letters, half-written editorials,
incidents of travel, obsolete briefs, with many other odds and ends that
have fallen from my brain during the last three years, but which from want
of quality in them or lack of energy in me, have failed to reach the
dignity of types and ink; I came across a diary kept while hunting buffalo
with the Sac and Fox Indians, some two hundred miles west of the
Mississippi, during the summer of 1842. Finding myself interested in
recurring to the incidents of that excursion, it occurred to me that
matter might be drawn therefrom which would not be without interest to the
public. I have therefore ventured to offer the following for publication;
it being an account of a night passed at the source of the Checauque, when
I did not deem my scalp worth five minute's purchase, and when I
cheerfully would have given ten years of an ordinary life to have been
under the humblest roof in the most desolate spot in the 'land of steady
habits.'

I have said that we were in the country of the Sioux. That our situation
may be understood, I would remark farther, that between the latter and the
confederated tribes of the Sac and Fox Indians, there has been for the
last forty years, and still exists, the most inveterate hostility; the two
parties never meeting without bloodshed. The Government of the United
States, in pursuance of that policy which guides its conduct toward the
various Indian tribes, for the preservation of peace between these two
nations, have laid out between them a strip of country forty miles in
width, denominated the 'Neutral Ground,' and on to which neither nation is
permitted to extend their hunting excursions.

On the occasion of which I write, the Sacs and Foxes, having been
disappointed in finding buffalo within their own limits, and perhaps
feeling quite as anxious to fall in with a band of Sioux as to obtain
game, had passed the 'Neutral Ground,' and were now several days' journey
into the country of their enemies.

For the last two days we had marched with the utmost circumspection; our
spies ranged the country for miles in advance and on either flank, while
at night we had sought some valley as a place of encampment, where our
fires could not be seen from a distance. Each day we had perceived signs
which indicated that small parties of Sioux had been quite recently over
the very ground we were travelling. The whites in the company, numbering
some eleven or twelve, had remonstrate