McKenney, Thomas L. and James Hall

History of the Indian Tribes of North America, with Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of the Principal Chiefs. Embellished with One Hundred and Twenty Portraits, from the Indian Gallery in the Department of War, at Washington. Philadelphia:  Daniel Rice and James G. Clark,  [1842-1844].

3 volumes, folio (20 x 14 1/4 in.; 510 x 365 mm). 120 handcolored lithographed plates ( with tissue-guards, as issued) including 117 portraits after C. B. King, 3 scenic frontispieces after Rindisbacher, also with a leaf of lithograph maps and table and 12 pages of facsimile signatures of subscribers; titles in 2 volumes creased, occasional foxing to text margins, but plates generally clean with only occassional marginal spotting.  Modern half deep green morocco, and linen buckram, spines gilt in six compartments, gilt edges.

Gerald F. Fitzgerald (bookplate to pastedowns)

BAL 6934 (states E, C and B); Field 992; Howes M129; Sabin 43410a

see cataloguing
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First edition of one of the century's key color plate books. These superb lithographs are based on oils by Charles Bird King, who was employed by the War Department to paint the Indian delegations visiting Washington, D.C. Most of King's original portraits were subsequently destroyed in a fire at the Smithsonian in 1865, so their appearance in McKenney and Hall's Indian Tribes is the only record of the likenesses of many of the most prominent Indian leaders of the nineteenth century: Sequoyah, Red Jacket, Major Ridge, Cornplanter, and Osceola were numbered among King's sitters. McKenney was the first director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and he provided the biographies, many based on personal interviews, that accompany the portraits. Hall, an Illinois lawyer and journalist, wrote the long general history of the North American Indian. Both authors, not unlike George Catlin (see lot 59), whom they tried to enlist in their own publishing enterprise, saw their work as means of preserving an accurate visual record of a rapidly disappearing culture.

"With 120 folio plates in three volumes, this the grandest color plate book issued in the United States up to the time of its publication, and one of the most important of the century. Its long and checkered publication history spanned twelve years and involved multiple lithographers (mainly Peter S. Duval and James T. Bowen) and publishers, but the final product is one of the most distinctive and important books in Americana. ....The complicated circumstances of its production have left a bibliographical stew of issues and issue points that are yet to be satisfactorily resolved" (Reese, Stamped with a National Character: Nineteenth Century American Color Plate Books, 24).