542 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



Of their extraordinary modes and sincerity of worship, I speak with equal confi- 

 dence; and although I am compelled to pity them for their ignorance, I am bound to 

 say that I never saw any other people, of any color, who spend so much of their lives 

 in humbling themselves before, and worshipping the Great Spirit, as some of these 

 tribes do, nor any whom I would not as soon suspect of insincerity and hypocrisy. 



SELF-DENIAL. 



Self-denial, which is comparatively a word of no meaning in the enlightened world, 

 and self-torture, and almost self-immolation, are continual modes of appealing to the 

 Great Spirit for his countenance and forgiveness ; and these, not; in studied figures of 

 rhetoric, resounding in halls and synagogues, to fill and astonish the ears of the mul- 

 titude, but humbly cried forth from starved stomachs and parched throats, from some 

 lone and favorite haunts, where the poor penitents crawl aud lay with their faces in 

 the dirt from day to day, and day to day, sobbing forth their humble confessions of 

 their sins, and their earnest implorations for Divine forgiveness and mercy. 



WORSHIP AMONG INDIANS AND WHITES. 



I have seen man thus prostrating himself before his Maker, and worshiping as 

 nature taught him ; and I have seen the mercenary white man, with his bottle and its 

 associate vices, unteaching them ; and after that, good and benevolent and pious men, 

 devotedly wearing out their valuable lives, all but in vain, endeavoring to break down 

 confirmed habits of cultivated vices and dissipation, and to engraft upon them the 

 blessings of Christianity and civilization. 



MISSIONARIES AND MISSIONS. 



I have visited most of the stations, and am acquainted with many of the excellent 

 missionaries, who, with their families falling by the diseases of the country about 

 them, are zealously laboring to benefit these benighted people ; but I have, with 

 thousands and millions of others, to deplore the ill success with which their painful 

 and faithful labors have generally been attended. 



This failure I attribute not to the want of capacity on the part of the savage, nor 

 for lack of zeal and Christian endeavors of those who have been sent, and to whom 

 the eyes of the sympathizing part of the world have been anxiously turned, in hopes 

 of a more encouraging account. The misfortune has been, in my opinion, that these 

 efforts have mostly been made in the wrong place — along the frontier, where (though 

 they have stood most in need of Christian advice and example) they have been the 

 least ready to hear it or to benefit from its introduction ; where whisky has been sold 

 for twenty or thirty or fifty years, and every sort of fraud and abuse that could be 

 engendered and visited upon them, and amongst their families, by ingenious money- 

 making white men; rearing up, under a burning sense of injustice, the most deadly 

 and thwarting prejudices, which, and which alone, in my opinion, have stood in the 

 way of the introduction of Christianity, of agriculture, and everything which vir- 

 tuous society has attempted to teach them ; which they meet and suspect and reject, 

 as some new trick or enterprise of the white man, which is to redound to his advan- 

 tage rather than for their own benefit. 



The pious missionary finds himself here, I would venture to say, in an indescribable 

 vicinity of mixed vices and stupid ignorance, that disgust and discourage him; and 

 just at the moment when his new theory, which has been at first received as a mystery 

 to them, is about to be successfully revealed and explained, the whisky bottle is 

 handed again from the bushes, and the poor Indian (whose perplexed mind is just 

 ready to catch the brilliant illumination of Christianity) grasps it, and, like too many 

 people in the enlightened world, quiets his excited feelings with its soothing draught, 

 embracing most affectionately the friend that brings him the most sudden relief, and 

 is contented to fall back, and linger and die in the moral darkness that is about him. 



And notwithstanding the great waste of missionary labors on many portions of our 



