hat all the Indian tribes, with
the exception of the Miamis and the Wyandots, had, since the transfer of
the old French possessions to the British Crown, maintained a firm
alliance with the latter. 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 ou