366 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



507. Eh-ke-nah-ha-nali-pick, or what they call the last race. Painted in 1832. 

 (Plate No. 69, page 176, vol. 1, Catlin's Eight Years.) 



After they Lave all been tortured in the lodge in the above manner, they are led out of it with the 

 weights, buffalo skulls, &c., hanging to their flesh. Around the big canoe is a circle of young men 

 formed, who hold a wreath of willow boughs between them, and run round with all possible violence, 

 yelling as loud as they can. 



The young fellows who have been tortured are then led forward, and each one has two athletic and 

 fresh young men (their bodies singularly painted) who step up to him, one on each side, and take him 

 by a leathern strap tied round the wrist, and run round outside of the other circle with all possible 

 speed, forcing him forward till ho faints, and then drag him with his face in the dirt until the weights 

 are all disengaged from him by tearing the flesh out, when they drop him, and he lies (to all appear- 

 ance a corpse) until the Great Spirit gives him strength to rise and walk home to his lodge. 



In this scene also the medicine-man leans against the big canoe and cries, and all the nation are 

 spectators. Many pages would be required to give to the world a just description of these strange 

 scenes, and they require to be described minutely in all their parts in order to be fully appreciated 

 and understood. — G. C. 



Then were led forward the young men who were further to suffer, and being placed 

 at equal distances apart and outside of the ring just described, each one was taken 

 in charge by two athletic young men, fresh and strong, who stepped up to him, one 

 on each side, and by wrapping a broad leather around his wrists without tying it, 

 grasped it firm underneath the hand and stood prepared for what they call Eh-ke- 

 nah-ka-nah-pick, the last race (No. 507 Plate No. 69). 



This the spectator looking on would suppose was most correctly named, for he 

 would think it was the last race they could possibly run in this world. In this con- 

 dition they stand pale aud ghastly from abstinence and loss of blood, until all are 

 prepared and the word is given, when all start and run around outside of the other 

 ring, and each poor fellow, with his weights dragging on the ground, and his furious 

 conductors by his side, who hurry him forward by the wrists, struggles in the desperate 

 emulatiou to run longer without " dying" (as they call it) than his comrades, who are 

 fainting around him and sinking down, likehimself, where their bodies are dragged with 

 all possible speed, and often with their faces in the dirt. In the commencement of this 

 dance or race they all start at a moderate pace, and their speed being gradually in- 

 creased, the pain becomes so excruciating that their languid and exhausted frames give 

 out, and they are dragged by their wrists until they are disengaged from the weights 

 that were attached to their flesh, and this must be done by such violent force as to tear 

 the flesh out with the splint, which (as they say) can never be pulled out^ndwise with- 

 out greatly offending the Great Spirit and defeating the ebjecifor which they have thus 

 far suffered. The splints or skewers which aro put through the breast and the shoul- 

 ders, take up a part of the pectoral or trapezius muscle, which is necessary for the sup- 

 port of the great weight of their bodies, and which, as I have before mentioned, are 

 withdrawn as soon as he is lowered down ; but all the others, on the legs and arms, 

 seem to be very ingeniously passed through the flesh and integuments without taking 

 up the muscle, and even these, to be broken out, require so strong and so violent a force 

 that most of the poor fellows fainted under the operation, and when they were freed from 

 the last of the buffalo skulls and other weights (which was often done by some of the 

 bystanders throwing the weight of their bodies on to them as they were dragging on 

 the ground) they were in every instance dropped by the persons who dragged them 

 and their bodies were left, appearing like nothing but a mangled and a loathsome 

 corpse. At this strange and frightful juncture the two men who had dragged them 

 fled through the crowd and away upon the prairie, as if they were guilty of some 

 enormous crime and were ileeiug from summary vengeance. 



SUPERSTITIOUS VIEWS AS TO THE VICTIMS. 



Each poor fellow having thus patiently and manfully endured the privations and 

 tortures devised for him, and (in this last struggle with the most appalling effort) torn 

 himself loose from them and his tormentors, he lies the second time in the "keeping 

 (as he terms it) of the Great Spirit," to whom he issues his repeated prayers and in- 



