Also, the fact of
an outrage upon one of their number, committed by a white person, which
should have been redressed at once by the civil magistrates. There is
but one way of escape for the Indians living in white communities, that
is, to place them, at once, under the protection, and subject to the
penalties of our criminal and civil codes.

_3d_. Renewed and confirmatory accounts are published at St. Louis, of
the desolating effects of the small-pox among the Indian tribes on the
Missouri. In addition to the tribes mentioned in the first accounts as
having suffered, the Upsarokees, or Crows, have been dreadfully
afflicted. The various bands of the Pie-gans, Blood Indians, and
Blackfeet, have lost great numbers. And the visitation of this appalling
disease, against which they have no remedy, has been one of the severest
ever felt by these tribes. Compared to it, the loss that the Saginaws
and other local bands in Michigan have felt, is small; but it is an
instructive fact, that the outbreak has been concurrent in point of
time, on the Missouri and in Michigan, which would seem to imply a
climatic condition of the atmosphere, on a wide scale, favorable to
morbid eruptions.

_6th_. A.E. Wing, Esq., declines to deliver the annual address before
the Michigan Historical Society, owing to other engagements. Few men who
have capacity are found willing to devote the time necessary for the
preparation of a literary address, even where the materials for it would
appear to lie ready. The pressing practical calls of life, in a new
country, where there is no hereditary wealth, appear to furnish a valid
reason for this. But another reason is, that the materials and frame-work
of an address are sought for at too great a distance, and are thought to
lie too deeply buried, to be disinterred by any but extraordinary hands.
This is a mistake. The subjects are at home, and exist not only in
exploring old literary mines, but in the very circumstances around us.
What more extraordinary than the current which throws such masses of
people daily among us, tearing up, as it were, the old plan of life, and
laying the foundations of new social ties in the wilderness. Not a
county is settled in the West, the initial steps of which does not
furnish legitimate materials for an address which would edify the living
generation, and instruct those which are to follow us. A single century
hence, and how much tradition will sleep in the grave that might