When I had landed from the steamer Warrior, at the wharf, I left all other considerations to hasten and report myself to my dear wife, leaving my little canoe on deck and in the especial charge of the Captain, till I should return for it in the afternoon, and remove it to safe storage with my other Indian articles, to form an interesting part of my Museum. On my return to the steamer it was “_missing_,” and like one that I have named on a former occasion, by some _medicine_ operation, for ever severed from my sight, though not from my recollections, where it will long remain, and also in a likeness which I made of it (+plate+ 240, _a_), just after the trick it played me on the shore of the Mascotin Island. After I had finished the likeness of my friend Joe, and had told him the two stories, I sat down and wrote thus in my note-book, and now copy it into my Letter:— The West—not the “Far West,” for that is a phantom, travelling on its tireless wing: but the _West_, the simple West—the vast and vacant wilds which lie between the trodden haunts of present savage and civil life—the great and almost boundless garden-spot of earth! This is the theme at present. The “antres vast and deserts idle,” where the tomahawk sleeps with the bones of the savage, as yet untouched by the trespassing ploughshare—the pictured land of silence, which, in its melancholy alternately echoes backward and forward the plaintive yells of the vanished red men, and the busy chaunts of the approaching pioneers. I speak of the boundless plains of beauty, and Nature’s richest livery, where the waters of the “great deep” parted in peace, and gracefully passed off without leaving deformity behind them. Over whose green, enamelled fields, as boundless and free as the ocean’s wave, Nature’s proudest, noblest men have pranced on their wild horses, and extended, through a series of ages, their long arms in orisons of praise and gratitude to the Great Spirit in the sun, for the freedom and happiness of their existence.—The land that was beautiful and famed, but had no chronicler to tell—where, while “civilized” was yet in embryo, dwelt the valiant and the brave, whose deeds of chivalry and honour have passed away like themselves, unembalmed and untold—where the plumed war-horse has pranced in time with the shrill sounding war-cry, and the eagle calumet as oft sent solemn and mutual pledges in fumes to the skies. I speak of the _neutral ground_ (for such it may be called), where the smoke of the wigwam is no longer seen, but the bleaching bones of the buffaloes, and the graves of the savage, tell the story of times and days that are passed—the land of stillness, on which the red man now occasionally re-treads in sullen contemplation, amid the graves of his fathers, and over which civilized man advances, filled with joy and gladness.