When he first set out on his great mission, this wandering patriot of the wilderness found the minds of his countrymen we cowed with fear, or so benumbed with indifference as to their fate, that there was scarcely a man among them all, outside his own near kindred, to lend him an ear, or join him in his self-imposed, herculean labor. But toward the end, when every hill and valley, plain and forest, river and lake of the great North-west had been made to resound full many a year with the echoes of that awakening voice, behold the result. Persuaded that their hour of deliverance and vengeance was come at last, thousands of the tawny warriors of the wilderness, drawn from the numerous tribes which he had succeeded in uniting, came flocking around him, ready to do his bidding, as one commissioned by the Great Spirit to be their leader and deliverer. Never, since their first landing on the Continent, had the whites beheld arrayed against them, by the energy and power of one mind, a league of the Indian tribes so formidable and wide-spread.
That the sachem was in error, there can of course be no doubt--all are who undertake to withstand the progress of a Christian civilization; but no less certain is it that he erred not because his heart was wrong, but that his mind was unenlightened. And in fair truth, with such limited views as to the right and wrong in human motive and action as the rude, narrow sphere in which his lot was cast enabled him to make, what other course could he in his own judgment have chosen, without dishonor to himself and injury to the people whose weal he most assuredly had earnestly at heart. Had his mind--crude as his own wilderness, as vast too, and as fertile and varied--been duly cultivated and enlightened, he would not have viewed the progress of civilization as a destroying flood, against which it behooved him as a patriot to array his people, lest thereby they be swept away from the earth. Rather would he have perceived that it was a life-giving, beneficent light, into which it was his highest duty, as a lover of the great brotherhood of man, to lead his people, that with it they might spread themselves over the earth, and in it grow strong and prosperous and happy.