"No other Indians of the American West held such a fascination for early explorers and fur traders as did the Mandans of the Upper Missouri in the years before they were decimated by a tragic plague of smallpox in 1837. And no other white man did so much to interpret primitive Mandan life and culture to the civilized world as did that pioneer American artist and amateur ethnologist of the Upper Missouri-George Catlin. Five summers before the destructive smallpox epidemic, Catlin visited the Mandans in their picturesque earth-lodge villages near the trading post of Fort Clark, at the mouth of the Knife River in present North Dakota. He painted numerous portraits of their prominent chiefs and women folk and pictured their village life, their amusements, dances, religious ceremonies, and burial ground. In his exceedingly popular two-volume work, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians, published at his own expense in London in 1841, Catlin vividly described and extravagantly praised the Mandans as the most remarkable of the more than forty Indian tribes he had met in his wide travels beyond the frontiers of white settlement."-- Taken from introduction.