Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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Thus I found myself, full of misgivings, in the country & state of my birth, for the 1st time since Mother & I had left them in 1783, when I was seven. I crost “glad Chesapeake” to the broad Choptank & Cooke’s Point, half expecting to be greeted by some version of “Henry Burlingame IV.” There were the frozen marshes of my childhood, the geese flown down from Canada to winter, the graves of good Maggie Mungummory & divers ancient Cookes, the tall-topt pines, the house of my ancestors (long since sold out of the family, & in need of repairs), the ice-blue water lapping chillily at the beach. The scene spoke to me of my namesake’s journey north to where those geese came from (I mean my grandfather’s, A.C. III’s), to learn the truth about his derivation & then to deal with it. ’Twas a tale I’d had in mythic outline, so to speak, from Mother, and from “Father” in the opprobrious detail rehearst in my 2nd letter (I had not yet seen all the diaries & other documents). I was nearing 30, sans course or cause or calling; I had not been to Castines Hundred myself since my 10th year. It was time.

Now we move more swiftly, as my life has moved through the eight years since. I spent that winter as a guest of the Pattersons in Baltimore, acquainting myself with American society in that city as well as in Philadelphia &, especially, the new capital town of Washington, still a-building. There Jefferson, friend of Barlow & of France as his predecessor had not been, was in the new President’s House, having been elected by the House of Representatives after a tie vote with Aaron Burr in the electoral college. Tho he opposed the strong navy built under John Adams’s administration (with the help of the Barbary pirates, who had already broacht “our” treaty!), the same amity with Napoleon that put an end to the naval quarrels between France & the U. States had made possible Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana from the First Consul. “America” now extended even west of the Mississippi, no one knew how far, some said all the way to the Pacific; Jefferson was sending an expedition from St. Louis to find out. Already nearly a million people had crost the line Pontiac fought for, and settled west of the Appalachians; Jefferson’s purchase would redouble that flow of settlers onto Indian lands, now going for $2 the acre. But as the Burr-Jefferson campaign made clear (and the earlier disputation over where the new capital should be built), the union of states was fragile yet; much, much was in the balance. I convey’d Barlow’s regards to the President, who pleasantly inform’d me that I was “much changed” since he had known me as Joel’s ward in Paris. He instructed me to advise Barlow that building lots, both in the city proper & in Georgetown, were still cheap: B. would do well to buy a few now if he was interested. But he should probably postpone his return to the country (another of my errands was to make this inquiry) until after the coming election, when the Republicans expected to sweep the field. Once reelected with a clear mandate, Jefferson could respond favorably to Barlow’s proposal that a national university be establisht in the capital, as suggested in George Washington’s will. He promist to invite Barlow himself to preside over its establishment.

Before I could sound him out on the question of a free state for Indians & manumitted or escaped African slaves – who since 1795 had been living together peacefully in the refugee Iroquois villages along the Grand River valley – he astonisht me by asking candidly whether I believed my father dead. I replied, I could but hope so, and ask’d him why he ask’d. Because, he said, he had heard from Mr. Alexander Hamilton, who had marshal’d his defeat of Burr in the House elections, that the man he had so narrowly defeated – now Vice-President of the nation! – was scheming with someone known to Hamilton’s informants only as “H.B.,” to promote a war with Spain & lead an expedition to snatch Mexico. Given the prevailing scurrility of the political climate, where Burr’s “low morals” (like John Randolph’s “impotence” & Barlow’s “free-thinking”) were openly lampoon’d, it was perfectly likely that the rumor was a Republican fabrication. On the other hand, given Burr’s energy, competence, unpredictability, & great ambition, together with the fluidity of the international situation, the rumor might be true. There was more America between the Appalachians & the Mississippi than between the Atlantic & the Appalachians, & yet more west of the Mississippi than those two regions combined, all of it up for grabs; plus giant Mexico below & giant Canada above, great prizes both. Bonaparte’s example was infectious: many besides Aaron Burr must be dreaming, not only of empire, but of literal emperorhood. Even Barlow, Jefferson had heard, that utterly unmilitary man (from whom he had the legendary exploits of my father), had petition’d the French Directory to lead an expedition into Louisiana…

Calling on Burr was my last errand in Maryland. The President, tho he could spare me but a quarter-hour, had done so promptly & cordially; the Vice-President did not want to see me. Burr protested his disbelief that I was who I claim’d to be (I was “too much changed”); then he kept me half an afternoon whilst he fulminated against Jefferson, against the Republicans, against the southern states, against the New York Tammany society which he himself had organized politically for the 1800 elections, only to have them turn on him after the contest in the House; against Alexander Hamilton, whose opposition would make it difficult for Burr to win even the governorship of New York, much less the presidency, in the current campaign. Barbarous, impossible, splendid country! Did I know that Hamilton had seriously consider’d leading an army into Mexico and proclaiming himself Emperor of Central & South America? & cetera. I ask’d for news of “H.B.” Burr said he expected me to have brot news from him; then he repeated his conviction that George Washington had had my father done away with after his betrayal of poor Benedict Arnold. Finally he mutter’d: “If he is not dead, he has turn’d into an Ohio River Irishman.” This remark he would not amplify. When I prest, he told me crossly I had been too long a Frenchman; that it was a mere idiom of the country. And he bid me good day.

Errands done, come spring I crost the mountains myself (in a wagon train bound for Governor Harrison’s Indian country) thro the Cumberland Gap to Pittsburgh, a brawling city sprung up where Pontiac’s Indians had been “Consuelo’d” with smallpox blankets. Thence up the Allegheny to Chautauqua Lake, where my dear grandparents had schemed & trysted half a century before. Over the portage trail to Lake Erie; by rough boat across to chilly Upper Canada, then again by wagon to Niagara (where I re-met Jérôme Bonaparte & his bride, honeymooning at the Falls), & anon to Castines Hundred. With every additional degree of north latitude and west longitude, my head clear’d. Even before I met your mother (then a fine fifteen) and fell in love with her on the spot, my movement from Napoleon’s France (and George’s England) to Jefferson’s America show’d me what Barlow & Tom Paine had been talking about: I understood I was not European. Moving farther, from the fail’d ideals of the French Revolution, thro the failing ones of the American, to the open country of the Indians, show’d me what my grandparents (and J. J. Rousseau) had been talking about: I understood I was not “American” either. My first adult glimpse of a Canadian village populated by white Loyalist refugees, displaced Iroquois, escaped Negro slaves, French habitants, & (a very few) British Canadians, cohabiting uneasily & in poverty but on the whole not unsuccessfully, set me to dreaming the family dream: a harmony not only between man & man, but between men & Nature. Jefferson’s ideal for the Indians – that they should all become little farmers, homesteaders, settlers—struck me now as no less grotesque than that they should become shopkeepers or sailors: I understood what Major Rogers had been talking about in his Ponteach; or, the Savages of America: A Tragedy. I was yet to meet Andrée’s idol Tecumseh, & do my utmost to advance his cause in the manner of us Cooks & Burlingames, and come to learn what a greater writer than any of these, old Sophocles, was talking about.

But I met ma belle cousine & her gentle parents, the lord & lady of Castines Hundred. I fell in love; not so Andrée, still under the spell of her Shawnee hero – her worrisome infatuation with whom led the Baron & Baroness to look favorably on my own attentions to her tho I was unpropertied, footloose, & as much her senior as Tecumseh, without his nobility of character. Being of French rather than English extraction, and part Indian himself thro his ancestor’s marriage to Madocawanda, the Baron was no bigot, but his tastes were those of a country gentilhomme, and he had opposed Andrée’s passion for Tecumseh not only on the grounds of her age but because he wisht a more settled life for her. (He was later to oppose our own match on that same sensible ground, when it became clear I was “my father’s son”; but when you made your existence known, he put by his objection with the good grace of the Barons Castine.) They had no firm word of my father since his visit of 1793, en route to Chief Little Turtle’s efforts against the American Legion: they had found him much changed; would not have known him but for his knowledge of our history & his characteristic enterprises. One rumor had it he was establisht on an island in the lower reaches of the Ohio, under an assumed name…

I took the occasion to make my filial feelings clear. The Baron & Baroness were taken aback, less by my sentiments (they had gravely mixt opinions of the man themselves, especially in his “Joseph Brant” metamorphosis, and they remember’d sympathetically my mother’s distraction) than by the indelicate vehemence of my expression. But Andrée brighten’d at once; lookt on me thenceforward with real interest, & question’d me endlessly thro the summer upon my theory that her Uncle Henry—& his grandfather H.B. III before him – had been secret Judas Iscariots of the Indian cause at Bloodsworth Island, at the Wyoming & Cherry Valleys, at Fallen Timbers, & the rest. She reminded me that he had made the same sort of charges against his father, Andrew Cooke III, vis-à-vis Pontiac’s betrayal. She urged me to meet Tecumseh, “the Shooting Star.” I declined, jealous, & declared the Indian cause already lost. A receding series of betrayals & retreats was their future, I opined: along the Eastern seaboard they were already but a colorful memory; in a hundred years they would be no more than that along the Pacific.

Andrée agreed, so long as the U. States’ westward expansion went uncheckt. And what could check it? Not Tecumseh’s daydream of confederating all the Indians from Florida to the Lakes, I scoft: that was but the tragedy of Pontiac replay’d. So it would be, my young friend conceded – unless, as she & Tecumseh plann’d, the action of the Indians coincided with full-scale war between the U. States & G. Britain!

I was astonisht, not only by the boldness of her suggestion, but by her precocious grasp of history & politics. It was not just to westward the “Americans” were moving, she declared: the U. States merchant fleet was grown prodigious in the Atlantic trade. But since Napoleon had broken the Peace of Amiens last year & gone to war in the Mediterranean, Britain had extended her policy of economic warfare by blockading French & Spanish ports against neutral shipping, & Napoleon must surely retaliate with a similar blockade against Britain. U. States ships & cargoes were being snatcht by both sides for running these blockades, & U. States sailors were being imprest into the Royal Navy. John Adams’s Federalist administration, sympathetic to the ties between old & New England, had come close to war with France in 1798 on these accounts. Jefferson’s Republicans inclined against Britain despite their reservations about Napoleon. My excellent cousin was persuaded that since the U. States could not afford to fight both major powers, it was likely to refight the War of 1776 if peaceful Jefferson – who would surely be reelected this year – were succeeded in 1808 by a less formidable or less pacific Republican. To the Loyalists in Upper Canada the ’76 war was still a rebellion, not a revolution; it was they who had prest Governor Haldimand not to return Fort Niagara to the U. States at the war’s end, and when he was obliged to – but only in 1796—to construct another fort on Canadian soil just across the gorge from it. A quarter-century of exile had dimm’d but not extinguisht their hope that New England, at least, might still secede from the Union, annex itself to Canada, & welcome them home. Young Republicans from the new western & southern states, for their part, were eager to move against the Canadas & the Floridas, on pretext that Britain was arming & inciting Indians against the western settlements. If they gain’d sufficient strength in Congress, especially in the off-year elections of 1806 and 1810, they could surely exploit the maritime issues to ally New England & the mid-Atlantic states to their cause. And if finally, over that same period, Britain & France continued to exhaust each other’s resources in European wars, & “we” were able to turn the western congressmen’s pretext into a fact by organizing Tecumseh’s Indian confederacy (a popular idea in the British cabinet, as it would make western America in effect a royal protectorate), there could be a 2nd Revolutionary War, as it were, as early as 1809 or ’10! To give her projections a little margin, Andrée was already speaking of it as “the War of 1811.” She would be 22 then: “we” had seven years to make our preparations.

I.e., herself, Tecumseh, me… and my father, her legendary Uncle Henry, if we could find him & determine once for all his true allegiance. Ten years past, her Indian friend had fought with Little Turtle’s Miamis in their victory over American soldiers on the Wabash & their defeat by Wayne’s American Legion at Fallen Timbers; thus his introduction to my father & subsequent visits to Castines Hundred. But Tecumseh was his own man, and tho he had valued “H.B.‘s” high opinion of Pontiac (his own model & exemplar), he had not always trusted his advice, particularly after Fallen Timbers. Just then, neither’s whereabouts was known.

I reported what I’d heard from Jefferson and Burr, which corroborated the Baron’s last news of “H.B.” I knew too little of American politics to yea or nay Andrée’s complex prognostications, but enough of French & Algerine, & of history generally, to warn her that events have their own momentum, & quickly get beyond the grasp of those who would control them. And if I should ever go in search of my “father,” I declared, it would not be to enlist myself in his cause, or him in mine.

“We don’t know his,” Andrée said tartly, “and you have none.”

True enough – till love & Aaron Burr gave me one, that same year. News reacht us of Burr’s duel with Hamilton on the Hudson Palisades, which spoilt his bid for the New York governorship & forced him into a kind of hiding. He was headed, we heard, for the Louisiana territory, where he own’d land, with a band of settlers, perhaps to establish a new state. But there were also rumors of intended rendezvous with a volunteer army that had been training on Blennerhassett Island in the Ohio River, no one knew what for. Napoleon, age 35, was crown’d Emperor of France & Anointed of the Lord, and prepared to make war against Austria & Russia. Jefferson handily won reelection; Republican strength increast in the Congress. I turn’d 28, & proposed marriage to my 16-year-old cousin. The Baron & Baroness said she was not ready; Andrée declared I was not, till I had accomplisht something in “our cause.” She bade me reconnoitre the activity on Blennerhassett Island, determine whether “Harman Blennerhassett” (so we had learnt its owner to be denominated) was my father, & whether whatever was afoot ’twixt him & Burr was an aid or a threat to Tecumseh’s program. I was then to take “appropriate measures,” report to Tecumseh, & ask the Chief’s permission for her hand! If he approved, she was mine whatever her dear parents thot.

Well, I could not stay on at Castines Hundred. In 1805 & ’06 & ’07—whilst Napoleon won at Ulm, Austerlitz, & Jena, lost at Trafalgar, and, just as Andrée had forecast, issued the Berlin Decree against trade with Britain in retaliation for Britain’s Orders in Council against trade with France; and whilst a sea battle was fought off the Virginia Capes betwixt the USS Chesapeake and HMS Leopard, such as she had hoped for (and whilst Jérôme Bonaparte’s marriage was annull’d by his brother, who made him King of Westphalia, and whilst Joel & Ruthy Barlow settled down in Philadelphia to bring out the Columbiad, and Toot Fulton helpt him with the engravings & built the Clermont)—I follow’d Burr’s fortunes from Blennerhassett Island, by flatboat down the Ohio & Mississippi to New Orleans & his arrest for conspiring to separate the western states from the Union; thence to Richmond & his trial & acquittal.

When Burr fled to Europe in perfect disgrace, and Harman Blennerhassett settled down to raise cotton in Mississippi, I came back to make my report (and en route met that 1st uncritical auditor of my Algerine adventure, Midshipman Cooper). Taken separately, I declared to Andrée, neither Harman Blennerhassett nor Aaron Burr was guilty as charged, and Justice Marshall had fairly resisted Jefferson’s pressure to convict. Blennerhassett, an Irish lawyer & adventurer, was in my opinion primarily bent on marching on Mexico, and Burr on bringing a large new state into the Union with himself as governor, tho each was prepared to do both if it should prove feasible. The conspiracy was mainly the invention of Jefferson’s western army commander, General James Wilkinson, a bona fide traitor in the secret pay of Spain, who (again in my opinion, because at my urging) had prest the Western Empire idea on B. & B. to divert them from Mexico; aroused their interest in it as a possibility if their “legitimate” program should fail; and then tattled on them to Jefferson & turn’d state’s evidence to cover his tracks as a Spanish agent!

In the same way, I did not believe that either Blennerhassett or Burr was guilty of being “Henry Burlingame IV,” whether or not that fellow in his latter guises was my sire.

Drawing on what I’d learnt from Consuelo to pose as a fellow agent of the Spanish minister to the U. States, I had enlisted Wilkinson to scotch their plan, not altogether on Tecumseh’s behalf (tho anything but the Mexican enterprise would have meant more encroachment on Indian lands) but principally to thwart two people who – separately or together! – might be H.B. IV. It was my intention to keep an occasional eye on both, especially on Burr, who it pleased me to report had at no time penetrated my disguise. Finally, at 18 my taskmaster was more desirable than before, & would she marry me?

She would be happy to, your mother replied, with Tecumseh’s consent. What had been his judgment of me?

I confest I had been too proud to seek him out & ask it, tho I’d heard his praises sung from Buffalo to New Orleans. A pity, Andrée said, since on the strength of her descriptions of me to Tecumseh during his recentest visit to Castines Hundred, he seem’d favorably inclined to the match. He had agreed in principle, she declared, that a war betwixt the British & the “Seventeen Fires” (as he call’d the U. States) would serve the interests of the Indians if the British won. They had proposed to him already the establishment of an arm’d Indian free state extending south from the Great Lakes. But he had seconded also my caution that events have energies of their own, and he worried that a U. States victory in such a war would be the end of Indian sovereignty. Even more he approved any plan to divide the Union, so long as it did not involve the formation of new white nations on Indian lands, as had Aaron Burr’s. Non-literate himself, Tecumseh was particularly imprest with my reported ability to counterfeit letters & other documents, so important in the white men’s commerce with one another. He had inquired of Andrée whether that talent might be put to use to disunite the Seventeen Fires whilst he tried to unite with his oratory the nations of the Indians.

And why, I ask’d, had Tecumseh paid this call on her? Because, she replied, his younger brother’s assumption in 1805 of the role of prophet & visionary, following upon Tecumseh’s own revival of Pontiac’s plan for an Indian confederacy, had put him troubledly in mind of Pontiac’s association with the Delaware Prophet, whose “vision” he knew to have been influenced by the 1st Andrée Castine. Tecumseh was uneasy about this reenactment; he trusted his brother’s loyalty, but not his judgment; he wanted, Andrée believed, both to reassure himself that she would not be another “Angélique Cuillerier,” & at the same time to learn whether she had any suggestions for improving his brother’s “vision” in the way the first Andrée had improved the Delaware Prophet’s. Your mother tactfully responded that her only vision was of Tecumseh at the head of an Indian empire rivalling that of the Aztecs or the Incas. Then she made the practical suggestion that the Prophet establish a religious center at some strategic location convenient to the principal nations of the confederacy – say, at the confluence of the Wabash & the Tippecanoe in the Indiana territory – to give the proposed union a physical headquarters like that of the Seventeen Fires in Washington. An “official” seat of authority, she maintain’d, might help to counter the Americans’ practice of making treaties to their own advantage with disaffected groups of Indians or self-styled chiefs. And the establishment of an Indian Mecca or Vatican, with the Wabash prophet at its head, would also help distinguish & fix him as the religious leader of the confederacy, & keep him out of Tecumseh’s hair in political & military matters. Tecumseh had thot this an inspired idea, thankt her happily, & urged her to send her intended to him.

For so she now declared me, in recompense for my work against the western empire of Burr, Blennerhassett, & General Wilkinson. But if I would have her to wife, I must complete two further tasks, one as it were for Tecumseh & the other as it might seem against him, for herself. She had learnt from her father’s friends in the Canadian Governor-General’s office that that worthy, Sir James Craig, was much pleased with a series of newspaper articles lately publisht by one John Henry of Vermont, attacking the republican form of government in general & the Republican administration in Washington in particular. Craig wanted to know whether this Henry could be hired to agitate in the Federalist press for the secession of New York & New England after the 1808 elections, when another Virginian was expected to follow Jefferson in the President’s House. Andrée had proposed me as one who could not only make that ascertainment, but supply Henry with appropriate copy, if necessary, to publish under his name. Her Quebec associate had offer’d to provide me with expense money & a stipend for this not very difficult assignment, which would serve also as my initiation into the British-Canadian secret service.

The 2nd task was more delicate. Governor Harrison of Indiana was negotiating with minor chiefs of the Delawares, Kickapoos, Miamis, & others of Pontiac’s old confederates to sell some 3,000,000 acres of their prime common hunting territory along the Wabash, for an absurdly small sum. Tecumseh opposed such a sale at any price; had even threaten’d to kill the potential signatories of Harrison’s treaty. My task was to suggest to him that his cause might better be served by permitting the treaty to be sign’d over his protests (but not by the Shawnees) & then enlisting the fierce Lake Erie Wyandots, who so far had held aloof from his confederacy, to aid him in punishing the “degenerate village chiefs” who sign’d it. The action would appeal to the Wyandots; their enlistment would impress the Potawatomis & other reluctant tribes; the elimination of those defectors amongst the minor chiefs would strengthen the Indian alliance & serve as a warning against further such treaties. It would also serve to introduce me to the Indians, whom I did not yet truly know… & to Tecumseh.

I observed to my young fiancée that she was ordering the deaths of some half-dozen human beings. She replied that they were cynical, drunken traitors who would trade their birthright & their people for a barrel of whiskey. If she could, she would perform the executions herself, with pleasure.

The 1st task was both easy & agreeable: it fetcht me in 1808 to Montreal & across the St. Lawrence into Vermont, where I readily enlisted the ambitious & erratic Mr. Henry – a former greengrocer, newspaper publisher, & artillery captain – to go down to Boston & test the air there for secession. I provided him with a simple cipher & instructions for transmitting his reports to the Governor-General’s office. Then, after Madison’s election & inauguration, I went to Boston myself to retrieve the man from the taverns & brothels where he claim’d to be keeping his finger on the pulse of public sentiment, and scolded him for providing “us” with no more than we could read more cheaply in the Boston newspapers: e.g., that the Federalists would oppose any move against Britain and, if Madison yielded to the western war-hawks, would perhaps attempt to set up a Congress of Federalist States in Boston or Hartford & remain neutral. I myself predicted (& still predict) against their actual secession, but felt the question to be of slight importance: there was enough pro-British, anti-French, & especially anti-Republican sentiment amongst the Yankees to guarantee a steady illegal sale of supplies from New York & New England to British forces in Canada. If the war goes successfully for Britain in that theater, annexation of those states to Canada should be negotiable without great difficulty. Whilst in Boston I draughted a few sample letters for Henry to cipher & transmit as his own. It did not trouble me that the man was of no consequence as a spy, for I saw already to what better use his letters could be put. I instructed him to keep copies, for the purpose of documenting his service to the British Foreign Office, and let him back to his tarts & ale.

The 2nd task was another story. Acting on your mother’s suggestion, in 1808 Tecumseh establisht for his brother “the Prophet’s Town” near where the Tippecanoe joins the Wabash: a mixt Indian community dedicated to industriousness, sobriety, the common ownership of property, brotherhood amongst the nations of red men, & repudiation of all things learnt from the “Long Knives,” by which term they call’d us whites. So successful was the town, & the strategy, Governor Harrison mistook the Prophet (who had changed his name from Lalawethika, or “Loud Mouth,” to Tenskwatawa, “Open Door”) for the leader of the confederacy, & invited him in the summer of 1809 to confer at Vincennes, the territorial capital, concerning the proposed treaty. That year I met all three.

Child: I am a Cook, not a Burlingame. You Burlingames get from your ancestor H.B. III a passion for the world that fetches you everywhere at once, in guises manifold as the world’s, to lead & shape its leaders & shapers. We Cooks, I know now, get from our forebear Ebenezer, the virgin poet of Maryland, an inexhaustible innocence that, whatever our involvement in the world (we are not merely Cooks), inclines us to be followers – better, learners: tutees of the Burlingames & those they’ve shaped. If Aaron Burr & Harman Blennerhassett had been one & the same man, as it sometimes seem’d to me they were, that man would be the Burlingame I despise & wish dead. If Tecumseh & Tenskwatawa were one man – a distillation & embodiment of the Indian blood flowing thro our line – that man would be the father I could love, admire, & pity. Of the Prophet I will say little: Jefferson agrees with Harrison that he is a rogue & charlatan, a former brawling drunk who, after a “conversion” as dramatical as Paul’s on the Damascus Road, became a teetotaling faker. I myself believe him to be both authentic & authentically half-mad, nowise to be trusted; I believe further that Tecumseh so saw him too, from the beginning.

As for the “Shooting Star”: what greater expression of my admiration can I make than that Tecumseh is more deserving of Andrée’s love than I? That I had rather be esteem’d by him than by anyone save her? That I think him worth a Jefferson, two Madisons, three Barlows, five Napoleons? I never felt more my grandfather’s son (but remember, I did not yet know that history in detail) than when I first sat at the feet of this successor to Pontiac, whom I pray it will be your fortune one day to meet as the head of a great free league of Indian nations, and to love as I do.

He began our closer connection in July 1810, by saving my life. On the strength of my relation to Andrée & my father’s & grandfather’s to Pontiac, Tecumseh had permitted me to live in the Prophet’s town (over the Prophet’s objections) & practice the Algonkin language thro the summer & fall of 1809, between my embassies to John Henry. He had heard me out carefully, thro an interpreter, on Andrée’s proposal regarding the Wyandots & the Harrison treaty, and had replied that while it did not strike him as the best strategy, it was the course he would probably follow anyhow, inasmuch as he expected the “village chiefs” to sign the treaty despite his threats. He also told me that William Henry Harrison was no villain, but a worthy tho implacable adversary who had champion’d legal justice for the Indians (vainly) in the Indiana legislature in 1807, even whilst dickering to buy their land at 3½ mills the acre—600 times less than the government’s standard selling price! But he would not talk to me further about such important matters as Pontiac’s rebellion, or his opinion of my father & grandfather, or my betrothal to his young friend “Star-of-the-Lake,” until we could discuss them in Algonkin.