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Show AUTHORS PREFACE. Vll especially of the Mandans and Manitaries, are more complete, because I spent a whole winter among them, and was able to have daily intercourse with them. Authentic and impartial accounts of the Indians of the Upper Missouri are now especially valuable, if the information that we have since received is well founded, namely, that to the many evils introduced by the Whites among those tribes, a most destructive epidemic-small-pox-has been added, and a great part of them exterminated : according to the newspapers, the Mandans, Manitaries, Assiniboins, and Blackfeet have been swept away except a small remnant. The observation of the manners of the aborigines is undoubtedly that which must chiefly interest the foreign traveller in those countries, especially as the Anglo-Americans look down on them with a certain feeling of hatred. Hence we have hitherto met with little useful information respecting the Indians, except in the recent writings of Edward James, Long, Say, Schoolcraft, M'Kenney, Cass, Duponceau, Irving, and a few others; and as good portraits of this race have hitherto been extremely rare, the faithful delineation contained in the portfolio of plates accompanying this work will be interesting to the friends of anthropology and ethnography. Several men, of great eminence in the learned world, have had the kindness to contribute to the publication. President Nees Von Esenbeck has undertaken the determination and description of the plants which I brought home; Professor Goldfuss, of Bonn, that of some fossil shells; Professor Goppert, of Breslau, that of the impression of fossil plants from Mauch Chunk; Professors Valenciennes at Paris, and Wiegmann at Boston, the comparison of some zoological specimens with those in their cities; and Lieut.-Col. W. Thorn, the construction of the map; for which obliging assistance I beg leave to offer to these gentlemen my sincere thanks. |