Erroneous impressions of Indians.—­Maj.  Whiting, of Detroit, says (27th inst.):  “I dare say I may find many things which will suit our purposes well.  Something new and genuine is what we want, and the source gives assurance these things all bear that character.  It is time the public should know that neither ladies nor gentlemen who have never crossed the lakes or the Alleghany, can have any but vague ideas of the children of the forest.  An Indian might not succeed well in portraying life in New York, because he does not read much, and would have to trust pretty much, if not altogether, to imagination; but his task would differ only in degree from that of the literary pretender who has never traveled West beyond the march of fresh oysters (though by the way, these have been seen in Detroit), and yet thinks he can penetrate the shadows and darkness of the wilderness.  They put a hatchet in his hand, and stick a feather in his cap, and call him ‘Nitche Nawba.’  If I recollect right, in Yamoyden a soup was made of some white children.  Indians have not been over dainty at times, and no doubt have done worse things; but on such occasions their modus operandi was not likely to be so much in accordance with the precepts of Madam Glass.”

Reviews.—­“I read over your last article in the N.A., and thought it had rather less point and connection than you had probably given it; but it still has much to recommend it.  The remarks on language were more intelligible to me than any I have before seen, and have given me many clues which I have vainly sought for in preceding dissertations of the kind.”

Sept. 22d.  This day the patriarch of the place, John Johnston, Esq., breathed his last.  He had attained the age of sixty-six.  A native of the county of Antrim, in the north of Ireland; a resident for some thirty-eight years of this frontier; a gentleman in manners; a merchant, in chief, in the hazardous fur trade; a man of high social feelings and refinements; a cotemporary of the long list of men eminent in that department; a man allied to bishops and nobles at home; connected in marriage with a celebrated Chippewa family of Algonquins; he was another Rolfe, in fact, in his position between the Anglo-Saxon and the Indian races; his life and death afford subjects for remark which are of the deepest interest, and would justify a biography, not a mere notice.  I wrote a brief sketch for the New York Albion, and transmitted copies of the paper to some of his connections in Ireland.

His coming out from that country was during the first presidency of Washington, and a few years before the breaking out of the Irish Rebellion.  He had a deep sense of his country’s injuries, and of the effect of the laws which pressed so heavily on her energies, political and commercial; but was entirely loyal, and maintained the highest tone of loyalism in argument.  He saw deeply the evils, but not the remedy, which he thought to lay rather in future and peaceful developments.