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Letters from a meeting at Fond du Lac on Lake Superior with the Ojibwe, in 1826

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Thomas McKenney, head of the new U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs in the War Dept., wrote these letters home from Lake Superior in 1826. The Fond du Lac referred to is near modern Duluth-Superior, and not the city of that name on the shores of Lake Winnebago. His romantic notion of the wilderness, his paternalism toward the Indians, and his idealism that white "civilization" could save a "vanishing race" are all quite typical of his era. The treaty whose councils he describes here gave the U.S. the right to mine copper and other metals in any part of the Ojibwe territory, but the Ojibwe retained the rights to occupy, hunt and fish there and ceded no land
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