very extensive, rare and valuable library of books and manuscripts relating to the early history of Michigan and of the Northwest Territory, and his various writings upon the subject place within the reach of the casual reader, matter not otherwise to be obtained except as the result of very laborious search and study.

In 1853, Mr. Walker was elected a member of the Detroit board of education, where he continued to serve for several years. He has the interest in popular education which seems natural to men of New England blood and training, and has remained a valuable and truly valued friend of the school system of Detroit, though for a long interval he ceased to be officially connected therewith. He is now and for some years past has been a member of that body. To the library of the city, too, he has devoted no little attention, and has been its constant upholder at all times.

In 1859 Mr. Walker became a professor in the law department of the University of Michigan, and remained in the service of that splendid institution for fifteen years, until failing health and the pressing demands of his business compelled him to resign. The place. was very much to his taste, and hundreds of sound and successful lawyers, now practicing in many states, bear testimony to the value of the teaching which he gave.

Judge B. F. H. Witherell died in 1867, leaving vacant the bench of the third circuit court. There was at that time an arrangement made for the submission to the people of a constitutional amend

ment, increasing the salary of judges of the circuit courts. Upon the faith that this amendment would be ratified, Mr. Walker, when Governor Crapo named him to succeed Judge Witherell, accepted the office. When the amendment met the popular test in the spring of 1868, it was defeated, and Judge Walker resigned his office after an incumbency of but ten months. He took this action simply because, not being a rich man, he could not afford a judicial office at the expense of surrendering a practice so much more remunerative. Though so short a time upon the bench, Judge Walker made a reputation for learning, wisdom, clear-headedness, judicial fairness and honesty which was well worth years, rather than months, of public service. When his intention to resign was stated, a meeting of the bar of Detroit was called, at which a prominent member of the profession, in referring to the announced determination of the judge to resign, spoke of it as a matter "which would be deeply felt by the bar and by all, as most calamitous to the interests of business men." Mr. A. B. Maynard offered the following:

Resolved, That a committee be appointed by the chair to take into consideration the address to the inquire whether some plan may not be adopted to bar delivered by Judge Walker this morning, and to retain Judge Walker's valuable services upon the bench of this court.

Such a committee was appointed in the persons of Messrs. Theodore Romeyn, A. B. Maynard, Levi Bishop, George Jerome, W. P. Wells and D. Bethune Duffield, but their efforts were not sufficient to persuade Judge Walker to alter

his judgment in the matter, and he retired from his office at the time he had already set. Since then he has devoted his time very closely and very laboriously to his large law practice, and, though now seventy-two years of age, is still regularly at his desk or in or in court as clear and vigorous in mind as twenty years ago. He has a well earned and well sustained place in the front rank of the Detroit bar, and is high in the respect and esteem of the wide circle of those who know him.

In still another field Judge Walker has performed great and lasting public service. Under the joint resolution of 1869, providing for a commission to visit the penal and charitable institutions of Michigan and other states, he was made a member of the commission. The work of the commission was very thoroughly and conscientiously done, at an expense of an immense amount of travel and careful study of the methods of many institutions, widely scattered and widely diverse in their theory and practice. The result was doubly valuable to the state, in that it showed not only many things wherein it might well imitate its neighbors, but many and equally important matters for its avoidance. So highly was the result appreciated that it led to the establishment of the Board of State Charities. this board Judge Walker was a member and chairman for many years. He has twice represented the board at the National Prison Reform congress, once at Baltimore in 1872, and again at St. Louis in 1874. Into the scientific consideration of the great prob

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lems of charity and correction Judge Walker has gone with his whole heart, and has been well recognized as a reliable authority upon all their aspects.

Such a sketch as this would scarcely be complete were I to say nothing of the political and religious affiliations of its subject. To reverse the order, then. Judge Walker was reared a Quaker and continued to observe their religious forms until he left home, at the age of sixteen years. He then became a Presbyterian, and so continued for several years. When he settled at Grand Rapids there was no Presbyterian church in the place, and he assisted in the formation of an Episcopal church, of which he was one of the officers and a regular attendant until his removal to the east. He never, however, became a communicant of that body. In Vermont he attended the Congregational church, and when he came to Detroit united with the First Congregational church of that city, with which he has ever since been connected.

In politics he is a Democrat, believing that in that party he finds embodied the nearest approach to his own views of statecraft, political economy and constitutional law. He is a strong believer in the morality and advisability of free trade, and an equally strong opponent of the centralization of political power. At the age of twenty-one years he was a member of the anti-slavery convention which assembled at Utica, which was broken up by a mob and reassembled at Peterboro, upon the invitation of Gerret Smith. An inflexible anti-slavery man, he was in sympathy with the Free Soil

Thus, Spanish Florida and the gulf have not yet entirely lost sight of Menendez and Ponce de Leon; aristocratic Carolina, Virginia and Maryland yet repeat the ambitions and courtly graces of their Raleighs, Richmonds and Baltimores; while stern, Puritan New England sends forth its keen thinkers, energetic workers and practical statesmen, whose influence is felt over all the land, even as that of Winthrop and Miles Standish moved the hearts of the little colony gathered round Plymouth Rock. New York shows plainly the conservative influences which have flown down through the veins of generations from the burghers of Holland, and Pennsylvania yet plumes herself on the elegance and social superiority which it has inherited from the republican court.

So, when we seek this northern shore and follow the two small vessels which under the command of Jacques Cartier, in 1534, blindly groped their way through the Bay of Newfoundland and up the St. Lawrence, making way. for the brave, chivalrous La Salle, Champlain, Frontenac and the scores of selfdenying priests, under whose leadership the secrets of a barbarous continent were unveiled, we still trace the footsteps of this alien race. Amid the practical and common-place life of modern American towns-more especially on the Canadian side-we come upon racemarks which tell us that Father Hennepin, Brebœuf, Salement, Marquette and a host of others have left traces which cannot be ignored or forgotten. Their

as their terrible fate, have gained for them the admiration and sympathy of the Protestant as well as the Catholic world. The candid testimony of Bancroft is, that "the annals of missionary labor are inseparably connected with the origin of all the establishments of French America. Not a cape was doubled, not a stream discovered, that a Jesuit did not lead the way."

These men brought with them to New France, the faith, narrow prejudices and the utterly conservative ideas, which from the days of Francis I to Louis XVI, governed the world as 'twere a stage whereon kings drew the wires to move the puppets of their will.

Many of the events recorded in the far scattered materials of this history, group themselves round single individuals, who have left the impress of their strong personality, their grand energy and self-denying perseverance, on many a point throughout this vast region, even as their names are perpetuated in lake, city and river.

The "Relations," as they are quaintly called, of these good old priests, which were sent back to the mother country, read like a fairy tale; and the fatherly letters of the great French king are curious reading in this Nineteenth century. He dwells with the greatest minuteness upon the habits and government of the people, sending prosy pages of advice and remonstrance in his own handwriting to his governors; scolding and advising individuals as if he could stretch his powerful arm across the sea, despite the interval of time and distance, and

"In the history of the autocracy which has fallen, and the democracy which has prevailed, extremes meet,” and we read the drama enacted amid untamed forests by a distant gleam of courtly splendors and having for background the regal pomp and glory of Versailles. Thus we see, that while the growth of New England was the result of the efforts of a busy multitude, that of New France was the achievement of a gigantic ambition striving with one hand to grasp a continent. It was a vain attempt, and was soon borne down by foes from without and corruption within. But out of the fall of New France grew revolutions whose influence is felt to this hour through every nation of the civilized world, and the clashing of these antagonistic systems is not without their suggestions even to us.

During the three centuries which have elapsed since this early exploration by the French, two distinct races have successively occupied and disappeared from this locality (the frontier near the mouth of the Niagara river), which is now in undisputed possession of a third.

From this strange and romantic beginning, the vast inland seas, and the shores now teeming with evidences of the highest civilization, emerged into the light shed by the old world, and gradually the march of thought and the indomitable will of the Anglo-Saxon has displaced the cross and lily for the more prosaic emblems of the eagle and sword.

of which history makes any mention, were the Attionandaronk, called KahKwas by the Senecas. They are first mentioned by Champlain during his winter visit to the Hurons, 1615. According to the early Jesuits,they excelled the Hurons in strength, stature and symmetry. Once in every ten years the survivors of each family gathered the remains of their deceased ancestors from the platforms on which they had been deposited, and buried them in heaps with many superstitious ceremonies. This was called "The Feast of the Dead." Many of the mounds thus raised may still be seen in this vicinity. A conspicuous one on Tonawanda island is affirmed by the old Senecas to have had such an origin. This people were the predecessors of the Senecas, and were destroyed by the Iroquois.

It is hardly necessary, though it would be very interesting, to go through the history of the Indian tribes which have been identified with this locality; the feeble remnant of which yet remain about twenty miles from here on what is known as the Cattaraugas reservation. In these spiritless and shiftless sons of the forest, one cannot recognize the descendants of the fiery and undaunted

Senecas.