He was 71 years of age, having, by his own account, published in 1833, been born in the Sac village on Rock River, in 1767—­the year of the death of Pontiac.  In his indomitable enmity to the (American type of the) Anglo-Saxon race, he was animated with the spirit of this celebrated chief, and had some of his powers of combination.  His strong predilections for the British Government were undoubtedly fostered by the annual visits of his tribe to the depot of Malden.  His denial of the authority of the men who, in 1804, sold the Sac and Fox country, east of the Mississippi, may have had the sanction of his own judgment, but without it he would have found it no difficult matter to hatch up a cause of war with the United States.  That war seems to have been brooded over many years:  it had been the subject of innumerable war messages to the various tribes, a large number of whom had favored his views.  And when it broke out in the spring of 1832, the suddenness of the movement, the great cruelties of the onset, and the comparatively defenceless state of the frontier, gave it all its alarming power.  As soon as the army could be got to the frontiers, and the Indian force brought to action, the contest was over.  The battle of the Badaxe annihilated his forces, and he was carried a prisoner to Washington.  But he was more to be respected and pitied than blamed.  His errors were the result of ignorance, and none of the cruelties of the war were directly chargeable to him.  He was honest in his belief—­honest in the opinion that the country east of the Mississippi had been unjustly wrested from him; and there is no doubt but the trespasses and injuries received from the reckless frontier emigrants were of a character that provoked retaliation.  He has been compared, in some things, to Pontiac.  Like him, he sought to restore his people to a position and rights, which he did not perceive were inevitably lost.  He possessed a degree of intellectual vigor and decision of character far beyond the mass, and may be regarded as one of the principal minds of the Indians of the first half of the 19th century.

15th.  A letter of this date from Council Bluffs, describes a most shocking and tragic death of a Sioux girl, of only fourteen years of age, who was sacrificed to the spirit of corn, by the Pawnees, on the 22d of February last.  For this purpose she was placed on a foot-rest, between two trees, about two feet apart, and raised above the ground, just high enough to have a torturing fire built under her feet.  Here she was held by two warriors, who mounted the rest beside her, and who applied lighted splinters under her arms.  At a given signal a hundred arrows were let fly, and her whole body was pierced.  These were immediately withdrawn, and her flesh cut from her bones in small pieces, which were put into baskets, and carried into the corn-field, where the grain was being planted, and the blood squeezed out in each hill.