24th.  Submitted an application to the department for expending a small part of the Indian education fund, for furthering the general object, by publishing, for the use of teachers and scholars, a compendious dictionary, and general grammar of the Indian languages.

25th.  In a conference with Mr. Murray, of Pennsylvania, a recent commissioner to adjust Indian claims at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, he gave me Mr. Robert Stuart’s testimony respecting the Indian trade, to read.  It appears from the document that the gain on trade of the American Fur Company, from 1824 to 1827, was $167,000.  From 1827 to 1834 it was $195,000.  From the aggregate of ten years’ business, there is to be deducted $45,000, being a loss from 1817 to 1824, which leaves a profit on seventeen years’ trade of $317,000.

Mr. Murray presented me a copy of the Commissioner’s report.  These claims have not yet received the action of the department.  The commissioners set out with requiring of traders high evidence of the individual indebtedness by Indians.  They finally decided that the Winnebago debts were national.  They went further—­they approved and adopted the decision of a meeting of the claimants themselves, as to the application to individual firms, of the fund.  This decision was subsequently sanctioned by eight Winnebago chiefs, who were stated to be authorized to act for the nation.

The error, in all these cases, seems to be, that where a tribe has agreed to set apart a generic sum to satisfy debts, and the United States has accepted the trusteeship of determining the individual shares, that the Indians, who cannot read, or write, or understand figures, or accounts at all, and cannot possibly tell the arithmetical difference between one figure and another, should yet be made the subject of these minor appeals.  The TRUSTEE himself should determine that, by such testimony as he approves, and not appear to seek to bolster up the decisions of truth and faithfulness, by calling on Indian ignorance and imbecility, which is subject to be operated on by every species of selfishness.

25th.  I applied to the department this day, by letter, for leave of absence from my post on the frontier, to visit Europe.

26th.  I called on Mr. Poinsett, the Secretary of War, and received from him the permission which I had yesterday solicited.  I also called on the President (Mr. Van Buren), who, in turning the conversation to the state of disturbances on the frontier, evinced the deepest interest that neutrality should be preserved, and asked me whether the United States Marshal at Detroit had faithfully performed his duty.