19th.  A memorial is got up in Ionia County, on Grand River, respecting the Indians, their feelings and their affairs.  In it facts are distorted, opinions misapprehended, and the acts and policy of the government and its agents greatly misconceived in some things, and wholly misrepresented in others.  And the paper, when examined by the lights of treaties and acts, as they really occurred, is to be regarded as the work of some ambitious man who wishes to get on the backs of the Indians to ride into office, or to promote, in some other way, selfish and concealed ends.  All such attempts, though they may seem to “run well” for a time, and may result in temporary success, may be safely left to the counteraction of right opinions.  For it has always remained an axiom of truth, verified by every day’s experience, “That he that diggeth a pit for his neighbor shall himself fall into it.”

20th.  General Jo.  M. Brown, of the militia, who with the valor of the redoubtable Peter Stuyvesant at Christina, marched into Toledo, “brimful of wrath and cabbage,” transmits the above precious memorial, not to the Department, or the President, to whom it is ostensibly addressed, but to the editor of a political party paper at Detroit, to “manufacture” public opinion, claiming, at the same time, very high motives for so very disinterested an act, in which the good of the Indians, and the integrity of public faith, are clearly held forth as the aim of the writer.  The editor endorsing it with most high-sounding phrases, in which he speaks of it as taking fit place beside the most atrocious fictions, which have been conjured up by mistaken heads and zealous hearts, anxious to ride the aforesaid “Indian question,” in relation to the Cherokees and Florida Indians.  When all this grandiloquent display of parental sympathy, and a sense of outraged justice, is stripped of its false garbs and put into the crucible of truth, the result is, that political capital can be made just now of the handling of the topic.  A delay of a few months (owing to the fiscal crisis at Washington) in the payment of half the annuity for the year, and the neglect or refusal of a few bands to come for the other moiety, as ready in silver, and paid at the stipulated time and place, is made the subject of allusion in this political hue and cry.  As to these bands, they are the most peaceable, corn-planting, and semi-agricultural bands in the State.  They have been pre-eminently cultivators from an early date of their history, and have been so characteristically addicted to barter, in the products of their industry as to be called by the other Algonquin bands, Ottawas, or traders from the days of Champlain.  They had probably as little to do with the Glass murder in Ionia, which is alleged as an instance of hostility to the United States, as Gen. Jo.  M. Brown himself.

20th.  Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz, one of our female writers, in a note of acknowledgment to the Hist.  Soc., falls into the same quandary about making out the signature of one of our most expert and beautiful penmen, that Washington Irving did.  She could by no means make out Mr. Trowbridge’s name, and addressed her reply to me.