THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 739 



All of this the coming of the white man displaced, and life to the red 

 man became a dread reality and not a romance. Why should he not 

 consider the white man an invader ? What could the white man give 

 him in return for all of the bounties of nature, which by his presence he 

 deprived him of? 



Mr. Catlin saw but the man. He queried not at policies. His plea 

 was humanity. His creed never changed. The facts of 1830 to 1839, 

 on which it was based, did change, however, but he was unalterable. 



MR. CATLIN'S INDIAN CREED IN 1868. 



I have had some unfriendly denunciations by the press, and by those critics I have 

 been reproachfully designated the "Indian-loving Catlin."* What of this? What 

 have I to answer? Havel any apology to make for loving the Indians? The In- 

 dians have always loved me, and why should I not love the Indians? 



I love the people who have always made me welcome to the best they had. 



I love a people who are honest without laws, who have no jails and no poor-houses. 



I love a people who keep the Commandments without ever having read them or 

 heard them preached from the pulpit. 



I love a people who never swear, who never take the name of God in vain. 



I love a people who " love their neighbors as they love themselves." 



I love a people who worship God without a Bible, for I believe that God loves them 

 also. 



I love the people whose religion is all the same, and who are free from religious 

 animosities. # 



I love a people who have never raised a hand against me, or stolen my property, 

 where there was no law to punish for either. 



I love the people who never ha re fought a battle with white men except on their 

 own ground. 



I love and don't fear mankind where God has made and left them, for they are 

 children. 



I love a people who live and keep what is their own without locks and keys. 



I love all people who do the best they can, and oh! how I love a people who don't 

 live for the love of money. — Last Rambles Amongst the Indians of the Rocky Mount- 

 ains and the Andes. George Catlin, London, 1868. 



This was in 1868, and written in Europe, and speaks of a period when the 

 relations and conditions of the Indian and whites had entirely changed — 

 froml830 to 1839. Mr. Catlin's creed was theory or opinion deduced from 

 a most delightful eight years with the Indians thirty years before. The 

 difference between the two periods can be best arrived at by reading 

 Mr. Catlin's creed and comparing it with the actual results of the op- 

 erations of the Army in settling Indian outbreaks. It is noc the prov- 

 ince of the chronicler to give substance to ideas that might have been, 

 but to tell faithfully of that " which is." The Army, under General 

 Sheridan, was not used to cause Indian outbreaks, but it was most vig- 

 orously used to suppress them. Neither he nor his subordinates were 

 or are responsible for Indian outbreaks, but when once begun they are 



* Mr. Catlin was an Indian lover. B*e was early captured by their native grace and dignity. He 

 said with Benjamin West, who, when he first saw the Appolo Belvidere, "My God! how like a 

 young Mohawk Indian ! " Mr. Catlin, in 1861, wrote: " One of the distinguished national traits of the 

 American Indian that stamps his character as so mentally superior to that of the African and some 

 other races is that of his inalienable and uncompromising tenacity of unbounded freedom-" 



