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.