Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/495

Rh case was conducted with very few formalities; and whenever the court took a recess, the jury were locked up in a grocery, where, for the sum of seventy-five cents each, we could have all the liquor we wanted, provided we did not waste or carry any away. Imbibing was quite prevalent among all classes in that day, and if each of the jurymen drank his seventy-five cents worth, the judge and counsel could not have been far behind, and some individual was heard to say that the prisoner was the only sober man in the court-room. After the jury was charged, we were locked up two or three nights, and on the third morning we brought in a verdict of not guilty and he was discharged."

During the summer of 1837, Charles Vineyard, a sub-agent, was sent to invite the Ojibways to a council at Fort Snelling, with the United States commissioner Gov. Henry Dodge. Twelve hundred assembled in July, and a treaty was concluded on the 29th of the month, under some excitement, caused by the custom which had grown up within a few years, of holding a whole tribe responsible to the traders for the bad debts of individuals.

The treaty was approved on the 15th of June, 1888, by the President and Senate of the United States. Under it the Ojibways ceded all the country within the following limits: "Beginning at the junction of the Crow Wing and Mississippi Rivers, between twenty and thirty miles above where the Mississippi is crossed by the forty-sixth parallel of north latitude, and running thence to the north point of Lake St. Croix, one of the sources of the St. Croix River; thence to and along the dividing ridge between the waters