Honorable Sir:
I received your favor of the 27th ultimo. Permit me to express to you my sincere thanks for the kind sentiments you entertain in my regard and which I shall ever gratefully remember. You reiterate to me the invitation, in the name of the " Honorable Committee of the United States Indian Commission " to assist at your meetings in New York on the 18th instant. Even apart from the great honor you are pleased to confer on me, nothing could be more pleasing to my personal feelings than to be admitted in the presence and at the deliberations of the most highly esteemed gentlemen of the country to whom the administration has confided in its wisdom the important Indian question as to the future welfare of the remaining Indian tribes. I stated in my previous letter that my health is rather declining, and must add that my hearing, particularly, is failing fast and makes my presence in meetings rather unpleasant. Besides, the invitations I have received from the Upper Sioux Indians and the promises I have made to them, if in my power to comply with their requests, make me humbly decline your very kind and honorable invitation, for which please receive again my sincere.and heartfelt thanks.
You do me the honor to ask me some account as to my personal experience among the Indians and my conviction as to their capacity for civilization and receiving religious instruction, etc. Though pressed for time, I take great pleasure in reviewing some of my early experience among the Indian tribes, accompanied with a few simple illustrative occurrences, showing the Indian character in its primitive nature where it had remained uncontaminated by the contact of vicious whites.
You allude in your letter to the anecdote I related to the honorable commissioners at Fort Leavenworth (1868) to
i Letter to Hon. S. F. Tappan.
St. Louis University, May, 1870.