He was more a man of peace than war, this Iowa boasted to Colonel McKenney.

His proudest moment, he told the Indian superintendent, was what his people called the "the beginning of his making presents."It took place when a Sauk and Fox war party killed two Iowa warriors. Both nations were prepared to declare war but the Orator insisted that the chiefs of both sides sit and smoke a pipe before the first shots were fired. Acting as an arbitrator he arranged for the Sauk and Fox to compensate the families of the dead men with blankets, horses, and a keg of whiskey. Peace was restored.

Some time later some young Iowa stole four horses from white settlers. For the Indians this was dangerous; the whites could use it as a provocation to start a war, or it could bring the dreaded Dragoons from Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis who would rather kill an Indian than talk to him.

Watchemonne called a council and the warriors were ordered to return the horses. The young warriors defied the chiefs and insisted they would fight if the white men attempted to recover their property.

Rather than risk a split within his nation, Watchemonne bought the horses and retuned them to their owners. McKenney wrote: "This act gained him great credit among the people of the border, who have ever since treated him with confidence and spoken in his praise."

When McKenney tried to trace the history of the Iowa through Watchemonne the chief told him that the memory of the oldest men went back to when "they crossed that lake"- Lake Pepin between Minnesota and Wisconsin.

His father, who had learned the story through eight preceding ancestors, insisted that they had lived on the shores of the lake until they were divided into the Winnebago, Omaha, Missouri, and Iowa tribes because "it was the will of the Great Spirit that they should not be stationary, but travel from place to place, cultivating different ground... they will only continue to have good crops and healthy children so long as they obey this law of their nature."

Watchemonne also revealed to McKenney that the heart of the nation was locked inside a sacred medicine bag stored inside a lodge, which had his flaps always fastened and which no woman was allowed to enter.

Ethnologists believe the traditional evidence that the so-called Chiwere tribes, Oto, Iowa, and Missouri, had departed from the Winnnebago and drifted westward to the Missouri river country.

At the time Watchemonne was in Washington the Iowa were still mourning the death of White Cloud, four years before. Watchemonne was overjoyed when McKenney gave him a lithograph of the favorite chief's portrait. The Indian superintendent boasted: "He declared [it] to be an excellent likeness."

When the portrait reached the Iowa village the people who had never seen an illustration or a painting were so stunned at the likeness of their chief that "they could not bear to look at it."