no MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 



it has never been so decided, and I hold that it is a grave and solemn wrong for a 

 writer to cast slurs or call names when such is the case — but will simply present 

 the evidence and let the reader deduce his own verdict. Then we shall do nobody 

 injustice, and our consciences shall be clear. 



On or about the ist day of September 1813, the Creek war being then in progress 

 in Florida, the crops, herds, and houses of Mr. George Fisher, a citizen, were 

 destroyed, either by the Indians or by the United States troops in pursuit of them. 

 By the terms of the law, if the Indians destroyed the property, there was no relief 

 for Fisher ; but if the troops destroyed it, the Government of the United States was 

 debtor to Fisher for the amount involved. 



George Fisher must have considered that the Indians destroyed the property, 

 because, although he lived several years afterward, he does not appear to have ever 

 made any claim upon the Government. 



In the course of time Fisher died, and his widow married again. And by and 

 by, nearly twenty years after that dimly-remembered raid upon Fisher's cornfields, 

 the widow Fisher's new husband petitioned Congress for pay for the property, and 

 backed up the petition with many depositions and affidavits which purported to 

 prove that the troops, and not the Indians, destroyed the property ; that the troops, 

 for some inscrutable reason, deliberately burned down " houses ' (or cabins) valued 

 at $600, the same belonging to a peaceable private citizen, and also destroyed 

 various other property belonging to the same citizen. But Congress declined to 

 believe that the troops were such idiots (after overtaking and scattering a band of 

 Indians proved to have been found destroying Fisher's property) as to calmly 

 continue the work of destruction themselves, and make a complete job of what the 

 Indians had only commenced. So Congress denied the petition of the heirs of 

 George Fisher in 1832, and did not pay them a cent. 



We hear no more from them officially until 1848, sixteen years after their first 

 attempt on the Treasury, and a full generation after the death of the man whose 



robbing of our government was a novelty. The very man who showed me where to find the docu- 

 ments for this case was at that very time spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in Washington 

 for a mail steamship concern, in the effort to procure a subsidy for the company — a fact which was a 

 long time in coming to the surface, but leaked out at last and underwent Congressional 

 investigation. 



