Great Indian Chief of the West Part 11

I am sir, Very respectfully, Your obedient servant, HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT.

P.S. Capt. Jouett, commanding at this post, has recently seized sixteen kegs of high-wines. His prompt, decisive, and correct conduct in this, and other transactions relating to Indian affairs, merits the approbation of government.

The Pet.i.te Corbeau has requested that no trader may be located at the mouth of the St. Croix.

The following picture of the present condition of the Winnebagoes, given in the St. Louis Bulletin, shows the deplorable results of the intercourse of the whites with the Indians--the baneful effects of spirituous liquors upon their morals and habits. The Winnebagoes were neighbors of the Sacs and Foxes, and long intimately a.s.sociated with them. Twenty years ago, all of these tribes, raised annually more corn, beans and other vegetables, than were needed for their own consumption.

Now they are miserable, squalid beggars, without the means of subsistence. The faithlessness of the Government, the perfidy and avarice of its agents and citizens, have brought this race of people to the horrible condition, in which they are represented in the statement that follows.

An agent of the Temperance Society, in a journal of a late tour to the region of the Upper Mississippi, presents a picture, melancholy indeed, of the present condition of the Indian tribes in that quarter, which must deeply rouse the commiseration of every benevolent man. From our own personal observation one year since, we would corroborate the a.s.sertion, that were the world ransacked for a subject in which should be concentrated and personified injustice, oppression, drunkenness, squalid filth, and degradation, one would point to the straggling Indian on the banks of the Upper Mississippi for the aptest exemplification.

There were some two or three hundred of these stragglers--Winnebagoes, chiefly, about Prairie du Chien--men, women, and children, many of whom had scarcely the fragments of a filthy blanket to hide their nakedness or screen them from the cold--strolling and straggling about in squads of from two to a half dozen each, begging for whiskey, or cold potatoes, or crusts of bread. One old female, doubtless turned of threescore and ten, half naked, was gathering up from the dirt and ashes about the boiler of the steam boat, a few pieces of dried apples that had been dropped and trodden under foot, which, with her toothless gums, she attempted to masticate with all the eagerness of a starving swine. Little children, from one to four years old, were crawling about in a state of nudity, and almost of starvation, while their own mothers and fathers, were staggering, and fighting, and _swearing_. It is a fact, that while these poor creatures cannot articulate a word of any thing else in English, the most awfully profane expressions will drop from their lips in English, as fluently as if it had been their vernacular tongue. When the whites first settled in that neighborhood, the Indians raised corn and other provisions enough, not only for their own use, but also for the fur-traders and settlers.

Now they are altogether dependent for even the scanty subsistence by which they are dragging out the remnant of a miserable life, upon the whites. And what has been the cause of so great a change in a few years in the circ.u.mstances and habits of a whole people!

The answer is plain to every one at all acquainted with Indian history. It is the perfidy and avarice of the whites, and WHISKEY, WHISKEY has been the all potent _agent_ by which it has been effected. By selling and giving them whiskey till they become drunk, they are soon filched of the little annuities received from government; and then treated the rest of the year like so many dogs.--As an ill.u.s.tration of the feeling towards them, a merchant at Prairie du Chien expressed the very humane wish, that there might soon be another Indian war to kill them all off.