The steamer Madison arrived with a crowd of emigrants for the west, one of whom had died on the passage from Detroit.  It proved to be a young man named Jesse Cummings, from Groton, N.H., a member of the Congregational Church of that place.  Having no pastor, I conducted the religious observance of the funeral, and selected a spot for his burial, in a high part of the Presbyterian burial ground, towards the N.E., where a few loose stones are gathered to mark the place.

2d.  Wakazo, a chief, sent to tell me that an Ottawa Indian, Ishquondaim’s son, had killed a Chippewa called Debaindung, of Manistee River.  Both had been drinking.  I informed him that an Indian killing an Indian on a reserve, where the case occurred, which is still “Indian country,” did not call for the interposition of our law.  Our criminal Indian code, which is defective, applies only to the murder of white men killed in the Indian country.  So that justice for a white man and an Indian is weighed in two scales.

3d.  Mrs. Therese Schindler, a daughter of a former factor of the N.W.  Company at Mackinack, visited the office.  I inquired her age.  She replied 63, which would give the year 1775 as her birth.  Having lived through a historical era of much interest, on this island, and possessing her faculties unimpaired, I obtained the following facts from her.  The British commanding officers remembered by her were Sinclair, Robinson, and Doyle.  The interpreters acting under them, extending to a later period, were Charles Gothier, Lamott, Charles Chabollier, and John Asken.  The first interpreter here was Hans, a half-breed, and father to the present chief Ance, of Point St. Ignace.  His father had been a Hollander, as the name implies.  Longlade was the interpreter at old Fort Mackinack, on the main, at the massacre.  She says she recollects the transference of the post to the island.  If so, that event could not have happened, so as to be recollected by her, till about 1780.  Asken went along with the British troops on the final surrender of the island to the Americans in 1796, and returned in the surprise and taking of the island in 1812.

5th.  Finished my report on a resolution of Congress of March 19th respecting the interference of the British Indian Department in the Indian affairs of the frontier.  The treaty of Ghent terminated the war between Great Britain and the United States, but it did not terminate the feelings and spirit with which the Indian tribes had, from the fall of their French power regarded them.

Mr. Warren (Lyman M.), of La Pointe, Lake Superior, visited the office.  Having been long a trader in the north, and well acquainted with Indian affairs in that quarter, I took occasion to inquire into the circumstances of the cession of the treaty of the 29th of July, 1837, and asked him why it was that so little had been given for so large a cession, comprehending the very best lands of the Chippewas in the Mississippi