aultless models of the human figure. See that
warrior standing by the tree, towering six feet and a half in stature.
Your eyes may trace the whole of his graceful and majestic height, and
discover no defect or blemish. With his free and noble attitude, with
the bow in his hand, and the quiver at his back, he might seem, but
for his face, the Pythian Apollo himself. Such a figure rose before the
imagination of West, when on first seeing the Belvidere in the Vatican,
he exclaimed, "By God, a Mohawk!"

When the sky darkened and the stars began to appear; when the prairie
was involved in gloom and the horses were driven in and secured around
the camp, the crowd began to melt away. Fires gleamed around, duskily
revealing the rough trappers and the graceful Indians. One of the
families near us would always be gathered about a bright blaze, that
displayed the shadowy dimensions of their lodge, and sent its lights
far up among the masses of foliage above, gilding the dead and ragged
branches. Withered witchlike hags flitted around the blaze, and here for
hour after hour sat a circle of children and young girls, laughing and
talking, their round merry faces glowing in the ruddy light. We could
hear the monotonous notes of the drum from the Indian village, with the
chant of the war song, deadened in the distance, and the long chorus of
quavering yells, where the war dance was going on in the largest lodge.
For several nights, too, we could hear wild and mournful cries, rising
and dying away like the melancholy voice of a wolf. They came from the
sisters and female relatives of Mahto-Tatonka, who were gashing their
limbs with knives, and bewailing the death of Henry Chatillon's squaw.
The hour would grow late before all retired to rest in the camp.
Then the embers of the fires would be glowing dimly, the men would be
stretched in their blankets on the ground, and nothing could be heard
but the restless motions of the crowded horses.

I recall these scenes with a mixed feeling of pleasure and pain. At
this time I was so reduced by illness that I could seldom walk without
reeling like a drunken man, and when I rose from my seat upon the ground
the landscape suddenly grew dim before my eyes, the trees and lodges
seemed to sway to and fro, and the prairie to rise and fall like the
swells of the ocean. Such a state of things is by no means enviable
anywhere. In a country where a man's life may at any moment depend on
the strength of h