the door of
Saint Paul's Church, on a sad, overclouded winter's day, in the year
1867. At that earlier time, Willis was by far the most prominent young
American author. Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Drake, had all
done their best work. Longfellow was not yet conspicuous. Lowell was a
school-boy. Emerson was unheard of. Whittier was beginning to make his
way against the writers with better educational advantages whom he was
destined to outdo and to outlive. Not one of the great histories, which
have done honor to our literature, had appeared. Our school-books
depended, so far as American authors were concerned, on extracts from the
orations and speeches of Webster and Everett; on Bryant's Thanatopsis,
his lines To a Waterfowl, and the Death of the Flowers, Halleck's Marco
Bozzaris, Red Jacket, and Burns; on Drake's American Flag, and Percival's
Coral Grove, and his Genius Sleeping and Genius Waking,--and not getting
very wide awake, either. These could be depended upon. A few other
copies of verses might be found, but Dwight's "Columbia, Columbia," and
Pierpont's Airs of Palestine, were already effaced, as many of the
favorites of our own day and generation must soon be, by the great wave
which the near future will pour over the sands in which they still are
legible.

About this time, in the year 1832, came out a small volume entitled
"Truth, a Gift for Scribblers," which made some talk for a while, and is
now chiefly valuable as a kind of literary tombstone on which may be read
the names of many whose renown has been buried with their bones. The
"London Athenaeum" spoke of it as having been described as a "tomahawk
sort of satire." As the author had been a trapper in Missouri, he was
familiarly acquainted with that weapon and the warfare of its owners.
Born in Boston, in 1804, the son of an army officer, educated at West
Point, he came back to his native city about the year 1830. He wrote an
article on Bryant's Poems for the "North American Review," and another on
the famous Indian chief, Black Hawk. In this last-mentioned article he
tells this story as the great warrior told it himself. It was an
incident of a fight with the Osages.

"Standing by my father's side, I saw him kill his antagonist and tear the
scalp from his head. Fired with valor and ambition, I rushed furiously
upon another, smote him to the earth with my tomahawk, ran my lance
through his body, took off his scalp, and returned in triumph to m