{Transcriber's Note: Quotation marks have been standardized to modern usage. Footnotes have been placed to immediately follow the paragraphs referencing them. Transcriber's notes are in curly braces; square brackets and parentheses indicate original content.} {Illustration: Cover} INDIAN BIOGRAPHY: OR, AN HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF THOSE INDIVIDUALS WHO HAVE BEEN DISTINGUISHED AMONG THE NORTH AMERICAN NATIVES AS ORATORS, WARRIORS, STATESMEN, AND OTHER REMARKABLE CHARACTERS. * * * * * BY B. B. THATCHER, ESQ. * * * * * IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. * * * * * NEW-YORK: PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, No. 82 CLIFF-STREET * * * * * 1836. [Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1834, by Harper & Brothers in the Clerk's Office of the Southern District of New-York.] PREFACE. The Author does not propose an elaborate explanation, nor an apology of any kind, for the benefit of the following work. If it absolutely requires either, he must even be content to have written it in vain, as no statement or argument can give it any degree of vitality or popularity in the one case or in the other. He has regarded it, historically, as an act of mere Justice to the fame and the memories of many wise, brilliant, brave and generous men,--patriots, orators, warriors and statesmen,--who ruled over barbarian communities, and were indeed themselves barbarians, but whose influence, eloquence and success of every description were _therefore_ but the nobler objects of admiration and the worthier subjects for record. Nor can Philosophy look upon them without predilection. Comparatively unopinionated and unaffected as they were,--governed by impulse and guided by native sense,--owing little to circumstances, and struggling much amidst and against them,--their situation was the best possible for developing both genius and principle, and their education at the sane time the best for disclosing them. Their Lives, then, should illustrate the true constitution of man. They should have, above all other history, the praise and the interest of "philosophy teaching, by example."