CHAPTER IV.
MOTIVES FOR THE TOUR, &c.
Niagara Falls is yet the common boundary in the West of the pleasure excursions for the summer, with European visitants of the New World, and with the travelling gentry of the United States. Few find motive enough, or feel sufficient ambition to endure the sea-sickness of the Lakes, that they may penetrate farther, merely for pleasure. It is true, that the rapid crowding of the West, by an emigrant population, settled all along the southern shore of Lake Erie, and through the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the Territory of Michigan, together with the grand communication now opened between the city of New York and the great valley of the Mississippi over the bosom of Lake Erie, has made that lake a busy scene of commercial enterprise. Besides all the sailing craft employed, a Steam-packet leaves both the upper and lower extremities of this Lake every day for a voyage of forty-eight hours, more or less, between Buffalo and Detroit, touching at the principal ports on the southern shore; and, in addition to these, several Steamers are employed in shorter trips. One stretches for the most direct course through the entire of the Lake, without touching at any of the intervening ports, for the sake of dispatch, and to accomplish the voyage in twenty-four hours. As might be expected, a constant stream of genteel travellers, going to and from the Mississippi Valley, and to and from the city of Detroit, for the various objects of business, of visiting friends, of scientific observations, of gratifying curiosity, of executing public trusts, or of finding a home for themselves and families, in some one of those regions of promise, is seen to be always moving there, like a fairy vision. Once a month a Steam-packet leaves Buffalo for the far off regions of the north-west, beyond the city of Detroit, through the upper Lakes, to answer the purposes of government, in keeping up a communication with the garrisons of those frontiers, and to accommodate the few travellers, who may have business in those quarters, or who are bold and romantic enough to push their excursions of pleasure so far.
As a Commission from the government of the United States had been ordered to the North West Territory, for August, 1830, to kindle a Council-fire, as it is called, and to smoke the pipe, with a public assembly of the Chiefs of the numerous tribes of Indians, in that quarter, for the purpose of settling certain disputes existing among themselves, in their relations to each other, and also some misunderstandings between sundry of their tribes and the general Government, the Author having leisure, and being a little curious to know more of this race, than he had ever yet seen, conceived, that this extraordinary occasion for the convention of the Chiefs and representatives of the wilder and more remote tribes, would afford a good opportunity for the knowledge and observation he so much coveted. He had seen not a little of the Indians, in their semi-civilized conditions, as they are found insulated here and there, in the midst of the white population of the States; and of course where their manners, habits, character, and very nature have been much modified by their intercourse and intimacies with civilized society. The Indian of North America, in such circumstances, is quite another being from the Indian in his wild and untutored condition; and as the advocates for the resolving of society into its original elements, would say:--he is there in his unsophisticated nature.
No one can pretend to understand the character of the aboriginal tenants of America, who has seen them only as _vitiated_ by contact with Europeans. I say _vitiated_. For, if they are not made better by proper protection and cultivation, they become much worse, as human nature, left to itself, is more susceptible of the contagion of vice, than of improvement in virtue. The Indian, thrown into temptation, easily takes the vices of the white man; and his race in such exposures melts away, like the snow before a summer’s sun. Such has been the unhappy fate of the aborigines of America, ever since the discovery of that continent by Columbus. They have melted away--and they are still melting away. They have been cut off by wars, which the provocations of the whites have driven them to wage,--and the remnants, depressed, unprotected--and in their own estimation humbled and degraded, their spirit broken within them,--have sunk down discouraged, and abandoned themselves to the fate of those, who have lost all ambition for a political existence, and who covet death rather than life.
The _wild_ Indian, however, whose contact with the European race has not been enough to vitiate his habits, or subdue his self-importance,--who still prowls the forest in the pride of his independence,--who looks upon all nations and tribes, but his own, as unworthy of the contemptuous glance of his eye,--whose dreams of importance become to him a constant reality, and actually have the same influence in the formation of his character, as if they were all that they seem to him;--he regards himself as the centre of a world, made especially for him. Such a being, and much more than this, who is not a creature of the imagination, but a living actor in the scenes of earth, becomes at least an interesting object, if he does not make a problem, yet to be solved, in moral philosophy, in politics, in the nature and character of man, as a social being.