A traveller observes, that the white settlers who live in the woods soon become sallow, lanky, and dejected; the atmosphere of the trees does not agree with Caucasian lungs; and it is, perhaps, in part an instinct of this which causes the hatred of the new settlers towards trees.  The Indian breathed the atmosphere of the forests freely; he loved their shade.  As they are effaced from the land, he fleets too; a part of the same manifestation, which cannot linger behind its proper era.

The Chippewas have lately petitioned the State of Michigan, that they may be admitted as citizens; but this would be vain, unless they could be admitted, as brothers, to the heart of the white man.  And while the latter feels that conviction of superiority which enabled our Wisconsin friend to throw away the gun, and send the Indian to fetch it, he needs to be very good, and very wise, not to abuse his position.  But the white man, as yet, is a half-tamed pirate, and avails himself as much as ever of the maxim, “Might makes right.”  All that civilization does for the generality is to cover up this with a veil of subtle evasions and chicane, and here and there to rouse the individual mind to appeal to Heaven against it.

I have no hope of liberalizing the missionary, of humanizing the sharks of trade, of infusing the conscientious drop into the flinty bosom of policy, of saving the Indian from immediate degradation and speedy death.  The whole sermon may be preached from the text, “Needs be that offences must come, yet woe onto them by whom they come.”  Yet, ere they depart, I wish there might be some masterly attempt to reproduce, in art or literature, what is proper to them,—­a kind of beauty and grandeur which few of the every-day crowd have hearts to feel, yet which ought to leave in the world its monuments, to inspire the thought of genius through all ages.  Nothing in this kind has been done masterly; since it was Clevengers’s ambition, ’t is pity he had not opportunity to try fully his powers.  We hope some other mind may be bent upon it, ere too late.  At present the only lively impress of their passage through the world is to be found in such books as Catlin’s, and some stories told by the old travellers.

Let me here give another brief tale of the power exerted by the white man over the savage in a trying case; but in this case it was righteous, was moral power.

“We were looking over McKenney’s Tour to the Lakes, and, on observing the picture of Key-way-no-wut, or the Going Cloud, Mr. B. observed, ‘Ah, that is the fellow I came near having a fight with’; and he detailed at length the circumstances.  This Indian was a very desperate character, and of whom, all the Leech Lake band stood in fear.  He would shoot down any Indian who offended him, without the least hesitation, and had become quite the bully of that part of the tribe.  The trader at Leech Lake warned Mr. B. to beware of him, and said that he once, when he (the trader) refused to give up to