's main source of information is a revered old storyteller named Checkered Cloud.

(Mary singing in foreign language) - The role of the storyteller is who we are, why the way things are the way they are, the history of our people, where we came from.

- Oh, Iktomi.

Yeah, you have to watch out for Iktomi.

You never know where he's going to be.

You never know what he's going to do.

He's a trickster.

- The storyteller is the one who keeps this tale going, who keeps the hope alive.

- [Narrator] Mary's interest in the Dakota is shared by her husband who methodically documents the many aspects of Dakota life, (crickets chirping) (Dakota flute music) the women guarding their cornfields from thieving blackbirds, the men hunting muskrats in winter through the ice, the women boiling the sap of the maple trees into sugar.

- Eastman was unique among the artists who painted Indians.

Other artists, George Catlin, John Mix Stanley came west for brief periods of time, captured as much as they could, and quickly hurried back to their East Coast studios to finish their paintings, but Eastman was here for seven years among the Indians.

He certainly came to know their culture very intimately.

- [Narrator] An original Eastman sketchbook sheds light on this process.

In the first few pages are landscapes from his last days at West Point.

On the left hand, we see notations for colors to apply.

Then, as the location changes to Minnesota, small human figures begin to appear.

This Dakota mother and child find their way into several larger compositions.

- Eastman, of course, was working from sketches that he had done.

I mean, you can always prove that he's going back to direct observation, even though he puts things into, it's like a different context in the end.

Yeah, so this shows the documentary nature of his work very clearly.

- [Mary] Our influence over the Dakota much increased by the success attending my husband's efforts to paint their portraits.

They thought it supernatural to be represented on canvas.

Some were prejudiced against sitting, others esteemed at a great compliment to be asked.

- I think there's no question that people that had that kind of ability to create something, almost like a living picture where, were highly prized by Indian people, 'cause artistry is such, it's even now, it is so highly regarded by Indian people.

That's another thing that might've given him an in with the people is that he was obviously a talented artist.

- [Narrator] Scenes of Dakota and Ojibwe daily life fill Eastman's sketchbooks.

From his graphite studies, he creates watercolors, small jewel-like works that demonstrate spontaneity and freshness.

- [Rena] I think Seth Eastman's best medium is the water color, and you must realize that this was at a period of time when this was not considered a serious art medium.

The fact that Seth Eastman really made enduring works of art in this medium is very significant.

- These are what they call.

(Carrie speaking foreign language) That's what our sub-band, the sub-band that we were.

That's what we are is the (Carrie speaking foreign language), log dwellers.

- "Dakota Villages" is a kind of snapshot of everyday life.

He sets up our visual interest using the lodges in this case with their scaffold porches, and then pulls our interest in to look at little vignettes of Indian life, including a group playing a game, a motif that he repeats in a number of his paintings and one that he shows very simply, prosaically.

- The plum stone game is like, oh well, they're the seeds from plums.

They put different markings on them.

Sometimes it'll be animal marking.

Sometimes it'll be just like dice itself, you know, numbers.

(seeds rattling) It's a competitive game and they shake it up really hard, and then they kind of just slam it down on the ground like that so that the plum stones all go like that, and then they look at to see what is turned up.

- [Sarah] So from a small element like this, we can weave many stories, and I think that's part of in many ways the openness of Seth Eastman's imagery.

- [Narrator] The burial scaffolds of the Dakota can be clearly seen from the walls of the fort.

The graveyard holds powerful images that as an artist, Eastman cannot resist.

- It was a, obviously a very sacred place.

It seems like the things that were more sacred to us were the things that were drawing people of European descent the most.

- [Narrator] These depictions of sacred places offend a number of Dakota people.

- I think that's what Eastman was doing was that he was just telling people that in my European way, this is really an attraction.

I really want to see this because it's really interesting, and my interest is more important than following the teachings of the rules of the people that I'm more or less invading here.

- Every society has rules about appropriate behavior, but these rules are only general rules.

There would be no need for rules if there were no exceptions, and the exceptions are defined as to who is supposed to be able to break the rules for the good of society and for the common good, really, like the storyteller who collects things, and then we tell things or like the artist who depicts things.

- [Narrator] In Eastman's watercolor, "Mourning for the Dead," we see relatives scarring their arms and cutting their hair.

- That would be a sign of her deep mourning, and she wouldn't keep cutting it short, but she would through that whole period, she would let it grow back out, and then at the end of the mourning period for us, which is a year, well, her hair should be out where it can be straightened out and fixed again, you know, but then that's also a reminder that life goes on.

New life goes on.

(drums banging) (Native American chanting) - [Narrator] Eastman uses food, money, and his Dakota relatives to gain access to ceremonies.

(Native American chanting) One large painting depicts the medicine dance, a ritual of the Grand Medicine Society.

Accounts describe initiation rites of symbolic death and resurrection.

- The composition of the painting is quite complex.

There are several focal points in that painting and the interest kind of dissipates into the distance, and I think in many ways, that's an indication of where Eastman was.

He was seeing something that he didn't fully understand, a lot was going on, and that in many ways translated in the painting.

It's probably a ceremony that he was able to see part of or hear part of about, but he didn't fully understand the complexities.

- [Narrator] Ordering supplies from Fort Snelling, Eastman produces large canvases of oils.

He captured scenes of lacrosse games between entire villages, intense, high stakes athletic competitions.

- Lacrosse games in those days didn't have quarters or halves or anything like that.

They just played until when somebody scored, and sometimes they played all day and into the night, and so hopefully somebody scored by morning and they were declared the winner, and they were rugged people.

Some people did get killed.

Sometimes between two different tribes, it was played in place of war.

That's why it was called a little brother to war.

- [Narrator] Eastman considers an offer from St. Louis artist Henry Lewis to paint a giant panorama of scenes of the Mississippi River.

In a rare personal letter, he debates accepting work as a commercial artist.

- [Seth] I have not yet decided.

I dislike to leave my Indian pictures.

My long residence among the Indians has given me a knowledge of their habits and character.

For this reason, these gentlemen wish me to unite with them.

Pardon me for writing so much of myself.

I have been induced to do so.

- [Narrator] Eastman declines the offer, but Mary later sells Henry Lewis a number of paintings that Lewis copies for his panorama.

Eastman builds an enormous Indian gallery in his seven years at Fort Snelling.

On a grand tour of the Northwest in 1848, the writer Charles Lanman views Eastman's work.

- [Charles] The collection now numbers about 400 pieces, comprising every variety of scenes, from the grand medicine dance to the singular and effecting Indian grave.

When the extent and character of this Indian gallery are considered, it must be acknowledged the most valuable in the country.

- [Narrator] Even as Eastman records Indian culture, he cannot escape his role as an instrument of government policy.

In June of 1848, the Winnebago tribe is to be moved from Wisconsin to land between the Dakota and Ojibwe.

A charismatic Dakota chief named Wabasha offers the Winnebago some of his land and convinces them to go no further.

Eastman moves troops and artillery by riverboat to end the standoff.

Mounted warriors charge Eastman's line.

His troops hold their position.

Eastman rides forward and calls for a counsel.

- And Eastman kept the lid on this.

He got everybody out of it without anybody getting killed, without any shots being fired.

He arrested Wabasha and was later convinced by the Winnebagos that he should be released, and he was, and Eastman's own credibility had certainly been enhanced with both the Dakota people and the Winnebagos.

- [Narrator] In August of 1848, the Office of Indian Affairs announces plans to publish a major study of the American Indian.

The author will be Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, explorer and former Indian agent.

Eastman writes a formal request to be assigned to the project as illustrator.

Before he receives a reply, the Army orders Eastman to Texas, hostile Comanche territory.

Captain Eastman and his family leave Fort Snelling.

- [Mary] How vivid is our recollection of the grief the Sioux showed at parting with us, for although it added to the pain naturally felt at leaving a place which had so long been our home, yet the sincere affection they evinced towards us and our children was most gratifying.

They wished us to remember them when far away with kindness.

- [Narrator] Mary leaves Captain Eastman at St. Louis and takes their five children east to live with relatives.

Faced with raising a family alone, she writes officials asking that Seth be reassigned to Washington and the Schoolcraft Indian report.

She begins efforts to sell her husband's paintings.

- [Mary] However one may love art, one must eat and be clothed, and so must one's children and wife.

During the whole time of our residence in Washington, I have had to apply to their utmost use such slight abilities as I may possess in order that we may live here.

- [Narrator] Eastman and his troops traveled to Texas by way of the Mississippi, giving the artist a rare opportunity to record landscapes the full length of the river.

(water gurgling) His pencil is never idle.

Over 200 sketches document the journey, revealing a changing America.

(folksy music) From camp near Fredericksburg, Texas, Eastman writes his good friend, Henry Sibley, now a congressional delegate from the Minnesota territory.

- [Seth] Dear Sibley, I have at last arrived at my journey's end and landed, I know not where, but in a very fine country full of game and Indians.

I wish you were here to go hunting with me.

It is rather dangerous, but very exciting.

I hope you have been able to do something for me in regard to my painting those Indian pictures.

Please drop me a line and let me know what is going on in the U.S. and especially in Congress.

Remember me to your wife and sisters at St. Peter's.

Yours truly, S. Eastman, Captain, U.S. Army.

- [Narrator] Requests on Eastman's behalf are denied.

Meanwhile, an outbreak of cholera kills a number of his men, including his second in command.

The first and only known journal kept by Eastman records two weeks in Texas in 1849.

- [Seth] Made several sketches during the day.

This old mission was very finely constructed with much sculpture in from around and over the door.

It has been deserted for years.

Since the Americans have ruled at San Antonio, no Indian has shown himself within the city.

When the Americans first came there and before the Comanche became acquainted with his character, they undertook to treat them as Mexicans, but they soon found it would not do.

A few lessons showed them that the white man must be the master.

- [Narrator] Finally, the Army grants Eastman a furlough.

In gratitude to Henry Sibley, Eastman paints a design for the territorial seal of Minnesota.

A version of this design is later adopted as the state seal of Minnesota.

In 1849, Mary's first book, "Dahcotah, or Life and Legends of the Sioux around Fort Snelling," is published in New York.

The volume is illustrated with four of her husband's paintings.

Within its pages, she presents her impressions of Dakota people and their culture.

- [Mary] As a great motive to improve the moral character of the Indians, I present the condition of the women in their tribes.

A degraded state of woman is universally characteristic of savage life.

The peculiar sorrows of the Sioux woman commence at her birth.

- She wanted to acculturate Indians.

She saw their lives as needing reform and the hard physical labor of Indian women was one of the factors that she would point to, not understanding the different gender roles within the Indian tribe, so to immediately responding, oh, it looks like the men lazing around in the women are doing the hard physical labor.

- And then she goes on to say, well, that's true in our society too, so she was not blind to, you know, the status of women, whether white or Indian.

- [Mary] The dog dance is held by the Sioux in great reverence.

- [Narrator] Her description of a rare ceremony called the dog dance sheds light on her husband's feelings toward Dakota rituals.

During the dance, men demonstrate their bravery biting pieces of a dog's heart hung from a pole.

- Seeing some of the warriors looking pale and deadly sick, Captain Eastman determined to try how many of their enemies' hearts they could dispose of.

He went down among the Indians and purchased another dog.

They could not refuse to eat the heart.

It made even the bravest men sick to swallow the last mouthful.

They were pale as death.

- People came to this country predisposed to see us as being inferior.

It was kind of a contest between Eastman and other artists and other historians because he wanted to be seen as more expert on us than other people, and his wife was quoted a few times as saying, he should be the one recognized as the Dakota expert, and that's kind of a silly thing because even I, as a Dakota person, as a former chairperson, I'm not an expert on the Dakota people.

I really disregard a lot of things that were written by non-Dakota people because again, they really had agendas.

- [Narrator] In February of 1850, Eastman learns he has been chosen to illustrate Schoolcraft's study on American Indians.

He brings seven years of observations and sketches to the project.

In 1851, the Dakota sign the treaty of Traverse des Sioux.

They lose 24 million acres of rich farmland.

The government moves their villages to a reservation, a 70 mile strip of land bordering the Minnesota River.

At the treaty site, an artist sketches Nancy, Eastman's Dakota daughter, now 20 years old and married.

She dies after giving birth to her fifth child, Ohiyesa, in 1858.

Congress publishes six volumes of what Henry Schoolcraft calls his great national work.

The report is entitled "History, Condition, and Future Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States."

In addition to images painted from his Minnesota collection, Eastman depicts the cultures of many other Indian tribes.

In the text, Henry Schoolcraft uses Eastman's images to further his own agenda.

- Henry Rowe Schoolcraft wanted to reform Indians by making them into farmers and tying them to specific allotments of land, and he saw the nomadic life as an obstacle to acculturating Indian people.

So for Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, this image was a call for change.

- From his experience with museum collections, anthropologist Christian Feest recognizes the details in Eastman's paintings.

- This is a picture of a medicine man preparing his medicine, which in itself is quite correct, but there are little things here that most people wouldn't even see and recognize as indications of good quality.

There's a little medicine pouch here which has decorations of dyed porcupine quills, which is something which occurs in collections.

So you know the object.

You can compare these to actual objects.

- [Narrator] A traveling journalist wrote that Eastman kept a collection of artifacts at Fort Snelling as a reference for his paintings.

- [John] Captain Eastman has a choice and beautiful cabinet of Indian curiosities, dresses, pipes, ornaments, and more.

He can read the private history of a chief or brave by the ornaments which decorate his person.

John Rod, St. Louis Reveille.

- [Narrator] To help reconstruct the past, archeologists have used Eastman's work as a guide.

- Meter 91.

- [Narrator] In 1986, archeologists from the University of Minnesota used 19th century accounts, Dakota oral tradition, and Eastman's paintings to help them visualize the layout of a Dakota village.

The physical evidence from the dig corresponds to Eastman's depictions.

Earrings found matched those of Dakota women in his painting, "Gathering Wild Rice."

- Archeologists could do worse than look at Eastman and other documentary artists of the period because these artists do show material culture in social context and what archeologists are doing is look for traces in remains of material culture to reconstruct the social context.

So here is a close link between what the archeologists are doing and what the artists have been doing 150 years ago.

- I think some do have more integrity.

The one about feeding the spirits, the body was on the scaffold and then, and those things, I believe there's no question that those sort of things did happen, and some he wrote, he painted because he was asked to paint, and so he would see what they were writing and just draw something that would go along with what they were writing.

- [Narrator] For Schoolcraft's book, Eastman illustrated "Protecting the Cornfields from Vermin," in which an Ojibwe woman creates a mystical barrier by walking nude in the moonlight.

Though many native peoples believe that women on their menses are spiritually powerful, Schoolcraft heard this story secondhand.

It cannot be substantiated by Ojibwe sources.

- So I think one really has to look at things one at a time to make a decision on when he's off and when he's really good, and most of the time he is really very good.

(reflective music) - [Narrator] In the 1850s, Seth and Mary buy a house in Washington, DC.

Mary writes four more books on Indian subjects, each one illustrated by Seth.

Her stories fill elaborate gift books like "The Iris," its cover embedded with mother of pearl.

The artwork takes a romantic turn.

"Indian Courting" shows a man serenading a woman with a traditional Dakota flute.

(Dakota flute music) - He's trying to show the courtship songs and the way they use the flute and a young man is dressed in all his decorated clothes and feathers, and he's playing a song and a girl is listening, and the only kind of songs you play on this type of a flute are love songs, but there's many kinds of love songs.

Some of the love songs might be singing about a father's love for his children, (Dakota flute music) and there's even a cherish grandmother song.

- One of the things I don't see in this painting is that, you know, a woman's whole family would live with her in the lodge, so when a young man went to court a young woman, there's relatives listening.

There's her sisters, her brothers, her parents, nieces and nephews perhaps, perhaps her grandparents.

So there wasn't a whole lot of privacy for a man and a woman to be alone, which back then would have been considered inappropriate.

What I do see in the painting that I've also been told by elders is that she is kind of covering her head with a blanket, and that was something that a long time ago was also part of a courtship ritual, and even is imitated in the rabbit dance where a man and a woman would go under a blanket or a robe to speak to each other.

- [Narrator] With every book she writes, Mary expresses more anger at the treatment of Indian people.

However, in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Mary writes a book defending slavery.

"Aunt Phillis's Cabin," though hastily and poorly written, sells 13,000 copies in the first two weeks of its release.

- Mary was a complicated person.

She really loved some of the Indian women she'd befriended, and this did not, for some reason, extend to Black women or Black people generally.

- [Narrator] Mary changes her tune with the onset of the Civil War.

With her husband and sons fighting for the North, she writes "Jenny Wade," a poem for a heroine at the battle of Gettysburg.

With his health fading at age 53, Seth Eastman serves as an administrator throughout the war.

He recruits new regiments, serves as military governor of Cincinnati, and commands Union prison camps.

In August of 1862, Dakota warriors attack white settlements in Minnesota.

Cheated of land and treaty payments, denied food by traders, the Dakota kill over 500 whites in an outpouring of rage.

It is the nation's bloodiest Indian war.

Union troops end the war in six weeks.

A military tribunal condemns 303 Dakota men to death, including Eastman's Dakota son-in-law, Many Lightnings.

Abraham Lincoln commutes the sentences of 265 prisoners, and on the day after Christmas, 1862, 38 Dakota men hang from a single gallows in Mankato, Minnesota.

It is the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

In a camp below the walls of Fort Snelling, the Army imprison 1,600 Dakota men, women, and children.

Missionaries convert many Dakota and make a bonfire of their sacred medicine bundles.

In 1848, Seth Eastman depicted medicine bundles as a visible part of Dakota daily life.

(church bells pealing) In 1862, they burn as symbols of their conversion.

(fire crackling) - [Ernest] Well, this was the area where the medicine bundle was found in the - - [Narrator] In the 1970s, construction workers found a medicine bundle hidden in the walls at historic Fort Snelling.

A note identified the bundle as belonging to Chief Wabasha.

It made its way eventually to his great-grandson, Ernest Wabasha.

- Amos Owen did a ceremony at our house and Earl brought the bundle over there, and we prayed and he gave the bundle to me.

- [Narrator] For Ernest and his son, Leonard, the bundle symbolizes the importance of their traditions and the story of their people.

- I guess I'm getting on in age and Leonard's my only son.

So sometime in the near future, I'll transfer the caretaking a bit to him and.

- Personally, I want to learn about these things as much as I can.

Sometimes you got to come to a place like Fort Snelling and look at the atrocities and the tragedies that have happened throughout history.

Maybe we can learn something from them, something we can pass on.

- [Narrator] The Army sends the remainder of the Dakota men to a military prison in Davenport, Iowa.

Among them is Many Lightnings, with two of Eastman's Dakota grandsons.

Through a missionary, one of them writes to Eastman.

- Grandfather, I never saw you, but I write you this letter.

They tell me you are a great man, but my mother was your daughter and I am her child.

She is dead many years ago and my brother and myself are here suffering in this prison with the Indians.

This, I wish to tell you my grandfather.

We are in want of clothes and other things, and for that reason, I write to you.

Can you not send us a little money, grandfather?

My brother and I shake hands with you, grandfather.

- [Narrator] There is no known response to this letter.

The Eastmans remained publicly silent.

No mention is made of the tragic events in Minnesota or the fate of Seth's Dakota family.

- It seems that at a time like that, that a man would reach out and do something to assist his family.

So I want to be respectful, and at the same time there, you know, there are times when I'm thinking about him and what happened where I don't have a lot of respect.

- The Army promotes Eastman to Brigadier General after the war.

In poor health, he presses for a commission to create works of art for Congress.

- Government patronage of the arts has always been a contested subject.

One of the reasons that he was able to do this was that he did it under his Army salary.

So Congress kinda got a bargain.

- [Narrator] On March 26th, 1867, Congress authorizes Eastman to paint Indian scenes for the House Committee on Indian Affairs.

Eastman completes nine paintings in a series on Indian life.

He presents native peoples as primary figures in their own environment, their way of life frozen in time.

- [Rena] Eastman did feel that this commission was the crowning achievement of his life.

When he came to translate his watercolors into the large oils, he made some significant changes.

What Seth Eastman did was to paint the Indians as classical heroes.

He translated the costumes and the, even the landscape background into something more monumental.

- [Narrator] The most controversial image is a painting called "Death Whoop," which depicts a warrior holding aloft the bloody scalp of his victim.

"Death Whoop" was removed from exhibition twice in response to protests from Native Americans, most recently in 1987 at the request of Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Native American Congressman from Colorado.

It has since been returned to the chambers of the House Resources Committee with the rest of the series on Indian life.

In June of 1870, Congress awards Eastman a second commission, this time for a series of 17 paintings of U.S. military forts in peace time.

With his health failing, Eastman completes 17 paintings over the next five years.

(triumphant music) He paints until his final hour.

On August 31st, 1875, Seth Eastman dies.

In his eulogy, it is written that he died at his easel.

His last work is a painting of his beloved West Point and its view of the Hudson river.

A series of fort paintings hang in the United States Capitol in the hallway of the attending physician, not open to the public.

Mary Henderson Eastman dies in Washington, DC in 1887.

No photographs of Mary are known to exist.

In 1869, she sent a photograph of her husband to the Minnesota Historical Society, but declined to send one of herself.

I wish I could send my own likeness, she wrote, but nature forgot to give me any beauty and art cannot supply the omission.

Seth Eastman's Dakota grandchildren succeed in the non-Indian world.

Ohiyesa, or Charles Eastman, becomes the first Indian physician in America.

He is also a published author, writing such books as "The Soul of an Indian," in which he records his memories of daily Dakota life and spirituality.

(Dakota drum music) During his lifetime, Seth Eastman painted with a sense of urgency, convinced this way of life would be swept away, but his predictions came true only in part.

Despite systematic attempts to destroy or change their culture, American Indians managed to keep many of their traditions alive today.

- [Announcer] Here we go.

(Dakota chanting) Welcome our eagle staff as they come into this arena.

We want to say thank you here to our staff Chief Wabasha, Larry Wabasha, Lee Pinner.

- When I see his pictures, I'm glad to see that we did do a pretty good job of, a very good job of not letting all those things be taken, and when you know what's been taken, you can reclaim it.

I guess his pictures can help us in that way.

(Dakota drum music) - [Narrator] In the year 2000, the Shakopee Dakota community builds a spiritual center.

The tribal council commissions artisans to construct stained glass windows depicting images from Seth Eastman's paintings.

- I'm not sure that the selection of his paintings says anything about the community's feelings about Seth Eastman.

I think it says something about their feelings for his artwork, and people liked them.

They're beautiful images, you know, most of them.

- It's a record and just a record.

He's just the recorder, and when kids ask about the paintings, we can say, well, this, that window there, it's a vision of village life and perhaps go into a whole story, and so that's also another passing on of tradition.

- What I would hope people learn from Seth Eastman's paintings is that there was a way of life here and a people here that was real, that was beautiful, that was valuable, and that those people were nearly destroyed, but their strength, the strength of our ancestors has brought us to today.

That's what I want people to know.

- [Announcer] To find out more information about this program or leave your comments, visit our website at tpt.org.

(Dakota flute music) "Seth Eastman: Painting the Dakota" is made possible by grants from the Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Anderson Foundation, Sarah and Beej Chaney, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Daitch, Judson and Elisabeth Dayton, the Hubbard Foundation, Mrs. Mark Stitzer, and the Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota community.

To order the video cassette or one of the companion books of "Seth Eastman: Painting the Dakota," call 1-800-436-8443.

(sobering music)