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Fort Moultrie, January 1838 · and Osceola, Indiana
The class expects a famous face whose only portrait burned or never existed. For this town's namesake the record inverts the expectation, and the inversion prints whole. Osceola the Seminole leader was painted from life three times in his final days. George Catlin painted him at Fort Moultrie in January 1838 — Os-ce-o-lá, The Black Drink, now the Smithsonian American Art Museum's (accession 1985.66.301) — and wrote that he painted him "precisely in the costume in which he stood for his picture." W. M. Laning and Robert John Curtis also painted him from life; one Curtis oil remains in the Charleston Museum. An 1838 plaster death cast attributed to Carlo Recli survives at the Smithsonian as well. He died January 30, 1838, within days of the sittings. The famous face is not lost; it is documented three times over at the end of his life, and every later "portrait" of him descends from those sittings. The founder is the gap. For John A. Henricks — the man who signed the 1837 plat and chose the name — no portrait was located in any source reached: not in the county histories' plates as read, not in the museum records searched. The town that bears the chief's name can show the chief's face and not its founder's.
Named gap: a portrait of John A. Henricks, if one exists — settler: The History Museum (South Bend) and St. Joseph County Public Library local-history collections, and the Henricks family record behind the People leg's biography.
Sources: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Catlin portrait record (1985.66.301) and Catlin's own account; Charleston Museum (Curtis oil); Notable People (banked Henricks article; no portrait carried).