1. Beall, who had been one of the commissioners to locate the road from Ohio to Michigan Territory, as agreed upon in the 25 Nov. 1808 Treaty of Brownstown, explained in the enclosed extract of his 16 June 1815 letter to Meigs (10 pp.; printed in Carter, description begins Clarence Carter et al., eds., The Territorial Papers of the United States (28 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1934–75). description ends Territorial Papers, Michigan, 10:558–62) that in 1812 he and his colleagues had selected the route they believed best calculated to facilitate travel to Michigan from Washington, D.C., and various points in the northwestern states. The Indians were initially satisfied with the choice, he wrote, but had been induced to protest by white men who had financial and political interests in a different route. The commissioners disregarded these objections, as well as those made directly to them by settlers and speculators. Beall suggested that the recent Indian complaints about the road’s location (see Meigs to JM, 20 June 1815, and n. 1) sprang from a similar source, and recommended hiring Dayton, Ohio, surveyor Benjamin Van Cleve, who was “incapable of being alarmed at a Shadow,” and “able to ascertain and report the true cause of the change, which (if any) has taken place with the Indians in the premisses.”