many of them, “among whom were the Winnebagoes, utterly refused to send deputies to the council.” This disaffection was thought by the commissioners to be largely due to the influence of British traders, who plied the Indians with gifts, and assured them that war would soon break out again between the United States and Great Britain. It is probable, however, that the Winnebagoes held themselves aloof from these negotiations more from a general distrust of white men than from any partisan or selfish leaning to the side of Great Britain; for when Dr. Jedediah Morse visited them, only seven years later, he wrote: “There is no other tribe which seems to possess so much jealousy of the whites, and such reluctance to have intercourse with them, as this.”
Spite of this reluctance they made, in 1816, a treaty “of peace and friendship with the United States,” agreeing “to remain distinct and separate from the rest of their nation or tribe, giving them no assistance whatever until peace shall be concluded between the United States and their tribe or nation.” They agreed also to confirm and observe all the lines of British, French, or Spanish cessions of land to the United States.
In 1825 the United States Government, unable to endure the spectacle of Indians warring among themselves, and massacring each other, appears in the North-western country as an unselfish pacificator, and compels the Sacs, Foxes, Chippewas, and Sioux, including the Winnebagoes, to make a treaty of peace and friendship with each other and with the United States. The negotiations for this treaty occupied one month; which does not seem a long time when one considers that the boundaries of all the lands to be occupied by these respective tribes were to be defined, and that in those days and regions definitions of distance were stated in such phrases as “a half day’s march,” “a long day’s march,” “about a day’s paddle in a canoe,” “to a point where the woods come out into the meadows,” “to a point on Buffalo River, half way between its
