hers, to the heart of the white man. And while
the latter feels that conviction of superiority which enabled our
Wisconsin friend to throw away the gun, and send the Indian to
fetch it, he needs to be very good, and very wise, not to abuse his
position. But the white man, as yet, is a half-tamed pirate, and
avails himself as much as ever of the maxim, "Might makes right." All
that civilization does for the generality is to cover up this with a
veil of subtle evasions and chicane, and here and there to rouse the
individual mind to appeal to Heaven against it.

I have no hope of liberalizing the missionary, of humanizing the
sharks of trade, of infusing the conscientious drop into the flinty
bosom of policy, of saving the Indian from immediate degradation and
speedy death. The whole sermon may be preached from the text, "Needs
be that offences must come, yet woe onto them by whom they come."
Yet, ere they depart, I wish there might be some masterly attempt to
reproduce, in art or literature, what is proper to them,--a kind of
beauty and grandeur which few of the every-day crowd have hearts to
feel, yet which ought to leave in the world its monuments, to inspire
the thought of genius through all ages. Nothing in this kind has been
done masterly; since it was Clevengers's ambition, 't is pity he had
not opportunity to try fully his powers. We hope some other mind may
be bent upon it, ere too late. At present the only lively impress
of their passage through the world is to be found in such books as
Catlin's, and some stories told by the old travellers.

Let me here give another brief tale of the power exerted by the
white man over the savage in a trying case; but in this case it was
righteous, was moral power.

"We were looking over McKenney's Tour to the Lakes, and, on observing
the picture of Key-way-no-wut, or the Going Cloud, Mr. B. observed,
'Ah, that is the fellow I came near having a fight with'; and he
detailed at length the circumstances. This Indian was a very desperate
character, and of whom, all the Leech Lake band stood in fear. He
would shoot down any Indian who offended him, without the least
hesitation, and had become quite the bully of that part of the tribe.
The trader at Leech Lake warned Mr. B. to beware of him, and said that
he once, when he (the trader) refused to give up to him his stock of
wild-rice, went and got his gun and tomahawk, and shook the tomahawk
over his head, saying, '_Now_, give me yo