Page 222 - La Société canadienne d'histoire de l'Église catholique - Rapport 1961

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218 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL COLLEOTIOHS.

ment of the United States was entirely unable to keep
possession of the country, and protect the Indians in their
rights.
British traders, then monopolized nearly the entire Fur
Trade of this region-and British gold was lavishingly ex-
pended, by active and efficient agents scattered over the whole
country, to influence the Indian tribes, and enlist them in
the cause of their former invaders, the English. On the
other hand, the Government of the United States, had but
a nominal possession of the country-but few forts, or places
of defence, and these but feebly manned or defended, and
the white population left to their own resources; it was but
natural that the Indians should take side with the most pow-
erful party, and with those ~hu promised them, that the
Americans should bc entirely expelled and driven from the
country, and, the original occupants restored to their former
homes. But this was not universally the case with the Me-
nomonees, for altho' they generally united under the British
Flag, there were many exceptions. The descendants of some
of the old American settlers well know that their families
were not only rescued from the scalping knife, but subsequent-
ly protected by different individuals of the Menornonee tribe.
In the Black Hawk war, they assembled en mast~e, and showed
themselves e5cient allies of the whites, in bringing to a close,
what at one time threatened to be a renewal of those savage
and sanguinary scenes, which at earlier periods devasta.ted
and laid waste many settlements in the Northwest.
But what remains at the present day, of these once pow-
and warlike tribes! Like snow, beneath the rays of the sun,
they have disappeared, leaving but faint and feeble remnants
of their tribe and people, The Winnebagoes at the present
day, number but a tithe of' their strength in the early part of
the present century. The Menomonees, altho' not reduced to
so great aproportion, yet are reduced to a mere fraction in
their former numbers-and taking the past history of the In-
dian race as a criterion, me may assume as a settled and in-