168 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



tliat I must quote it. When upon liis death-bed, in parting with his Christian wife, 

 he said : " When I am dead it will be noised about through all the world. They will 

 hear of it across the waters and say, ' Red Jacket, the great orator, is dead.' * * * 

 Clothe me in my simplest dress, put on my leggins and my moccasins, and hang 

 around my neck the cross I have worn so long and let it lie upon my bosom, tl\en 

 bury me among my people. * * * Your minister s.ays the dead will rise. Perhaps 

 they will. If they do, I wish to rise with my old comrades. I do not wish to rise 

 with pale-faces. I wish to be surrounded by red men." His last wishes have been 

 consulted. The bones of the mighty orator have been rescued from neglect and im- 

 pending degradation and re-entombed, with mournful ceremonies, by his own people, 

 and he now lies among his old comrades, awaiting the resurrection. 



Mr. William Clement Bryant, at the same ceremony at Buffalo, N, 

 T., October 9, 1884, said : 



The remnant of the Senecas, through the humane intervention, were permitted to 

 return to the United States at the end of the war of the Revolution, and rake the 

 embers from their devastated hearths, but they returned as vassals, and no longer a 

 sovereign nation. 



Red Jacket returned with them. He was young when the war commenced. We 

 can easily conjure up the figure of the youthful warrior from the shreds of tradition 

 which have come down to us — an Indian Apollo, graceful, alert, quick-witted, fleet of 

 foot, the favorite messenger of British officers to convey intelligence from one military 

 post to another, and who bestowed upon him the traditional scarlet tunic, and caused 

 him to be christened Otetiani, or "Always Ready." He acquired no distinction as a 

 warrior during the Revolutionary struggle, for he was born an orator, and, while 

 morally brave, lacked the stolid insensibility to suffering and slaughter which char- 

 acterized their war captains. We can imagine him, at the end of the war, grown 

 older, wiser in experience and reflection, more ambitious and crafty, with greater con- 

 fidence in his rich, natural gifts of logic, j)ersuasion, and invective, and attaining, by 

 virtue of these attributes, the chief place of power and influence in his nation — alas! 

 a peeled and broken nation. The repose, however, so essential to the recuperation of 

 this wasted people was denied them. Every breeze wafted to the ears of the Indian 

 hunter the ring of the white man's ax and the crash of falling trees. The restless 

 feet of the pale-faces were on their track, first a slender stream of traders and advent- 

 urers, many of them seeking the far woodland solitudes as a shelter from outraged 

 and pursuing justice ; then a tide of immigrants ever waxing in volume until the 

 Seneca territory was islanded by a sea of covetous, hungry pale-faces. 



Red Jacket was no longer the petted though humble Otetiani, but the Sagoyeivaiha 

 of his tribe; the "keeper-awake" of a broken, war-wasted people fast lapsing into 

 that comatose state which only by a little precedes dissolution. He loved his people, 

 who were still the proprietors of a magnificent domain. He yearned over them as a 

 hunted lion over its whelps. The efforts of the "gamblers," as he aptly termed the 

 land speculators, and the companies endowed with incomprehensible rights of pre- 

 emption, to dispossess the ancient lords of the soil, lashed his soul into fury. He 

 hated the enemies of his people with fierce and unrelenting hatred, and he consecrated 

 the remaining years of his life to the work of baffling their mercenary schemes. Incon- 

 ceivably difficult was the task. He could neither read nor speak English, nor any 

 other language spoken by the whites, and yet his speeches in council, mutilated frag- 

 ments of which still remain, disclose an acute and lofty intellect, a vigorous under- 

 standing, a marvelous memory, an imagination and wit electric and phenomenal. 

 His logic was as keen as a Damascus blade; he was a master of satire and invective j 

 he thoroughly understood the windings and intricacies of what we term human 

 nature. His denunciation had the terrible vehemence of the thunderbolt, and anon 

 his oratory would be as grateful and caressing as the zephyrs of midsummer. Reply- 

 ing to Mr. Ogden, the head of the great Ogdeu Land Company, he exclaimed with in- 



