watomi, Kickapoos and other tribes, but
in all these treaties he was pre-eminently fair with the savages, never
resorting to force or treachery, or stooping to low intrigue or fraud.
We have a statement from his own pen as to his manner of conducting an
Indian treaty. In a letter from Vincennes on the third day of March,
1803, to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, we have the following: "I
should have passed over without an observation, if he had not hinted at
the use of unfair means in procuring the consent of the Indians to the
treaties I have made with them, and as I have never before, that I
recollect, informed you of my mode of proceeding on these occasions I
have thought it proper to do so at the present moment. Whenever the
Indians have assembled for any public purpose the use of ardent spirits
has been strictly interdicted until the object for which they were
convened was accomplished, and if in spite of my vigilance it had been
procured, a stop was immediately put to all business until it was
consumed and its effects completely over. Every conference with the
Indians has been in public. All persons who chose to attend were
admitted, and the most intelligent and respectable characters in the
neighborhood specially invited to witness the fairness of the
transaction. No treaty has ever been signed until each article was
particularly and repeatedly explained by the most capable and
confidential interpreters. Sketches of the tract of country about to be
ceded have always been submitted to the Indians, and their own rough
delineations made on the floor with a bit of charcoal have proved their
perfect comprehension of its situation and extent." Copies of the old
Western Sun, amply testify to the fact that prior to the important
treaties of 1809, at Fort Wayne and Vincennes, he issued a public
proclamation at the latter place, prohibiting any traffic in liquor with
the Indians, so that their judgment might not be perverted; that he
constantly inveighed against this illegal commerce with the tribes, and
that he at various times attempted to restrain the violence of the
squatters and settlers who sought to appropriate the lands of their red
neighbors. The language of his first message to the territorial
legislature reads thus: "The humane and benevolent intentions of the
government, however, will forever be defeated, unless effectual measures
be devised to prevent the sale of ardent spirits to those unfortunate
people. The