“The white man is growing.  He wants our lands.  He will buy them now.  By and by he will take them, and the little band of our people left will wander without homes, poor and despised, and be beaten like dogs.  We must go to a new home, and learn like the white man to till the earth, grow cattle, and depend on these for food and life.  Nohow else can many people live on the earth.  This makes the white man like the leaves; the want of it makes the red men weak and few.  Let us learn how to make books, how to make ploughs, and how to cultivate the ground, as the white man does, and we will grow again, and again become a great people.  We will unite with the Cherokee, the Choctaw, and the Seminole, and be one people.  The Great Spirit made us one people.  Yes, we are all the children of one family:  we are the red men of the Great Spirit, and should be one people for strength and protection.  We shall have schools for our children.  Each tribe shall have its council, and all shall unite in great council.  They will be wise through learning as the white man is, and we shall become a great State, and send our chiefs to Congress as the white man does.  We shall all read, and thus talk, as the white man does, with the mighty dead who live in books; and write and make books that our children’s children shall read and talk with, and learn the counsels of their great fathers in the spirit-land.  This it is which makes the white man increase and spread over the land.  In our new home he promises to protect us—­to send us schools and books, and teach our children to know them; and he will send us ploughs, and men to make them, and to teach our young men how to make them.

“The plough will make us corn for bread, for the strength of the body; the books will be food for the head, to make us wise and strong in council.  Let us sell and go away, and if we suffer for a time, it will be better for our children.  You see it so with the white man; shall we not learn from him, and be like him?”

When he had concluded his talk, it was greeted in their own peculiar manner by his followers as good.  Hopothlayohola, the great red chief, turning from McIntosh as if disdaining him, addressed the commissioners of the Government: 

“Our great father, your head chief at Washington, sent us a talk by you, which is pleasant to hear, because it promises the red man much—­his friendship, his protection, and his help; but in return for this he asks of us much more than we are willing to give even for all his promises.  The white man’s promises, like him, are white, and bring hope to the red man; but they always end in darkness and death to him.