Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/120

100 and scenes among them. He says: “The North American Indian in his native state is an hospitable, honest, faithful, brave, warlike, cruel, revengeful, relentless, yet honorable, contemplative, and religious being.” While freely stating their defects and enormities, Catlin adds: “I have lived with thousands and ten thousands of these knights of the forest, whose whole lives are lives of chivalry, and whose daily feats with their naked limbs might vie with those of the Grecian youth in the beautiful rivalry of the Olympian games.” Their passion for stealing horses, Catlin ascribes to their having been trained to regard the act as a virtue. The artist says he has often seen six, eight, or ten hundred Indians engaged in their animating ball-playing, with five or six times the number of men, women, and children looking on. “And I pronounce such a scene — with its hundreds of Nature's most beautiful models, denuded, and painted of various colors, running and leaping into the air, in all the most extravagant and varied forms, in the desperate struggles for the ball — a school for the painter or sculptor equal to any of those which ever inspired the hand of the artist in the Olympian games or the Roman forum.” He adds, that they have learned their worst vices from the contamination of the whites, but that they find a full equivalent in nature and freedom for all the harassments of civilization, and make an intelligent estimate of the relative advantages of either state of man. “They are noble fellows, noblemen and gentlemen. . . . I have met with so many acts of kindness and hospitality at the hands of the poor Indian, that I feel bound, when I can do it, to render what excuse I can for a people who are dying with broken hearts, and never can speak in the civilized world in their own defence. . . . Nature has no nobler specimen of man or beast than the Indian and the buffalo.” Catlin pleads with equal earnestness for the man and the beast, and suggests for his own monument a grand national park to preserve both from extermination. There