O-Kee-Pa: A Religious Ceremony: and other Customs of the Mandans.

CATLIN, George.

$12,000.00

Item Number: 119463

Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co, 1867.

First edition of Catlin’s important work on the Mandan people and their rituals, one of the only records of the Mandan tribe which was almost entirely exterminated in the smallpox epidemic of 1837. Octavo, original publisher’s green beveled cloth with gilt titles and double gilt ruling to the front panel, illustrated with thirteen tissue-guarded chromolithographic plates after Catlin by Simonau & Toovely, half-title present, coated green endleaves, all edges gilt. From the library of American businessman and amateur archaeologist William H. Claflin Jr. with his pictorial bookplate to the pastedown. In near fine condition. Rare and desirable, especially in this condition.

American portraitist and painter George Catlin spent nearly fourteen years among the tribes of the North American Indians and left the most authentic anthropological record of the swiftly vanishing people. He wrote O-Kee-Pa in response to an article that appeared in an 1866 issue of Truebner's that attributed him as the author of an "indescribably lascivious pamphlet" on the secret customs of the Mandans. O-Kee-Pa is therefore as much a defense of Catlin as of the Mandans, a tribe native to the west side of the Missouri River, most of whom were destroyed by a smallpox epidemic in 1837. Catlin states in his preface that of the many customs he had recorded, nothing was so peculiar and surprising as the O-kee-Pa ceremony of the Mandans which was a crucial part of their survival and incorporated a number of "shocking" sexual rituals which, considered too salacious for the general public, were included in a separately issued three-page "Folium Reservatum," in an edition of approximately twenty-five copies. Because the Mandan were almost completely exterminated by smallpox in 1837, virtually no other documentation of this ceremony exists. Field 262; Sabin 11543.