30th.  The same officer reports that his duties will not permit him to erect quarters for the Indian agent, which he is required to put up, till another year.  If this step is to be regarded, as it seems, as a retaliatory measure for my not issuing process, en masse, against the citizens, without he or his subordinates condescending to name individuals, it manifests an utter ignorance of the first principles of law, and is certainly a queer request to be made of a justice of the peace.  Nor does it appear how the adoption of such whims or assumptions is compatible with a just official comity or an enlarged sense of public duty, on his part, and pointed instructions, to boot, in co-operating with the Indian department on a remote and exposed frontier.

There seems to be a period, on the history of the frontiers, where conflicts between the military and civil authorities are almost inevitable; but there are, perhaps, few examples to be found where the former power has been more aggressively and offensively exercised than it has been under the martinet who is now in command at this post.  It is an ancient point of settlement by the French, who are generally a mild and obliging people, and disposed to submit to authorities.  Some of these are descended from persons who settled here under Louis XIV.  That a few Americans have followed the troops with more rigid views of private rights, and who cannot be easily trampled on, is true.  And the military have, justly, no doubt, felt annoyances from a freedom of trade with the soldiery, who cannot be kept within their pickets by bayonets and commands.  But he must be far gone in his sublimated notions of self-complacency and temporary importance who supposes that a magistrate would surrender his sense of independence, and impartiality between man and man, by assuming new and unheard-of duties, at the beck of a military functionary who happens to overrate his own, or misjudge another’s position.

March 31st.  I have given no little part of the winter to a revision of my manuscript journal of travels through the Miami and Wabash Valleys in 1821.  The season has been severe, and offered few inducements to go beyond the pale of the usual walk to my office, the cantonment, and to the village seated at the foot of the rapids.  Variety, in this pursuit, has been sought, in turning from the transcription of these records of a tourist to the discussion of the principles of the Indian languages—­a labor, if literary amusement can be deemed a labor, which was generally adjourned from my office, to be resumed in the domestic circle during the long winter evenings.  A moral enjoyment has seldom yielded more of the fruits of pleasure.  In truth, the winter has passed almost imperceptibly away.  Tempests howled around us, without diminishing our comforts.  We often stood, in the clear winter evenings, to gaze at the splendid displays of the Aurora Borealis.  The cariole was sometimes put in requisition.  We sometimes tied on the augim, or snow-shoe, and ventured over drifts of snow, whose depth rendered them impassable to the horse.  We assembled twice a week, at a room, to listen to the chaste preaching of a man of deep-toned piety and sound judgment, whose life and manners resemble an apostle’s.