the Winnebagoes.  Circumstances had prepared this latter tribe for hostilities against the United States.  The replies of the leading chief, Four-Legs, were evasive and contradictory; in the meantime, reports from the Wisconsin and the Mississippi rivers denoted this tribe ripe for a blow.  They had fired into a boat descending the Mississippi, at Prairie du Chien, and committed other outrages.  General Cass was not slow to perceive or provide the only remedy for this state of things, and, leaving the camp under the charge of Colonel McKenney and the agents, he took a strongly manned light canoe, and passed over to the Mississippi, and, pushing night and day, reached St. Louis, and ordered up troops from Jefferson Barracks, for the protection of the settlement.  In this trip, he passed through the centre of the tribe, and incurred some extraordinary risks.  He then returned up the Illinois, and through Lake Michigan, and reached the Butte des Morts in an incredibly short space of time.  Within a few days, the Mississippi settlements were covered; the Winnebagoes were overawed, and the business of the treaty was resumed, and successfully concluded on the 11th of August.

During the long assemblage of the Indians on these grounds, I was sitting one afternoon, in the Governor’s log shanty, with the doors open, when a sharp cry of murder suddenly fell on our ears.  I sprang impulsively to the spot, with Major Forsyth, who was present.  Within fifty yards, directly in front of the house, stood two Indians, who were, apparently, the murderers, and a middle aged female, near them, bleeding profusely.  I seized one of them by his long black hair, and, giving him a sudden wrench, brought him to his back in an instant, and, placing my knees firmly on his breast, held him there, my hand clenched in his hair.  The Major had done something similar with the other fellow.  Inquiry proved one of these men to be the perpetrator of the deed.  He had drawn his knife to stab his mother-in-law, she quickly placed her arms over her breast and chest and received the wounds, two strokes, in them, and thus saved her life.  It was determined, as her life was saved, though the wounds were ghastly, to degrade the man in a public assemblage of all the Indians, the next day, by investing him with a petticoat, for so unmanly an act.  The thing was, accordingly, done with great ceremony.  The man then sneaked away in this imposed matchcota, in a stolid manner, slowly, all the Indians looking stedfastly, but uttering no sound approvingly or disapprovingly.

I embraced the opportunity of the delay created by the Winnebago outbreak, and the presence of the Stockbridges on the treaty ground, to obtain from them some outlines of their history and language.  Every day, the chiefs and old men came to my quarters, and spent some time with me.  Metoxon gave me the words for a vocabulary of the language, and, together with Quinney, entered so far into its principles, and furnished such examples, as led me, at once, to perceive that it was of the Algonquin type, near akin, indeed, to the Chippewa, and the conclusion followed, that all the New England dialects, which were cognate with this, were of the same type.  The history of this people clears up, with such disclosures, and the fact shows us how little we can know of their history without the languages.