The farther up the Missouri Catlin traveled, the more entranced he became with the world he encountered. He observed permanent settlements of the Mandan and Hidatsa, where the tribes lived on their own sacred lands. At last, Catlin believed, he had found the true, noble, unspoiled Indians whose customs and beliefs were solely a product of their natural environment, uncompromised by association with European civilization. Here among these and the Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, and Crow, he could, as he said, "select and study from the finest models in Nature, unmasked and moving in their grace and beauty." Jú-ah-kís-gaw, Woman with Her Child in a Cradle, 1835 Ojibwe/Chippewa oil 29 x 24 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr. Frank Bennett Fiske 1883-1952 Mandan Medicine Lodge about 1900 National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution