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Discontented with their life on the reservation west of the Mississippi, to which they had been removed, the Sacs, with several other tribes, resolved to recover their old hunting-grounds. The warlike chief, Black Hawk, was at the head of the revolt, and his march toward the Rock river was signalized by a number of massacres.
We white people can very well understand that a human government, which professes, on the principles recognised by civilized nations, to have jurisdiction over certain extensive territories that lie in the virgin forest, and which are used only, and that occasionally, by certain savage tribes as hunting-grounds, should deem it right to satisfy those tribes, by purchase, before they parcelled out their lands for the purposes of civilized life; but, it would not be so easy to make an unsophisticated mind understand that there could be two owners to the same property.
Then he spoke of their necessities; of the gifts they had a right to expect for their past services; of their distance from their proper hunting-grounds and native villages; and of the necessity of consulting prudence more, and inclination less, in so critical circumstances.
"Why?" repeated the Pike man boastfully. "They were afraid. They recognized me as the Rip-tail Roarer. They knew that I had sent more than fifty Indians to the happy hunting-grounds, and alone as I was they fled." "Sho!" "Did you kill any of them?" asked Joe. "When I was some distance on my way I found I had left my revolver behind. Did you find it, stranger?"
The Indians were a day and night ahead, hurrying by dawn and dusk to the north, that the body of the dead chief, cured like a mummy by the smoke curling from the big tepee at every stop, might have burial, the earth-bound spirit begin its journey to the shadowy hunting-grounds.
With me, it is as on-creditable for a white man not to be a Christian as it is for a red-skin not to believe in his happy hunting-grounds; indeed, after allowing for difference in traditions, and in some variations about the manner in which the spirit will be occupied after death, I hold that a good Delaware is a good Christian, though he never saw a Moravian; and a good Christian a good Delaware, so far as natur 'is consarned.
"As the red-men obtained all the booty they could carry off, many times more than the amount of the reward they expected to receive, they are not likely to attack your farm, indeed they are already on their road back to their own hunting-grounds, so you may now rest in peace for some time to come. Should I again hear that they are out on the war-path, I will give you timely notice.
Why," he repeated, quietly but firmly abstracting a silver spoon from the table, "why do you seek to drive him from the wigwams of his fathers? His brothers are already gone to the happy hunting-grounds. Will the Pale Face seek him there?" And, averting his face from the Judge, he hastily slipped a silver cake-basket beneath his blanket, to conceal his emotion.
That night I proposed to "Sam" to bring me down to our tent at the salt water, and though I could see that he did not relish leaving the good hunting-grounds just as he had reached them, he consented, and finally seemed delighted when I promised him an old pair of pantaloons for his trouble.
My brother asks us if WE know what has become of these ten tribes. How should poor red men, who live on their hunting-grounds, and who are busy when the grass grows in getting together food for their squaws and pappooses, against a time when the buffalo can find nothing to eat in this part of the world, know anything of a people that they never saw?
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