rose and made a speech, in which
I explained to them the treaty made by Quashquame, and three of our
braves, according to the manner the trader and others had explained it
to me. I then told them that Quashquame and his party positively denied
having ever sold my village, and that as I had never known them to lie,
I was determined to keep it in possession.

I told them that the white people had already entered our village,
burned our lodges, destroyed on, fences, ploughed up our corn and beat
our people. They had brought whisky into our country, made our people
drunk, and taken from them their homes, guns and traps, and that I had
borne all this injury, without suffering any of my braves to raise a
hand against the whites.

My object in holding this council was to get the opinion of these two
chiefs as to the best course for me to pursue. I had appealed in vain,
time after time to our agent, who regularly represented our situation to
the chief at St. Louis, whose duty it was to call upon the Great Father
to have justice done to us, but instead of this we are told that the
white people wanted our county and we must leave it for them!

I did not think it possible that our Great Father wished us to leave our
village where we had lived so long, and where the bones of so many of
our people had been laid. The great chief said that as he no longer had
any authority he could do nothing for us, and felt sorry that it was
not in his power to aid us, nor did he know how to advise us. Neither
of them could do anything for us, but both evidently were very sorry. It
would give e great pleasure at all times to take these two chiefs by the
hand.

That fall I paid a visit to the agent before we started to our hunting
grounds, to hear if he had any good news for me. He had news. He said
that the land on which our village now stood was ordered to be sold to
individuals, and that when sold our right to remain by treaty would be
at an end, and that if we returned next spring we would be forced to
remove.

We learned during the winter, that part of the land where our village
stood had been sold to individuals, and that the trader at Rock Island,
Colonel Davenport, had bought the greater part that had been sold. The
reason was now plain to me why he urged us to remove. His object, we
thought, was to get our lands. We held several councils that winter to
determine what we should do. We resolved in one of them, to return to
our village a