rk which are of the
deepest interest, and would justify a biography, not a mere notice. I
wrote a brief sketch for the _New York Albion_, and transmitted copies
of the paper to some of his connections in Ireland.

His coming out from that country was during the first presidency of
Washington, and a few years before the breaking out of the Irish
Rebellion. He had a deep sense of his country's injuries, and of the
effect of the laws which pressed so heavily on her energies, political
and commercial; but was entirely loyal, and maintained the highest tone
of loyalism in argument. He saw deeply the evils, but not the remedy,
which he thought to lay rather in future and peaceful developments.

He suffered greatly and unjustly in the war of 1812, in which his place
was pillaged by the American troops, and some forty thousand dollars of
his private property destroyed, contrary to the instructions of the
American commandant. Low-minded persons who had been in his service as
clerks, and disliked his pretensions to aristocracy, were the cause of
this, and piloted the detachment up the river. He was, however, in
nowise connected with the North-west Company, far less "one of its
agents." He was a civil magistrate under Gov.-Gen. Prevost, and was
honestly attached to the British cause, and he had never accepted any
office or offers from the American government. The Canadian British
authorities did not, however, compensate him for his losses, on the
ground of his living over the lines, at a time, too, when Gen. Brock had
taken the country and assumed the functions of civil and military
governor over all Michigan. The American Congress did not acknowledge
the obligation to sustain the orders to respect private property,
the Chairman of the Committee of Claims reporting that the actors
"might be prosecuted," and the old gentleman's last years were thus
embittered, and he went down to the grave the victim of double
misconceptions--leaving to a large family of the Indo-Irish stock little
beyond an honorable and unspotted name.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Treaty of St. Joseph--Tanner--Visits of the Indians in distress--Letters
from the civilized world--Indian code projected--Cause of Indian
suffering--The Indian cause--Estimation of the character of the late Mr.
Johnston--Autobiography--Historical Society of Michigan--Fiscal
embarrassments of the Indian Department.

1828. Tanner was a singular being--out of humor with the world, speaking