April 8th.  The object contemplated by invoking the aid of the Home Missionary Society, in the establishment of a church at this remote point on the frontiers—­in connection with the means already possessed, and the aid providentially present, have, it will have been seen, had the effect to work quite a moral revolution.  The evils of a lax society have been rebuked in various ways.  Intemperance and disorder have been made to stand out as such, and already a spirit of rendering the use, or rather misuse of time, subservient to the general purposes of social dissipation, has been shown to be unwise and immoral in every view.  More than all, the Sabbath-day has been vindicated as a part of time set apart as holy.  The claims and obligations of the decalogue have been enforced; and the great truths of the Gospel thus prominently brought forward.  The result has been every way propitious.

The Rev. Wm. M. Ferry, of Mackinack, writes (Feb. 21):  “The intelligence we have received by your letters, Mr. Boutwell, &c., of the Lord’s doings among you, as a people, at the Sault, has rejoiced our hearts much.  Surely it is with you a time of the right hand of the Most High.”  “All of us,” writes Mr. Robert Stuart (March 29) “who love the Lord, were much pleased at the indications of God’s goodness and presence among you.”

The Rev. J. Porter, in subsequently referring to the results of these additions to the church, observes, that they embraced five officers and four ladies of the garrison; two gentlemen and seven ladies of the settlement, and thirty soldiers and four women of Fort Brady, numbering fifty-two in all.  Of these, twenty-six were adults added by baptism.

At Detroit a similar result was experienced.  Mr. Trowbridge writes (April 8th), that about seventy persons united themselves a few days previous to Mr. Wells’ church, to which the influence has been principally, but not wholly confined.  Among these were many who had, unaffectedly, listened to the Gospel, if not all their lives, certainly no small part of it.

May 3d.  Public instructions are issued for my organizing and taking command of an expedition to the country upon the sources of the Mississippi River, to effect a pacification between the Indian tribes, in order to carry out, with increased means, the efforts made in 1831.  Those efforts were confined to tribes living in latitudes south of St. Anthony’s Falls.  It was now proposed to extend them to the Indian population living north of that point, reaching to the sources of that river.  This opened the prospect of settling a long contested point in the geography of that stream, namely, its actual source—­a question in which I had long felt the deepest interest.

The outbreak of Indian hostility, under Black Hawk, which characterized the summer of 1832, was apprehended, and it became the policy of the Indian Bureau, in the actual state of its information, to prevent the northern tribes from joining in the Sac and Fox league under that influential leader.  I forwarded to the Superintendent and Governor of the territory, a report of a message and war-club sent to the Chippewas to join in the war, for which I was indebted to the chief, Chingwauk, or Little Pine.