No. 24.
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.