University of Virginia Library

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vi

"To Mr. George Catlin.

"Dear Sir,

"Your letter came safely to hand, and revived the quite forgotten
recollections of my stay amongst the Indian tribes of the Missouri, now
thirty-three years past.

"The Mandan tribe, which we both have known so well, and with whom
I passed a whole winter, was one of the first to be destroyed by a terrible
disease, when all the distinguished chiefs, Mah-to-toh-pa, Char-a-ta, Numa-ka-kie,
etc. etc., died; and it is doubtful if a single man of them remained
to record the history, customs, and religious ideas of his people.

"Not having been, like yourself, an eye-witness of those remarkable
starvations and tortures of the O-kee-pa, but having arrived later, and spent
the whole of a winter with the Mandans, I received from all the distinguished
chiefs, and from Mr. Kipp (at that time director of Fort Clarke, at the
Mandan village, and an excellent interpreter of the Mandan language), the
most detailed and complete record and description of the O-kee-pa festival,
where the young men suffered a great deal; and I can attest your relation
of it to be a correct one, after all that I heard and observed myself.

"In my description of my voyage in North America (English edition)
I gave a very detailed description of the O-kee-pa, as it was reported to me
by all the chiefs and Mr. Kipp, and it is about the same that you told,—
and nobody would doubt our veracity, I hope.

"I know most of the American works published on the American
Indians, and I possess many of them; but it would be a labour too heavy
for my age of eighty-five years, to recapitulate them all.

"Schoolcraft is a writer who knows well the Indians of his own part of
the country, but I do not know his last large work on that matter. If he
should doubt what we have both told in our works, of the great Medicine
festivities of the O-kee-pa, he would be wrong, certainly.

"If my statement, as that of a witness, could be of use to you, I should
be very pleased.