but few of their children; their self-respect, their dignity of character, and the heroism inherited from their ancestors, were lost. The ravages of intemperance and its kindred vices, reduced their numbers, and scattered their tribes. They became, in their own estimation, a degraded, dependent race. The government, availing itself of their weakness and want of energy, succeeded, by bribes and menaces, in obtaining the best portions of their country, and eventually in driving them from the land of their birth, to a distant home, in an unknown region.

This distressing chapter of aboriginal history began at the treaty of Greenville, in 1795, and terminated in less than fifty years. The writer of these notes witnessed its commencement, progress, and close. Prior to that treaty, there had been no friendly intercourse between the Indians and the white men of the United States, in consequence of the war which existed between them. That intercourse and its destructive consequences began immediately after the restoration of peace. Until that time, the natives were numerous, powerful, and uncontaminated.

The yearly journeys of the writer, to attend the General Court of the Territory at Detroit, made it necessary to go through some of their villages, and convenient to visit others, and often led him to their hunting camps, which gave him many opportunities of seeing them in their villages and on their hunting excursions, and of becoming personally acquainted with some of their principal chiefs and warriors. At that time, their hospitality was limited only by their means of indulging it. The corrupting influence of their new associates was just commencing, and had made but little progress. They retained the distinctive marks of their national character. Their deportment showed that they felt conscious of their strength.

In their general intercourse with white people, their manners and deportment manifested their consciousness of equality. They had lost nothing of the self-confidence,

which they possessed, when the national and state governments admitted their independence, and met them in council as equals and friends. They were, however, unconscious of their comparative numerical weakness, and of the corrupting influence of their new associates. In a few short years their eyes were opened their delusion vanished, and their last hopes sunk in despair.

It would be unjust to form an opinion of the original inhabitants of this country, by a reference to their descendants, of the present day. In the short period of half a century, they have been so changed, that scarcely a trace remains of what they were, when their country was first entered by the pioneers of our race; an event which sealed their destiny.

In journeying, more recently, through the State, the writer has occasionally passed over the ground, on which, many years before, he had seen Indian towns filled with families of that devoted race, contented and happy; but he could not perceive the slightest trace of those villages, or the people who had occupied them. All the settlements through which he passed on the Maumee and the Auglaize, from Fort Wayne to Defiance, and from thence to the foot of the Rapids, had been broken up and deserted. The battle-ground of General Wayne, which he had often seen, in the rude state in which it was, when the action of 1794 was fought, was so changed in its appearance, that he could not recognize it, and not an indication remained, of the many populous Indian villages, he had formerly seen, extending many miles on either side of the river. Flourishing towns, and fields cultivated by white men, covered the ground, which, thirty years before, was the property and the home of the natives of the forest.

The contrast was striking; and excited a train of unpleasant recollections. It was a natural enquiry, "Where are the multitudes of red people, who were formerly seen here, amusing themselves on these Rapids, taking the swift

muskelunge, with their bows and arrows?" They were then independent and undisturbed owners of the country, which had descended to them through a long line of heroic ancestors, and which they expected their children would continue to possess, when they were gone.

It was far from their thoughts, that in a few years they would be expelled from those homes, and driven to herd with strangers, in a strange land. They did not expect to hear, so soon, the same chilling salutation, which was addressed to the eloquent bard of Mantua, by the Roman soldier, to whom his paternal villa had been allotted, by the agrarian laws of Italy.

"Hæc mea sunt; veteres migrate coloni."

The final catastrophe of that noble race, was witnessed by the people of Cincinnati, a few years since, when the remnant of the Wyandots, the last of the braves of the Ohio tribes*"relliquias Danaum atque immitis Achillei” — arrived at the landing, and ascended the steam ships that were to convey them from the places of their nativity, into hopeless banishment. To the eye of the humane observer, they seemed to linger, and turn to the north, as if to bid a last farewell, to the tombs in which they had deposited the remains of their deceased children, and in which the bones of their fathers had been accumulating and mouldering for untold ages.

"Quis talia fando

Myrmidonum, Dolopumve, aut duri miles Ulyssei
Temperet a lachrymis?”

* Since this article was written, a remnant of the Miami tribe, who had been suffered to remain on a reservation, made by treaty in their favor, in the State of Indiana, but since relinquished to the United States, have been compelled to remove. During the month of October, 1846, they arrived at Cincinnati, about seventy in number, including women and children, and embarked on a steamboat, bound to St. Louis, on their way to the Far West.

CHAPTER XXII.

Early land laws injudicious. Sold in very large tracts.-Few purchasers.— Settlement of the country retarded.-Laws modified.-Sales in small tracts. -Population multiplied.-State improvements advanced.-Commerce of little value for want of a market.-Produce of the country consumed in the expense of transportation.-Miami Exporting Company got up.—Its objects. -Introduction of barges.-Schemes to improve the navigation of the Falls. -Canal attempted on the Indiana side.-Operations of the Branch Bank of the United States at Cincinnati.-Tyrannical proceedings of the Agent of the parent Board.-Immense sacrifice of private property.

THE plan originally adopted by Congress, for the sale of their land in the Western Territory, was injudicious, and calculated to defeat its own object. The first ordinance passed for that purpose, proposed to sell it in tracts of two millions of acres; the second, in smaller tracts of one million. Under that ordinance, the contract of the Ohio Company, on the Muskingum, and that of Judge Symmes and his associates, between the Miamies, were made; the former for two millions, the latter for one million of acres. By a subsequent ordinance, passed in May, 1785, seven ranges of townships, of five miles square, were surveyed on the Ohio river, and the Pennsylvania line, which were divided and offered for sale, in quarter townships; first at Pittsburgh, and afterwards in Philadelphia.

In May, 1796, an act was passed, calculated, in a small degree, to accommodate the people, and accomplish the object of Congress. That law directed the Surveyor General to cause the public lands to be divided into townships of six miles square; and one-half of those townships, taking them alternately, to be divided into sections of one mile

square, and the residue into quarter townships of three miles square.

In the year 1800, another law was passed, ordering a portion of these lands to be sub-divided, and sold in half sections, of three hundred and twenty acres. When this law came into operation, Land Offices were established at Cincinnati, Chillicothe, Marietta, and Steubenville, and a large quantity of the richest and most productive soil was brought into market. The character and value of Western lands, and the mildness and salubrity of the climate, were then becoming generally known, and understood. A permanent peace with the Indian tribes had been established, and public attention, throughout the Atlantic States, had been directed to the Ohio.

Anterior to that time, the tracts of land, offered for sale by the government, were so large, that men of limited means were unable to purchase. The scheme which had been established, was better calculated to meet the views of speculators, and advance their interest, than it was to relieve the poor, industrious laborer, who by the decree of the Fates was compelled to eat his bread in the sweat of his face. The smallest tract that could be purchased was a section, of six hundred and forty acres. A fractional section lying on a river, or on the boundary of a separate district, containing a smaller quantity than six hundred and forty acres, could not be sold, but in connection with the adjoining section.

Although this approximation towards the accommodation of the industrious poor was of great importance, yet it was not sufficiently so, to advance the settlement of the Territory, with much rapidity. But the act passed at a subsequent session, which ordered the sections and half sections to be subdivided and offered for sale in quarter sections, at two dollars per acre, on a credit of five years, was of vastly more importance, as it enabled multitudes to become freeholders, and independent cultivators of their