where the troops, as they came up, marched with inspiring music, and regularly encamped.  The roll of the drum was now the law for getting up and lying down.  It might be 168 or 170 years since the French first landed at this point.  It was just 59 since the British power had supervened, and 39 since the American right had been acknowledged by the sagacity of Dr. Franklin’s treaty of 1783.  But to the Indian, who stood in a contemplative and stoic attitude, wrapped in his fine blanket of broadcloth, viewing the spectacle, it must have been equally striking, and indicative that his reign in the North-West, that old hive of Indian hostility, was done.  And, had he been a man of letters, he might have inscribed, with equal truth, as it was done for the ancient Persian monarch, “MENE, MENE, TEKEL.”

To most persons on board, our voyage up these wide straits, after entering them at Point de Tour, had, in point of indefiniteness, been something like searching after the locality of the north pole.  We wound about among groups of islands and through passages which looked so perfectly in the state of nature that, but for a few ruinous stone chimneys on St. Joseph’s, it could not be told that the foot of man had ever trod the shores.  The whole voyage, from Buffalo and Detroit, had indeed been a novel and fairy scene.  We were now some 350 miles north-west of the latter city.  We had been a couple of days on board, in the area of the sea-like Huron, before we entered the St. Mary’s straits.  The Superior, being the second steamer built on the Lakes,[14] had proved herself a staunch boat.

[Footnote 14:  The first steamer built on the Lakes was called the “Walk-in-the-Water,” after an Indian chief of that name; it was launched at Black Rock, Niagara River, in 1818, and visited Michilimackinack in the summer of that year.]

The circumstances of this trip were peculiar, and the removal of a detachment of the army to so remote a point in a time of profound peace, had stimulated migratory enterprise.  The measure was, in truth, one of the results of the exploring expedition to the North-West in 1820, and designed to curb and control the large Indian population on this extreme frontier, and to give security to the expanding settlements south of this point.  It was in this light that Mr. Calhoun, the present enlightened Secretary of War, viewed the matter, and it may be said to constitute a part of his plan for throwing a cordon of advanced posts in front of the wide area of our western settlements.  From expressions heard on our route, the breaking up in part of the exceedingly well-quartered garrison of Madison barracks at Sackett’s Harbor, N.Y., was not particularly pleasing to the officers of this detachment, most of whom were married gentlemen, having families, and all of whom were in snug quarters at that point, surrounded as it is by a rich, thriving, farming population, and commanding a good and cheap market of meats and vegetables.  To be ordered