.

I should be sorry to have my reader suppose that I am coloring the
picture too highly; I saw with my own eyes several of the cases of
misery which I have been describing; and I was the witness of sufferings
which I have not the power to portray.

At the end of the year 1831, whilst I was on the left bank of the
Mississippi at a place named by Europeans, Memphis, there arrived a
numerous band of Choctaws (or Chactas, as they are called by the
French in Louisiana). These savages had left their country, and were
endeavoring to gain the right bank of the Mississippi, where they
hoped to find an asylum which had been promised them by the American
government. It was then the middle of winter, and the cold was unusually
severe; the snow had frozen hard upon the ground, and the river was
drifting huge masses of ice. The Indians had their families with them;
and they brought in their train the wounded and sick, with children
newly born, and old men upon the verge of death. They possessed neither
tents nor wagons, but only their arms and some provisions. I saw them
embark to pass the mighty river, and never will that solemn spectacle
fade from my remembrance. No cry, no sob was heard amongst the assembled
crowd; all were silent. Their calamities were of ancient date, and they
knew them to be irremediable. The Indians had all stepped into the bark
which was to carry them across, but their dogs remained upon the bank.
As soon as these animals perceived that their masters were finally
leaving the shore, they set up a dismal howl, and, plunging all together
into the icy waters of the Mississippi, they swam after the boat.

The ejectment of the Indians very often takes place at the present
day, in a regular, and, as it were, a legal manner. When the European
population begins to approach the limit of the desert inhabited by a
savage tribe, the government of the United States usually dispatches
envoys to them, who assemble the Indians in a large plain, and having
first eaten and drunk with them, accost them in the following manner:
"What have you to do in the land of your fathers? Before long, you must
dig up their bones in order to live. In what respect is the country you
inhabit better than another? Are there no woods, marshes, or prairies,
except where you dwell? And can you live nowhere but under your own sun?
Beyond those mountains which you see at the horizon, beyond the lake
which bounds your territory on the west, there li