MY DEAR COUSIN: By
the time this reaches you the excitement growing out of the Cincinnati Convention
will, I presume, have somewhat subsided. I need not tell how much I hope it may
find you the successful man in the struggle that may occur there. Should
however this be not the case, I hope you will console yourself with the
reflection that there is yet sufficient time ahead for your turn.
It was my intention
at an early day after my arrival in this country to post you up thoroughly on
the origin and merits of this war going on here with the Indians. But I no
sooner landed than I was packed off to this outpost where I have been unable to
see any intelligent or disinterested man who could give me the information I
wanted. Nor have I been able to meet any hostile Indians in action or otherwise
and learn from them their own accounts of their difficulties. Indeed it is in
this respect that I conceive one of the greatest blunders of the whole business
has been committed, for I have been unable yet to see any one who can give me
an intelligent and consistent account of what the Indians regard as the cause
of the war, and as its object, and upon what terms &c they desire. We in
the Army are campaigning and fighting here in the dark. Without understanding
the cause or the object of the war, and consequently without the means of
knowing what are the best means to bring about a peace. Most of the whites say
it is dissatisfaction with the treaties made by Gov. Stevens. If so instead of
going to War on the subject, and, attempting to teach them a lesson on adhering
to treaties which will cost us some millions of money, why not send for them
and learn what features of the treaty are distasteful to them, and if
reasonable why not let them have what they want as long as it does not
interfere with the just wants and safety of the settlers. I am told the Indians
complain that by these treaties they are required to live upon small reserves
incapable of subsisting them and their animals in their mode of life. That the
Indians [?] have been located upon lands badly situated, indeed so much so that
the whites can't use it, with no prairie or pasture lands for their animals and
no clear lands for their potatoes &c; and that if they are all crowded upon
such small ill-selected spots they must starve to death.
If there is truth in
this, and no one has tried that I know of, to see the hostile Indians to
ascertain whether this be so or not, it is in my opinion a just cause not only
of dissatisfaction and complaint but of war. We cant expect men to change their
habits of life, the habits of their race, or to starve to death quietly merely
to satisfy the wild schemes of white men. If this be true I can see no reason
why they should not have larger and more suitable reserves given them,
particularly too since they have relinquished by these treaties more lands than
will be sufficient for the settlers of this country, at present rates, and for
the next hundred years. In making this concession to them we should be giving
them nothing more than humanity demands us to give them, and which common
justice should never have permitted us to take away from them. But you will
gather from the enclosed newspaper slips something of the merits of the
question at issue between the authorities here. From all that I can learn I am
well satisfied that this War has been very unnecessarily brought on by Govr.
Stevens' treaties. Not only by the ill judged provisions of the treaties
themselves, but especially by entering into treaties with them where the wants
of the country (in my judgment) did not require anything of the sort. As bad
fortune would have it I am told that this treaty, out of the large number which
he made on his Quixotic pilgrimage in the interior of the continent where no
white men will settle in the next 300 years perhaps, was the only one which
reached Washington City in time to be confirmed by the Senate during the last
Congress, and is now the law of the land. I am satisfied that if this were not
the case and I had the power from Mr. Pierce to annul and destroy Stevens'
treaty I could establish a permanent peace here in six weeks and not fire a
rifle, a peace by which the settlers should be safe from danger, and not
checked in their settlement of the country. And I would make no concession to
the Indians which any practical and reasonable man could find fault with.
