This story may be true, and it may not. I cannot contradict it; and I am sure the world will forgive me, if I say, I cannot believe it. If it be true, two things are also true; the one, not much to the credit of the Indian character; and the other, to the everlasting infamy of the Fur Traders. If it be true, it furnishes an instance of Indian depravity that I never have elsewhere heard of in my travels; and carries the most conclusive proof of the incredible enormity of white men’s dealings in this country; who, for some sinister purpose must have introduced the poisonous drug into the country, and taught the poor chief how to use it; whilst they were silent accessories to the murders he was committing. This story is said to have been told by the Fur Traders; and although I have not always the highest confidence in their justice to the Indian, yet, I cannot for the honour of my own species, believe them to be so depraved and so wicked, nor so weak, as to reveal such iniquities of this chief, if they were true, which must directly implicate themselves as accessories to his most wilful and unprovoked murders. Such he has been heralded, however, to future ages, as a murderer—like hundreds and thousands of others, as “horse thieves”—as “drunkards”—as “rogues of the first order,” &c. &c.—by the historian who catches but a glaring story, (and perhaps fabrication) of their lives, and has no time nor disposition to enquire into and record their long and brilliant list of virtues, which must be lost in the shade of infamy, for want of an historian. I have learned much of this noble chieftain, and at a proper time shall recount the modes of his civil and military life—how he exposed his life, and shed his blood in rescuing the victims to horrid torture, and abolished that savage custom in his tribe—-how he led on and headed his brave warriors, against the Sacs and Foxes; and saved the butchery of his women and children—how he received the Indian agent, and entertained him in his hospitable wigwam, in his village—and how he conducted and acquitted himself on his embassy to the civilized world. So much I will take pains to say, of a man whom I never saw, because other historians have taken equal pains just to mention his name, and a solitary (and doubtful) act of his life, as they have said of hundreds of others, for the purpose of consigning him to infamy. How much more kind would it have been for the historian, who never saw him, to have enumerated with this, other characteristic actions of his life (for the verdict of the world); or to have allowed, in charity, his bones and his name to have slept in silence, instead of calling them up from the grave, to thrust a dagger through them, and throw them back again.