Page:The Conquest.djvu/439

 get out! The Indians hunt on our lands, and kill our tame stock. They are a great annoyance."

For two years Governor Edwards had been asking for help.

"The General Government has been applied to long enough to have freed us from so serious a grievance. If it declines acting with effect, it will soon learn that these Indians will be removed, and that very promptly."

Clark himself was personally using every exertion to prevail on the Indians to move as the best means of preserving tranquillity, and did all he could without actual coercion. The Indians continued to promise to go, but they still remained.

"More time," said the Indians. "Another year."

The combustible train was laid,—only a spark was needed, only a move of hostility, to fire the country. Will Black Hawk apply that spark?

"We cannot go," said the Pottawattamies. "The sale of our lands was made by a few young men without our consent."

Five hundred Indians determined to hold all the northern part of Illinois for ever.

Sacs, Foxes, Pottawattamies, sent daily letters and complaints. "Our Father! our Father! our Father!"—it was a plea and a prayer, and trouble, trouble, trouble. Black Partridge's letters make one weep. "Some of my people will be dead before Spring."

Meanwhile agents were ahead surveying lands in that magic West. The Indians were becoming as interested in migration as the whites had been; the same causes were pushing them on.

Clark was busily making contracts for saw-mills and corn-mills on the Platte and Kansas, arranging for means of transportation, for provisions for use on the way and after they settled, for oxen and carts and stock,—when one day four strange Indians, worn and bewildered, arrived at St. Louis, out of that West. Some kind hand guided them to the Indian office.

That tunic, that bandeau of fox skins,—Clark recalled it as the tribal dress of a nation beyond