MY NEW REPUBLIC.
Governor of the State, and the President of the Republic. Full of enthusiasm and impossible theories were the letters I sent, and no doubt full of bad spelling and worse grammar ; but they were honest, sincere, and well meant, and deserved something better than the contemptuous silence they received.
I thought of this thing day after day, and it came upon me at last like a great sunrise, full and complete. The Indians entered into it with all their hearts. Their great desire was to have a dividing line a mark that would say, Thus far will we come and no farther. They did not seem to care about details or particulars where the line would be drawn, only that it should be drawn, and leave them secure in bounds which they could call their own. They would submit to almost anything for this.
Remove they would not ; but they were tired of a perpetual state of half- war, half-peace, that brought only a steady loss of life and of land, without any lookout ahead for the better, and would enter into almost any terms that promised to let them and theirs permanently and securely alone. I may say here in a kind of parenthesis that the only way an Indian can get a hearing is to go to war, and thus call the attention of the Government to the fact of his existence.
How magnificent and splendid seemed my plan ! Imagination had no limit. Here would be a national
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park, a place, one place in all the world, where men lived in a state of nature, and when all the ot
