102 EXPEDITION TO THE 



who, having never visited the Indians, have been influ- 

 enced by a laudable incredulity, springing doubtless from 

 a justifiable wish to close their eyes and ears against evi- 

 dence which bears so hardly upon human nature. With 

 these feelings the gentlemen of the expedition first heard 

 the reports of the anthropophagy of the Potawatomi, and 

 yielded but an unwilling ear to every thing that could in- 

 duce a belief in the existence of this disgusting trait in the 

 character of the north-west Indians. Truth compels them 

 however to assert, that the reports which they have re- 

 ceived on this subject were so frequent, so circumstantial, 



when we saw that their children were cutting- slices of flesh from the 

 slave whom their parents had murdered with the most unheard of 

 cruelties, and that these young anthropophagi were eating the flesh of 

 this man in our own presence, we withdrew from the hut of the 

 chief, and we would eat with them no longer, and we retraced 

 our steps through forests to Niagara river." (page 40,) and again, in 

 page 304. 



•* In this confusion it was not difiicult for the Iroquois, united with 

 the Miamis, to carry away about eight hundred slaves, both women 

 and young men. These anthropophagi eat immediately several old 

 men of the Illinois nation, and burned a few others who had not 

 strength enough to follow them to the country of tlie Iroquois, more 

 than four hundred leagues distant." He however makes an excep- 

 tion in favour of the Nadiousioux, (Sioux ?) whom he asserts, " not 

 to be so inhuman, and not to partake of human flesh." (Page 68. 

 Description de la Louisianne, &c. &c. par le K. P. Louis Hennepin, 

 &c. Paris. 1683. 12mo.) 



Even Adair, who may be considered as the great skeptic on this 

 subject, in the same page in which he rejects the charge as a false 

 one, states that he could not learn "that they had eaten human flesh, 

 only the heart of the enemy, which they all do sympathetically, (blood 

 for blood,) in order to inspire them with courage." •••»«« To eat the 

 heart of an enemy will, in their opinion, like eating other things be- 

 fore mentioned, communicate and give greater heart against the ene- 

 my," &c. Page 135. History of the American Indians, by James 

 Adair, Esq. London, 17'74. 4to. 



