Catlin Life Among the Indians

Illustrated Edition - Indians of North and South America: Everyday Life & Customes of Indian Tribes, Indian Art & Architecture, Warfare, Medicine and Religion
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-80-268-9269-4
Verlag: Madison & Adams Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 215 Seiten

Life Among the Indias was written as a result of a demand for a book of facts on the character and condition of the American Indians. George Catlin (1796-1872) was an American painter, author, and traveler, who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the Old West. Travelling to the American West five times during the 1830s, Catlin was the first white man to depict Plains Indians in their native territory. Contents: The Indians of America My Adventure With the First Indian I Ever Saw How the Indians Build Their Wigwams Indian Warfare - Scalps and Scalping Medicine Men - 'Drawing Fire From the Sun' How the Indians Paint Themselves - The Prairies Catching Wild Horses - A Buffalo Hunt An Adventure With Bears The Mandan Indians - The Chief's Tale The Sioux Indians - A Challenge! Pipe-stone Quarry - 'The Thunder's Nest' - 'Stone Man Medicine' A Ride to the Camanchees - A False Alarm A Solitary Bide on 'Charley' Across the Prairies A Journey Down the Orinoco - The 'Handsome Dance' En Route for the Amazon - The 'Medicine Gun' Rio Trombutas - Adventures With a Tiger and a Rattlesnake Still en Route for the Amazon - An Adventure With Peccaries On the Amazon The Indians of the Amazon - Poisoned Arrows Red Indians in London Red Indians in Paris

Autoren/Hrsg.

Catlin, George

Leseproben

Chapter II.
My Adventure With the First Indian I Ever Saw

Table of Contents

Wyoming Massacre — Valley of the Oc-qua-go — The Old Saw-mill Lick — A Chill, a Shiver, and False Alarm-John Darrow—Story of the Panther—Deer in the Lick— A Huge Indian—Red Indian at the Lick—A Run from the Lick—Johnny O'Neil's "Gipsies "—George's Indiana — The Saddle of Venison—On-o-gong-way's Story—The Kettle of Gold—My Tomahawk.

The first Indian I ever saw was in this wise. I have before told you that I was born in the beautiful and famed Valley of Wyoming, which is on the Susquehanna River, in the State of Pennsylvania. Not a long time after the close of the Revolutionary War in that country, a settlement was formed in that fertile valley by white people, while the Indian tribes, who were pushed out, were contesting the right of the white people to settle in it. After having practised great cruelty on the Indian tribes, and been warned from year to year by the Indians to leave it, it was ascertained one day that large parties of Indians were gathered on the mountains, armed and prepared to attack the white inhabitants.

The white men in the valley immediately armed, to the number of five or six hundred, and leaving their wives and children and old men in a rude fort on the bank of the river, advanced towards the head of the valley in search of their enemies.

The Indians, watching the movements of the white men from themountain tops, descended into the valley, and at a favourable spot, where the soldiers were to pass, lay secreted in ambush on both sides of the road, and in an instant rush, at the sound of the war-whoop, sprang upon the whites with tomahawks and scalping-knives in hand, and destroyed them all, with the exception of a very few, who saved their lives by swimming the river.

Amongst the latter was my grandfather on my mother's side, from whom I have often had the most thrilling descriptions. This onslaught is called in history, the "Wyoming Massacre" Some have called it "treachery" It was strategy, not treachery; and strategy is a merit in the science of all warfare.

After this victory, the Indians marched down the valley and took possession of the fort containing the women and children, to whom not one of the hus bands returned at that time. Amongst the prisoners thus taken in the fort was my grandmother, and also my mother, who was then a child only seven years old.

These several hundreds of prisoners, though in the hands of more than a thousand fierce and savage warriors, were not put to death, but kept as prisoners for several weeks, when a reinforcement of troops arriving over the Pokona mountains for their relief, the Indian warriors left the fort, with the women and children in it, having hunted for them and supplied them with food, and painted their faces red, calling them "sisters and children," and to the honour of the Indian's character, be it for ever known (as attested by every prisoner both men and women), treating them in every sense, with the greatest propriety and kindness.

These brief facts, which happened many years before I was born, with a thousand others which could be narrated, having become startling legends of that region, will account for the marvellous and frightful impressions I had received in my child hood, of Indian massacres and Indian murders, and also for the indelible impression made on my mind and my nerves by the thrilling incident I am about to describe.

Whilst my infant mind was filled with these impressions, my father, for the relief of his health, impaired by the practice of the law, removed some forty miles from the Valley of Wyoming to a romantic valley on the banks of the Susquehanna Kiver, in the State of New York, where he had purchased a beautiful plantation, resolving to turn his attention during the remainder of his life to agricultural pursuits.

This lovely and picturesque little valley, called by its Indian name "Oc-qua-go" surrounded by high and precipitous mountains and deep ravines, being nearer to the straggling remnants of the defeated Mohawk and Oneida Indians, who had retreated before the deadly rifles of the avengers of Wyoming's misfortunes, I was in a position to increase rather than to diminish the excitements already raised in my mind relative to the Indians who had barricaded and bravely defended in their retreat, one by one, every defile and mountain pass, and whose paths and other markings were still recent.

The ploughs in my father's fields were at this time daily turning up Indian skulls or Indian beads, and Indian flint arrow-heads, which the labouring men of his farm, as well as those of the neighbour hood, were bringing to me, and with which I was enthusiastically forming a little cabinet or museum; and one day, as the most valued of its acquisitions, one of my father's ploughmen brought from his furrow the head of an Indian pipe-tomahawk, which was covered with rust, the handle of which had rotted away.

At this early age, when probably only nine or ten years old, I had become a pretty successful shot, with a light single-barrelled fowling-piece which my father had designated as especially my own, and with which my slaughter of ducks, quails, pheasants, and squirrels was considered by the neighbouring hunters to be very creditable to me.

But I began now to feel a higher ambition—that of kitting a deer —for which the rifles of my two elder brothers were the weapons requisite, and which (they being absent, and pursuing their academical studies in a distant town) I began now to lay temporary claim to.

lu my then recent visits to the "Old Saw-mill" on the "Big Creek" —a famous place, to which my co-propensity, that of trout-fishing, often called me —I had observed that the saw-mill lick was much frequented by deer, and that I soon fixed as the scene of my future and more exciting operations.

The "old saw-mill" was the shattered remains of a saw-mill which had been abandoned for many years, and consisting only of masses of thrown-down timbers and planks, converted into piles by the force of the water, under and around which I always had my greatest success in trout-fishing.

This solitary ruin, about one mile from my father's back fields, was enveloped in a dark and lonely wilderness, with an old and deserted road leading to it, following mostly along the winding banks of the creek. Near by it, in a deep and dark gorge in the mountain's side, overshadowed by dark and tall hemlocks and fir-trees, was the "lick" to which my aspiring ideas were now leaning. The paths leading to it down the mountain sides were freshly trodden, and the mud and water in the lick, still riley with their recent steps, showed me the frequency with which the deer were paying their visits to it.

A "lick" (a "deer lick"), in the phrase of the country, is a salt-spring which the deer visit in warm weather, to allay their thirst, and to obtain the salt, which seems necessary for digestion. Most; of the herbivorous animals seem to visit these places as if from necessity, and appear oftentimes under a sort of infatuation in their eagerness for them, in consequence of which they fall an easy prey to wild beasts, as well as to hunters, which lie in wait for them.

Stimulated by the proofs aboved named, and by my recollections, yet fresh, of the recitals of several of the neighbouring hunters of their great success in the old saw-mill lick, I resolved to try my first luck there.

A rifle for this enterprise was absolutely necessary—a weapon which I never had fired, and as yet was not strong enough to raise, unless it was rested upon something for its support.

For this I foresaw a remedy, and I had every confidence in my accuracy of aim. But the greater difficulty of my problem was the positive order of my father that I was not to meddle with the 'arms of my elder brothers, which were in covers and hanging against the wall. This I solved, how ever, by a manoeuvre, at a late hour of the night, by extracting one of them from the cover, and put ting my little fowling-piece in its place, and taking the rifle into the fields, where I concealed it for my next afternoon's contemplated enterprise.

The hour approaching, and finding the rifle loaded, I proceeded, with a light and palpitating heart, through the winding and lonely road, to the old saw-mill lick; creeping along through narrow defiles, between logs and rocks, until, by a fair glance, at the lick, I found there was no game in it at the moment. I then took to a precipitous ledge of rocks in the side of the hill partly enclosing the dark and lonely place where the salt-spring issued, and where the deer were in the habit of coming to lick.

The nook into which I clambered and seated my self was elevated some twenty or thirty feet above the level of the lick, and at the proper distance for a dead shot. I here found myself in a snug and sly little box, which had evidently been constructed and used for a similar purpose on former occasions by the old hunters.

Having taken this position about the middle of the afternoon, with the muzzle of my rifle resting on a little breastwork of rock before me, I remained until near nightfall without other excitement than an occasional tremor from the noise of a bird or a squirrel in the leaves, which I mistook for the footsteps of an approaching deer! The falling of a dry branch, however, which came tumbling down upon the hill side above and behind me, in the midst of this silent and listless anxiety, gave me one or two tremendous shivers, which it took me some time to get over, even after I had discovered what it was; for it brought instantly into my mind the story which I had...