Seth Eastman

These topographical drawings by Seth Eastman show the Sonoran Desert against the backdrop of the Chiricahua Mountains, and are among the first views European settlers had of these remote areas of southern Arizona. The first drawing depicts a Pima (Akimel O'odham) village, with dwellings, a stockade, a man wearing a lozenge-shaped armature on his back, and another weaving at a loom staked to the ground.

These are two of the thirteen drawings by Eastman in the Museum’s collection that were part of the government-sponsored project to survey the U.S.-Mexico border, led by Providence native John Russell Bartlett. Eastman did not accompany Bartlett but instead translated his field drawings, and those of the survey artist Henry Cheever Pratt, into watercolors for publication. Cuts in government funding meant that Eastman’s drawings were never published in Bartlett’s final volume. The original field sketch made by Pratt—now in the collection of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence—notes that it portrays Maricopa, the Pima winter village on the Gila River.