my good old friend Margaret Dwight, we sat down and passed a few hours in social chat." Dwight wrote her own account of her Western Reserve trip, A Journey to Ohio in 1810. Over twenty years later, in 1832, Ellsworth traveled west again, this time as U.S. Commissioner of Indian Tribes in Arkansas and Oklahoma. President Andrew Jackson appointed Ellsworth one of three commissioners to "study the country, to mark the boundaries, to pacify the warring Indians and, in general to establish order and justice" after Congress's passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Ellsworth travelled to Fort Gibson to investigate the situation. (Some critics blame Ellsworth for being complicit in the subsequent removal of Native Americans to Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma, particularly since Ellsworth's appointment and subsequent western trip followed the Indian Removal Act, Andrew Jackson's first significant act as President. Other historians note Ellsworth's sympathetic outlook towards the tribes.) Along the way, Ellsworth made stops in Cincinnati and Louisville, then traveled on to St. Louis, Missouri, where he met with explorer William Clark and saw the recently captured Native American leader Black Hawk, chief of the Sauk and Fox tribe. Leavitt's mission was a complicated one: he was charged with trying to mediate between the conflicting claims of several Indian tribes, who were being forced into an ever-smaller area, in competition with newer immigrants and the interests of the Chouteau family, the powerful St. Louis magnates of the Midwestern fur trade. Ellsworth was accompanied on the expedition by three companions: author Washington Irving, who recorded his impressions in A Tour on the Prairies; Charles La Trobe, an Englishman, mountaineer and travel writer who later served in the British diplomatic corps in the West Indies and Australia; and Swiss Count Albert Pourtales. Washington Irving wrote of Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, "this worthy leader of our little band": "He was a native of one of the towns of Connecticut, a man in whom a course of legal practice and political life had not been able to vitiate an innate simplicity and benevolence of heart. The greater part of his days had been passed in the bosom of his family and the society of deacons, elders, and statesmen, on the peaceful banks of the Connecticut; when suddenly he had been called to mount his steed, shoulder his rifle and mingle among stark hunters, backwoodsmen, and naked savages, on the trackless wilds of