s usual in the spring. We concluded that if we were removed
by force, that the trader, agent and others must be the cause, and that
if they were found guilty of having driven us from our village they
should be killed. The trader stood foremost on this list. He had
purchased the land on which my lodge stood, and that of our graveyard
also. We therefore proposed to kill him and the agent, the interpreter,
the great chief at St. Louis, the war chiefs at Forts Armstrong, Rock
Island and Keokuk, these being the principal persons to blame for
endeavoring to remove us. Our women received bad accounts from the
women who had been raising corn at the new village, of the difficulty
of breaking the new prairie with hoes, and the small quantity of corn
raised. We were nearly in the same condition with regard to the
latter, it being the first time I ever knew our people to be in want of
provisions.

I prevailed upon some of Keokuk's band to return this spring to the Rock
river village, but Keokuk himself would not come. I hoped that he would
get permission to go to Washington to settle our affairs with our Great
Father. I visited the agent at Rock Island. He was displeased because we
had returned to our village, and told me that we must remove to the west
of the Mississippi. I told him plainly that we would not. I visited the
interpreter at his house, who advised me to do as the agent had directed
me. I then went to see the trader and upbraided him for buying our
lands. He said that if he had not purchased them some person else would,
and that if our Great Father would make an exchange with us, he would
willingly give up the land he had purchased to the government. This I
thought was fair, and began to think that he had not acted so badly as I
had suspected. We again repaired our lodges and built others, as most
of our village had been burnt and destroyed. Our women selected small
patches to plant corn, where the whites had not taken them in their
fences, and worked hard to raise something for our children to subsist
upon.

I was told that according to the treaty, we had no right to remain on
the lands sold, and that the government would force us to leave them.
There was but a small portion however that had been sold, the balance
remaining in the hands of the government. We claimed the right, if
we had no other, to "live and hunt upon it as long as it remained
the property of the government," by a stipulation in the treaty that
req