Though some of the young fellows were, as I have
said, magnificent and beautiful animals, I think the palm of unique
picturesqueness, in body, limb, physiognomy, &c., was borne by the old
or elderly chiefs, and the wise men.
My here-alluded-to experience in the Indian Bureau produced one very
definite conviction, as follows: There is something about these
aboriginal Americans, in their highest characteristic representations,
essential traits, and the ensemble of their physique and
physiognomy--something very remote, very lofty, arousing comparisons
with our own civilized ideals--something that our literature, portrait
painting, &c., have never caught, and that will almost certainly never
be transmitted to the future, even as a reminiscence. No biographer,
no historian, no artist, has grasp'd it--perhaps could not grasp it.
It is so different, so far outside our standards of eminent humanity.
Their feathers, paint--even the empty buffalo skull--did not, to say
the least, seem any more ludicrous to me than many of the fashions I
have seen in civilized society. I should not apply the word savage (at
any rate, in the usual sense) as a leading word in the description of
those great aboriginal specimens, of whom I certainly saw many of the
best. There were moments, as I look'd at them or studied them, when
our own exemplification of personality, dignity, heroic presentation
anyhow (as in the conventions of society, or even in the accepted
poems and plays,) seem'd sickly, puny, inferior.
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