1837. Aug. 16th.  A Mr. Nathan, an English traveler, of quiet and pleasing manners, was introduced.  He had been to St. Mary’s Falls, and to the magnificent entrance into Lake Superior, of whose fine scenery he spoke in terms of admiration.  It seems to me that Englishmen and Englishwomen, for I have had a good many of both sexes to visit me recently, look on America very much as one does when he peeps through a magnifying glass on pictures of foreign scenes, and the picturesque ruins of old cities, and the like.  They are really very fine, but it is difficult to realize that such things are.  It is all an optical deception.

It was clearly so with Marryatt, a very superficial observer; Miss Martineau, who was in search of something ultra and elementary, and even Mrs. Jameson, who had the most accurate and artistic eye of all, but who, with the exception of some bits of womanly heart, appeared to regard our vast woods, and wilds, and lakes, as a magnificent panorama, a painting in oil.  It does not appear to occur to them, that here are the very descendants of that old Saxa-Gothic race who sacked Rome, who banished the Stuarts from the English throne, and who have ever, in all positions, used all their might to battle tyranny and oppression, who hate taxations as they hate snakes, and whose day and night dreams have ever been of liberty, that dear cry of Freiheit, whichever war made “Germania” ring.  It has appeared to me to be very much the same with the Austrian and Italian functionaries who have wandered as far as Michilimackinack within a few years, but who are yet more slow to appreciate our institutions than the English.  The whole problem of our system, one would judge, seems to them like “apples of ashes,” instead of the golden fruits of Hesperides.  They alike mistake realities for fancies; real states of flesh and blood, bone and muscle, for cosmoramic pictures on a wall.  They do not appear to dream how fast our millions reduplicate, what triumphs the plough, and the engine, and loom, are making, how the principles of a well guarded representative system are spreading over the world, and what indomitable moral, and sound inductive principles lie at the bottom of the whole fabric.

Troops arrived from St. Mary’s this day, to garrison the Fort, to keep order during the annuity payments.  The chiefs from St. Mary’s send over a boat for their share of the treaty, tobacco, salt, rice, &c.

18th.  Mr. Conner, the sub-agent, writes that the Saginaws are afflicted by want and threatened by starvation; and, to render their condition extreme, the small-pox has broken out amongst them.  Ordered relief to be given in the cases specified.