The independence achieved by the United States did not alter the policy of the natives, nor did our Government succeed in winning or purchasing their friendship.

Great Britain, it is true, bid high to retain them.

Every year the leading men of the Chippewas, Ottawas, Pottowattamies, Menomonees, Winnebagoes, Sauks, and Foxes, and even still more remote tribes, journeyed from their distant homes to Fort Malden in Upper Canada, to receive their annual amount of presents from their Great Father across the water.

It was a master-policy thus to keep them in pay, and had enabled those who practised it to do fearful execution through the aid of such allies in the last war between the two countries.
The presents they thus received were of considerable value, consisting of blankets, broadcloths or _strouding_, calicoes, guns, kettles, traps, silver-works (comprising arm-bands, bracelets, brooches; and ear-bobs), looking-glasses, combs, and various other trinkets distributed with no niggardly hand.
The magazines and store-houses of the Fur Company at Mackinac were the resort of all the upper tribes for the sale of their commodities, and the purchase of all such articles as they had need of, including those above enumerated, and also ammunition, which, as well as money and liquor, their British friends very commendably omitted to furnish them.
Besides their furs, various in kind and often of great value--beaver, otter, marten, mink, silver-gray and red fox, wolf, bear, and wild-cat, musk-rat, and smoked deer-skins--the Indians brought for trade maple-sugar in abundance, considerable quantities of both Indian corn and _petit-ble_,[1] beans and the _folles avoines_,[2] or wild rice; while the squaws added to their quota of merchandise a contribution in the form of moccasins, hunting-pouches, mococks, or little boxes of birch-bark embroidered with porcupine-quills and filled with maple-sugar, mats of a neat and durable fabric, and toy-models of Indian cradles, snow-shoes, canoes, etc., etc.
It was no unusual thing, at this period, to see a hundred or more canoes of Indians at once approaching the island, laden with their articles of traffic; and if to these we add the squadrons of large Mackinac boats constantly arriving from the outposts, with the furs, peltries, and buffalo-robes collected by the distant traders, some idea may be formed of the extensive operations and important position of the American Fur Company, as well as of the vast circle of human beings either immediately or remotely connected with it.
It is no wonder that the philanthropic mind, surveying these, races of uncultivated heathen, should stretch forward to the time when, through an unwearied devotion of the white man's energies, and an untiring sacrifice of self and fortune, his red brethren might rise in the scale of social civilization--when Education and Christianity should go hand in hand, to make "the wilderness blossom as the rose." Little did the noble souls at that day rejoicing in the success of their labors at Mackinac, anticipate that in less than a quarter of a century there would remain of all these numerous tribes but a few scattered bands, squalid, degraded, with scarce a vestige remaining of their former lofty character--their lands cajoled or wrested from them, the graves of their fathers turned up by the ploughshare--themselves chased farther and farther towards the setting sun, until they were literally grudged a resting-place on the face of the earth! Our visit to the Mission-school was of short duration, for the Henry Clay was to leave at two o'clock, and in the mean time we were to see what we could of the village and its environs, and after that dine with Mr.Mitchell, an old friend of my husband.

As we walked leisurely along over the white, gravelly road, many of the residences of the old inhabitants were pointed out to me.