It is probable that the United States agent was at a disadvantage in dealing with the Indians, as he would have to obey the law forbidding the supplying them with spirits; which law the other traders ignored. In Hurlbut's "Antiquities" a bit of "local color" gives with much vividness the condition of the prairie in those days. "In the holidays of 1808-9 Mr. Jouett (then a widower) married Susan Randolph Allen of Kentucky, and they made their wedding journey on horseback in January, through the jungles, over the snow drifts, on the ice and across the prairies, in the face of driving storms and the frozen breath of the winds of the north. They had, on their journey, a negro servant named Joe Battles and an Indian guide whose name was Robinson; possibly the late chief Alexander Robinson. A team and wagon followed, conveying their baggage, and _they marked their route for the benefit of any future travelers."_ The government had tried to befriend the Indian in every way. It did not forbid private traders from dealing with him; but it appointed agents whose duty it was to sell him goods at prices barely sufficient to cover cost and expenses. At the same time it forbade, under penalty, the supplying him with liquor in any quantity, upon any pretext. Unhappily the last-named kindly effort thwarted the first. The miserable savage loved the venal white who would furnish him with the poison. For it he would give not only his furs, but his food and shelter, his wives and children, his body and his everlasting soul. As the grand old Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy says, regarding the treaty of 1821, at which he was present: "At the treaty Topenebe, the principal chief of the Pottowatomies, a man nearly eighty years of age [a long and constant friend of the Kinzies], irritated by the continued refusal on the part of the commissioners to gratify his importunities for whisky, exclaimed in the presence of his tribe: 'We care not for the land, the money or the goods. It is whisky we want. Give us the whisky.' After the business of the treaty was concluded and before the Indians left the treaty grounds, seven barrels of whisky were given them, and within twenty-four hours afterward ten shocking murders were committed amongst them." To quote from Munsell's History of Chicago: Few and meagre are the records of occurrences on the banks of the Chicago during these quiet years. The stagnation in this remote corner of creation was in sharp contrast with the doings in the great world, for these were the momentous Napoleonic years. Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Wagram, were fought between 1805 and 1809, and one wonders whether even the echoes of the sound of those fights reached little Fort Dearborn. Yet the tremendous doings were not without their influence; for it was Napoleon's "European System" and England's struggle against it that precipitated our war of 1812; and one trivial incident in that war was the ruin of our little outpost.