Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium; Vol. 1 (of 2): being Notes of Eight Years' Travels and Residence in Europe with his North American Indian CollectionCatlin, George
History
Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium; Vol. 1 (of 2): being Notes of Eight Years' Travels and Residence in Europe with his North American Indian Collection
Catlin, George
England -- Description and travel; France -- Description and travel; Indians of North America
arranged, he gave me the following account of the difficulties he had
just been in, and of the incidents of his journey from Liverpool to
London with the bears.
[Illustration: N^o. 2.]
At Liverpool he had had great difficulty in getting permission to
travel by the luggage train, to keep company with the bears, the
necessity of which he urged in vain, until he represented that, unless
he was with them to feed them, their howlings and other terrific noises
and ravings would frighten their hands all out of the stations, and
even add probabilities to their breaking loose from the cage in
which they were confined, to feed upon the human flesh around them, and
of which they were peculiarly fond. Upon these representations, he was
allowed the privilege of a narrow space, to stand or to sit, in the
corner of one of the luggage-trains, and thus bore the bears company
all the way.
When they entered the first tunnel on their way, they raised a hideous
howl, which they continued until they were through it, which might
have been from a feeling of pleasure, recognizing in it something of
the character of the delightful gloominess of their own subterranean
abodes; or their outcries might have been from a feeling of dread or
fear from those narrow and damp caverns, too much for their delicate
tastes and constitutions. This, however, is matter for the bears to
decide. At Birmingham, where they rested on the truck for the greater
part of a day, their notification to the town had called vast crowds
of spectators around them; and though their tarpaulin prevented them
from being seen, many, very many, drew marvellous accounts of them
from one another, and from the flying reports which had reached them
several days before from Liverpool, of "two huge monsters imported from
the Rocky Mountains, that had scales like alligators, with long spears
of real flint at the ends of their tails; that they made nothing of
eating paving-stones when they were hungry, and that in Liverpool they
had escaped, and were travelling to the north, and demolishing all the
inhabitants of Lancashire as they went along," &c. Their occasional
howls and growls, with, once in a while, a momentary display of one
of their huge paws, exhibited from under the tarpaulin, riveted the
conviction of the gaping multitude as to the terror and danger of these
animals, while it put at rest all apprehensions as to their being at
large and overrunning the country. Poor Daniel had to stand between
the crowd and his pets, to save them from the peltings and insults
of the crowd, and at the same time, to muster every talent he had at
natural history, to answer the strange queries and theories that were
raised about them. He was assailed on every side with questions as
to the appearance and habits of the animals, and at last, about "the
other animals," as they called them, "running on two legs, in America;"
for many of them, from his representations, had come fresh from the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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