Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 11).djvu/217

 I met this morning Mr. Baker of Philadelphia, an intelligent traveller, who knows my friend J. Ingle, living eighty miles further west of this place, and who has kindly borrowed a horse for me, and agrees to pilot me thither to-morrow. I saw a large party of Miami Indian hunters,[73] accompanied by their ugly squaws, all on horseback, and all astride, with their tomahawks and frightful knives girdled round them, dressed in blankets and turbans, and painted red, green, black, and white; every feature having a different shade of {218} colour, and all, save the squaws, apparently half drunk, having their bottle of fire-water, or whiskey, with them, which, after drinking from it themselves, they stopped and handed to me and my friend Baker. We took it and applied it to our lips, it being considered the perfection of rudeness and barbarism, and little short of enmity, to refuse any thing so kindly offered. This tribe had approached the town for the purpose of selling their venison. Each horse carried two or three quarters, fat and fine, ready skinned, and hanging down its sides. The price was only a quarter dollar for 30lbs., not an English halfpenny per pound.

Although Vincennes is an old mother town, abounding in rich land, it is uncultivated, and there is occasionally a scarcity of necessaries, particularly of milk and butter, which, with the worst tea, are dealt out very sparingly; no lump sugar, no brandy, no segars, no spitoons are seen at this hotel.

All persons here, and all whom I have met, hitherto, during this western pilgrimage, whether they have or have not visited Birkbeck, think very meanly of both him and his settlement. The English emigrants particularly, (says