A less impartial course appears to have been
pursued at Green Bay, where this policy of the "goods offer" of 1837 was
loudly called in question. I had shielded the tribes under my care from
it, and should have had credit for it from all honest and candid men,
but finding no disposition in some quarters to discriminate, I
immediately, on reaching home, sat down and wrote a plain and clear
statement of the affair for the public press, and having thus satisfied
my sense of justice and truth, left others, who had acted wholly out of
my jurisdiction and influence, to vindicate themselves. J.W. Edmonds,
Esq., and Maj. John Garland, who had been chief actors in the matter,
did so. But it seemed like talking against a whirlwind. The whole action
of this offer, on the Michigan Indians, _was to postpone, by their own
consent_, the payment of the half annuity in coin one year.
The Grand River Indians declined to come to Mackinack, the place
specially named in the treaty, to receive their half annuity, in
consequence of which, it was not practicable to send it to them till the
next spring.
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