But his was no mean spirit of personal revenge; his mind was too noble for that. He hated the whites as the destroyers of his race, but prisoners and the defenseless knew well that they could rely on his honor and humanity and were safe under his protection. When only a boy—for his military career began in childhood—he had witnessed the burning of a prisoner, and the spectacle was so abhorrent to his feelings that by an earnest and eloquent harangue he induced the party to give up the practice forever. In later years his name was accepted by helpless women and children as a guaranty of protection even in the midst of hostile Indians. Of commanding figure, nearly six feet in height and compactly built; of dignified bearing and piercing eye, before whose lightning even a British general quailed; with the fiery eloquence of a Clay and the clear-cut logic of a Webster; abstemious in habit, charitable in thought and action, brave as a lion, but humane and generous withal—in a word, an aboriginal American knight—his life was given to his people, and he fell at last, like his father and his brothers before him, in battle with the destroyers of his nation, the champion of a lost cause and a dying race. His name has been rendered “The Shooting Star” and “The Panther Crouching, or Lying in Wait.” From a reply to a letter of inquiry addressed to Professor A. S. Gatschet, the well-known philologist, I extract the following, which throws valuable light on the name system and mythology of the Shawano, and shows also that the two renderings, apparently so dissimilar, have a common origin: