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14 fession of interpreter. When Rev. Alfred Brunson visited the Indians at La Pointe in the winter of 1842–3, on an embassy from the government, he selected young Warren, then seventeen years of age, as interpreter, and found him very ready and skillful. Hon. Henry M. Rice writes: "In the treaty of Fond du Lac, made by Gen. Isaac Verplank and myself in 1847, William was our interpreter. (See Statutes at Large.) He was one of the most eloquent and fluent speakers I ever heard. The Indians said he understood their language better than themselves. His command of the English language, also, was remarkable—in fact, musical."

In the summer of 1842, in his eighteenth year, Mr. Warren was married to Miss Matilda Aitkin, daughter of Wm. A. Aitkin, the well-known Indian trader, who had been educated at the Mackinaw Mission School. It was during his interpretership under I. P. Hays in 1844–45, his relatives say, that his health began to fail. Frequent exposures, long and severe winter expeditions, connected with the Indian service at that time, brought on those lung troubles, which subsequently ended his life so prematurely, after several years of suffering.

Warren came to what is now Minnesota, with his family, in the fall of 1845, first living at Crow Wing and Gull Lake, where he was employed as farmer and interpreter, by Major J. E. Fletcher, Winnebago agent, then also in charge of the Mississippi Ojibways. He was also employed as interpreter in the attempted removal of the Lake Superior Indians under J. S. Watrous—an act which he did not, however, approve of. After a year or two he established a home at Two Rivers, now in Morrison Co. In the fall of 1850, he was nominated and elected as a member of the Legislature from the district in which he lived—a district embracing more than one-half the present area of the State. In January following (1851), he ap-