532 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



"From England, across tlie water ?" 



" How white man come to see England ? How you face come to get white, ha ? " 



HOW THEY CAME TO AMERICA. 



I never yet have been made to see the necessity of showing how these people came 

 here, or that they came here at all, which might easily have been done by the way 

 of Behring's Straits, from the north of Asia. I should much rather dispense with 

 such a necessity than undertake the other necessities that must follow the establish- 

 ment of this — those of showing how the savages paddled or drifted in their canoes 

 irom this continent, after they had got here, or from the Asiatic coast, and landed 

 on all the South Sea Islands, which we find to be inhabited nearly to the South 

 Pole. For myself, I am quite satisfied with the fact, which is a thing certain and to 

 be relied on, that this continent was found peopled in every part by savages, and 

 so nearly every island in the South Seas, at a distance of several thousand miles 

 from either continent ; and I am quite willing to surrender the mystery to abler pens 

 than my own — to theorists who may have the time and the means to prove to the 

 world how those rude people wandered there in their bark canoes without water for 

 their subsistence or compasses to guide them on their way. 



THEORIES. - 



The North American Indians, and all the inhabitants of the South Sea Islands, 

 speaking some two or three hundred different languages, entirely dissimilar, may 

 have all sprung from one stock; and the Almighty, after creating man, for some 

 reason that is unfathomable to human wisdom, might have left the whole vast uni- 

 verse, with its severed continents and its thousand distant isles everywhere teeming 

 with necessaries and luxuries spread out for man's use, and there to vegetate and 

 rot for hundreds and even thousands of centuries, until ultimate abstract accident 

 should throw him amongst these infinite mysteries of creation, the least and most 

 insignificant of which have been created and placed by design. Human reason is 

 weak and human ignorance is palpable when man attempts to approach these un- 

 searchable mysteries; and I consider human discretion well applied when it beckons 

 him back to things that he can comprehend, where his reason and all his mental 

 energies can be employed for the advancement and benefit of his species. With this 

 conviction I feel disposed to retreat to the ground that I have before occupied — to the 

 Indians as they are and where they are, recording amongst them living evidences 

 whilst they live, for the use of abler theorists than myself who may labor to estab- 

 lish their origin, which may be as well (and perhaps better) done a century hence 

 than at the present day. 



The reader is apprised that I have nearly filled the limits allotted to these epistles, 

 and I assure him that a vast deal which I have seen must remain ujitold, whilst firom 

 the same necessity I must tell him much less than I think, and beg to be pardoned if 

 I withhold till some future occasion many of my reasons for thinking. 



THINKS THE INDIANS ARE OF JEWISH DESCENT. 



I believe, with many others, that the North American Indians are a mixed people, 

 that they have Jewish blood in their veins, though I would not assert, as some have 

 undertaken to prove, that they are Jews, or that they are the ten lost tribes of Israel. 

 From the character and conformation of their heads, I am compelled to look upon them 

 as an amalgam race, but still savages ; and from many of their customs, which seem 

 to me to be peculiarly Jewish, as well as from the character of their heads, I am 

 forced to believe that some part of those ancient tribes, who have been dispersed by 

 Christians in so many ways and in so many different eras, have found their way to 

 this country, where they have entered amongst the native stock, and have lived and 

 intermarried with the Indians until their identity has been swallowed up and lost in 



