war, were committed by the
Potawatomi. The cowardly and brutal massacre at Chicago, August 15,
1812, was the work principally of the Potawatomi, "and their several
bands from the Illinois and Kankakee rivers; those from the St. Joseph
of the lake, and the St. Joseph of the Maumee, and those of the Wabash
and its tributaries were all represented in the despicable act." In that
massacre, Captain William Wells, the brother-in-law of Little Turtle,
was killed when he was trying to protect the soldiers and refugees. He
was discovered afterwards, terribly mutilated. His body lay in one
place, his head in another, while his arms and legs were scattered about
over the prairie. The warriors of this tribe, stripped to the skin,
except breech-cloth and moccasins, and with bodies painted with red
stripes, went into battle with the rage of mad-men and demons and
committed every excess known to human cruelty.

Looking at the Potawatomi in the true light, and stripped of all that
false coloring with which he has been painted, and the facts remains
that he was every inch a wild and untamed barbarian. And while we must
admire him for his native strength, his wonderful endurance through the
famine and cold of the northern winters, and his agility and ingenuity
in the chase or on the warpath, it is not any wonder that the children
of that time, as Judge James Hall relates, "learned to hate the Indian
and to speak of him as an enemy. From the cradle they listened
continually to horrid tales of savage violence, and became familiar with
narratives of aboriginal cunning and ferocity." Nor is it any wonder
that when General Harrison crossed the Wabash at Montezuma and gave an
order to the advance guard to shoot every Indian at sight, that the
rough frontiersman, John Tipton, entered in his diary, "Fine News!"

CHAPTER VIII

OUR INDIAN POLICY

_--The Indian right of occupancy recognized through the liberal policy
of Washington and Jefferson._

By the terms of the definitive treaty of 1783, concluding the war of the
revolution the territory northwest of the river Ohio passed forever from
the jurisdiction of the British government, over to the new born states
of the United States. By the first article of that treaty, the thirteen
former colonies were acknowledged to be free, sovereign and independent
powers, and Great Britain not only relinquished all her rights to the
government, but to the "proprietary and territorial rights of th