The same evening, at twelve o’clock, we were at Detroit.  “You must lock your state-rooms in the night,” said one of the persons employed about the vessel, “for Detroit is full of thieves.”  We followed the advice, slept soundly, and saw nothing of the thieves, nor of Detroit either, for the steamboat was again on her passage through Lake St. Clair at three this morning, and when I awoke we were moving over the flats, as they are called, at the upper end of the lake.  The steamer was threading her way in a fog between large patches of sedge of a pea-green color.  We had waited several hours at Detroit, because this passage is not safe at night, and steamers of a larger size are sometimes grounded here in the day-time.

I had hoped, when I began, to bring down the narrative of my voyage to this moment, but my sheet is full, and I shall give you the remainder in another letter.

Letter XXXI.

A Trip from Detroit to Mackinaw.

Steamer Oregon, Lake Michigan, July 25, 1846.

Soon after passing the flats described in my last letter, and entering the river St. Clair, the steamer stopped to take in wood on the Canadian side.  Here I went on shore.  All that we could see of the country was a road along the bank, a row of cottages at a considerable distance from each other along the road, a narrow belt of cleared fields behind them, and beyond the fields the original forest standing like a long lofty wall, with its crowded stems of enormous size and immense height, rooted in the strong soil—­ashes and maples and elms, the largest of their species.  Scattered in the foreground were numbers of leafless elms, so huge that the settlers, as if in despair of bringing them to the ground by the ax, had girdled them and left them to decay and fall at their leisure.

We went up to one of the houses, before which stood several of the family attracted to the door by the sight of our steamer.  Among them was an intelligent-looking man, originally from the state of New York, who gave quick and shrewd answers to our inquiries.  He told us of an Indian settlement about twenty miles further up the St. Clair.  Here dwell a remnant of the Chippewa tribe, collected by the Canadian government, which has built for them comfortable log-houses with chimneys, furnished them with horses and neat cattle, and utensils of agriculture, erected a house of worship, and given them a missionary.  “The design of planting them here,” saidth esettler, “was to encourage them to cultivate the soil.”

“And what has been the success of the plan?” I asked.

“It has met with no success at all,” he answered.  “The worst thing that the government could do for these people is to give them every thing as it has done, and leave them under no necessity to provide for themselves.  They chop over a little land, an acre or two to a family; their squaws plant a little corn and a few beans, and this is the extent of their agriculture.  They pass their time in hunting and fishing, or in idleness.  They find deer and bears in the woods behind them, and fish in the St. Clair before their doors, and they squander their yearly pensions.  In one respect they are just like white men, they will not work if they can live without.”