Shortly after his arrival in Albany—where he visited the first families—he took advantage of Governor Clinton’s journey to Fort Stanwix (where a treaty was to be held with the Indians,) to return to his tribe. On the route, Otsaquette amused the company (among whom were the French Minister, Count De Moustiers, and several gentlemen of respectability) by his powers on various instruments of music. At Fort Stanwix, he found himself again with the companions of his early days, who saw and recognised him. His friends and relations had not forgotten him, and he was welcomed to his home and to his blanket.
But that which occurred soon after his reception, led him to a too fearful anticipation of an unsuccessful project; for the Oneidas, as if they could not acknowledge Otsaquette, attired in the dress with which he appeared before them,—a mark which did not disclose his nation,—and, thinking that he had assumed it, as if ashamed of his own native costume, the garb of his ancestors, they tore it from him with a savage avidity, and a fiend-like ferociousness, daubed on the paint to which he had been so long unused, and clothed him with the uncouth habiliments held sacred by his tribe. Their fiery ferocity, in the performance of the act, showed but too well the bold stand they were about to take against the innovations they supposed Otsaquette was to be the agent for affecting against their immemorial manners and customs, and which, from the venerable antiquity of their structure, it would be nothing short of sacrilege to destroy.
Thus the reformed savage was taken back again to his native barbarity, and—as if to cap the climax of degradation to a mind just susceptible of its own powers—was married to a squaw!
From that day, Otsaquette was no longer the accomplished Indian, from whom every wish of philanthropy was expected to be realized. He was no longer the instrument by whose power the emancipation of his countrymen from the thraldom of ignorance and superstition, was to be effected. From that day, he was again an inmate with the forest; was once more buried in his original obscurity, and his nation only viewed him as an equal. Even a liberal grant from the State, failed of securing to him that superior consideration among them which his civilization had procured for him with the rest of mankind. The commanding preeminence acquired from instruction, from which it was expected ambition would have sprung up, and acted as a double stimulant, from either the natural inferiority of the savage mind, or the predetermination of his countrymen—became of no effect, and, in a little time, was wholly annihilated. Otsaquette was lost! His moral perdition began from the hour he left Fort Stanwix. Three short months had hardly transpired, when Intemperance had marked him as her own, and soon hurried him to the grave. And, as if the very transition had deadened all the finer feelings of his nature, the picture given him by the Marquis—the very portrait of his affectionate friend and benefactor himself—he parted with!
Extraordinary and unnatural as the conduct of this educated savage may appear, the anecdote is not of a kind altogether unique; which proves, that little or nothing is to be expected from conferring a literary education upon those children of the forest:—An Indian, named George White-Eyes, was taken, while a boy, to the college at Princeton, where he received a classical education. On returning to his nation, he made some little stay in Philadelphia. He was amiable in his manners, and of modest demeanour, without exhibiting any trait of the savage whatever; but, no sooner had he rejoined his friends and former companions, in the land of his nativity, than he dropped the garb and manners of civilization, and resumed those of the savage, and, drinking deep of their intoxicating cup, soon put a period to his existence.
Many other instances might be adduced, to show how ineffectual have been the attempts to plant civilization on savage habits, by means of literary education—“Can the leopard change his spots?”
