Beauchamp's health having improved he reëntered the ministry in 1822, and at the General Conference two years later he lacked but two votes of being chosen bishop. He died in 1824.
Hinde, in 1825, was a member of the Wabash Navigation Company, consisting of seventeen prominent Indiana and Illinois men, and having a capital stock of one million dollars. He was one of the nine directors for the first year. He continued to be a contributor to periodical literature and became the biographer of his friend Beauchamp. In a letter from Mt. Carmel, of May 6, 1842, Hinde says: "I have just returned from the East, having visited the Atlantic cities generally for the first time, after forty-five years pioneering in the wilderness of the West. I have been three times a citizen of Kentucky, twice of Ohio, and twice of Illinois." Hinde died in 1846 and was buried at Mt. Carmel. Among his writings is found one of the most acute analyses of frontier character that has appeared. The writer points out that eastern ministers have often been unsuccessful and eastern immigrants unpopular, because they have underrated the people of the West, among whom there are many people of culture. They prefer "the _useful_ to the shining or showy talent." In the West the best work has been done by westerners. The English spoken in the West is the purest to be found, because the various provincialisms of the immigrants are mutually corrective. The Virginian, who retained his unbounded hospitality, was the most prominent character in the West. "If we expect to find on crossing the mountains a people either illiterate or ignorant as a body, we will assuredly, in many instances, be happily disappointed. It too often happens, that one puffed up with self importance, and possessing a conceited and heated imagination, will form wild conjectures as to men and things. We have been amused at the bewildered minds of such, with the 'whys' and 'wherefores'; and one of the most ridiculous whims of some, is to endeavour to press every thing into their own _mould_; and shape it, be it what it may, if possible, after their own manner, custom, or operation, forgetting that 'we have to take the world as it is, and not as we would have it to be.' The fact is, an emigrant should come forth as an inquirer, and set himself down to learn at the threshold of experience. On this rock thousands have been injured, and none have suffered more than the English emigrants. Oh! with what poignant grief have I heard the English emigrant exclaim with the bitterest invectives on his own course and conduct, as to this particular. Conceiving that he knew every thing, when he came here to test his experience, he soon found that he 'knew nothing.' This circumstance I have found too to have its bearings upon American emigrants from different states; upon families, upon individuals, and upon preachers also. How often have I heard the old settler complaining, (who having himself learned by _experience_) of the impertinent conduct of an emigrant, who sometimes carries his local policy through all the ramifications of his life, and often into the religious society, as well as elsewhere; he wishing every thing done, as he saw it done in Boston, New-York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and very often 'Old England' and 'Ireland!' as if men who have to act, and reflect upon the circumstances of the case, different from any ever before presented except among themselves, are to be governed by acts and doings of people in the moon!"(549) A man who thus knew the frontier was fitted to be the founder of a western town.