O-KEE-PA: A RELIGIOUS CEREMONY; AND OTHER CUSTOMS OF THE MANDANS

Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1867.. vii,52pp. including half title, plus thirteen full-page color plates depicting the Mandan Torture Ceremony. Modern three-quarter morocco and marbled boards, spine gilt. Bookplate on front pastedown. Original front wrapper bound in at rear. Some light foxing and soiling. Very good. First American edition, using the same sheets and printing as the London edition of the same year, but with a cancel titlepage. Catlin spent some fourteen years among the various North American Indian tribes and left the most authentic anthropological record of an already vanishing people. He wrote O-KEE- PA in response to an article appearing in an 1866 issue of Truebner's monthly catalogue. The article attributed to Catlin the authorship of an "indescribably lascivious pamphlet" on the secret customs of the Mandans (see Sabin 11528). O-KEE-PA is as much a defense of Catlin as of the Mandans, a tribe who were mostly found on 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 all the numerous customs which he had recorded, nothing was so peculiar and surprising as the O-kee-pa ceremony of the Mandans. The curious rite of O-kee-pa is shown in "horrible fidelity" (Field) in the thirteen outstanding color plates. The explicit details of the sexual elements of the ceremony were considered too shocking for the general public and were included in a separately issued three-page "Folium Reservatum," purportedly issued in an edition of approximately twenty-five copies, not present here. BENNETT, p.22. FIELD 262. HOWES C244, "b." SABIN 11543. McCRACKEN, CATLIN, pp.101-8, 25A&B. REESE, BEST OF THE WEST 170 (ref).