s
of a severe winter--a winter which every one dreads the approach of, and
the severity of which was perhaps magnified in proportion as it
was unknown.

[Footnote 17: For the property thus taken possession of, the United
States Government, through the Quartermaster's Department, paid the
claimant the just and full amount awarded by appraisers.]

_11th_. What my eyes have seen and my ears have heard, I must believe;
and what is their testimony respecting the condition of the Indian on
the frontiers? He is not, like Falstaff's men, "food for powder," but he
is food for whisky. Whisky is the great means of drawing from him his
furs and skins. To obtain it, he makes a beast of himself, and allows
his family to go hungry and half naked. And how feeble is the force of
law, where all are leagued in the golden bonds of interest to break it!
He is indeed

"Like some neglected shrub at random cast
That shades the steep and sighs at every blast."

_12th_. I received by to-day's mail a note from De Witt Clinton,
Governor of New York. America has produced few men who have united civic
and literary tastes and talents of a high order more fully than he does.
He early and ably investigated the history and antiquities of Western
New York. He views with a comprehensive judgment the great area of the
West, and knows that its fertility and resources must render it, at no
distant day, the home of future millions. He was among the earliest to
appreciate the mineralogical and geographical researches which I made in
that field. He renewed the interest, which, as a New Yorker, he felt in
my history and fortunes, after my return from the head of the
Mississippi in 1820. He opened his library and house to me freely; and I
have to notice his continued interest since my coming here. In the
letter which has just reached me, he encloses a favorable notice of my
recent _Narrative of the Expedition to the Sources of the Mississippi_,
from Sir Humphrey Davy. If there were nothing else, in such a notice
from such a source but the stimulus it gives to exertion, that alone is
worth to a man in my position "pearls and diamonds."

Colonel Brady, who is active in daily perambulating the woods, to make
himself acquainted with the environs, seeking, at the same time, the
best places of finding wood and timber, for the purposes of his command,
brought me a twig of the Sorbus Americana, a new species of tree to him,
in the American forest, of whi