previous treaties. Of these three treaties Schoolcraft says: “These three conferences embody a new course and policy for keeping the tribes in peace, and are founded on the most enlarged consideration of the aboriginal right of fee-simple to the soil. They have been held exclusively at the charge and expense of the United States, and contain no cession of territory.”
They were the last treaties of their kind. In 1828 the people of Northern Illinois were beginning to covet and trespass on some of the Indian lands, and commissioners were sent to treat with the Indians for the surrender of such lands. The Indians demurred, and the treaty was deferred; the United States in the mean time agreeing to pay to the four tribes $20,000, “in full compensation for all the injuries and damages sustained by them in consequence of the occupation of any part of the mining country.”
In 1829 a benevolent scheme for the rescue of these hard-pressed tribes of the North-western territory was proposed by Mr. J. D. Stevens, a missionary at Mackinaw. He suggested the formation of a colony of them in the Lake Superior region. He says—and his words are as true to-day, in 1879, as they were fifty years ago: “The Indian is in every view entitled to sympathy. The misfortune of the race is that, seated on the skirts of the domain of a popular government, they have no vote to give. They are politically a nonentity. * * * The whole Indian race is not worth one white man’s vote. If the Indian were raised to the right of giving his suffrage, a plenty of politicians on the frontiers would enter into plans to better him; whereas now the subject drags along like an incubus in Congress.”
It did, indeed. Appropriations were sadly behindhand. The promises made to the Indians could not be fulfilled, simply because there was no money to fulfil them with. In 1829 a Washington correspondent writes to Mr. Schoolcraft: “There
