cut off the business of nearly all the mining country and much of the cattle country, and on the north the Canadian Pacific has taken away the traffic of all the Dominion posts, agencies, and police, and of the fur-trapping Indians and half-breeds over the line. There is nothing left for the town to live upon but the trade of the cattle and sheep ranches in the country close at hand. Most of the boats that used to come up the river have been withdrawn, and those that arrived last season with light freights could get no return cargoes, there being no more buffalo skins to carry. It would not be appropriate to say that in Benton all the week seems like Sunday, for in prosperous times Sunday was the busiest and noisiest day. There used to be a saying in the Yellowstone country that " West of Bismarck there is no Sunday, and west of Miles City there is no God." Benton was probably never so good as now. In time the town will rebound from its present depression, and with the development of the resources of the neighboring farming and grazing country will again be prosperous, but in a different way. The dramatic features of its old life as a remote outpost of civilization are gone forever.*

The town is built on a bank by the riverside surrounded by grassy hills. Climb the hills, or cross the river by the current ferry and scramble to the top of the lone mud cliffs, and you see that the stream runs some hundreds of feet below the general level of the country, which is a rolling plateau. The town is a queer conglomeration of handsome new brick structures and old cotton-wood log huts, with a few neat frame houses painted in the fashionable olives and browns. One is astonished at the size of the hotel, of the mercantile establishments, of the court-house, and of the buildings of the two newspapers.

Near the town, we visited the camp of a dozen lodges of Piegan Indians, who had come to stay all winter for the sake of such subsistence as they could get from the garbage-barrels of the citizens. A race of valorous hunters and warriors has fallen so low as to be forced to beg at back doors for kitchen refuse. In one of the tepees in the Piegan camp there was an affecting scene. A young squaw lay on a pile of robes and blankets, hopelessly ill and given up to die. In the lines of her face and the expression of her great black eyes there were traces of beauty and refinement not often seen in Indian women. Crouched on the ground by her side sat her father, an old blind man with long white hair and a strong, firm face clouded with an expression of stolid grief.

The Piegans and the Blackfeet, who inhabit the great reservation north and east of Fort Benton, have suffered grievously of late for want of food, and hundreds have died from scrofula and other diseases induced by insufficient nourishment. In fact, the Government has kept them in a state of semistarvation. It is a long way from the Upper Missouri to the halls of Congress, where the money is voted for Indian supplies, and it is not easy to place on the proper shoulders the blame for the barbarity of issuing for a week's rations barely enough food for two days. The appropriations for these Indians have hitherto been based on estimates for their winter support only. In the season of roaming and hunting it was supposed they could pick up their own living, as they used to do with ease before the white buffalo-hunters exterminated the game which was their main dependence. Now, the buffaloes which used to roam these plains in great herds are gone. Occasionally a solitary animal is found, or perhaps a little "bunch" of half a dozen, lurking in a ravine among the Bad Lands, but an Indian might starve to death before he had the luck to find one. Knowing how desperate are the chances of killing game, the Indians crowd around the agencies and try to subsist on the scanty rations issued by the Government. A few, up at Fort Belknap, raise little patches of grain; but of the five or six thousand on the reservation north of the Missouri, probably there are not five hundred who can be called selfsupporting. One of the Jesuit fathers from Flathead Mission visited the Blackfeet lately and prevailed upon them to let him take fifty of their children to be reared and educated at the Mission. Indians are strongly attached to their children in a passionate, unreasoning way, and as they are but children of larger growth themselves, living only in the present and incapable of much thought for the future, it is very hard to persuade them to part with the little ones. In this case the only consideration that moved them was the fear that the children would die for want of food, as many had already done. Father Palladimi told me that the speeches of the Indian chiefs at the council, where they told of the sufferings of the tribe and bared their emaciated arms and breasts to show to what a condition they had been brought by hunger, were thrilling bursts of savage oratory, even affecting listeners who could not, as he did, understand the spoken words. There seems to be but one humane and sensible course for the Government to take with these Indians. Their enormous reser

poses of the chase, should be abolished,

VOL. XXXV.- 58.

and smaller ones containing good agricultural and grazing lands established, and they should be fed until they could be put in a way of raising crops and cattle. This course has lately been recommended by a commission sent out to examine into their condition.

The old adobe fort erected in 1846 by the American Fur Company, which served as a nucleus to the town of Fort Benton and gave it its name, is still in existence, though much dilapidated. The four towers at the corners of the quadrangle are in a good state of preservation, but portions of the connecting walls have fallen. The rooms where the trappers and traders used to count their profits and make merry are now a rookery of poor homeless people, and the court looks like the backyard of a block of New York tenement houses. In one of the towers an embrasure is shown from which a cannon was once turned with terrible effect upon a party of peaceable In dians gathered outside the walls of the fort for traffic. The story is that a hunting party of Blackfeet drove off some cattle belonging to the fort, and killed a negro who followed them to recover the animals. The burgess (the title borne by the commander of the furtrading station) was a man of violent and revengeful disposition. When the Blackfeet

failed to give up the murderer, he determined to punish them Indian fashion, and waited until all apprehension of reprisals had been allayed in their minds and they had brought in their furs to barter for goods. Then he loaded his cannon to the muzzle with slugs and musket-balls, and, his men all refusing to put a match to it, fired it himself into a group of the unsuspecting savages.

The original trading fort on the Upper Missouri stood at the mouth of the Maria's River, twenty miles below Benton, and was built in 1828. This was abandoned in 1849, and old Fort Benton was erected eight miles above the present town and occupied for fourteen years. In 1843 the traders went down to the mouth of the Judith and built Fort Shagran. In 1846 they began work on the existing adobe fort and transferred to it the name of Benton. The American Fur Company sold the fort in 1865 to the North-west Fur Company, and in 1877 the Government leased it for a military post and occupied it four years. The town grew up slowly under the protection of the walls of the fort. These are the outlines of the history of a place whose trade extended over an area as great as that of all New England and the Middle States when it was itself only a collection of mudroofed log huts and warehouses.

LINCOLN'S CABINET.

HERE is distinguished authority for the statement that the work of framing the new Cabinet was mainly performed on the evening of the presidential election. After the polls were closed on the 6th of November (so Mr. Lincoln related a year or two later), the superintendent of the telegraph at Springfield invited him to come and remain in his office and read the dispatches as they should come in. He accepted the offer; and, reporting himself in due time at the telegraph office, from which all other visitors were excluded at 9 o'clock, awaited the result of the eventful day. Soon the telegrams came thick and fast-first from the neighboring precincts and counties; then from the great Western cities, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati; and finally from the capitals of the doubtful States, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the Empire State of New York. Here in this little room, in the company of two or three silent operators moving about their mysteriously clicking instruments, and recording with imperturbable gravity the swift-throbbing messages from near and far, Mr. Lincoln read the reports as they came in, first in vague and fragmentary dribblets, and later in the rising and swelling stream of cheering news. There was never a nicer or closer calculator of political probabilities than himself. He was emphatically at home among election figures. All his political life he had scanned tables of returns with as much care and accuracy as he analyzed and scrutinized maxims of government or platforms of parties. Now, as formerly, he was familiar with all the turning-points in contested counties and "close" districts, and knew by heart the value of each and every local loss or gain and its relation to the grand result. In past years, at the close of many a hot campaign he had searched out the comforts of victory from a discouraging and adverse-looking column of figures, or correctly read the fatal omen of defeat in some fragmentary announcement from a precinct or + Hon. Gideon Welles, conversation. J. G. N., per

county. Silently, as they were transcribed, the operators handed him the messages, which he laid on his knee while he adjusted his spectacles, and then read and re-read several times with deliberation. He had not long to wait for indications. From a scattering beginning, made up of encouraging local fragments, the hopeful news rose to almost uninterrupted tidings of victory. Soon a shower of congratulatory telegrams fell from the wires, and while his partisans and friends from all parts of the country were thus shaking hands with him "by lightning" over the result, he could hear the shouts and speeches of his Springfield followers, gathered in the great hall of the Statehouse across the street, and fairly making that building shake with their rejoicings.

Of course his first emotions were those of a kindling pleasure and pride at the sweeping completeness of his success. But this was only a momentary glow. He was indeed Presidentelect; but with that consciousness there fell upon him the appalling shadow of his mighty task and responsibility. It seemed as if he suddenly bore the whole world upon his shoulders, and could not shake it off; and sitting there in the yet early watches of the night, he read the still-coming telegrams in a sort of absent-minded mechanical routine, while his "inner man" took up the crushing burden of his country's troubles, and traced out the laborious path of coming duties. "When I finally bade my friends good-night and left that room," said Lincoln, "I had substantially completed the framework of my Cabinet as it now exists."

iticians of prominence and influence from other States, and, on the occasion of a short visit to Chicago, met and conferred with Mr. Hamlin, the Vice-President-elect, - all constituting, most probably, little else than a continued study of the Cabinet question. Never arbitrary nor dictatorial in the decision of any matter, he took unusual care on this point to receive patiently and consider seriously all the advice, recommendations, and objections which his friends from different States had to offer.

His personal experience during his service as a member of Congress had given him an insight into the sharp and bitter contentions which grow out of office-seeking and the distribution of patronage. It was therefore doubtless with the view to fortify himself in his selections, that he now determined to make definite offers of some at least of the Cabinet appointments. The question of taking part of his constitutional advisers from among his political opponents, and from the hostile or complaining Southern States, had been thoroughly debated in his own mind. The conclusion arrived at is plainly evinced by the following, written with his own hand, and inserted as a short leading editorial in the Springfield "Journal" on the morning of December 12th (or 13th), 1860:

"We hear such frequent allusions to a supposed purpose on the part of Mr. Lincoln to call into his Cabinet two or three Southern gentlemen from the parties opposed to him politically, that we are prompted to ask a few questions.

"First. Is it known that any such gentleman of character would accept a place in the Cabinet?

"Second. If yea, on what terms does he surrender to Mr. Lincoln, or Mr. Lincoln to him, on the political differences between them, or do they enter upon the administration in open opposition to each other?"

The high authorship of these paragraphs was not announced, but the reductio ad absurdum was so complete that the newspapers were not amiss in guessing whence they emanated. The selection of enemies being out of the question, Mr. Lincoln, in execution of longmatured plans, proceeded to choose his friends, and those of the best and ablest. On the morning of December 8th, 1860, he penned the following letters:

SPRINGFIELD, ILL., December 8th, 1860. MY DEAR SIR: With your permission I shall at the proper time nominate you to the Senate for confirmation as Secretary of State for the United States. Please let me hear from you at your own earliest convenience.

Your friend and obedient servant,
A. LINCOLN.

HON. WILLIAM H. SEWARD,
Washington, D. C.*

(Private and confidential.) SPRINGFIELD, ILL., December 8th, 1860. MY DEAR SIR: In addition to the accompanying and more formal note, inviting you to take charge of the State Department, I deem it proper to address you this. Rumors have got into the newspapers to the ef

fect that the Department named above would be tendered you as a compliment, and with the expectation I you would decline it. I beg you to be assured that

that

have said nothing to justify these rumors. On the contrary, it has been my purpose, from the day of the nomination at Chicago, to assign you, by your leave, this place in the Administration. I have delayed so long to communicate that purpose, in deference to what ap peared to me a proper caution in the case. Nothing has been developed to change my view in the premises; and I now offer you the place in the hope that you will accept it, and with the belief that your position in the public eye, your integrity, ability, learning, and great experience all combine to render it an appointment preeminently fit to be made.

One word more. In regard to the patronage sought with so much eagerness and jealousy, I have prescribed beseech your coöperation in keeping the maxim good. for myself the maxim, "Justice to all"; and I earnestly Your friend and obedient servant,

HON. WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Washington, D. C.*

A. LINCOLN.

This letter, so full of frankness and delicate courtesy, together with the brief note preceding it, was sent to two intimate friends of the President-elect at Washington, with the request, if their judgment concurred in the step, to hand them to Mr. Seward. They were at once delivered, and the recipient wrote the following equally courteous and characteristic answer:

WASHINGTON, December 13th, 1860.

MY DEAR SIR: I have had the honor of receiving as well your note which tenders to me a nomination to the Senate for the office of Secretary of State, as also your private and confidential letter on the same subject.

It would be a violation of my own feelings, as well as a great injustice to you, if I were to leave occasion for any doubt on your part that I appreciate as highly as I ought the distinction which, as the Chief Magistrate of the Republic, you propose to confer upon me, and that I am fully, perfectly, and entirely satisfied with the sincerity and kindness of your sentiments and wishes in regard to my acceptance of it.

You will readily believe that, coming to the consideration of so grave a subject all at once, I need a tions and temper of a minister, and whether it is in little time to consider whether I possess the qualificasuch a capacity that my friends would wish that I should act if I am to continue at all in the public service. These questions are, moreover, to be considered in view indeed, that a conference with you upon them were posof a very anomalous condition of public affairs. I wish, sible. But I do not see how it could prudently be held under existing circumstances. Without publishing the fact of your invitation, I will, with your leave, reflect upon it a few days, and then give you my definite answer, which, if I know myself, will be made under the influence exclusively of the most earnest desire for the success of your administration, and through it for the safety, honor, and welfare of the Union.

Whatever may be my conclusion, you may rest as sured of my hearty concurrence in your views in regard to the distribution of the public offices as you have communicated them.

Believe me, my dear sir, most respectfully and most faithfully your friend and humble servant, WILLIAM H. SEWARD. THE HON. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President-elect of the United States.*