762 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



but human, ready and disposed to meet 1ms fellow-man in friendship and kindness 

 where there has been no cause given for a different reception. 



Subsequent to the shocking invasions and cruelties recited above colonization in 

 North America commenced, and the beginning of this was the little colony of Puri- 

 tans who sailed from England, and landed, with their wives and children, on the 

 rock of Plymouth. " They were hungry and in distress, and the Indians received 

 them with open arms, and fed them with maize and other food which they brought 

 to them." 



This was not wonderful, but natural and noble, because these mtelligent and dis. 

 criminating people contemplated in this little domestic group of husbands, wives, 

 and children the elements of fellowship and peace, instead of the signals of war and 

 plunder. 



The entrance of this colony opened the door for others, and the stream of emigration 

 that has continued ever since, peopling the whole Atlantic coast and constantly mov- 

 ing on towards the West, and displacing or moving the Indian populations by treaty 

 stipulations or by force. 



And we now come to what is strictly wonderful, and even astonishing — that under 

 all the invasions, the frauds, the deceptions, and tricks, as well as force, that have 

 been practiced upon them to push them from their lands and towards " the setting 

 sun," these poor and abused people have exercised so little cruelty as they have ; that 

 rum, and whisky, and small-pox, of the white man's importation amongst them, have 

 been submitted to, and border warfare, until they are reduced, tribe after tribe, to 

 mere remnants, and still pushed again and again to the West ; and that even there, 

 and under these irritating circumstances, white men travel unprotected, their lives 

 secure, and their property transported with safety; that "Lasalle and Father Hen- 

 nepin," in 1678, with only thirty men, should have passed, in their voyages of dis- 

 covery, through the whole of the great lakes, the Illinois and the Mississippi, during 

 eight years of continual travels and explorations amongst more than twenty tribes 

 as yet ignorant of civilization ; and Father Hennepin (as he relates), with only two 

 men, ascending, amongst the numerous tribes (the first explorer there), to the Falls 

 of Saint Anthony ; and under all the exposure and trying vicissitudes of those eight 

 years, as they say, they were uniformly treated with hospitality and kindness by the 

 Indians ; that " Lewis and Clark," with a small detachment of men, in 1805, should 

 have ascended the whole length of the Missouri River, crossed the Rocky Mountains, 

 and reached the Pacific Ocean and returned, a distance of more than 8,000 miles, in 

 which they paid the first visits of white men to more than thirty of the wildest and 

 most warlike tribes on the continent, without having to wield a weapon in self- 

 defense ! "And," as I had it from General Clarke's lips in his old age, " we visited 

 more than 200,000 of those poor people, and they everywhere treated us with hospi- 

 tality and kindness;" and that to hundreds of other travelers, and amongst them my- 

 self, whose lives and whose property have been at their mercy, they have been so 

 merciful, and so friendly and honorable, under the sense they have of white men's 

 cruelties and wrongs, is truly a matter of wonder. 



In the epitome of my wanderings given in this little work it has been seen that I 

 have found my way into and through one hundred and twenty different tribes in North, 

 South, and Central America, and the reader who has got thus far in the book will easily 

 imagine that my life and my property have been much of the time at their mercy, and 

 will here learn that not only have I found it unnecessary ever to raise my hand against 

 one of them, but that they have everywhere treated me with hospitality and kindness, 

 and nowhere to my knowledge stolen a sixpence worth of my property, though in their 

 countries there is universal poverty to stimulate to crime and no law to punish for 

 theft, and where travelers carry no trunks with locks and keys ! 



The above statements, if they be true, show us a people who are not only by nature 

 human, but humane, and evince a degree of submission and forbearance on their part 

 which would be a virtue and an honor for any race, and which, with their other 

 claims, entitle them to a better fate than the unlucky one they are hastening to. 



