The Indian, in truth, no longer has a country. He is reduced to starvation or to warring to the death. The Indian´s first demand is that the white ma… - Stephen E. Ambrose

heifer for a joke. The heifer bucked and Autie was thrown to the ground, receiving a bad cut on his forehead.) Lydia wanted Autie to come to Monroe to live with her, help David in his draying business and on the farm, and attend school. Maria agreed — she had more than enough children to look after and Monroe’s schools were thought to be superior to those of New Rumley.16 So Autie left home. Monroe had a population of 3,500 in 1849, equal parts French, English, and German. The second oldest town in southern Michigan, it had pretensions of sophistication. There was an established class, a group of leading citizens who owned or controlled the community’s economic life and liked to think of itself as composing an elect society. In Monroe, in short, Autie encountered snobbery for the first time. He saw it from the underside, too, for the Reeds were not members of the better classes. A retired Army officer with aristocratic pretensions, Major Joseph R. Smith, dismissed the Reeds with a

in the words of the superintendent of public instruction in Indiana, the policy was “to make of all the varieties of population among us, differing as they do in origin, language, habits of thought, modes of action, and social custom, one people, with one common interest.”11 The accepted

Despite himself, Webster was drawn to the people. “The Germans I have seen so far have impressed me as clean, efficient, law-abiding people,” he wrote his parents on April 14. They were churchgoers. “In Germany everybody goes out and works and, unlike the French, who do not seem inclined to lift a finger to help themselves, the Germans fill up the trenches soldiers have dug in their fields. They are cleaner, more progressive, and more ambitious than either the English or the French.”1