the Indian boys and girls of the
mission have been collected. It began operations with them, I think, in
1822; and having, in this interval, expended many thousand dollars, and
erected expensive buildings, it now drops the thing, just at the point
when the Indians have commenced important cessions, and when their
condition is such that they are not only inclined to receive interior
teachers and evangelists, which have been raised at that central point,
but, by these cessions to the government, they have provided funds for
schools and teachers.

Merely because the excellent superintendent determined, two or three
years ago, to leave this important point and enter into secular
business, to provide for a growing family; and because the attraction of
foreign fields carries young clergymen abroad, to the detriment of the
home field, it does not, I think, fulfil the highest requisitions of
duty to abandon the field, and thereby to leave it to be said that the
Board doubts God's purposes with regard to the red man. If the
missionary himself, who has so many years conducted the concern with
approbation, was not willing to trust his rewards to a higher power, but
aimed, as it were, to steady himself by stretching forth his hand, it
seems to me the race ought not to be the sufferers for such a course.
They constitute a vastly more appropriate field of labor than the
"millions of foreign lands," who sit, to a large extent, unaffected by
the Gospel. Not, indeed, that those fields should be neglected; but the
Indian race, and these large families of it, are worthy of a warmer
sympathy than I can see in Dr. Greene's letters, or the decisions of the
Board by whom he is governed.

_20th_. Signed a supplementary treaty with the Saginaws at Flint. By
this treaty the Saginaws relinquish their reserves in this valuable and
rapidly settling portion of the country, and agree to accept a location
on the head waters of the Osage, which their chiefs, have explored. They
are to occupy two of their reservations on the west shores of Saginaw
Bay, for five years. The government is to pay them the entire proceeds
of the land, as sold in the public land offices. They set apart funds
for schools, and to pay their debts. This tribe has now no instructors.
They have the reputation of being turbulent, and averse to all plans of
improvement. Their history is fraught with deeds of violence. They made
bloody inroads on the settlements of Western Virginia