Howdy folks, it’s the fourth week of October 2025, and welcome to This Week in The West.
I’m Seth Spillman, broadcasting from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
On this podcast, we share stories of the people and events that shaped the history, art and culture of the American West—and those still shaping it today.
He grew as an artist on the banks of the Rhine River, but it was on the unexplored reaches of the Mississippi and the Missouri where he crafted the visual history of the West.
Today, we tell the story of Karl Bodmer, whose works remain among the most vivid and accurate portraits of Native peoples. Bodner died this week, October 30, 1893.
Karl Bodmer was born on February 11, 1809, in Zürich, Switzerland. Raised in modest circumstances, his artistic training first came from his uncle, who was a skilled engraver and watercolorist.
The intricacy of engraving gave Bodner an eye – and a skill – for minute detail and accuracy. By his twenties, Bodmer was already making a name for himself in Germany, producing watercolors, aquatints and drawings of the scenic Rhine and Mosel rivers.
But then a Prince entered the picture.
Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied was a German naturalist and explorer. He had already led an expedition through the jungles of Brazil, and now he set his sights on North America, hoping to record its landscapes, wildlife and people with the rigor of a scientist.
But Maximilian knew words alone would not suffice. He needed an artist, someone with a steady hand and a disciplined eye, to provide visual testimony of the discoveries. Bodmer was hired. At just 23 years old, the young Swiss artist was headed across the ocean to the American frontier.
On May 17, 1832, Maximilian, Bodmer, and the expedition’s huntsman, David Dreidoppel, set sail for North America. They arrived in Boston on July 4 only to find the country in the grip of a cholera epidemic.
Undeterred, the party pressed westward. They traveled by stagecoach and steamboat, moving along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers until they reached St. Louis. From there, they embarked on a grueling 2,500-mile journey up the Missouri River, traveling by steamboat, keelboat and often on foot.
Bodmer sketched bustling river towns, captured the form of steamboats and painted sweeping vistas.
What caught his eye the most, though, were the indigenous people.
Bodmer painted the tribes they encountered: the Omaha, Mandan, Minatarre, Sioux and Assiniboine.
The resulting portraits are renowned for their accuracy, sensitivity and humanity. Bodmer painted his subjects as individuals, not stereotypes, each with distinctive features, clothing and presence.
The Prince, Bodmer and their party faced harsh winters on the trail. Bodmer’s paints froze solid, and there was the constant threat of illness. At Fort Clark, Bodmer once became lost for hours on the vast prairie, wandering alone until he found his way back.
By the time the expedition ended in 1834, he had created hundreds of sketches and watercolors, many of which would later be transformed into aquatints that illustrated Prince Maximilian’s monumental Travels in the Interior of North America.
Aquatints are prints resembling a watercolor, produced from a copper plate etched with nitric acid.
Bodmer created 81 aquatints from his fieldwork. These images, painstakingly reproduced in Paris, brought the American frontier to European audiences with unprecedented clarity.
Published first in German in 1839 and later in English in 1843, Maximilian’s book combined his meticulous notes with Bodmer’s illustrations. Together, text and image offered readers in Europe and the United States a vivid window into the American West, its landscapes, wildlife and most crucially its Native people.
These aquatints remain some of the most important visual records of the early 19th-century frontier. They are not only remarkable works of art but also invaluable ethnographic documents.
Wrote art historian W. Raymond Wood: “The value of Bodmer’s art is heightened not only because of its beauty, but also because he illustrated the proud residents of the upper Missouri while their culture was still in bloom … The pictorial record that Bodmer created for the tribes of the upper Missouri is therefore cherished by their descendants as illustrating a life that was all but obliterated by (a smallpox) epidemic and later indignities.”
After the expedition, Bodmer returned to Europe. In France, he joined the Barbizon School, a group of artists devoted to painting realistic landscapes. He continued to paint scenes of forests and animals, and one of his works, Interior of the Forest in Winter, even inspired Claude Monet, who later painted the same grove of trees: forever nicknamed “The Bodmer Oak.”
Bodmer was made a Knight of the French Legion of Honour in 1877, but his later years were difficult. Tastes in art shifted, and the kind of illustrations and engravings he excelled at fell out of fashion.
He struggled with illness and poverty before he died in Paris in 1893.
And with that, we’re finished with our reindeer games for another episode of “This Week in the West.”
Our show is produced by Chase Spivey and written by Mike Koehler.
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We leave you today with the words of art historian David C. Hunt: “Bodmer’s work has long been acknowledged by scholars in Europe and America as one of the most illuminating documentaries of its kind to have appeared in the 19th century. Today, more than 150 years after its publication, it still maintains this distinction.”
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Much obliged for listening, and remember, come Find Your West at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
