This assembly will form an era among them, and I trust will be ever dear to their memories. It closed on the 23d of September.
The happy results of this council are, no doubt, owing to the prudent measures of the commissioners of the Government, and more especially to their conciliatory manners in all their intercourse and transactions with the Indians. The council will doubtless produce the good effects they have a right to expect. It will be the commencement of a new era for the Indians - an era of peace. In future, peaceable citizens may cross the desert unmolested, and the Indian will have little to dread from the bad white man, for justice will be rendered to him.
Quite late in the afternoon of the 23d of September I bade farewell to the Creoles, Canadians and half-bloods. I exhorted them to live well and to pray to God, and to hope that he would soon send them spiritual succor for their temporal and eternal happiness and that of their children. I shook hands for the last time with the great chiefs and with a large number of Indians, and addressed them some encouraging words and promised to plead their cause with the great chiefs of the Black-gowns, and make known the desire, good intentions and hopes they had expressed to me, while they would daily, in all sincerity of heart, implore the " Master of Life " to send them zealous priests to instruct them in the way of salvation, which Jesus Christ, his only Son, came to trace to his children on earth.
I directed my course toward " the springs," situated about fourteen miles distant, in the vicinity of Robidoux' trading-house, for Colonel Mitchell had named this as the rendezvous for all those who proposed going directly to the United States. On the 24th, before sunrise, we set out in good and numerous company. I visited, in my way, two