the whole tribe to have been intentionally left out by
me, as "good for nothing." This was the last picture that I painted
amongst the Sioux, and the last, undoubtedly, that I shall ever
paint in that place. So tremendous and so alarming was the
excitement about it that my brushes were instantly put away, and I
embarked the next day on the steamer for the sources of the
Missouri, and was glad to get underweigh.

Subsequently, Mr. Catlin elaborates this incident into the "Story of the
Dog" (vol. 2, page 188 _et seq_).

Now, whatsoever of truth or of fancy there may be in this story, it
cannot be used as evidence that the Indians could not understand or
interpret profile pictures, for Mr. Catlin himself gives several plates
of Indian pictographs exhibiting profile faces. In my cabinet of
pictographs I have hundreds of side views made by Indians of the same
tribe of which Mr. Catlin was speaking.

It should never be forgotten that accounts of travelers and other
persons who write for the sake of making good stories must be used with
the utmost caution. Catlin is only one of a thousand such who can be
used with safety only by persons so thoroughly acquainted with the
subject that they are able to divide facts actually observed from
creations of fancy. But Mr. Catlin must not be held responsible for
illogical deductions even from his facts. I know not how Mr. Allen
arrived at his conclusion, but I do know that pictographs in profile are
found among very many, if not all, the tribes of North America.

Now, for another example. Peschel, in _The Races of Man_ (page 151),
says:

The transatlantic history of Spain has no case comparable in
iniquity to the act of the Portuguese in Brazil, who deposited the
clothes of scarlet-fever or small-pox patients on the hunting
grounds of the natives, in order to spread the pestilence among
them; and of the North Americans, who used strychnine to poison the
wells which the Redskins were in the habit of visiting in the
deserts of Utah; of the wives of Australian settlers, who, in times
of famine, mixed arsenic with the meal which they gave to starving
natives.

In a foot-note on the same page, Burton is given as authority for the
statement that the people of the United States poisoned the wells of the
redskins.

Referring to Burton, in _The City of the Saints_ (page 474), we find him
saying:

The Yuta