A GROUP OF NOBLE SAVAGES.

MR. PAUL KANE is a Canadian artist. He
was born in the City of Toronto when it was
no city, but the muddy and dirty village of
Little York, with Indians living round about
it. After studying his profession for some
years in Europe, he resolved to exercise it upon
his old friends the red men, and proposed to
himself a wild journey with pencil and brush
along the great chain of American lakes, by
the Red River settlement and the valley of the
Saskatchowan, across the Rocky Mountains
and down the Columbia, to that region of the
Pacific which is now destined to become our
great Pacific empire. That journey he made
sketching scenery and taking portraits as he
went, and often gossipping with Indian chiefs
while he was painting them. It was his whole
purpose as a traveller to make perfect
acquaintance with the Indians. He kept a
journal of his pilgrimage in which he set
down the most noticeable things he saw and
heard.

Some of the pictures, for which he brought
sketches home, are now arranged in the
library of the Canadian Parliament, and his
diary, under the name of Wanderings of an
Artist among the Indians of North America,
has just been published in this country.
The account given in it of the present natives of
our future colony of the Pacific in Vancouver's
Island, and upon the opposite mainland,
is very full and amusing.

Mr. Kane began with a comparatively
short tour of about sixteen hundred miles to
the Falls of Saint Mary, between Lake
Superior and Lake Huron, with a diversion
into Lake Michigan, and then round by Lake
Erie, home. Among the labyrinth of thirty
thousand islands on the north shore of Lake
Huron, there was a sketch made of an Indian
encampment, corresponding, in its general
character, to the encampments of all North
American tribes. The wigwams, or lodges,
have for their skeleton eight or ten poles tied
together at the top and stuck in the ground
at distances marking the required circle
of the tent. Except at the top where the
smoke passes out between the naked poles, the
skeleton is wrapped round either with rush
mats or with large pieces of birch–bark sewn
together in long strips, root–fibres being used
as thread. The birch–bark is in constant use
among the tribes of North America. It
makes the house–wall, it makes the canoe,
it makes the kettle. The canoe, so light that
it can be carried by hand up dangerous
rapids, except at the Pacific shore, is of birch–
bark stretched over a very light frame of split
cedar laths. The mohcocks, or kettles of
birch–bark, hold water, and the game or
fish that has to be cooked. Hot stones are
dropped into the water, and in this way an
Indian woman can boil fish as fast as English
cooks could boil it with a kitchen range
and fish–kettle. Birch–bark is also the Indian's
paper upon which he draws what he wants
when he sends to a post for any articles,
signing his order with his to–tem, or family
sign, as a fox, or dog, or turtle. The
Indian in his smoky lodge is very dirty.
Whatever his tribe he carries vermin on
his person. He does not carry out his filth
or shift his tent–poles for exchange to cleaner
ground.

In the great Manetoulin Island, the chief
island of the north shore of the Huron,
Indians assemble once a year from the
surrounding regions to receive the presents
with which there is a vessel annually freighted
by the provincial government. At this
assembly of about two thousand Indians,
Mr. Kane was present, and among the great
men with whom he made acquaintance there
was Shawwanossoway—"one with his face
towards the west"—a mighty medicine–man.
Once he had been a mighty warrior, but he
had stretched out his hand for the flower of
the Ojibbeways, Awhmidway—"there is
music in her footsteps"—when the flower
was already destined for the bosom of
Mucketickenow—the Black Eagle.
The young beauty's  parents, flattered by
Shawwanossoway's attentions, sought to break
her faith to her betrothed. Her betrothed sought to
propitiate them, and, confident of the maid's
truth, departed on a distant hunt. While he
was away, Shawwanossoway pressed the suit
urgently. In self–defence the girl told him her
story, trusting in his generosity. He stole
away, tracked out her lover in the woods,
shot him down secretly, returned and pressed
again his suit. If the Black Eagle did not
return within a given time, the maid, with
music in her footsteps, was to be the bride of