rights and properties of the Indians, within their shrunken possessions, should be respected. By degrees the Indians sold their lands for whisky, as of old, and retired to smaller reservations. Of course, they suffered in the bargain; the savage ever parts with his birthright for the well-known mess of pottage. The Osages, for instance, canceled $4000, claimed by unscrupulous traders, by a cession of two million acres of arable land. The Potawotomies fared even worse; under the influence of liquor, ὡς λέγουσι, their chiefs sold 100,000 acres of the best soil on the banks of the Missouri for a mere song. The tribe was removed to a bald smooth prairie, sans timber and consequently sans game; many fled to the extreme wilds, and the others, like the Acadians of yore, were marched about till they found homes—many of them six feet by two—in Fever Patch, on the Kaw or Kansas River. Others were more fortunate. The Ottoes, Omahas, and Kansas had permanent villages near the Missouri and its two tributaries, the Platte and the Kansas. The Osages, formerly a large nation in Arkansas, after ceding 10,000,000 of acres for a stipend of $52,000 for thirty years, were settled in a district on the west bank of the Neosho or Whitewater—the Grand River. They are described as the finest and largest men of the semi-nomad races, with well-formed heads and symmetrical figures, brave, warlike, and well disposed to the whites. Early in June, after planting their maize, they move in mounted bands to the prairies, feast upon the buffalo for months, and bring home stores of smoked and jerked meat. When the corn is in milk they husk and sun-dry it; it is then boiled, and is said to be better flavored and more nutritious than the East Indian "butah" or the American hominy. After the harvest in October they return to the game country, and then pass the winter under huts or skin lodges. Their chief scourge is small-pox: apparently, all the tribes carry some cross. Of the settled races the best types are the Choctaws and the Cherokees; the latter have shown a degree of improv-
The contest about Missouri began in 1818, and raged for three years, complicated by a new feature, namely, Maine separating herself from Massachusetts, and balancing the admission of Alabama by becoming a free state. The Lower House several times voted to exclude the "peculiar institution" from the new state, and the conservative Senate—in which the Southern element was ever predominant—as often restored it. Great was the war of words among the rival legislators; at length, after repeated conferences, both Senate and House agreed upon a bill admitting Missouri, after her Constitution should be formed, free of restriction, but prohibiting slavery north of 36° 30'. Missouri acknowledged the boon by adopting a Constitution which denied the rights of citizens even to free negroes. She was not finally admitted until the 10th of August, 1821, when her Legislature had solemnly covenanted to guarantee the rights of citizenship to "the citizens of either of the states." Such is an outline of the far-famed "Missouri Compromise." The influence of the Southern slaveholders caused it to be repealed, as a slip of Texas happened to lie north of the prohibitative latitude, and the late Mr. S. A. Douglas did it to death in 1854. The Free-soilers, of course, fought hard against the "sad repeal," and what they now fight about, forty years afterward, is to run still farther south the original line of limitation. Hinc illæ lachrymæ!
