trouble in convening a formidable assemblage of Indians at Huron Village, opposite Detroit, where they held council together from November 28 to December 18, 1786.

These councils resulted in the presentation of an address to Congress, wherein they expressed an earnest desire for peace, but firmly insisted that all treaties carried on with the United States should be with the general voice of the whole confederacy in the most open manner; that the United States should prevent surveyors and others from crossing the Ohio River; and they proposed a general treaty early in the spring of 1787. This address purported to represent the Five Nations, Hurons, Ottawas, Twichtwees, Shawanese, Chippewas, Cherokees, Delawares, Pottawatomies, and the Wabash Confederates, and was signed with the totem of each tribe.

Such a remonstrance, considering the weakness of the government under the old Articles of Confederation, and the exhausted condition immediately following the Revolution, produced a profound sensation in Congress. That body passed an act providing for the negotiation of a treaty or treaties, and making an appropriation for the purchase and extinguishment of the Indian claim to certain lands. These preparations and appropriations resulted in two treaties made at Fort Harmar, January 9, 1789, one with the Six Nations, and the other with the Wiandot, Delaware, Ottawa, Chippewa, Pottawatima, and Sac Nations, wherein the Indian title of occupancy is clearly acknowledged. That the government so understood and recognized this principle as entering into the text of those treaties is evidenced by a communication bearing date June 15, 1789, from General Knox, then Secretary of War, to President Washington, and which was communicated by the latter on the same day to Congress, in which it is declared that—

The principle thus outlined and approved by the administration of President Washington, although more than once questioned by interested parties, has almost, if not quite, invariably been sustained by the legal tribunals of the country, at least by the courts of final resort; and the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States bear consistent testimony to its legal soundness. Several times has this question in different forms appeared before the latter tribunal for adjudication, and in each case has the Indian right been recognized and protected. In 1823, 1831, and 1832, Chief Justice Marshall successively delivered the opinion of the court in important cases involving the Indian status and rights. In the second of these cases (The Cherokee Nation vs. The State of Georgia) it was maintained that the Cherokees were a state and had uniformly been treated as such since the settlement of the country; that the numerous treaties made with them by the United States recognized them as a people capable of maintaining the relations of peace and war; of being responsible in their political character for any violation of their engagements, or for any aggression committed on the citizens of the United States by any individual of their community; that the condition of the Indians in their relations to the United States is perhaps unlike that of any other two peoples on the globe; that, in general, nations not owing a common allegiance are foreign to each other, but that the relation of the Indians to the United States is marked by peculiar and cardinal distinctions which exist nowhere else; that the Indians were acknowledged to have an unquestionable right to the lands they occupied until that right should be extinguished by a voluntary cession to our government; that it might well be doubted whether those tribes which reside within the acknowledged boundaries of the United States could with strict accuracy be denominated foreign nations, but that they might more correctly perhaps be denominated domestic dependent nations; that they occupied a territory to which we asserted a title independent of their will, but which only took effect in point of possession when their right of possession ceased.

The Government of the United States having thus been committed in all of its departments to the recognition of the principle of the Indian right of possession, it becomes not only a subject of interest to the student of history, but of practical value to the official records of the government, that a carefully compiled work should exhibit the boundaries of the several tracts of country which have been acquired from time to time, within the present limits of the United States, by cession or relinquishment from the various Indian tribes, either through the medium of friendly negotiations and just compensation, or as the result of military conquest. Such a work, if accurate, would form the basis of any complete history of the Indian tribes in their relations to, and influence upon the growth and diffusion of our population and civilization. Such a contribution to the historical collections of the country should comprise:

1st. A series of maps of the several States and Territories, on a scale ranging from ten to sixteen miles to an inch, grouped in atlas form, upon which should be delineated in colors the boundary lines of the various tracts of country ceded to the United States from time to time by the different Indian tribes.

2d. An accompanying historical text, not only reciting the substance of the material provisions of the several treaties, but giving a history of the causes leading to them,, as exhibited in contemporaneous official correspondence and other trustworthy data.

3d. A chronologic list of treaties with the various Indian tribes, exhibiting the names of tribes, the date, place where, and person by whom negotiated.

4th. An alphabetic list of all rivers, lakes, mountains, villages, and other objects or places mentioned in such treaties, together with their location and the names by which they are at present known.

5th. An alphabetic list of the principal rivers, lakes, mountains, and other topographic features in the United States, showing not only their present names but also the various names by which they have from time to time been known since the discovery of America, giving in each case the date and the authority therefor.

INDIAN BOUNDARIES.

The most difficult and laborious feature of the work is that involved under the first of these five subdivisions. The ordinary reader in following the treaty provisions, in which the boundaries of the various cessions are so specifically and minutely laid down, would anticipate but little difficulty in tracing those boundaries upon the modern map. In this he would find himself sadly at fault. In nearly all of the treaties concluded half a century or more ago, wherein cessions of land were made, occur the names of boundary points which are not to be found on any modern map, and which have never been known to people of the present generation living in the vicinity.

In many of the older treaties this is the case with a large proportion of the boundary points mentioned. The identification and exact location of these points thus becomes at once a source of much laborious research. Not unfrequently weeks and even months of time have been consumed, thousands of old maps and many volumes of books examined, and a voluminous correspondence conducted with local historical societies or old settlers, in the effort to ascertain the location of a single boundary point.

To illustrate this difficulty, the case of "Hawkins' line" may be cited, a boundary line mentioned in the cession by the