Feb. 3d.  Rev. David Green, of Boston, communicates the determination of the Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to break up and abandon the school and mission at Mackinack.  This decision I have long feared, and cannot but deplore.  The school is large, and the education of many of the pupils is such that in a few years they would make useful practicable men and women, and carry a Christian influence over a wide circle.  By dispersing them now the labor is to some extent lost.

6th.  Received, a vote of thanks of the Detroit Total Abstinence Society, for my temperance address of the 1st instant, which is courteously called “elegant and appropriate.”  So, ho!

22d.  A party of Wyandots from the River Huron, of Michigan, visited the office.  They complain that trespasses are committed by settlers on the lands reserved to them.  The trespasses arise from the construction of mill-dams, by which their grounds are overflowed.  They asked whether they hold the reservation for fifty years or otherwise.  I replied that they hold them, by the terms of the treaty, as long as they shall have any posterity to live on the lands.  They only escheat to the United States in failure of this.  But that I would send an agent to inquire into the justice of their complaint, and to redress it.

24th.  Robert Kankapot presents himself with about twenty followers.  He is a Stockbridge Indian of Green Bay, Wisconsin, on his way to the East.  He is short of funds, and asks for relief.  No annuity or other funds are payable, at this office, to this tribe.  I deemed his plea, however, a reasonable one, and loaned him personally one hundred dollars.

I detained him with some historical questions.  He says he is sixty-four years of age, that he was born in Stockbridge, on the head of the Housatonic River, in Massachusetts.  From this town they take their present name.  They are, however, the descendants of the ancient Mohegans, who lived on the sea coast and in the Hudson Valley.  They were instructed by the Rev. Jonathan Edwards, the eminent theologian, who was afterwards president of Princeton College.  Their first migration was into New Stockbridge, in Oneida County, New York, where the Oneida tribe assigned them lands.  This was about the era of the American Revolution.  They next went, about 1822, to Fox River of Green Bay, where they now reside.  Their oldest chief, at that point, is Metoxon, who is now sixty-nine.

He says his remote ancestry were from Long Island (Metoacs), and that Montauk means great sea island. (This does not appear probable philologically.) He says the opposite coast, across the East River, was called Monhautonuk.  He afterwards, the next day, said that Long Island was called Paum-nuk-kah-huk.

March 1st.  To a friend abroad I wrote:  “I have written during the winter an article on Mr. Gallatin’s recently published paper on the Indian languages, entitled A Synopsis of the Indian Tribes, which is published by the American Antiquarian Society.  It was with great reluctance that I took up the subject, and when I did, I have been so complete a fact hunter all my life, that I found it as difficult to lay it down.  The result is probably an article too long for ninety-nine readers out of a hundred, and too short for the hundredth man.”