For some years it had been customary for the British authorities to send presents to the Indians on the Mississippi, and Robert Dickson had promised the natives that the practice would be continued. But with the coming of peace this custom was not allowed by the Americans. Accordingly, in June, 1815, word was sent to the river tribes, that all who came to the British headquarters at Drummond Island in Lake Huron, would be supplied. By June 19th of the next year four hundred Indians had arrived at the post--mainly Sioux. To sympathetic ears they reported that they feared that the Americans were planning their extinction, and a confederation was being formed to resist the building of American forts on the Indian lands. As late as 1825, of the four thousand Indians in the habit of visiting Drummond Island, three thousand came from the region west and southwest of Lake Huron--that is from American territory.[37] These motley processions which trailed through the American woods, stopping to beg at the American posts, were not slow in being reported. It did not take a vivid imagination to see that the renewal of border warfare was inevitable.[38] This danger was increased by the rapid development of the West following the war. Just as over the mountain trails and down the rivers, Kentucky and Tennessee had been settled before the war, now the States of the Old Northwest received their pioneers. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who made his first trip down the Ohio at this time (1818), remarked: "I mingled in this crowd, and, while listening to the anticipations indulged in, it seemed to me that the war had not, in reality, been fought for 'free trade and sailors' rights' where it had commenced, but to gain a knowledge of the world beyond the Alleghanies.... To judge by the tone of general conversation, they meant, in their generation, to plow the Mississippi Valley from its head to its foot."[39] The flatboats on the rivers, the crowded ferries, and the caravans crossing the prairies were familiar scenes. In _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_, which appeared in 1819, Washington Irving puts this fondest dream into the mind of his hero, Ichabod: "Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where." When he wrote this the author was not using his imagination: it was a picture he saw daily.[40]