nevertheless, promised their lives. This was not an evidence of courage,
but of cowardice. By this perfidious act you also violated your
promises, and proved yourselves to be the most debased of human
beings--liars!

"You have asked me many times in the course of this day to take pity on
you. How have you the hearts to stand up and ask me for pity, when you
have showed no pity yourselves. When those poor disarmed and despairing
men implored you to pity their condition, reminding you of your
promises, and their generosity in making you presents, when you saw them
afterwards submit to be plundered, you gave them not pity but the war
club and scalping knife. Did you suppose the God of white men would
permit you to go unpunished? Did you think you had got so far in the
woods that no person could find you out? Or, did you think your great
father, the President, governed by a pusillanimous principle, would
allow you to kill any of his people, without seeking to be revenged?

"Let this day open your eyes. You have richly deserved death, and not a
man of your nation could complain, if I should order you at this
instant, to be drawn out before my door, and shot. But a less
_honorable_ death awaits you.

"I have before told you, that your Great Father the President is as just
as he is powerful; and that he seeks to take away the life of no man,
without full, just, and clear proof of guilt. For this purpose he has
appointed other chiefs, whose duty it is to hear, try, and punish
all offences.

"Before these judges you shall now be sent. You will be closely
examined. You will have counsel assigned to defend your cause. You will
have every advantage that one of our own citizens could claim. If any
cause can be shown why one of you is less guilty than another it will
then appear; if not, your bodies will be hung on a gallows."

I then addressed Kewaynockwut. "No person has accused you of murder; but
you have led men who committed murder, and have thereby excited the
anger of your Great Father, who is slow to forgive when any of his
people, even the poorest of them, have been injured, far less when a
murder has been committed. Though I include you with those cowards who
first took away the arms of our people, and then shot them--those mean
dogs who sit trembling before me--I do not forgive you. The blood of our
citizens rests upon you. I can neither take you by the hand, nor smoke
the pipe you offer to me. You lie under the sever