Kellogg—Removal of the Winnebago 
29 
were also known to have visited their old homes during the winter 
of 1833-34. 
So they came back—the dispossessed—^year after year. White 
pioneers tell of the long trains of Indian visitors that used to 
come each summer to their old Rock River homes, to fish once 
more in the beloved waters, to stand once more beside the effigy 
mounds of their clans. The dispossessed make a sad picture, yet 
an inevitable one. The Great Spirit had willed that this valley 
of the Rock should be no longer a wilderness, haunted by bar¬ 
barians, but the home of a great civilization. Let us, however, in 
our plenty and prosperity prove our humaneness by giving now 
and then a look into the past and a sigh of sympathy for the dis¬ 
possessed red man, who loved the woods and streams and lakes 
of his ancestral home with a deep and abiding affection. “This,’’ 
said one of the Winnebago tribe to the writer, “is the home of my 
spirit.” From this home they were forced to go in the early 
summer of 1833, because of the unreasoning terror of the frontier 
settlers, and by the stern orders of the officers of the United 
States government.^ 
* This paper is based almost wholly upon the documents in the Indian office at Wash¬ 
ington, copies of which are in the State Historical Library. Dodge’s letters of this 
period are printed in Iowa Historical Record, v; 337—361; vi; 391—422, 445—467. See 
also a trooper’s experience, in TTfs. Hist. Colls., x; 231—234. Mrs. Kinzie’s valuable 
record in Wau Bun closes just before the removal and the payment of 1833. See in¬ 
cidents connected with the repeated return of the Winnebago, in Wis. Hist. Colls., x; 
258-259. 
