can describe, no heart conceive, and no tongue can adequately tell.

In September, the difficulties with the Indians were settled by a treaty, in which they ceded to the United States thirty millions of acres. Black Hawk and his family were sent as hostages to Fort Monroe, on the Chesapeake, where they remained until July, 1833. He soon after returned to his people, and dying a few years subsequent, was buried on the banks of the Mississippi. He possessed the common savage virtue of bravery; but in intellectual qualties, was not to be compared with Pontiac or Tecumseh.

THE PESTILENCE-A FRONTIER SKETCH.

THE pioneer is the "forlorn hope" of civilization. He marches into the wilderness, and encounters peril, hardship and suffering in a thousand different forms, and thus prepares the way smooth for those who follow.

The settlers of most new countries are afflicted with bilious and intermittent fevers, which prevail far more extensively at some seasons than at others. The summer and fall of 1838-the year of the great eclipse of the sun-was a period of unusual sickness in the West, particularly in Illinois. A sketch of the scenes which there fell under the observation of the writer is annexed below. It most vividly describes a kind of experience that belongs to the history of the country.

The close of the summer found our home a melancholy one. Days of agony, and nights of delicious visions that made the morning sorrowful, wore slowly away. Abroad the gloom still deepened. The sickness which had begun early to prevail in various parts of the country, increased in strength and malignancy. The longer the drought held, the, more fatal grew its ravages, and the more cheerless the aspect of the whole land. Vegetation was parched to ashes; the dews no longer fell; the thirsty earth gaped under the merciless sun; and the trodden roads were piled with dust, so that every breath of wind which swept across them, and every vehicle that passed along, raised a blinding cloud. The skies seemed to have shut their chamber of mercy, and to have no relenting toward the blighted earth. For long, long weeks the heavens were watched for a cloud, or some sign of mercy, but in vain. A hard metallic glare pervaded the whole arch, an impassable barrier to the blessings we so much craved. Meantime, pain, disease and death were stalking abroad. The pestilence claimed its victims in almost every house. In some the whole family was prostrated, and the sufferers were dependent on the kindness of their distant neighbors to minister to their wants.

The fevers took their most malignant and fatal character in the "cotton lands." There gigantic trees shoot up on the rich earth

made by the spring floods, and weave their heavy branches above into a dense canopy, which the sun can scarcely penetrate. On the black soil, below which is often ten, twelve or fifteen feet in depth, and of the finest loam, vegetation riots in unbounded energy. Immense quantities are produced, the decay of which, with the heavy foliage of the trees, generates vast volumes of miasmata. The high bluffs then which border these teeming lands, together with the dense wood that covers them, prevent the circulation of the purer air from the uplands, and leave all the causes of disease to take their most concentrated forms among the unfortunate settlers. Here, therefore, at this fated period, the pestilence found its readiest and most numerous victims. In riding through these regions, one would frequently find houses in which every member of the family was sick; so that it was a blessing for a stranger to call and hand them a cup of water. In these districts, individuals were found lying in all stages of disease. Some had never been seen by a physician; and the few that recovered wore a ghastly sallow hue, that was frightful to behold, as they crept about their death-stricken homes.

One could ride miles through these dark woods, the steady sun, when it poured through the leaves, heating the still air almost to suffocation, and pass on his route many cabins apparently deserted; but on entering, he would find two or three, or perhaps a greater number of persons lying in the same dark room, tossing and raging in the various stages of consuming fever. It was frightful to hear of, still more so to witness, their condition.

But suffering and mortality were not confined to these gloomy districts. They spread throughout the entire country. Our little village was one of the last spots visited. On the 18th of September, the day of the great eclipse, two infants, twin daughters of our village teacher, were buried. I remember well the gloom of that afternoon. It was easy to conceive how, in periods of affliction and calamity, the benighted nations that had lived here before us should construe such an impressive phenomenon into an expression of anger by the Great Spirit. The prolonged and unnatural darkness, and the alarm which prevails among the lower animals, following the impression already produced upon the mind, might well be considered as evidence of displeasure in the Power that rules the element.

We trusted that some change would be wrought in the atmosphere by this great event, that would break the dreadful monotony of drought. There were but three or four wells in the village that afforded any water, and the earth seemed actually consuming under the fiery orb, now for a brief space hidden from our weary eyes. Not a drop of rain had fallen for near seven weeks, and for a previous period of nearly twice that length, the few showers that had descended were barely sufficient to saturate the dust. But our hopes were vain. The shadow passed from the sun, and he rode out, glaring and bright as ever, into the relentless heavens.

Gloom and despair brooded over everything. Nature seemed about to light her own funeral pile. People walked slowly about, with countenances darkened by their own griefs, or saddened with sympathy for their neighbors.

THE EDUCATED INDIAN TRAPPER.

PROVIDENCE seems to have made some races of mankind for a mere temporary object. They appear upon earth, fulfill their allotted part, and then disappear forever from the stage of human action, oftentimes leaving no traces, save the bare fact of their having once existed. Such seems to be the destiny of the aborigines of our country. Their course is nearly run; and in a few more generations, they will exist alone in the annals of the past! Attempts to civilize them generally met with signal failure. There is something inherent in their nature that forbids it.

A gentleman, who was traveling in the vicinity of the Rocky Mountains some few years since, has given an interesting sketch of an Indian whom he met near the headwaters of the Arkansas, who had been educated among the whites; but, true to his natural instincts, he had forsaken civilized life, and taking to the prairies and mountains of the Far West, had become once more a free man of the forests. His sketch we annex.

One of these trappers whom I met at Bent's Fort was from New Hampshire. He had been educated at Dartmouth College, and was altogether one of the most remarkable men I ever knew. A splendid gentleman, a finished scholar, a critic on English and Roman literature, a politician, a trapper, and an Indian! His stature was something more than six feet; his shoulders and chest were broad, and his arms and lower limbs well formed and very muscular. His head was clothed with hair as black as jet, near a yard in length, smoothly combed, and hanging down his back. He was dressed in a deer-skin frock, leggins and moccasins; not a thread of cloth about his person.

Having ascertained that he was proud of his learning, I approached him through that medium. He seemed pleased at this compliment of his superiority to those around him, and at once became easy and talkative. His "Alma mater" was described and re-described. All the fields, and walks, and rivulets, the beautiful Connecticut, the evergreen primitive hedges lying along its banks, which, he said, "had smiled for a thousand ages on the march of decay," were successive themes of his gigantic imagination. His descriptions were minute and exquisite. He saw in everything all that Science sees, together with all that his capacious intellect, instructed and imbued with the wild fancyings and legends of his race, could see. I inquired the reason of his leaving civilized life for a precarious livelihood in the wilderness. "For reasons