obstacles may yield. But if the whites can not be restrained from furnishing them with spiritous liquors, nor they from the use of them, I fear all other efforts to extend to them the benefits of civilization will prove fruitless. The knowledge of letters serves as the medium of entering into secret arrangements with the whites, to supply the means of their own destruction, and, within the limits of my intercourse, the principal use of the knowledge of letters or civilized language has been to obtain liquor for themselves or others.

66

Secondly.-The general aversion to the habits, manners, customs, and dress of civilized people; and, in many cases, an Indian is an object of jealousy for being acquainted with a civilized language, and it is made use of as a subject of reproach against him.

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Thirdly.-General indolence, connected with a firm conviction that the life of a civilized man is that of slavery; and that savage life is manhood, ease, and independence.

*

"Fourthly.-The unfavorable light in which they view the character of the citizens of the United States-believing that their minds are so occupied in trade and speculation, that they never act from any other motives. * Their opinion of the government of the United States is, in some degree, more favorable; but, secretly, they view all white people as their enemies, and are extremely suspicious of every thing coming from them.

"All the Miamis, and Eel river Miamis, are under my charge, about one thousand four hundred in number; and there are something more than 'two thousand Pottawattamies who come within my agency. The proportion of children can not be ascertained, but it must be less than among the white inhabitants of the United States. They have had no schools nor missionaries among them since the time of the French Jesuits. They have places that are commonly called villages, but, perhaps, not correctly, as they have no uniform place of residence. During the fall, winter, and part of the spring, they are scattered in the woods, hunting. The respective bands assemble together in the spring at their several ordinary places of resort, where some have rude cabins, made of small logs, covered with bark; but, more commonly, some poles stuck in

the ground and tied together with pliant slips of bark, and covered with large sheets of bark, or a kind of mats made

of flags.

"Near these places of resort they plant some corn. There are eleven of these places of resort, called villages, within my agency. The Miamis and Eel river Miamis reside, principally, on the Wabash, Mississinewa, and Eel river, and the head of White river. The Pottawattamies [reside] on the Tippecanoe, Kankakee, Iroquois, Yellow river, St. Joseph of lake Michigan, the Elkhart, Miami of the lake, the St. Joseph emptying into it, and the St. Mary's river. They all believe in a God, as creator and governor, but have no idea of his will being communicated to man, except as it appears in the creation, or as it appears, occasionally, from his providential government. Some of them have been told of other communications having been made to the white people a long time since, and that it was written and printed; but they have neither conception nor belief in relation to it. Their belief in a future existence is a kind of transubstantiation-a removal from this existence to one more happy, with similar appetites and enjoyments. They talk of a bad spirit, but never express any apprehension of his troubling them in their future existence."

In tracing the history of the Miami Indians, from the present time, backward through a period of one hundred and fifty years, the mind of the enlightened reader must pass, painfully, over a long and mournful picture of ignorance, superstition, injustice, war, barbarity, and the most debasing intemperance. There were some men, of piety and zeal, who, successively entering the field of missionary labors, endeavored to establish among these Indians the foundations of civilization and the doctrines of christianity. But these philanthropists were few in number, with an imperfect knowledge of the language of the Miamis, without schools, without homes, often placing their lives in peril, and in some instances falling the victims of savage violence. Such men were, in the west, the pioneers in the conflict between barbarism and civilization.

At the present day, a few small, mixed, and miserable bands, constitute the remnant of the once powerful Miami nation. Their ignorance, their errors, their misfortunes, and the vices which they learned from bad men of the white race, still cling

to them with unabated power to degrade and destroy. Thus, with the lights of civilization and religion beaming around them, the last fragments of one of the most powerful aboriginal nations of North America are gradually passing away from the earth for ever.

CHAPTER IV.

FRENCH COLONIES IN THE WEST.

THE wars in which France and England were engaged, from 1688 to 1697, retarded the growth of the colonies of those nations in North America; but soon after the peace of Ryswick, Louis XIV determined to send a large number of colonists to Louisiana, and to maintain garrisons among them, for their protection. Lemoine D'Ibberville was appointed governor of Louisiana, and M. de Bienville was commissioned as lieutenantcommandant of the province. Under the direction of these officers, a number of adventurers emigrated from France, in 1698; and, in the course of the succeeding year, founded a settlement at Biloxi, on the northern shores of lake Borgne, between Mobile bay and lake Ponchartrain.

The early efforts which were made by France to establish colonies in the valley of the Mississippi, from Canada to the gulf of Mexico, excited the jealousy, and aroused the fears, of some of the English statesmen of those times. In the year 1698, Dr. D'Avenant, inspector-general of the customs, published some discourses on the public revenues and trade of England. In one of these discourses he said:"Should the French settle at the disemboguing of the river Mississippi, they would not be long before they made themselves masters of that rich province, which would be an addition to their strength very terrible to Europe, but would more particularly concern England; for, by the opportunity of that settlement, by erecting forts along the several lakes between that river and

Canada, they may intercept all the trade of our northern plantations."*

During the period that elapsed between 1700 and 1712, the hostility of the Five Nations, or Iroquois confederacy, defeated the attempts which were made by the French to establish trading posts in the regions which lie adjacent to the southern shores of lake Ontario and lake Erie; but, in the month of June, 1701, Antoine de Lamotte Cadillac, accompanied by a missionary and one hundred men, left Montreal, and, in the month of July, arrived at the site of Detroit, where the party founded a permanent settlement.

As early as 1705, Louis XIV invested Lamotte Cadillac with power to grant, or concede, the lands about Detroit, in small lots, to actual settlers. By the conditions of a grant,† made by Cadillac, at Detroit, in 1707, the grantee was bound to pay a reserved rent of fifteen francs a year to the crown, for ever, in peltries, and to begin to clear and improve the land within three months from the date of the grant. All the timber was reserved to the crown, whenever it might be wanted for fortifications, or for the construction of boats or other vessels. The property of all mines and minerals was reserved to the crown. The privilege of hunting rabbits, hares, partridges, and pheasants, was reserved to the grantor. The grantee was bound to plant, or help to plant, a long May-pole before the door of the principal manor-house, on the first day of May in every year. All the grain raised by the grantee was to be carried to the mill of the manor to be ground, paying the tolls sanctioned by the custom of Paris. On every sale of the land a tax was levied; and, before a sale, the grantee was bound to give information to the government, and if the government was willing to take the land at the price offered to the grantee, it was to have precedence as a purchaser. The grantee could not mortgage the land, without the consent of the government. For a term of ten years, the grantee was not permitted to work, or cause any person to work, directly or indirectly, at the profession and trade of a blacksmith, locksmith, armorer, or brewer, without a permit. All effects, and articles of merchandise, sent to, or brought from, Montreal, were to be sold

*Anderson's His. of Com., i, 25.

Am. State Papers, Pub. Lands, v. i, 201

by the grantee himself, or other person who, with his family, was a French resident; and not by servants, or clerks, or for-eigners, or strangers. The grantee was forbidden to sell or trade spiritous liquors to Indians. He was bound to suffer on his lands such roads as might be thought necessary for public use. He was bound to make his fences in a certain manner, and, when called upon, to assist in making his neighbors' fences. Such were the conditions on which the first French settlers at Detroit obtained grants of land from the commandants at that post.

Of the early French adventurers who emigrated from Canada to the western dependencies of that province, some settled at Detroit; a few gathered around the post of Michilimackinac ; and others, impelled by their necessities, or moved by their inclinations, led a rambling life among various tribes of the Indians who occupied the territory northwest of the river Ohio. Mingled with these pioneer adventurers, there were a few intelligent, ambitious, and enterprising men, who expected to derive great profits and advantages from the prosecution of the fur trade. This trade was carried on by means of men who were hired to manage small vessels on the lakes, and canoes along the shores of the lakes and on the rivers, and to carry burdens of merchandise from the different trading posts to the principal villages of the Indians who were at peace with the French. At those places, the traders exchanged their wares for valuable furs, with which they returned to the places of deposit.

The articles of merchandise used by the French traders, in carrying on the fur trade, were, chiefly, coarse blue and red cloths, fine scarlet, guns, powder, balls, knives, hatchets, traps, kettles, hoes, blankets, coarse cottons, ribbons, beads, vermillion, tobacco, spiritous liquors, etc. The poorest class of fur traders sometimes carried their packs of merchandise, by means of leather straps, suspended from their shoulders, or with the straps resting against their foreheads. It is probable that some of the Indian villages on the borders of the Wabash were visited by a few of this class of traders before the French founded a settlement at Kaskaskia. It has been intimated, conjecturally, by a learned writer,* that missionaries and traders, before

*Bishop Bruté.