charged goods) at a higher
price to the last comer, on condition of the latter individual getting
the earlier inadequate sale set aside by the agent of the United States,
through evidence from its pretended victim that the payment for it had
only been nominal, and was forthwith fradulently withdrawn. Even the
judges are accused of being, covertly, sometimes as bad as any of the
rest, and it is said that instances are not unknown wherein some of them
have, not long after withdrawing from the seat of justice, proved to be
full of wealth in lands, which could only be accounted for by a supposed
collusion with accusers who have supplied them with pretexts for
cancelling prior sales by Indians in favor of better offers, when
contrasted with the preceding ones, though offers really amounting to
nothing at all in comparison with the true worth of the purchase. Amid
these scenes of complicated villany, it is not unusual, after the
session of a commission representing the United States for trying the
validity of titles, to see a foiled thief rush at the successful
overreaching one, with fist and bowie-knife; and it is then accounted a
case of uncommon good luck if either live to look upon what both have
stolen from the red-man, and one not only from the red-man, but the
white.

I beheld a fine, gentle, innocent-looking girl,--a widow, I
believe,--come up to the investigator to assert that she had never sold
her land. She had been counterfeited by some knave. The Investigator's
court was a low bar-room. He saw me eyeing him, and some one told him I
was travelling to take notes. He did not know but government had
employed me as a secret supervisor. He seemed to shrink, and postponed a
decision. I have since heard that he is a rascal of the sort at which I
have just hinted.

The ill-starred red people here are entirely at the mercy of
interpreters, who, if not negro-slaves of their own, are half-breeds,--a
worse set, generally, than the worst of either slaves or knaves. In the
jargon of the border, they are called _linkisters_,--some say because
they form, by interpreting, a _link_ between the Indian nations and
ours; but I should rather regard the word as a mere corruption of
_linguist_.

The Indians become more easily deluded by the borderers than by others,
because the borderers know that they never esteem any one to be
substantial who does not keep a shop. So your rascal of the frontier
sets up a shop, and is pronounced a _