must be yet very far from having reached any true estimate of real values, as General Harrison adds: “From the best calculation I have been able to make, the tract now ceded contains at east two millions of acres, and embraces some of the finest lands in the Western country.”
Cheap at one thousand dollars a year!—even with the negro man thrown in, which General Harrison tells the Secretary he has ordered Captain Wells to purchase, and present to the chief, The Turtle, and to draw on the United States Treasury for the amount paid for him.
Four years later (1809) General Harrison is instructed by the President “to take advantage of the most favorable moment for extinguishing the Indian title to the lands lying east of the Wabash, and adjoining south;” and the title was extinguished by the treaty of Fort Wayne—a little more moncy paid, and a great deal of land given up.
In 1814 we made a treaty, simply of peace and friendship, with the Delawares and several other tribes: they agreeing to fight faithfully on our side against the English, and we agreeing to “confirm and establish all the bonndaries” as they had existed before the war.
In 1817 it was deemed advisable to make an effort to “extinguish the Indian title to all the lands claimed by them within the limits of the State of Ohio. Two commissioners were appointed, with great discretionary powers; and a treaty was concluded early in the autumn, by which there was ceded to the United States nearly all the land to which the Indians had claim in Ohio, a part of Indiana, and a part of Michigan. This treaty was said by the Secretary of War to be “the most important of any hitherto made with the Indians,” “The extent of the cession far exceeded” his most sanguine expectations, and he had the honesty to admit that “there can be no real or well-founded objection to the amount of the compensation given for it, except that it is not an adequate one.”
