540 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



FEW PUNISHMENTS. 



If their punishments are certain and cruel, they have the merit of being few, andf 

 those confined chiefly to their enemies. It is natural* to be cruel to enemies, and in 

 this I do not see that the improvements of the enlightened and Christian world have 

 yet elevated them so very much above the savage. To their friends there are no peo- 

 ple on earth that are more kind, and cruelties and punishments (except for capital 

 offenses) are amongst themselves entirely dispensed with. No man in their commu- 

 nities is subject to any restraints upon his liberty, or to any corporal or degrading 

 punishment, each one valuing his limbs, and his liberty to use them, as his inviolable 

 right, which no power in the tribe can deprive him of; whilst each one holds the 

 chief as amenable to him as the most humble individual in the tribe. 



TORTURE AMONGST THE SIOUX. 



On an occasion when I had interrogated a Sioux chief, on the Upper Missouri, about 

 their government, their punishments and tortures of prisoners, for which I had freely 

 condemned them for the cruelty of the practice, he took occasion, when I had got 

 through, to ask me some questions relative to modes in the civilized world, which, 

 with his comments upon them, were nearly as follows, and struck me, as I think they 

 must every one, with great force : 



"Among white people, nobody ever take your wife, take your children, take your 

 mother, cut off nose, cut eyes out, burn to death ? No ! Then you no cut off nose, 

 you no cut out eyes, you no burn to death ; very good." 



INDIAN OPINION OF WHITE MEN'S PUNISHMENT. 



He also told me he had often heard that white people hung their criminals by the 

 neck and choked them to death like dogs, and those their own people ; to which I an- 

 swered, "yes." He then told me he had learned that they shut each other up in 

 prisons, where they kept them a great part of their lives because they can't pay 

 money I I replied in the affirmative to this, which occasioned great surprise and ex- 

 cessive laughter, even amongst the women. He told me that he had been to our fort 

 at Council Bluffs, where we had a great many warriors and braves, and he saw three 

 of them taken out on the prairies and tied to a post and whipped almost to death, 

 and he had been told that they submit to all this to get a little money. " Yes." He 

 said he had been told that when all the white people were bom their white medicine- 

 men had to stand by and look on ; that in the Indian country the women would not 

 allow that; they would be ashamed. That he had been along the frontier and a good 

 deal amongst the white people, and he had seen them whip their little children, athing 

 that is very cruel ; he had heard also, from several white medicine-men, that the Great 

 Spirit of the white people was the child of a white woman, and that he was at last 

 put to death by the white people ! This seemed to be a thing that he had not been 

 able to comprehend, and he concluded by saying, " The Indian's Great Spirit got no 

 mother ; the Indians no kill him ; he never die." He put me a chapter of other ques- 

 tions, as to the trespasses of the white people on their lands ; their continual corrup- 

 tion of the morals of their women, and digging open the Indians' graves to get their 

 bones, &c., to all of which I was compelled to reply in the affirmative, and quite 

 glad to close my note-book and quietly to escape from the throng that had collected 

 around me, and saying (though to myself and silently) that these and a hundred 

 other vices belong to the civilized world, and are practiced upon (but certainly 

 in no instance reciprocated by) the " cruel and relentless savage." 



INDIAN MODES OF WAR. 



Of their modes of war, of which a great deal has been written by other travelers, I 

 could say much, but in the present place must be brief. All wars, offensive or de- 

 fensive, are decided on by the chiefs and doctors in council, where majority decider 



