“Le Petit Corbeau, a chief of a small band of Sioux, located upon the banks of the Mississippi, towards the confines of the Chippeway territory, going out one morning to examine his beaver trap, found a Sauteur in the act of stealing it.  He had approached without exciting alarm, and while the Sauteur was engaged in taking the trap from the water, he stood maturely surveying him with a loaded rifle in his hands.  As the two nations were at war, and the offence was in itself one of the most heinous nature, he would have been justified in killing him on the spot, and the thief looked for nothing else, on finding himself detected.  But the Sioux chief walking up to him discovered a nobleness of disposition which would have done honor to the most enlightened of men.  ‘Take no alarm,’ said he, ’at my approach; I only come to present to you the trap of which I see you stand in need.  You are entirely welcome to it.  Take my gun also, as I perceive you have none of your own, and depart with it to the land of your countrymen, but linger not here, lest some of my young men, who are panting for the blood of their enemies, should discover your footsteps in our country, and fall upon you.’  So saying he delivered him his gun and accoutrements, and returned unarmed to the village of which he is so deservedly the chief.”

COLONIZATION OF THE INDIANS.

The plan, now in progress of execution, for the removal of all the Indians, within the limits of the United States, to a region of country west of Missouri and Arkansas, will of course, when carried out, greatly modify our relations with them.  New laws must be enacted by Congress, and new treaties formed between the Indians and the United States.

From the organization of the federal government to the present time, our relations with the Indians have been the subject of frequent legislation, and the statute book bears many evidences of benevolent action towards this ill-fated race.  If the laws enacted by Congress for the protection and civilization of the aborigines of this country, had been regularly and rigidly enforced, and a more impartial interpretation of the treaties made with them, had been observed, their condition would have been far better than it now is—­they would have passed from the hunter to the pastoral state, and have grown in numbers, virtue and intelligence.  But these laws and these treaties, have been year after year violated by our own people, and the result has been a constant deterioration of the Indians.  This is especially true of those laws intended to prevent our citizens from hunting on the Indian lands, residing in their country, and trading with them without a license from the United States.  These have generally been a dead letter upon the national statute book, and the encroachments of the lawless frontiers-men, the trader, the land speculator, and the vender of spirituous liquors, have impoverished degraded, and vitiated, more or