The Frontier may properly be denominated the fleeting and unsettled line extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Lake of the Woods, a distance of three thousand miles; which indefinitely separates civilized from Indian population—a moving barrier, where the unrestrained and natural propensities of two people are concentrated, in an atmosphere of lawless iniquity, that offends Heaven, and holds in mutual ignorance of each other, the honourable and virtuous portions of two people, which seem destined never to meet. From what has been said in the foregoing epistles, the reader will agree that I have pretty closely adhered to my promise made in the commencement of them; that I should confine my remarks chiefly to people I have visited, and customs that I have _seen_, rather than by taking up his time with matter that might be gleaned from books. He will also agree, that I have principally devoted my pages, as I promised, to an account of the condition and customs of those Indians whom I have found entirely beyond the Frontier, acting and living as Nature taught them to live and act, without the examples, and consequently without the taints of civilized encroachments. He will, I flatter myself, also yield me some credit for devoting the time and space I have occupied in my first appeal to the world, entirely to the condition and actions of the _living_, rather than fatiguing him with _theories_ of the living or the dead. I have theories enough of my own, and have as closely examined the condition and customs of these people on the Frontier, as of those living beyond it—and also their past and present, and prospective history; but the reader will have learned, that my chief object in these Letters, has been not only to describe what I have _seen_, but of _those_ things, such as I deemed the most novel and least understood; which has of course confined my remarks heretofore, mostly to the character and condition of those tribes living entirely in a state of nature. And as I have now a little leisure, and no particular tribes before me to speak of, the reader will allow me to glance my eye over the whole Indian country for awhile, both along the Frontier and beyond it; taking a hasty and brief survey of them, and their prospects in the aggregate; and by not _seeing_ quite as distinctly as I have been in the habit of doing heretofore, taking pains to tell a little more emphatically what I _think_, and what I have _thought_ of those things that I have seen, and yet have told but in part.