Three volumes, folio in 20 individual parts (approximately 532 x 385 mm, size varying slightly). 120 original lithographed plates in original hand-colouring, 1 lithographed map in black and white, and 17 pages bearing the lithographed signatures of subscribers at the end of the first issue. Preserved in the original printed brown wrappers, housed in three modern portfolios. Some occasional chipping and small tears to the wrappers, otherwise a very fine, complete and particularly broad-margined copy.

“One of the most costly and important ever published on the American Indians” (Field). In 1816 James Madison appointed Thomas McKenney superintendent of Indian trade, and in 1824 he became the first head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. For years he worked to promote relations between the United States government and Native Americans, while seeking to preserve a record of their cultures. His collaborator on the present work was the Illinois jurist and author James Hall. In 1821 President James Monroe invited a delegation of Native American leaders to Washington, partly in an effort to demonstrate the wealth and power of the United States and thereby encourage peaceful relations.

At McKenney’s direction, leading artists, most notably Charles Bird King, painted portraits of these visitors, and during the following decade scores of portraits were made of members of more than twenty Native American nations who came to Washington on official business. These paintings formed the nucleus of the government’s National Indian Portrait Gallery, first housed at the War Department and later transferred to the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian fire of 1865 destroyed almost the entire collection, with only a small number of the original paintings surviving. McKenney and Hall’s publication consequently preserves the likenesses of many of the most prominent Native American leaders of the period for whom the original portraits have been lost.

After his dismissal from government service by Andrew Jackson in 1830, McKenney began planning the publication of the portraits accompanied by biographical accounts, many drawing upon his own encounters and interviews with their subjects. The result was one of the most ambitious illustrated publications produced in nineteenth-century America.

The scale of the undertaking was formidable. Its exceptional cost and technical complexity required publication in parts over a period of years, with several publishers, printers and lithographers participating before its completion by Rice and Clark in 1844. The original folio edition was consequently an expensive production intended for a relatively restricted audience; smaller-format editions followed, making its remarkable gallery of Native American portraiture available to a wider public.

The survival of the present copy in its individual parts and original printed wrappers is particularly noteworthy. Such publications were normally bound by their early owners, with the wrappers discarded in the process; a complete set retaining them therefore preserves important evidence of the work as it was originally issued and distributed.

Bibliography of American Literature, 6934; Howes, M-128; Reese, Stamped with a National Character, 24; Sabin 43410a.