264 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



the certainty with which his victims fell around him precisely at the times he saw fit 

 to predict their death. It has been said that he administered this potent drug, and 

 to them unknown medicine, to many of his friends as well as to foes; and by such an 

 inhuman and unparalleled depravity succeeded in exercising the most despotic and 

 absolute authority in his tribe until the time of his death. 



This story may be true and it may not. I cannot contradict it, and I am sure the 

 world will forgive me if I say I cannot believe it. If it be true, two things are also 

 true ; the one, not much to the credit of the Indian character, and the other, to the 

 everlasting infamy of the fur traders. If it be true, it furnishes an instance of Indian 

 depravity that I never have elsewhere heard of in my travels, and carries the most 

 conclusive proof of the incredible enormity of white men's dealings in this country, 

 who, for some sinister purpose, must have introduced the poisonous drug into the 

 country, and taught the poor chief how to use it, whilst they were silent accessories 

 to the murders he was committing. This story is said to have been told by the fur 

 traders, and although I have not always the highest confidence in their justice to 

 the Indian, yet I cannot, for the honor of my own species, believe them to be so de- 

 praved and so wicked, nor so weak, as to reveal such iniquities of this chief, if they 

 were true, which must directly implicate themselves as accessories to his most willful 

 and unprovoked murders. 



Such he has been heralded, however, to future ages, as murderer — like hundreds 

 and thousands of others as " horse thieves," as "drunkards," as "rogues of the first 

 order," &c. — by the historian who catches but a glaring story (and perhaps fabrica- 

 tion) of their lives, and has no time nor disposition to inquire into and record their 

 long and brilliant list of virtues, which must be lost in the shade of infamy for want 

 of a historian. 



I have learned much of this noble chieftain, and at a proper time shall recount the 

 modes of his civil and military life; how lie exposed his life and shed his blood in 

 rescuing the victims to horrid torture, and abolished that savage custom in his tribe; 

 how he led on and headed his brave warriors against the Sacs and Foxes, and saved 

 the butchery of his women and children ; how he received the Indian agent, and en- 

 tertained him in his hospitable wigwam in his village ; and how he conducted and 

 acquitted himself on his embassy to the civilized world. 



So much I will take pains to say of a man whom I never saw, because other histor- 

 ians have taken equal pains just to mention his name, and a solitary (and doubtful) 

 act of his life, as they have said of hundreds of others, for the purpose of consigning 

 him to infamy. 



How much more kind would it have been for the historian, who never saw him, to 

 have enumerated with this, other characteristic actions of his life for the verdict of 

 the world ; or to have allowed, in charity, his bones and his name to have slept in 

 silence, instead of calling them up from the grave to thrust a dagger through them 

 and throw them back again. 



Book-making now-a-days is done for money-making, and he who takes the Indian 

 for his theme, and cannot go and see him, finds a poverty in his matter that naturally 

 begets error by grasping at every little tale that is brought or fabricated by their 

 enemies. Such books are standards, because they are made for white men's reading 

 only, and herald the character of a people who never can disprove them. They 

 answer the purpose for which they are written, and the poor Indian, who has no re- 

 dress, stands stigmatized and branded as a murderous wretch and beast. 



If the system of book-making and newspaper printing were in operation in the In- 

 dian country awhile to herald the iniquities and horrible barbarities of white men in 

 these Western regions, which now are sure to be overlooked, I venture to say that 

 chapters would soon be printed which would 6icken the reader to his heart, and set 

 up the Indian a fair and tolerable man. — Pages 5 and 7, vol. 2, Catlin's Eight Years. 



