Alexandria Gazette

DEATH OF OSCEOLA—He died on Tuesday night at Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan's Island, in the harbor of Charleston. Mr. Catlin informs us that a few days before he left, Osceola was suddenly attacked one night with a violent inflammation of the throat, which proved Quinsey. The officers and surgeon thought him dying and sat up with him. By copious bleeding in the arm, he recovered. It was at this moment that Mr. C. saw Osceola under circumstances of so impressive a character that he can never erase them from his mind. For some distance before reaching his quarters, he heard his deep and heavy groans, and on entering found the noble chieftain—who could endure every hardship in Florida's desolate hammocks, and who dared to peril any danger "that man dare do"—prostrate on his back, unnerved and conquered by disease. His proud spirit in its grandeur chafing like a torrent in a compressed ravine against the destructible and perishable embankments that impeded its hounding course. For nobly formed as his outward person was, he felt that it was too circumscribed to contain a soul like his, and that with all other things earthly, it carried the fatal impress of death.

In his extreme suffering he had torn off his Angola Turban, and his black clustering tresses now flowed in disheveled wildness down his nobly formed neck and shoulders, and over the lap of the favorite wife on whom his head reposed. The other was bathing his chest, and it was thus that the groups were arranged when the artist saw this graphic scene. Osceola manfully as he breasted mortal nature, could not conceal the pain he endured. His features were distorted, or thrown into an expression of mingled despair and resolute firmness to meet his fate: the eye rolling in wild frenzy beneath the fretted brow; the chest heaving like the ocean billows; the throat laboring in the last death struggle of the deep gurgling rattle, which gave to that fine mouth that once could utter such winning eloquence, the expression of dark despair that implored some pitying hand to put an end to his misery.

There was nothing in the dying gladiator or the writhings of Laocoon—nor of all that sculpture or painting has conceived to express the moral sublimity of human suffering that could surpass this scene—that received a deeper coloring from the darkness of the chamber, only faintly illuminated at times by the gleam that fitfully glared from the fire place upon the noble wreck that was perishing on its hearth.

Such appeared Osceola, whose life history, and personal appearance, have been so often graphically pourtrayed in our columns by the pens of Catlin, Simmons, &c. And it was a repetition, probably, of the foregoing scene which closed its death door upon this great man, by stratagem a prisoner of war, and cut off in the zenith of his life by wounded pride that preyed on his proud spirit, and forever closed upon the triumphant career that in all probability, was destined for him.

—New York Star.