During eighteen years of my life I was Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the north-western territory of the United States; and during more than five I was Secretary of War, to which department belongs the general control of Indian concerns. I know the Indians thoroughly--I have spent many a month in their camps, council-houses, villages, and hunting-grounds--I have fought with them and against them--and I have negotiated seventeen treaties of peace or of cession with them. I mention these circumstances to show you that I have a good right to speak confidently upon the subject of your drawings. Among them I recognise many of my old acquaintances, and everywhere I am struck with the vivid representations of them and their customs, of their peculiar features, and of their costumes. Unfortunately they are receding before the advancing tide of our population, and are probably destined, at no distant day, wholly to disappear; but your collection will preserve them, as far as human art can do, and will form the most perfect monument of an extinguished race that the world has ever seen. LEWIS CASS. _To George Catlin._ ----*---- _Cottage, Haddington, 15th April, 1843._ DEAR SIR, I have enjoyed much pleasure in attending your lectures at the Waterloo Rooms in Edinburgh. Your delineations of the Indian character, the display of beautiful costumes, and the native Indian manners, true to the life, realised to my mind and view scenes I had so often witnessed in the parts of the Indian countries where I had been; and for twenty years' peregrinations in those parts, from Montreal to the Great Slave River north, and from the shores of the Atlantic, crossing the Rocky Mountains, to the mouth of the Columbia River, on the Pacific Ocean, west, I had opportunities of seeing much. Your lectures and exhibition have afforded me great pleasure and satisfaction, and I shall wish you all that success which you so eminently deserve for the rich treat which you have afforded in our enlightened, literary, and scientific metropolis. I remain, dear Sir, yours very truly, JOHN HALDANE. _To George Catlin, Esq._ The following is an extract of a letter received some days since by a gentleman in Edinburgh, from Mr. James Hargrave, of the Hudson's Bay Company, dated York Factory, Hudson's Bay, 10th December, 1842:-- "Should you happen to fall in with Catlin's Letters on the North American Indians, I would strongly recommend a perusal of them for the purpose of acquiring a knowledge of the habits and customs of those tribes among whom he was placed. Catlin's sketches are true to life, and are powerfully descriptive of their appearance and character." CATLIN'S INDIAN COLLECTION INDIAN PORTRAITS.