I beheld a fine, gentle, innocent-looking girl,--a widow, I believe,--come up to the investigator to assert that she had never sold her land. She had been counterfeited by some knave. The Investigator's court was a low bar-room. He saw me eyeing him, and some one told him I was travelling to take notes. He did not know but government had employed me as a secret supervisor. He seemed to shrink, and postponed a decision. I have since heard that he is a rascal of the sort at which I have just hinted.
The ill-starred red people here are entirely at the mercy of interpreters, who, if not negro-slaves of their own, are half-breeds,--a worse set, generally, than the worst of either slaves or knaves. In the jargon of the border, they are called _linkisters_,--some say because they form, by interpreting, a _link_ between the Indian nations and ours; but I should rather regard the word as a mere corruption of _linguist_.
The Indians become more easily deluded by the borderers than by others, because the borderers know that they never esteem any one to be substantial who does not keep a shop. So your rascal of the frontier sets up a shop, and is pronounced a _sneezer_. If his shop be large, he is a _sneezer-chubco_; if larger than any other, he is a _sneezer-chubco-mico_. But, in any of his grades, a _sneezer_ is always considered as a personage by no means to be sneezed at. The _sneezer_ will pay for land in goods, and thinks himself very honest if he charges his goods at five hundred times their worth, and can make it appear by his account against the Indian's claim that he has paid him thousands of dollars, when in fact he may scarcely have paid him hundreds of cents.
Well! So much for the beautiful state of our national legislation and morals, as civilizers and protectors of the red-men. It is time for me to relieve you from these details, so uncomplimentary to us of the superior order, and to tell you something about the famous religious festival which took me amongst the Indians, and thereby caused, the foregoing first preamble,--the ennui produced by which I proceed to cure, like a quack doctor, _by doubling the dose_. Accordingly, here comes a second preamble, by way of introductory explanation of what is to come at last.