attended the demand for the Chippewa murderers, awaited me.  Some practical questions, deemed indispensable respecting that transaction, required my immediate return to St. Mary’s, which was effected on the 27th, and I again embarked at St. Mary’s on the 28th, and rejoined the party at Mackinack on the 30th.  The distance traversed is about ninety miles, which was four times passed and repassed in six days, a feat that could only have been accomplished in the calms of summer.

We finally left Mackinack for our destination on the Mississippi, on the 1st of July.  The convocation to which we were now proceeding was for the purpose of settling internal disputes between the tribes, by fixing the boundaries to their respective territories, and thus laying the foundation of a lasting peace on the frontiers.  And it marks an era in the policy of our negotiations with the Indians, which is memorable.  No such gathering of the tribes had ever before occurred, and its results have taken away the necessity of any in future, so far as relates to the lines on the Mississippi.

We encountered head winds, and met with some delay in passing through the straits into Lake Michigan, and after escaping an imminent hazard of being blown off into the open lake, in a fog, reached Green Bay on the 4th.  The journey up the Fox River, and its numerous portages, was resumed on the 14th, and after having ascended the river to its head, we crossed over the Fox and Wisconsin portage, and descending the latter with safety, reached Prairie du Chien on the 21st, making the whole journey from Mackinack in twenty-one days.

We found a very large number of the various tribes assembled.  Not only the village, but the entire banks of the river for miles above and below the town, and the island in the river, was covered with their tents.  The Dakotahs, with their high pointed buffalo skin tents, above the town, and their decorations and implements of flags, feathers, skins and personal “braveries,” presented the scene of a Bedouin encampment.  Some of the chiefs had the skins of skunks tied to their heels, to symbolize that they never ran, as that animal is noted for its slow and self-possessed movements.

Wanita, the Yankton chief, had a most magnificent robe of the buffalo, curiously worked with dyed porcupine’s quills and sweet grass.  A kind of war flag, made of eagles’ and vultures’ large feathers, presented quite a martial air.  War clubs and lances presented almost every imaginable device of paint; but by far the most elaborate thing was their pipes of red stone, curiously carved, and having flat wooden handles of some four feet in length, ornamented with the scalps of the red-headed woodpecker and male duck, and tail feathers of birds artificially attached by strings and quill work, so as to hang in the figure of a quadrant.  But the most elaborately wrought part of the devices consisted of dyed porcupines’ quills, arranged as a kind of aboriginal mosaic.