he and his people were sorry for the words that had been spoken, and which had done so much harm; that he came into the council by the unanimous desire of his people, to recall those foolish words, and did there take them back - handing round strings of wampum, which passed around and were received by all with the greatest satisfaction. Several of the principal chiefs delivered speeches to the same effect, handing round wampum in turn, and in this manner the whole difficulty of the preceding day was settled, and to all appearances forgotten. The Indians are very civil and courteous to each other and it is a rare thing to see their assemblies disturbed by unwise or ill-timed remarks. I never witnessed it except upon the occasion here alluded to, and it is more than probable that the presence of myself and other white men contributed towards the unpleasant ocurrence. I could not help but admire the genuine philosophy and good sense displayed by men whom we call savages, in the transaction of their public business, and how much we might profit in the halls of our Legislatures, by occasionally taking for our example the proceedings of the great Indian council at Upper Sandusky."

THE CONQUEST OF THE INDIAN.

BENJAMIN R. COWEN, CINCINNATI.

[Portion of an address delivered by General Cowen on the 28th of June, 1904, at the placing of the tablet in commemoration of the Harrison-Tarhe Peace Conference.]

We have heard the story of the historic incident this monument is designed to commemorate eloquently told by the Regent

BENJAMIN R. COWEN.

of the Columbus Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. That society has rendered a valuable service in the erection of this unique memorial which commemorates what is not only an interesting incident in local history, but an important epoch in the history of the great Northwest Territory, while being at the same time an enduring landmark. of our progress.

I have heard it suggested that inas much as woman has ostensibly little or nothing to do with government functions or with the wars, the hardships and the sacrifices of the race under primitive conditions she has no business meddling with them in any manner. Never was a greater error. True, war and border struggles and sacrifices are generally regarded as peculiar to the stronger sex from which woman is exempt. Yet war and sacrifice and hardship have been woman's burden since our first parents turned their backs on Eden. So that the women who have erected this memorial were strictly in the line of duty, and privilege, for women should have a place of honor wherever the hardships and the sacrifices of the race are held in grateful memory.

'Tis said the doting pyramids have long forgotten the names of their builders. Here we have a monument eons old before those buildiers were born, yet to the eye of science the glacial hieroglyphics carved thereon tell the story of its antiquity and its endurance. We, the ephemera of a day, will soon pass from memory, but let us hope that this monument, in its indestructible character, may prove a type of the imperishable recollection of the event it is intended to commemorate and of the form of government to the establishment of which that event contributed.

In the mighty changes which have taken place since Harrison erected here a bulwark against a threatening barbarism the people of Ohio have had much to be proud of; much to be thankful for. In the intervening years Ohio has grown from 40,000 population to four millions and the Nation from eight millions to eighty millions, a growth so remarkable as to be without parallel in the world's history.

It is so customary, however, to give thanks for visible and tangible mercies and blessings, rather than for the escape from possible evils which have been averted that our expressions of gratitude for the former are so absorbing as to leave little room for thought of the latter.

We are all proud of our State and of her name and all that it implies of history and endeavor and achievement. Could we have been equally proud, think you, had the name once sought to be fixed on it been allowed to stand? I have my doubts.

It is a historic fact little known, to-day, that a Committee of the Continental Congress, March 1st, 1784. reported a scheme. for the organization of the Northwest Territory which contemplated its division into nine States and prescribing the boundaries and the names of each. The territory now embraced in the State of Ohio was to be made into two states, the Northern to be called Washington and the Southern Polysipia. The only redeeming feature of the last name was that it was less objectionable than some of the other names proposed. Those names were: Sylvania, Michigania, Cheronessus, Asenisipia, Metropotamia, Illinoia, Saratoga, Polypotamia, Washington and Polysipia.

In reckoning our mercies let us not forget to return thanks that we are neither Polypotamians nor Polysipians, but plain Ohioans. The name Ohio is good enough for us.

Yet I have no doubt the wonderful achievements of the sons of this State during the past 100 years would even have popularized the name Polysipia and made it a name to conjure with as the name of Ohio is to-day.

This monument is intended to perpetuate an event in which both white men and Indians took part on a plane of perfect equality. The part borne by the Indians was not only highly creditable to them; it was of great advantage to the whites at a most critical period in our history. So that it seems appropriate to the occasion that I divide my time between the two races.

As the Indian has disappeared from the stage of action, however, we can only tell of his past. As the white man the American the Anglo-Saxon, so called, approaches the zenith of his powers, we may in some measure speak of his future.

But, through the glowing story of our pioneer struggles and successes runs a dark thread of shame in our treatment of the Indians which cannot be ignored in any fair narration of the story of the contact of the two races.

It was long an accepted maxim on the frontier that "the only good Indian is a dead one." But had an Indian Thucydides, smarting under the wrongs of his people, arisen to write a truthful story of his race on this continent I imagine the verdict of history might be different.

To civilize a race it would seem a wise policy to offer it such models as are pleasing and attractive and by as much as those models are superior to and more desirable than existing methods in so much will they be accepted.

The three civilizations - Spanish, French and Englishwhich first came in contact with the North American Indian had respectively bloomed and given to the world as the ripe fruit of their culture and their faith the Inquisition, St. Bartholomew and the Bloody Assizes. The crimson annals of Indian warfare furnish no names so execrated for inhumanity as Torquemada, Catherine de Medicis and Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys. The Indian could not conceive, much less execute any tortures so ex

quisite, any crimes against humanity so horrible and unnatural, as were perpetrated under the forms of law in the lands of the several Christian sovereigns under whose broad seals of authority those pioneers of the New World had come to convert and to save. Inflexible, merciless and selfish, and little adapted to attract simple, primitive natures yet it was those forms of civilization to which our aborigines were first introduced and which inaugurated the Indian policy which substantially prevailed on this continent ever since.

"Welcome, Englishmen," was the cordial greeting of the pagan Indian Samoset, as with the open hand of friendship he met the discouraged band of Christian pilgrims as they stepped ashore at Plymouth one bleak December day in 1620. For nearly 300 years, with mailed hand and the robber's plea, those civilized Christian Pilgrim-Puritans, so called, and their descendants, by robbery, murder, enslavement, debauchery, and every form of wrong which the devilish ingenuity of perverted religionists could devise, have given the response of Christian civilization to that pagan welcome.

Through all the colonial times since the first treaty when the Plymouth governor made old Massasoit drunk and stole his land, Indian treaties were made but to be broken, and from the first treaty made by our government, that with the Delawares at Fort Pitt in 1778, when that nation was cajoled into active alliance with the infant republic by the promise of a State organization and a representative in Congress, down to the latest treaty with the tribes huddled together on the arid lands of the far West — in all over 900 treaties, every one of the number was broken in one or more important particulars by the whites. And the same is true of all the contracts made with our predecessors, the French, the Spanish and the British.

In the treaty of peace of 1783 with Great Britain no mention was made of the native tribes and their rights in the soil, and no demand or request was made by Great Britain in their behalf, though she had been greatly aided during our Revolutionary War by her Indian allies.

Let me cite some authorities on the subject of the relative reliability of the two races: