188 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



sailed they were as compact and indomitable as the Macedonian phalanx. They con- 

 quered very widely and made far distant nations their tributaries. They united policy 

 with power, and replenished their members when thinned by war by adopting the 

 fittest of their captives. They were the Romans of this continent— Romans of a stone 

 age. If they had had iron and letters they would have conquered North America, 

 and advanced in mechanic arts and all the sciences, perhaps repelled the intruding 

 white man and carried peaceful commerce or revengeful war across the broad Atlan- 

 tic. And when they had run through the common course of all the ancient nations 

 and fallen through luxury and sin, they would have left the world the records of a 

 history as full of moving incidents and heroic acts as that of Greece or Rome. But, 

 while this great but savage confederacy was in the dawn of its glory and advance- 

 ment, the white man came, and the Iroquois were no longer the Ongwe Honwee of the 

 land. The white man gave them arms and clothing for their furs and tendered them 

 letters and religion ; but they also brought them rum, won lands from them by fraud 

 or force, made them dependents, and kept them occupied in war. Ah me ! it was cruel 

 in Great Britain and France to foster their red children's appetite for war. Their pro- 

 tection was such " as vultures give to lambs, covering them and devouring them." 



I recall with pride the fact that at the outbreak of the Revolution and of the war 

 of 1812, efforts of this State and of the Confederated States were employed to bind 

 the red men to neutrality. But, alas! they were armed and incited to war by Great 

 Britain; and yet Great Britain, when she recognized our independence, forgot her 

 Indian allies within our boundaries and made no provision for their safety. Red 

 Jacket said " When you Americans and the King made peace, he did not mention us 

 and showed us no compassion, notwithstanding all he had said to us and all we had 

 suffered. This has been the occasion of great sorrow and loss to us, the Five Nations. 

 When you and he settled the peace between you two great nations he never asked us 

 for a delegation to attend to our interests." So, in the long state of bitter feeling 

 between our country and Great Britain, during her retention of our frontier posts, 

 she egged the Indians on to war with us, in the hope of their making the Ohio a part 

 of our northern boundary. Then, and long before that time, some of the Indian tribes 

 realized that, to their own great loss and danger, Great Britain, in her selfish policy, 

 was bribing them to fight battles not their own. Heckewelder was right in his high 

 estimate of the shrewdness and eloquence of the speech of Captain Pipe, the Dela- 

 ware, in December, 1801, to the British commandant at Detroit, at whose instance he 

 had made war against the Long Knives. He told him expressly that the whites had 

 got up a war among themselves and ought themselves to wage it ; that the British 

 had compelled their red children to take up the hatchet and join in a war for which 

 they had no cause or inclination, and intimated his conviction that the British would 

 make peace and throw their then useless tools aside. 



But to return to the Iroquois. In their early and palmy state they command our 

 admiration, even as they now, when fallen so far below it, command our sympathy 

 and love. They were, indeed, fierce and cruel, but not more so than the fathers and 

 progenitors of the European nations were even after they had attained iron and had 

 letters. Recall the rude, barbarian hordes who created primal Greece and Rome ; 

 think of the death of Regulus by Carthaginian hands; of the swarms from the Scandi- 

 navian hive that peopled Gaul and revivified all Europe ; of man's inhumanity to man 

 in all times and all nations; and can we render judgment of peculiar condemnation 

 against the Iroquois because they warred by ambush and surprise, scalped those who 

 fell beneath their hatchet, and tortured their prisoners ? In the white man's wars 

 against them he, too, not infrequently tore the scalp from the head of his red enemy 

 and tucked it under his belt. In August, 1778, when Charles Smith, a troublesome 

 emissary of the enemy, was shot by a party of riflemen belonging to the force of Col. 

 William Bu ler, in command at Schoharie, they brought in his scalp and it was sent 

 to General Stark, the then commandant at Albany. (Clinton Papers, 1639 and 1650.) 

 We did not wholly humanize the Indians who were our friends in the war of the Rev- 

 olution. The Oneidas and Tuscaroras, in September, 1778, in giving to Major Coch- 



