544 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



new continent, ''I swear to your majesties that there is not a better people in the 

 world than these ; more affectionate, affable, or mild. They love their neighbors as 

 themselves, and they always speak smilingly." 



INDIAN ARTS AND WRITINGS. 



They are ingenious and talented, as many of their curious manufactures will prove, 

 which are seen by thousands in my collection. 



In the mechanic arts they have advanced but little, probably because they have 

 had but little use for them, and have had no teachers to bring them out. In the fine 

 arts they are perhaps still more rude, and their productions are very few. , Their ma- 

 terials and implements that they work with are exceedingly rare and simple, and their 

 principal efforts at pictorial effects are found on their buffalo robes, of which I have 

 given some accounts in former letters, and of which I shall herein furnish some addi- 

 tional information. 



I have been unable to find anything like a system of hieroglyphic writing amongst 

 them; yet, their picture writings on the rocks and on their robes approach somewhat 

 towards it. Of the former, I have seen a vast many in the course of my travels, and 

 I have satisfied myself that they are generally the totems (symbolic names) merely of 

 Indians who have visited those places, and, from a similar feeling of vanity that 

 everywhere belongs to man much alike, have been in the habit of recording their 

 names or symbols, such as birds, beasts, or reptiles, by which each family and each 

 individual is generally known, as white men are in the habit of recording their names 

 at watering places, &c. 



Many of these have recently been ascribed to the Northmen, who probably discov- 

 ered this country at an early period, and have been extinguished by the savage tribes. 

 I might have subscribed to such a theory had I not, at the red pipe-stone quarry, 

 where there are a vast number of these inscriptions cut in the solid rock, and at other 

 places also, seen the Indian at work, recording his totem amongst those of more 

 ancient dates ; which convinced me that they had been progressively made, at differ- 

 ent ages, and without any system that could be called hieroglyphic writing. 



The paintings on their robes are in many cases exceedingly curious, and generally 

 represent the exploits of their military lives, which they are proud of recording in 

 this way and exhibiting on their backs as they walk. 



[Here follows, from pages 246 to 249, a description of Indian painted robes, given 

 him. See also herein.] 



From these brief hints, which I have too hastily thrown together, it will be seen 

 that these people are ingenious, and have much in their modes as well as in their 

 manners to enlist the attention of the merely curious, even if they should not be 

 drawn nearer to them by feelings of sympathy and pity for their existing and ap- 

 proaching misfortunes. 



THE INDIAN DOOMED. 



But he who can travel amongst them, or even sit down in his parlor, with his 

 map of North America before him, with Halkett's Notes on the History of the North 

 American Indians (and several other very able works that have been written on their 

 character and history), and fairly and truly contemplate the system of universal 

 abuse that is hurrying such a people to utter destruction, will find enough to enlist 

 all his sympathies, and lead him to cultivate a more general and intimate acquaint- 

 ance with their true character. 



He who will sit and contemplate that vast frontier, where, by the past policy of 

 the Government, one hundred and twenty thousand of these poor people (who had 

 just got initiated into the mysteries and modes of civilized life, surrounded by exam- 

 ples of industry and agriculture which they were beginning to adopt), have been 

 removed several h undred miles to the west, to meet a secon^ siege of the whisky- 



