1831 by Louis P. Masur

Author:Louis P. Masur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

12. George Catlin, Black Hawk, a Prominent Sauk Chief (Courtesy of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.)

13. George Catlin, Pigeon’s Egg Head (The Light) Going to and Returning from Washington (Courtesy of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.)

Wi-jun-jon’s return to his people ended in tragedy. After he arrived home and “passed the usual salutations among his friends, he commenced the simple narration of scenes he had passed through, and of things he had beheld among the whites; which appeared to them so much like fiction, that it was impossible to believe them, and they set him down as an imposter.” Wi-jun-jon fell into disgrace and drunkenness. As he unraveled, so did his outfit, until all that was left was his umbrella, which he always held in his hand. The stories he told about gaping multitudes and fabulous cities and “curious and wonderful machines” earned him a reputation among his people not only as a liar, but as a conjurer whose medicine was potent and evil. At last, a member of the tribe fitted the muzzle of his gun with an iron projectile made out of a pot handle and, while Wi-jun-jon was talking to a trader, came up behind the storyteller and “blew out his brains.”

Civilization had destroyed the Indian not only by turning him to foppery and whiskey but by revealing scenes that, to the Indians of the West, could not possibly be true, though they were. Catlin drew out the moral for his listeners, readers, and viewers: “Thus ended the days and the greatness, and all the pride and hope of Wi-jun-jon, the Pigeon’s Egg Head, a warrior and a brave of the valient Assinboins, who travelled eight thousand miles to see the President, and all the great cities of the civilized world; and who, for telling the truth, and nothing but the truth, was, after he got home, disgraced and killed for a wizard.”

Catlin was not the only traveler to experience and document the fate of the North American Indians. On Christmas Day, on a steamboat heading down the Mississippi from Memphis to New Orleans, Alexis de Tocqueville recorded the “truly lamentable” scene of a group of Choctaw being boarded for a journey to Arkansas: “The Indians came forward toward the shore with a despondent air; they first made the horses go, several of which, little accustomed to the forms of civilized life, took fright and threw themselves into the Mississippi, from which they could be pulled out only with difficulty. Then came the men, who, following their usual custom, carried nothing except their weapons; then the women, carrying their children attached to their backs or wrapped up in the blankets that covered them; they were, moreover, overburdened with loads that contained all their riches. Finally, the old people were led on. There was among them a woman of a hundred and ten years of age. I have never seen a more frightening figure.

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