Red Jacket’s face, too, is much more intellectual than almost any other.  But, in becoming so, it loses nothing of the peculiar Indian stamp, but only carries these traits to their perfection.  Irony, discernment, resolution, and a deep smouldering fire, that disdains to flicker where it cannot blaze, may there be read.  Nothing can better represent the sort of unfeelingness the whites have towards the Indians, than their conduct towards his remains.  He had steadily opposed the introduction of white religion, or manners, among the Indians.  He believed that for them to break down the barriers was to perish.  On many occasions he had expressed this with all the force of his eloquence.  He told the preachers, “if the Great Spirit had meant your religion for the red man, he would have given it to them.  What they (the missionaries) tell us, we do not understand; and the light they ask for us, makes the straight and plain path trod by our fathers dark and dreary.”

When he died, he charged his people to inter him themselves.  “Dig my grave, yourselves, and let not the white man pursue me there.”  In defiance of this last solemn request, and the invariable tenor of his life, the missionaries seized the body and performed their service over it, amid the sullen indignation of his people, at what, under the circumstances, was sacrilege.

Of Indian religion a fine specimen is given in the conduct of one of the war chiefs, who, on an important occasion, made a vow to the sun of entire renunciation in case he should be crowned with success.  When he was so, he first went through a fast, and sacrificial dance, involving great personal torment, and lasting several days; then, distributing all his property, even his lodges, and mats, among the tribe, he and his family took up their lodging upon the bare ground, beneath the bare sky.

The devotion of the Stylites and the hair-cloth saints, is in act, though not in motive, less noble, because this great chief proposed to go on in common life, where he had lived as a prince—­a beggar.

The memoir by Corn Plant of his early days is beautiful.

Very fine anecdotes are told of two of the Western chiefs, father and son, who had the wisdom to see the true policy toward the whites, and steadily to adhere to it.

A murder having taken place in the jurisdiction of the father, he delivered himself up, with those suspected, to imprisonment.  One of his companions chafed bitterly under confinement.  He told the chief, if they ever got out, he would kill him, and did so.  The son, then a boy, came in his rage and sorrow, to this Indian, and insulted him in every way.  The squaw, angry at this, urged her husband “to kill the boy at once.”  But he only replied with “the joy of the valiant,” “He will be a great Brave,” and then delivered himself up to atone for his victim, and met his death with the noblest Roman composure.

This boy became rather a great chief than a great brave, and the anecdotes about him are of signal beauty and significance.