her the best limitation on the Executive discretion in
this case would not be by the number of seamen which may be employed in
the whole service rather than by the number of the vessels. Occasions
oftener arise for the employment of small than of large vessels, and it
would lessen risk as well as expense to be authorized to employ them of
preference. The limitation suggested by the number of seamen would admit
a selection of vessels best adapted to the service.

Our Indian neighbors are advancing, many of them with spirit, and
others beginning to engage in the pursuits of agriculture and household
manufacture. They are becoming sensible that the earth yields
subsistence with less labor and more certainty than the forest, and find
it their interest from time to time to dispose of parts of their surplus
and waste lands for the means of improving those they occupy and of
subsisting their families while they are preparing their farms. Since
your last session the Northern tribes have sold to us the lands between
the Connecticut Reserve and the former Indian boundary and those on the
Ohio from the same boundary to the rapids and for a considerable depth
inland. The Chickasaws and Cherokees have sold us the country between
and adjacent to the two districts of Tennessee, and the Creeks the
residue of their lands in the fork of Ocmulgee up to the Ulcofauhatche.
The three former purchases are important, inasmuch as they consolidate
disjoined parts of our settled country and render their intercourse
secure; and the second particularly so, as, with the small point on
the river which we expect is by this time ceded by the Piankeshaws, it
completes our possession of the whole of both banks of the Ohio from its
source to near its mouth, and the navigation of that river is thereby
rendered forever safe to our citizens settled and settling on its
extensive waters. The purchase from the Creeks, too, has been for some
time particularly interesting to the State of Georgia.

The several treaties which have been mentioned will be submitted to both
Houses of Congress for the exercise of their respective functions.

Deputations now on their way to the seat of Government from various
nations of Indians inhabiting the Missouri and other parts beyond the
Mississippi come charged with assurances of their satisfaction with the
new relations in which they are placed with us, of their dispositions
to cultivate our peace and friendship, and their des