THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 527 



I have seen a vast many of these wild people in my travels, it will be admitted by 

 all. And I have had toils and difficulties and dangers to encounter in paying them 

 my visits ; yet I have had my pleasures as I went along, in shaking their friendly hands, 

 that never had felt the contaminating touch of money or the withering embrace of 

 pockets. I have shared the comforts of their hosjjitable wigwams, and always have 

 been preserved unharmed in their country. And if I have spoken or am to speak of 

 them with a seeming bias, the reader will know what allowance to make for me, who 

 am standing as the champion of a people who have treated me kindly, of whom I feel 

 bound to speak well, and who have no means of speaking for themselves. 



Of the dead to speak kindly, and to their character to render justice, is always a 

 praiseworthy act ; but it is yet far more charitable to extend the hand of liberality 

 or to hold the scale of justice to the living, who are able to feel the benefit of it. Jus- 

 tice to the dead is generally a charity, inasmuch as it is a kindness to living friends ; 

 but to the poor Indian dead, if it is meted out at all, which is seldom the case, it is 

 thrown to the grave with him, where he has generally gone without friends left be- 

 hind him to inherit the little fame that is reluctantly allowed him while living and 

 much less likely to be awarded to him when dead. Of the thousands and millions, 

 therefore, of these poor fellows who are dead, and whom we have thrown into their 

 graves, there is nothing that I could now say that would do them any good or that 

 would not answer the world as well at a future time as at the present, while there is 

 a debt that we are owing to those of them who are yet living which I think justly 

 demands our attention and all our sympathies at this moment. 



The peculiar condition in which we are obliged to contemplate these most unfor- 

 tunate people at this time, hastening to destruction and extinction, as they evidently 

 are, lays an uncompromising claim upon the sympathies of the civilized world, and 

 gives a deep interest and value to such records as are truly made, setting up and per- 

 petuating from the life their true native character and customs. 



If the great family of North American Indians were all dying by a scourge or epi- 

 demic of the country, it would be natural and a virtue to weep for them; but merely 

 to sympathize with them (and but partially to do that) when they are dying at our 

 hands, and rendering their glebe to our possession, would be to subvert the simplest 

 law of nature, and turn civilized man, with all his boasted virtues, back to worse 

 than savage barbarism. 



Justice to a nation who are dying need never be expected from the hands of their 

 destroyers; and where injustice and injury are visited upon the weak and defense- 

 less from ten thousand hands, from governments, monopolies, and individuals, the 

 offense is lost in the inseverable iniquity in which all join and for which nobody is 

 answerable, unless it be for their respective amounts at a final day of retribution. 



Long and cruel experience has well proved that it is impossible for enlightened 

 governments or money-making individuals to deal with these credulous and unso- 

 phisticated people without the sin of injustice; but the humble biographer or histo- 

 rian, who goes amongst them from a different motive, may come out of their country 

 withhishands and his conscience clean and himself an anomaly — a white man dealing 

 with Indians and meting out justice to them, which I hope it may be my good prov- 

 ince to do with my pen and my brush, with which, at least, I will have the singular 

 aud valuable satisfaction of having done them no harm. 



With this view, and a desire to render justice to my readers also, I have much yet 

 to say of the general appearance and character of the Indians, of their condition and 

 treatment, and far more,- 1 fear, than I can allot to the little space I have designed 

 for the completion of these epistles. 



THE APPEARANCE OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 



Of the general appearance of the North American Indians much might be yet said 

 that would be new and instructive. In stature, as I have already said, there are some 

 of the tribes that are considerably above the ordinary height of man, and others that 



