a 
Pa 
POWELL.] SPECULATIVE WRITING. 85 
which had been the cause of the affray; and supposed by the whole tribe to have been 
intentionally left out by me, as ‘‘good for nothing.” This was the last picture that I 
painted amongst the Sioux, and the last, undoubtedly, that I shall ever paint in that 
place. So tremendous and so alarming was the excitement about it that my brushes 
were instantly put away, and I embarked the next day on the steamer for the sources 
of the Missouri, and was glad to get underweigh. 
Subsequently, Mr. Catlin elaborates this incident into the “Story of 
the Dog” (vol. 2, page 188 et seq). 
Now, whatsoever of truth or of fancy there may be in this story, it 
cannot be used as evidence that the Indians could not understand or 
interpret profile pictures, for Mr. Catlin himself gives several plates of 
Indian pictographs exhibiting profile faces. In my cabinet of picto- 
graphs I have hundreds of side views made by Indians of the same tribe 
of which Mr. Catlin was speaking. 
It should never be forgotten that accounts of travelers and other per- 
sons who write for the sake of making good stories must be used with 
the utmost caution. Catlin is only one of a thousand such who can be 
used with safety only by persons so thoroughly acquainted with the 
subject that they are able to divide facts actually observed from creations 
of fancy. But Mr. Catlin must not be held responsible for illogical de- 
ductions even from his facts. I know not how Mr. Allen arrived at his 
conclusion, but I do know that pictographs in profile are found among 
very many, if not all, the tribes of North America. 
Now, for another example. Peschel, in The Races of Man (page 151), 
says: 
The transatlantic history of Spain has no case comparable in iniquity to the act of the 
Portuguese in Brazil, who deposited the clothes of scarlet-fever or small-pox patients 
on the hunting grounds of the natives, in order to spread the pestilence among them; 
and of the North Americans, who used strychnine to poison the wells which the Red- 
skins were in the habit of visiting in the deserts of Utah; of the wives of Australian 
settlers, who, in times of famine, mixed arsenic with the meal which they gave to 
starving natives. 
In a foot-note on the same page, Burton is given as authority for the 
statement that the people of the United States poisoned the wells of the 
redskins. 
Referring to Burton, in The City of the Saints (page 474), we find 
him saying: 
The Yuta claim, like the Shoshonee, descent from an ancient people that immigrated 
into their present seats from the Northwest. During the last thirty years they have 
considerably decreased, according to the mountaineers, and have been demoralized 
mentally and physically by the emigrants. Formerly they were friendly, now they 
are often at war with the intruders. As in Australia, arsenic and corrosive sublimate 
in springs and provisions have diminished their number. 
Now, why did Burton make this statement? In the same volume he 
describes the Mountain Meadow massacre, and gives the story as related 
by the actors therein. It is well known that the men who were engaged 
in this affair tried to shield themselves by diligently publishing that it 
was a massacre by indians incensed at the travelers because they had 
poisoned certain springs at which the Indians were wont to obtain their 
