f what would have
been acceptable as extends from the neighborhood of Saguina Bay to the
Miami of the Lakes, with a prospect of soon obtaining a breadth of 2
miles for a communication from the Miami to the Connecticut Reserve.
The treaty for this purpose entered into with the Ottoways, Chippeways,
Wyandots, and Pottawattamies at Detroit on the 17th of November last is
now transmitted to the Senate, and I ask their advice and consent as to
its ratification.

I communicate herewith such papers as bear any material relation to
the subject.

TH. JEFFERSON.

JANUARY 15, 1808.

_To the Senate of the United States_:

Although it is deemed very desirable that the United States should
obtain from the native proprietors the whole left bank of the
Mississippi to a certain breadth, yet to obliterate from the Indian
mind an impression deeply made in it that we are constantly forming
designs on their lands I have thought it best where urged by no
peculiar necessity to leave to themselves and to the pressure of
their own convenience only to come forward with offers of sale to
the United States.

The Choctaws, being indebted to certain mercantile characters beyond
what could be discharged by the ordinary proceeds of their huntings, and
pressed for payment by those creditors, proposed at length to the United
States to cede lands to the amount of their debts, and designated them
in two different portions of their country. These designations not at
all suiting us, their proposals were declined for that reason, and with
an intimation that if their own convenience should ever dispose them to
cede their lands on the Mississippi we should be willing to purchase.
Still urged by their creditors, as well as by their own desire to be
liberated from debt, they at length proposed to make a cession which
should be to our convenience. James Robertson, of Tennessee, and Silas
Dinsmore were thereupon appointed commissioners to treat with them on
that subject, with instructions to purchase only on the Mississippi. On
meeting their chiefs, however, it was found that such was the attachment
of the nation to their lands on the Mississippi that their chiefs could
not undertake to cede them; but they offered all their lands south of
a line to be run from their and our boundary at the Omochita eastwardly
to their boundary with the Creeks, on the ridge between the Tombigbee
and Alabama, which would unite our possessions there from Natchez
to Tombi