thence, finding the water low, rode on horseback to Chicago, horses having been sent, for this purpose, from Chicago to meet us.  There was not a house from Peoria to John Craft’s, four miles from Chicago.  I searched for, and found, the fossil tree, reported to lie in the rocks in the bed of the river Des Plaines.  The sight of Lake Michigan, on nearing Chicago, was like the ocean.  We found an immense number of Indians assembled.  The Potawattomies, in their gay dresses and on horseback, gave the scene an air of Eastern magnificence.  Here we were joined by Judge Solomon Sibley, the other commissioner from Detroit, whence he had crossed the peninsula on horseback, and we remained in negotiation with the Indians during fifteen consecutive days.  A treaty was finally signed by them on the 24th of August, by which, for a valuable consideration in annuities and goods, they ceded to the United States about five millions of acres of choice lands.

Before this negotiation was finished, I was seized with bilious fever, and consequently did not sign the treaty.  It was of the worst bilious type, and acute in its character.  I did not, indeed, ever expect to make another entry in a human journal.  But a vigorous constitution at length prevailed, and weeks after all the party had left the ground, I was permitted to embark in a vessel called the Decatur on the 23d of September for Detroit.  We reached Michilimackinack the seventh day of our voyage, and returned to Detroit on the 6th of October.  The incidents and observations of this journey have been given to the public under the title “Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley” (1 vol. pp. 459, 8vo.:  New York).

I still felt the effects of my illness on reaching Detroit, where I remained a few days before setting out for New York.  On reaching Oneida County, where I stopped to recruit my strength, I learned that some envious persons, who shielded themselves under the name of “Trio,” had attacked my Narrative Journal, in one of the papers during my absence.  The attack was not of a character to demand a very grave notice, and was happily exposed by Mr. Carter, in some remarks in the columns of the Statesman, which first called my attention to the subject.

“A trio of writers,” he observes, in his paper of 17th August, “in the Daily Advertiser of Wednesday, have commenced an attack on the Narrative Journal of Mr. Schoolcraft, lately published in this city.  We should feel excessively mortified for the literary reputation of our country, if it took any three of our writers to produce such a specimen of criticism as the article alluded to; and ’for charity’s sweet sake,’ we will suppose that by a typographical error the signature is printed Trio instead of Tyro.  At any rate, the essay, notwithstanding all its wes and ours, bears the marks of being the effort of one smatterer, rather than the joint production of three critics, as the name imports.”