The Author leaves his Collection in the Louvre, and arrives with the Indians in Bruxelles—Indians at the soirÉe of the American Minister in Bruxelles—Author’s reception by the King in the Palace—Small-pox among the Indians—Indians unable to visit the Palace—Exhibition closes—Seven sick with small-pox—Death of one of them—His will—A second dies—His will—The rest recover—Faithful attentions of Daniel—The Author accompanies them to Antwerp, and pays their expenses to London on a steamer—Death of the War-chief in London—His will—The Author raises money by subscription and sends to them—Letter from the survivors, in England, to the Author—Drawings by the War-chief—The Author stopped in the streets of London and invited to see the skeleton of the War-chief!—His indignation—Subsequent deaths of four others of this party in England—The three parties of Indians in Europe—Their objects—Their success—Their conduct—Their reception and treatment—Things which they saw and learned—Estimates and statistics of civilized life which they have carried home—Their mode of reasoning from such premises—And the probable results.

During the time that my collection was exposed to the exclusive views of the Royal Family and their guests, the Indians were lying still, at my expense, which was by no means a trifling item. The young man whom I said they were under a contract with to pay them so much per month had performed his agreement with them for the two first months, and when the third month’s wages became due he declared to them and to me that he could not pay them, nor pay their expenses back to London, as he was obligated to do. These duties then devolved on me, or at least, the Indians having been so long under my control and direction, I assumed them, and told the chiefs I would pay their expenses to London, and probably make something for them on the way, after my exhibition in the Louvre was finished. They were thus lying idle at this time, waiting for me to be at liberty to go with them, and, as I have said, living at my expense. I told them that I designed going by the way of Belgium, and making their exhibitions in Bruxelles, Antwerp, and Ghent for a few weeks, the whole receipts of which, over the expenses, they should have, and I fully believed it would be sufficient to pay their expenses quite home to their own country; and that I would also, as I had promised, pay all their expenses from Paris to London myself.

With this design and with these views, leaving my collection in the Louvre, I started with the Indians for Bruxelles, where we arrived the next evening.

We were all delighted with the appearance of Bruxelles, and the Indians in fine glee, in the fresh recollections of the honours just paid them in Paris, and the golden prospect which they considered now lay before them. But little did they dream, poor fellows! of the different fate that there awaited them. While resting a few days, preparing for the commencement of their exhibitions, they were kindly invited, with the author, to attend the soirÉe of the American Minister, Mr. Clemson, where they were ushered into a brilliant and numerous crowd of distinguished and fashionable people, and seemed to be the lions of the evening, admired and complimented by all, and their way was thus paved for the commencement of their exhibitions. I had in the mean time made all the preparations and the necessary outlays for their operations, which they merely began upon, when it became necessary to suspend their exhibitions, owing to one of the number having been taken sick with the small-pox.

I had at this time an audience appointed with the King, at the Palace, where I went and was most kindly received and amused in half an hour’s conversation with His Majesty about the condition and modes of the American Indians. He expressed the deepest sympathy for them and solicitude for their welfare and protection, and, a few days after my audience, transmitted to me, through one of his ministers, a beautiful gold medal, with an appropriate inscription on it.

The nature of the sickness that had now appeared amongst the Indians prevented the contemplated interview at the Palace, and also all communication with the public. It was still hoped by the physicians that a few days would remove all difficulty, but it was destined to be otherwise, for in a few days two others were attacked, and in a day or two more another and another, and at last they were in that pitiable and alarming state that seven of them were on their backs with that awful and (to them) most fatal of all diseases.

My position then, as the reader will perceive, was one of a most distressing and painful kind, with my natural sympathy for their race, and now with the whole responsibility for the expenses, lives, and welfare of these poor people on my shoulders, their only friend and protector in a foreign country, as their conductor had left them and returned to London, and my own life in imminent danger whilst I was attending on them.

One of these poor fellows died in the course of a few days in their rooms, another died in one of the hospitals to which he was removed, and a third died a few days after they reached London, though he was in good health when he travelled across the Channel.

Such were the melancholy results of this awful catastrophe, which the reader will easily see broke up all their plans of exhibitions in Belgium, and ended in the death of three of the finest men of the party.

Their sickness in Bruxelles detained me there near two months before the survivors were well enough to travel, during which gloomy time I had opportunity enough to test the fidelity of my man Daniel and his attachment to the Indians, who stayed by them night and day, fearless of his own danger, as he lifted them about in his arms in their loathsome condition both when dead and alive.

When the party were well enough to travel I went to Antwerp with them, and placed them on a steamer for London, having paid their fare and given them a little money to cover their first expenses when they should arrive there. I then took leave of them, and returned to my little family in Paris, having been absent near three months, with an expenditure of 350l.

With the poor fellows who died there seemed to be a presentiment with each, the moment he was broken out with the disease, that he was to die, and a very curious circumstance attended this conviction in each case.

The first one, when he found the disease was well identified on him, sat down upon the floor with the next one, his faithful and confiding friend, and, having very deliberately told him he was going to die, unlocked his little trunk, and spreading all his trinkets, money, &c., upon the floor, bequeathed them to his friends, making the other the sole executor of his will, intrusting them all to him, directing him to take them to his country and deliver them with his own hand. As he was intrusting these precious gifts, with his commands, to an Indian, he was certain, poor fellow! that they would be sacredly preserved and delivered, and he then locked his little trunk, and, having given to his friend the key, he turned to his bed, where he seemed composed and ready to die, because, he said, it was the will of the Great Spirit, and he didn’t think that the Great Spirit would have selected him unless it was to better his condition in some way.

About the time of the death of this young man his confiding and faithful friend was discovered to be breaking out with the disease also, and, seeming to be under a similar conviction, he called Say-say-gon (the War-chief) to him, and, like the other, unlocked his little trunk, and, taking out his medal from the King, and other presents and money, he designated a similar distribution of them amongst his relatives; and trusting to the War-chief to execute his will, he locked his trunk, having taken the last look at his little hard-earned treasures, and, unlocking that of his deceased companion, and designating, as well as he could, the manner in which the verbal instructions had been left with him, gave the key to the War-chief, and begged of him to take charge of the trunk and the presents, and to see them bestowed according to the will of the testator. After this he turned away from his little worldly treasures, and suddenly lost all knowledge of them in the distress of the awful disease that soon terminated his existence.

The War-chief was one who escaped the disease in Bruxelles, and, being amongst those whom I took to Antwerp and sent by steamer to London, was at that time in good health and spirits; but letters which I received a few days after their arrival in London informed me that he was there attacked with the same disease, and, most singular to relate, as soon as he discovered the disease breaking out upon his skin, he said that he should die, and, calling the chief Maun-gua-daus to him, he, like the others, opened his trunk, and, willing his gold medal from the hand of Louis Philippe, to his little son, and his other trinkets and money to his wife and other relatives, intrusted the whole to the chief to execute. He then unlocked the trunks of his two friends who were dead, and, as well as he could recollect them, communicated to Maun-gua-daus the nature of the two bequests that had been intrusted to him, and died, leaving the chief to be the bearer of all the little effects they had earned, and sole executor of their three wills.

It is a fact which may be of interest to be made known, that all of this party had been vaccinated in their own country, and supposed themselves protected from the disease; and also that the only three full-blooded men of the party died. The other four who had the disease had it in a modified form, and, in all probability, with the three who died, the vaccine matter had not been properly communicated, or, what is more probable, and often the case in the exposed lives they lead, it had in some way been prevented from taking its usual effect.

After their misfortunes in Belgium and in London the excellent lady of the American Ambassador in Bruxelles raised, by a subscription, several hundred francs and sent to me in Paris, to which I got other additions in that city, and forwarded to them in England, to assist in paying their expenses back to their own country; and shortly after, and before they embarked for America, I received the following letter from them, which I feel it my duty to myself to insert here, lest any one should be led to believe that I did less than my duty to these unfortunate people:—

The above letter was spontaneous on their part, and written in the hand of Maun-gua-daus, the chief, who spoke and wrote the English language very correctly.

I was much shocked and distressed to hear of the death of Say-say-gon, the War-chief, for he was a remarkably fine Indian, and had become much attached to me. His life, as a warrior and a hunter, had been one of an extraordinary nature, and the principal incidents of it, particularly in the hunting department, he had been for some weeks engaged, just before their disastrous sickness, in illustrating by a series of designs in his rude way, presenting me a portfolio of them, with the story of each, which I wrote down from his own lips as he narrated them.

This most amusing and original keepsake, which I shall treasure up as long as I live, and which I regret that the dimensions of this work did not allow me the space to insert, can at all times be seen by the curious of my friends who desire to see it.

For the amusement of the reader, however, I have made room for a couple of his drawings, which will convey some idea of their general character, and of the decided cleverness of this good fellow at story-telling and design. The woodcuts are traced from the originals, and are therefore as near fac-similes as I could make them. Plate No. 23 represents Pane-way-ee-tung, the brother-in-law of Say-say-gon, crossing the river Thomas in a bark canoe, who had the following curious and amusing encounter with a bear which he met swimming in the middle of the river. Though the Indian had no other weapon than a paddle, he pursued the bear, and, overtaking it, struck it a blow, upon which it made an effort to climb into the canoe, by which the canoe was upset and the Indian sank under it. He arose to the surface, however, just behind the canoe, which in its progress had passed over him, and, being bottom upwards, the bear had climbed upon it, as seen in the sketch, and, having seen the man sink under it, was feeling under the canoe with his paws in hopes of getting hold of him. The bear, having made no calculation for the progress of the canoe, had not thought of looking behind it for his enemy, but balanced himself with difficulty without being able to look back; and whilst he was thus engaged feeling for his enemy under the canoe the Indian silently swam behind it, and, cautiously pushing it forward with his hand, succeeded in moving it near the shore, where he discovered his friend Say-say-gon hunting with his rifle, who was in waiting for it, and when near enough shot it in the head.

Plate No. 24 is his illustration of the first interview between white men and the Ojibbeway Indians; his description of it is as follows:—

But a few months after the death of this fine Indian I was on a visit to London, and while walking in Piccadilly was accosted by an old acquaintance, who in our conversation informed me that the skeleton of my old friend the War-chief had been preserved, and he seemed to think it might be an interesting thing for me to see. The struggle between the ebullition of indignation and the quiescence of disgust rendered me for the moment almost unfit for a reply; and I withheld it for a moment, until the poor Indian’s ideas of hyÆnas before described had time to run through my mind, and some other similar reflections, when I calmly replied, “I have no doubt but the skeleton is a subject of interest, but I shall not have time to see it.”

My friend and I parted here, and I went on through Piccadilly, and I know not where, meditating on the virtues of scientific and mercenary man. I thought of the heroic Osceola, who was captured when he was disarmed and was bearing a white flag in his hand; who died a prisoner of war, and whose head was a few months afterwards offered for sale in the city of New York! I thought also of the thousands of Indian graves I had seen on the frontier thrown open by sacrilegious hands for the skulls and trinkets they enclosed, to which the retiring relatives were lurking back to take the last glance of, and to mingle their last tears over, with the horror of seeing the bones of their fathers and children strewed over the ground by hands too averse to labour and too ruthless to cover them again.

I was here forcibly struck with the fitness of Jim’s remarks about the hyÆnas, of “their resemblance to Chemokimons or pale-faces,” when I told him that they lived by digging up and devouring bodies that had been consigned to the grave.

I thought also of the distress of mind of the Little Wolf when he lost his child at Dundee—of his objections to bury it in a foreign land; and also of the double pang with which the fine fellow suffered when dire necessity compelled him to leave the body of his affectionate wife amidst the graves of the thousands whose limbs and bones were no curiosity. And I could thus appreciate the earnestness with which, in his last embrace of me in Paris, he desired me to drive every day in a cab, as he had been in the habit of doing, to the cemetery of Montmartre, to see that no one disturbed the grave of her whom he had loved, but was then to leave; and that I should urge his kind friend M. Vattemare to hasten the completion of the beautiful monument he was getting made, that it might be sure to be erected over her grave before she might be dug up.

With regard to the remainder of the party of Ojibbeways whom I have said I had advised to return as soon as possible to their own country, I am grieved to inform the reader that, from letters from several friends in England, I have learned that the chief has persisted in travelling through various parts of the kingdom, making his exhibitions of Indian life during the last year, and has had the singular and lamentable misfortune of burying three of his children and his wife! These, being facts, show a loss of seven out of twelve of that party, affording a shocking argument against the propriety of persons bringing Indians to Europe with a view to making their exhibitions a just or profitable speculation.

Three of the former party died while under my direction, as I have described in the foregoing pages; and a noble fine Indian, by the name of Jock-o-sot, of the Sac tribe, brought to England by a Mr. Wallace about the same time, was dying, and died on his way home, from causes he met in this country; making the melancholy list of eleven who lost their lives in the space of eighteen months. These are facts which bring the reader’s mind, as well as that of the author, to inquire what were the objects of these parties in England—how they came here—and what their success, as well as what will be the results that will probably flow from them. Each of these speculations has undoubtedly been projected by the white men who brought the Indians over, having conceived a plan of employing and taking to Europe such parties, who would be great curiosities in a foreign country, and by their exhibitions enabled to realise a great deal of money.

These parties, in each case, have been employed, and induced to come on condition of a certain sum of money to be paid them per month, or so much per year, to be given them on their return to their own country, with the additional advantage of having all their expenses borne, and themselves entitled to all the numerous presents they would receive during their travels.

As I have been with each of these parties the greater part of the time while they were making their exhibitions, I feel quite sure that this last condition of their engagements has been strictly kept with them, and that by it the Indians profited to a considerable amount from the kind and charitable hands of people whom they were amusing. But how far they have been benefited by the other conditions of their engagements, after they have returned to their homes, I am unable to tell.

As for their reception by the public generally where they have travelled, and their conduct whilst amongst and dealing with the world, it gives me great pleasure, as a living witness, to tender to that public my grateful acknowledgments for the kindness and friendship with which they received those unsophisticated people; and in justice to the Indians, as well as for the satisfaction of those who knew them, to acknowledge the perfect propriety of their conduct and dignity of deportment whilst they were abroad.

There were of the three parties thirty-five in all, and I am proud, for the character of the abused race which I am yet advocating, that, for the year and a half that I was daily and hourly in familiarity with them in Europe, I never discovered either of them intoxicated, or in a passion with one another, or with the world. They met the people, and all the wondrous and unaccountable works which their eyes were daily opened to in the enlightened world, with an evenness of temper and apparent ease and familiarity which surprised all who saw them.

Their conduct was uniformly decent and respectful, and through their whole tour, whilst abroad, they furnished a striking corroboration of two of the leading traits of their national character, which I have advanced in my former work, of their strict adherance to promises they make, and of their never-ending garrulity and anecdote when, in their little fireside circles, they are out of the embarrassing gaze of the enlightened world, who are wiser than themselves.

For these nightly gossips, which generally took place in their private apartments after the labours of the day were done and the pipe was lit, the excitements of the day, and the droll and marvellous things they had seen in their exhibition-room and in the streets of London and Paris, afforded them the endless themes; and of these little sittings I was almost an inseparable member, as will have been seen by many anecdotes entered in the pages which the reader has already passed over.

It will be pleasing therefore to the reader, at least to those who felt an interest in those poor people, to learn, that, though they might have been objects of concern and pity whilst making a show of themselves in this country, they were, nevertheless, happy, and in the height of amusements, philosophically enjoying life as they went along; and to those who know me, and feel any anxiety for my welfare, that, although I was aiding them in a mode of living to which I was always opposed, I was happy in their society, and also in the belief that I was rendering them an essential service, although my labours were much less successful as regarded my own pecuniary interest. One of the leading inducements for Indians to enter into such enterprises, and the one which gains the consent of their friends and relations around them, and more particularly is advanced to the world as the plausible motive for taking Indians abroad, is that of enlightening them—of opening their eyes to the length and breadth of civilization, and all the inventions and improvements of enlightened society. These three parties (having met their old friend and advocate abroad, who has introduced them to the highest society of the world—has led them into three palaces, and from those down through every grade of society, and into almost every institution and factory of the continent—whose eyes and whose ears have been opened to most of the information and improvements of this enlightened age, and who have gone back to relate and to apply, in their own country, the knowledge they have gained) will furnish the best argument on record, for or against the propriety of bringing American Indians abroad, as the means of enlightening them and making them suitable teachers of civilization when they go back to the wilderness. And though the pages of this book cannot sum up the results of these visits, which can only be looked up ultimately in the respective tribes to which they have returned, yet a few words more upon the materials with which they have returned, and the author’s opinion (in his familiar knowledge of the Indians’ mode of reasoning) of their probable results, may not be obtrusive, as a sort of recapitulation of scenes and estimates, with their tendencies, made in the foregoing pages.

It is natural, or at least habitual, to suppose that, for the ignorant to learn is always to improve; and that what a savage people can learn amongst civilized society must be for their benefit. But in this view of the case, which would generally be correct, there arises a very fair question how far, for the benefit of the unenlightened parts of the world, it is judicious to acquaint them at a glance, with the whole glare of the lights and shades of civilized life, by opening the eyes of such parties to so many virtues and so many luxuries and refinements so far beyond the possibility of their acquiring, and at the same time to so many vices, to so much poverty and beggary not known in their simple modes of life, to teach to their people and to descant on when they get home; themselves as well as those whom they are teaching, despairing of ever attaining to what they have seen to admire and covet, and unwilling to descend to the degrading vices and poverty which they have seen mixed up in the mysterious and money-making medley of civilization.

If I startle the readers, let them reflect for a moment upon what perhaps some of them have never yet exactly appreciated—that a man, to know how his own house looks, must see how the houses of others appear. To know how his own city and country actually look, and how his countrymen act and live, he should see how cities and countries look, and how people act, in other parts of the world. If he will do this, and then leave all civilized countries a while, and the din and clatter, and the struggles for wealth amidst the rags and vices of the community he has lived in, and taste for a time the simple, silent life of the wilderness, he will find, on returning to his home, that he has been raised amongst a variety of vices and follies which he never before had duly appreciated, and will then realise, to a certain degree, the view which the savages take of the scenes in civilized life when they look into the strange medley of human existence in our great towns and cities, where all the contrasts are before their eyes, of rich and poor, equally struggling for wealth or the means of existence.

With such eyes were those wild people here to look; and without the cares and hourly and momentary concerns which lead the scrambling, busy world through and across the streets, blinded to what is about them, the poor but entirely independent Indians were daily and hourly scanning from the top of their buss, or the platform of their exhibition-rooms, the scenes, and manners, and expressions that were about them; and though they looked with unenlightened eyes, they saw and correctly appreciated many things in London and Paris which the eyes of Londoners and Parisians scarcely see. They saw their sights and got their estimates and statistics, and in the leisure of their inquisitive and abstracted minds drew deductions which few of the business world have leisure or inclination to make; and with all of these they have gone back to be the illustrators and teachers of civilization in the wilderness.

Each one will be a verbal chronicler, as long as he lives, of the events and scenes he witnessed while abroad, and Wash-ka-mon-ya (or Jim), with his smattering of civilization, and his book of entries, which he will find enough to read and translate, will furnish abundance of written evidence for them to comment upon to their nation, who will be looking to them for information of the secret of civilization.

The bazaar of toys and trinkets presented to them, with the money and medals which they will open to view in the wilderness, will glitter in the eyes of their people, and, it is to be feared, may be an inducement to others to follow their example. oe Their Bibles had increased in their various boxes since the last census to more than a hundred and fifty; their religious tracts, which they could not read, to some thousands; their dolls, in all, to fifty; and other useless toys, to a great number. Then came their medals, their grosses of buttons, their beads, ribbons, brooches, fans, knives, daggers, combs, pistols, shawls, blankets, handkerchiefs, canes, umbrellas, beaver hats, caps, coats, bracelets, pins, eye-glasses, &c. &c.; and then their prints—views of countries they had seen, of churches, cathedrals, maps of London and Paris, views of bridges, of factories, of coal-pits, of catacombs, of Morgues, &c. &c., to an almost countless number, all to be opened and commented upon, and then scattered, as the first indications of civilization, in the wilderness. These are but mere toys, however, but gewgaws that will be met as matters of course, and soon used up and lost sight of. But Jim’s book of the statistics of London, of Paris, and New York, will stand the Magna Charta of his nation, and around it will assemble the wiseacres of the tribe, descanting on and seeking for a solution of the blessings of civilization, as the passing pipe sends off its curling fumes, to future ages, over its astounding and marvellous estimates of civilized nations, of cities, of churches, of courts of justice, and gaols—of the tens of thousands of civilized people who are in it recorded (to their amazement) as blind, as deaf and dumb, and insane; of gallows and guillotines, of massacres and robberies, the number of grog-shops and breweries, of coal-pits, of tread-mills and foundling hospitals, of poorhouses and paupers, of beggars and starvation, of brothels, of prisons for debtors, of rapes, of bigamy, of taxation, of game-laws, of Christianity, of drunkenness, of national debt and repudiation.

The estimates of all these subjects have gone to the wilderness, with what the eyes of the Indians saw of the poverty and distress of the civilized world, to be taught to the untaught, and hereafter to be arrayed, if they choose, against the teachings of civilization and Christianity in the Indian communities: a table of the enormous numbers in the civilized world who by their own folly or wickedness drag through lives of pain and misery, leaving their Indian critics, in the richness of their imaginations, to judge of the immense proportion of the enlightened world who, in just retribution, must perish for their crimes and their follies; and in their ignorance, and the violence of their prejudices, to imagine what proportion of them are actually indulged in the comforts of this life, or destined to enjoy the happiness of the world to come.

Teaching, I have always thought, should be gradual, and but one thing (or at most but few things) taught at a time. By all who know me and my views, I am known to be, as I am, an advocate of civilization; but of civilization, as it has generally been taught amongst the American Indians, I have a poor opinion; and of the plan I am now treating of, of sending parties to foreign countries to see all that can be seen and learned in civilized life, I have a still poorer opinion, being fully convinced that they learn too much for useful teachers in their own country. The strides that they thus take are too great and too sudden for the slow and gradual steps that can alone bring man from a savage to a civilized state. They require absolutely the reverse of what they will learn from such teachers. They should, with all their natural prejudices against civilized man, be held in ignorance of the actual crime, dissipation, and poverty that belong to the enlightened world, until the honest pioneer, in his simple life, with his plough and his hoe, can wile them into the mode of raising the necessaries of life, which are the first steps from savage to civil, and which they will only take when their prejudices against white men are broken down, which is most effectually done by teaching them the modes of raising their food and acquiring property. I therefore am constrained to give judgment here against the propriety of parties of Indians visiting foreign countries with a view to enlightening their people when they go back; and here also to register my opinion, for which I am daily asked, as to the effects which these visits to Europe will have upon the parties who have been abroad, and what impressions they will make amongst their people when they return.

I am sure they saw many things which pleased them and gained their highest admiration, and which they might be benefited by seeing; and also that they saw many others which it would have been decidedly better they had never seen. They have witnessed and appreciated the virtues and blessings, and at the same time the vices and miseries and degradations of civilized life, the latter of which will doubtless have made the deepest impressions upon their minds, and which (not unlike some more distinguished travellers than themselves) they will comment and enlarge upon, and about in equal justice to the nation they represent and are endeavouring to instruct.

Their tour of a year or two abroad, amidst the mazes and mysteries of civilized life, will rest in their minds like a romantic dream, not to be forgotten, nor to be dreamed over again; their lives too short to aspire to what they have seen to approve, and their own humble sphere in their native wilds so decidedly preferable to the parts of civilized life which they did not admire, that they will probably convert the little money they have made, and their medals and trinkets, into whisky and rum, and drown out, if possible, the puzzling enigma, which, with arguments, the poor fellows have found it more difficult to solve.

With this chapter I take leave of my Indian friends; and as the main subject of this work ends with their mission to Europe, the reader finds himself near the end of his task.

In taking leave of my red friends, I will be pardoned for repeating what I have before said, that on this side of the Atlantic they invariably did the best they could do; and that, loving them still as I have done, I shall continue to do for them and their race, all the justice that shall be in the power of my future strength to do.