At the conclusion of peace between England and America, in eighteen hundred and fifteen, the Indians, who had been instigated and supported in their hostility by the British, suddenly found themselves deprived of their allies. If they now made war upon the Americans, they must do so upon their own responsibility, and, excepting the encouragement of a few traders and commanders of outposts, whose enmity survived the general pacification, without assistance from abroad. They, however, refused to lay down their arms, and hostilities were continued, though languidly, for some years longer. But the rangers, now disciplined by the experience of protracted warfare, and vastly increased in numbers, had grown to be more than a match for them, so that not many years elapsed before the conclusion of a peace, which has lasted, with but occasional interruptions, to the present day. When danger no longer threatened the settlements, there was no further call for these irregular troops. The companies were disbanded, and those who had families, as a large proportion of them had, returned to their plantations, and resumed the pursuits of industry and peace. Those who had neither farms nor families, and were unfitted by their stirring life for regular effort, emigrated further west. Peace settled upon our borders, never, we hope, to be seriously broken. But as soon as the pressure of outward danger was withdrawn, and our communities began to expand, the seeds of new evils were developed--seeds which had germinated unobserved, while all eyes were averted, and which now began to shoot up into a stately growth of vices and crimes. The pioneers soon learned that there was among them a class of unprincipled and abandoned men, whose only motive in emigrating was to avoid the restraints, or escape the penalties, of law, and to whom the freedom of the wilderness was a license to commit every sort of depredation. The arm of the law was not yet strong enough to punish them.