Sham Fight of the Camanchees by Catlin, George

George Catlin’s “Sham Fight of the Camanchees” (1865) is a memory made material. Painted decades after his final journey west, it preserves a ritualized combat he witnessed firsthand among the Comanche people on the Upper Missouri. The work lives in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, one of hundreds Catlin created to document a way of life he knew was vanishing under the pressure of westward expansion.

Look into the center of the painting. The lances are levelled, but no one is falling. The bodies are stretched and urgent, but the faces are calm. This is the visual record of a sham fight, a controlled, ceremonial event where young warriors proved their skill and reinforced the bonds of the tribe. The man on the right glancing backward connects the riders in a clear narrative loop, a detail Catlin drew directly from his field sketches.

Catlin was not a trained artist but a lawyer who abandoned his practice after seeing a delegation of Native Americans in Philadelphia. He felt compelled to act. Over five gruelling trips in the 1830s, he filled countless notebooks with sketches, convinced he was documenting a world that would not survive the century. This late studio work, painted on card in 1865, was his act of preservation long after the open plains had begun to close.

A sham fight is not violence. It is a rehearsal for protecting a home. Catlin understood that what he painted was already becoming a form of theatre, and he chose to frame it with that same respect.