Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/421

Rh could, as a matter of course, destroy life in the same way, if I chose." When a movement was made to expel him from a village, and a council was held about the matter, which sat for several days, he got admittance to their council, and assured them, he says, "that I was but a man like themselves; that my art had no medicine or mystery about it, but could be learned by any of them if they would practice it as long as I had; and that in the country where I lived brave men never allowed their squaws to frighten them with foolish whims and stories. They all immediately arose, shook me by the hand, and dressed themselves for their pictures. After this there was no further difficulty about sitting all were ready to be painted; the squaws were silent, and my painting-room a continual resort for the chiefs and medicine-men." But Mr. Catlin always noticed that, when a picture was going on, the braves who were assisting kept passing the pipe around, smoking for the success of the picture and the preservation of the sitter. Thin he was feasted, a doctor's rattle was presented to him, and a magical wand, or doctor's staff, "strung with claws of the grizzly bear, with hoofs of the antelope, with ermine, with wild sage and bats' wings and perfumed with the choice and savory odor of the polecat; a dog was sacrificed and hung by the legs over my wigwam, and I was therefore and thereby initiated into the arcana of medicine or mystery."

Mr. Catlin was called by the Iowa Indians CMp-pe-ho-la; by the Mandans, Te-ho-pe-nee Wash-ee, or Great Medicine White Man; and by the Sioux at Fort Pierre, Ee-clia-zoo-kali-ga-iva-kou, the Medicine Painter, and also We-chash-a-iva-kou, the Painter. Associating with the Indians almost constantly, and seeing their best side, Mr. Catlin's sympathies were wholly enlisted for them; and we find much in his observations appreciative of their character and revealing an anxious interest in their future. He often speaks as one who felt that a doom of extermination which they did not deserve had been pronounced against them. He wrote an "Indian creed" in 1868, pertinently to his being called "the Indian-loving Catlin," in which he described those people as having always loved him and made him welcome to the best they had; as being honest without laws, having no jails or poorhouses, keeping the commandments without ever having read them or heard them preached from the pulpit, having never taken the name of God in vain, loving their neighbors as themselves, worshiping God without a Bible and believing that God loved them also, and "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!" He asserted, in his North American Indians, that the Indian "is everywhere, in his native state, a highly moral and religious being, endowed by his Maker with an intuitive