23d.  A functionary of the general government at Washington writes me, to bespeak my favorable interest for the wayward son of a friend.  Arwin, for I will call him by this name, was the son of a kind, intelligent, and indulgent father, dwelling in the District of Columbia, who had spared nothing to fit him for a useful and honorable life.  The young man also possessed a handsome person, and agreeable and engaging manners and accomplishments.  But his love for the coarser amusements of the world and its dissipations, absorbed faculties that were suited for higher objects.  As a last, resort, he was commended to some adventurous gentleman engaged in the fur trade on the higher Missouri; where, it was hoped, the stern realities of life would arrest his mind, and fix it on nobler pursuits.  But a winter or two in those latitudes appeared to have wrought little change.  He came to Mackinack, on his way back to civilized life, late in the fall of 1834, exhausted in means, poor and shabby in his wardrobe, and evidently not a pilgrim from the “land of steady habits.”

I invited him to my house, in the hope of winning him over to the side of morals, gave him a bed and plate, and treated him with courteous and respectful attention.  He was placed under restraint by these attentions, but it was found to be restraint only.  He was secretly engaged in dissipations, which finally became so low, that I was compelled to leave him to pursue his course, and thus to witness another example of the application of that striking remark of Dr. Johnson, “that negligence and irregularity, if long continued, will render knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible.”

Nov. 29th.  The rough scenes required by a missionary life on the sources of the Mississippi, are depicted in a letter from the Rev. W.S.  Boutwell, who has just planted himself among the Pillagers at Leech Lake.  This is the same gentleman who accompanied me to Itasca Lake in 1835.  “Your favors,” he says, “of April 28th and July 26th, are before me; and would that I could command time to compensate you for at least half!  But look at a man whose head and hands are full of cares and duties.  The only time I get to write is stolen, if I may so say, from the hours of repose.  October the ninth I arrived here.  There was not a sack of corn nor rice to be bought or sold.  I had but two men, and with these a house must be built and a winter’s stock of fish laid up.  What must be done?  I will briefly tell you what I did.  Four days after my arrival I sent my fisherman to Pelican Island, and pulled off my coat and shouldered my axe, and led the other into the bush to make a house.  In about ten days, with the help of one man, I had the timber cut and on the spot for a log-cottage twenty-two by twenty-four.  Some part of this I not only cut, but assisted in carrying on my own back.  But for every inch of over-exertion I got my pay at night, when I was sure to be ‘double and twisted’ with the rheumatism.  I have located about two miles east of the old fort, where you counseled with the Indians at this place.  As you cross the point of land upon which the old fort is built, you fall on a beautiful bay, a mile and a half broad, on the east side of which I have located, in the midst of a delightful grove of maples.  South-west, three-fourths of a mile, is the present trading house.