moccasins. The Mille Lacs people have so many that they can sell; those in the other villages keep them for their own use. The Ojibway justly prefers the moccasin, winter and summer, to any other foot-wear.

NEGLECT OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS.

The Ojibways, like Indians everywhere, have no feeling whatever for the sufferings of animals. They always allow numbers of domestic animals to starve in winter and spring, though with two or three days of labor they might cut hay enough to keep them fat. Very often they do not house them; and the oxen and ponies stand out night and day for weeks when the cold is thirty or forty degrees below zero. It is pitiful also to see the starving creatures wandering through the villages, as Leech Lake, trying to eat horse dung that has a little straw or old hay mixed with it. It never seems to occur to the Indians to feel the least pity for their sufferings. Towards spring especially is the time when most of the cattle and ponies die of starvation. All around are native hay meadows, and in one day a man should cut grass enough to feed a horse or an ox for a year. One of the evil effects of maple sugar-making is that when they move from their homes to the sugar woods, they abandon any animals they do not use to transport them there; so the cattle, hogs, or ponies, being turned out into the deep snow and having nothing either to eat or drink, wander about, unsheltered and starving, till they die. This continual loss of cattle and ponies, every year, cripples them very much, as may be imagined, in their feeble efforts at farming.

The winter of 1896-97, on account of its deep snow, was unusually disastrous to the cattle and ponies. Some Indians had cut and stacked some hay on the meadows a few miles from where they lived, but had not hauled it home; and when the snow became deep, the ponies, being feeble, were unable to haul it, and so they nearly all died. At Cass lake there were only two or three ponies that survived; they nearly all died at Red lake, on the White Earth reservation, everywhere. Some tried to keep them alive by feeding them branches of trees; but, as may be imagined, with poor success. One would won

der that, with the continual hard treatment every winter, and the great numbers that starve, there are any ponies left; but the explanation is that they get a fresh supply of ponies every summer from the Sioux, who abound in ponies. Most of the Ojibway men have their women make quantities of their beautiful bead-work every winter and store it up. When summer comes, the husband carries it to the Sioux country, and brings back as many ponies as he had tobacco-pouches (kashkibitagunug). One of the bead-work pouches is the great ornament of an Ojibway, and any person wearing it is considered to be in full dress; it is worth a pony among the Sioux. Thus the stock of horses is every summer replenished. The Ojibways are not horse Indians; naturally they have no horses, excepting those they get from the Sioux.

The United States government occasionally has issued yokes of oxen, perhaps twelve yokes at a time, to as many Red Lake Indians. With these they hauled freight for the government, from the then nearest railroad station, Detroit, 100 to 110 miles distant; and later, when the railroad was built to Fosston, from that place, 65 miles. They, of course, camped out by the way. The roads were in many places shocking, and, between the severity of the labor and the want of feed and care, the oxen were usually all dead within two years. Oxen were often similarly issued to the White Earth Indians; and they, too, often starved to death, from their owners not making hay for them in summer. Then instead of using them for farming they were used to take their families to Indian dances, at great distances, as Leech Lake, 94 miles, Red Lake, 90 miles, or to the Sioux country, several hundred miles; and on such trips they were very poorly fed, and were otherwise abused. It is no wonder, therefore, that usually the oxen soon all died. They were used also to carry their owners and families where the different berries abounded, as they became ripe, often fifty or sixty miles distant.

Cows were also issued to the White Earth Indians, but they never milked them, as they do not care for milk and never drink it. The first Indian agent, E. P. Smith, who was there in 1872 and 1873, being a man of most admirable judgment, bought the finest cattle of the best breeds and issued them to

the Indians. The consequence was that in the following years visitors from St. Paul and other places, who were judges of stock, said that the cattle which they saw in summer grazing on the White Earth reservation were the finest they had ever seen in their lives. Within a few years broncho men have brought in that kind of horses, and traded them to the Indians for their cattle and got away from them nearly all that remained. The bronchos enable them to get about quicker, visiting Sioux or going to dances, but are worthless for farming purposes. The genuine Indian pony (not the broncho) is the toughest thing in the world, and it is astonishing what loads the Indians will haul with them. The Indians at Leech Lake, for many years, hauled flour and goods for the merchants and supplies for the government, first from Brainerd, 68 miles distant, and later from Park Rapids, 45 miles. The roads for part of the way were indescribably bad, the wagons frequently sinking to the hub. Yet with small ponies and heavy wagons they managed to haul loads of from eighteen to twenty-two hundred weight. I do not think any white men could have got those loads over such roads with those small ponies. They kept at them day and night, often when they were staggering from weakness, until they got them to Leech Lake. The prices paid them were perhaps from 50 to 75 cents a hundred, from Park Rapids.

GREAT ENDURANCE IN WALKING.

The Ojibways are good walkers. The Rev. Mark Hart left Red Lake at two o'clock in the afternoon of a November day, camped on the road about thirty-four miles out, and the next evening was at my house, eighty or ninety miles from Red Lake. He thought nothing of it. They do not consider walking work. Even children of six years will walk twenty-five miles in a day for several days in succession and do not seem to mind it. Rev. Mark Hart's son, six years old, walked from Cass Lake to Red Lake, forty-five miles, in two days, and slept out on the road. I have known Indians to leave Red lake at noon, and get to the shore of Leech lake by midnight, the distance being sixty-five miles.

Old Rocky Mountain, living at Red Lake, heard that his annuity money, five dollars, was at White Earth, some ninety miles distant, and started to walk there to get it. He was between eighty and ninety years of age. When he got to the Twin lakes, sixty-five miles distant, on the second day out, he learned that the money had been returned to Washington. Consequently he turned and in the next two days walked back to Red Lake, walking on the last day forty miles. He said he was not a particle tired when he got back, but was skipping about bringing pails of water. His son, who was with him, was tired. The same old man used to walk every year, at payment time, from Red Lake to Leech Lake, nearly seventy miles, and back, to receive his annuity, which was five dollars, camping out in all weathers.

These Indians enumerate the great walkers who have been among them in the last two hundred years. One was an Ojibway, one a Frenchman, and the third James Lloyd Breck, the first missionary of the Episcopal Church among them. He walked in one day from the old agency near Crow Wing to Leech lake, and back the next, a distance of seventy miles each way. He was always doing such things, but never spoke of them and never thought of them. The Indians acknowledge that he could outwalk any of them. He walked so fast that they had to run to keep up with him. When I was coming once from Leech lake, and stopping for dinner at Pine river, thirty-four miles distant, an old Indian appeared, pursuing us, with a letter that had been forgotten. He delivered it, and turned round to trot home again, another thirty-four miles, when one of the party kindly sent him into the hotel to get his dinner. He was an old man, of about sixty years.

Along in the 70's and 80's the mail was carried by an Ojibway on foot from White Earth to Red Lake, and back, once a week. The distance between the places is 80 or 90 miles, and was through an uninhabited wilderness, with only one house on the way. On Monday the man usually walked 25 or 32 miles, and camped; the next day he walked 32 or 40 miles, and camped; the third day he arrived at Red Lake by noon. After resting a day he repeated the trip by return to White Earth. His mail sack weighed sometimes from 50 to 75

pounds; and in addition he had to carry his provisions and blanket. In winter the roads were deep with snow, the trail hardly broken, and in summer he was devoured night and day by mosquitoes, and could only live at all by switching his neck and face constantly with twigs and leaves. He was paid one dollar a day, and his provisions. Usually one Indian carried the mail only a little time, when he gave way to another. Allan Jourdan, now deceased, a half-breed, carried it the longest, three months. Once while the poor exhausted carrier was sleeping at Wild Rice river, his clothing caught fire from his camp fire, and his limbs were dreadfully burned. He was carried by men on a litter to White Earth, and after a long illness recovered.

To illustrate how the Indians look on walking, even the most severe, as no work, I may tell the remark of an old blind woman, Bugwudj-ique (The Woman of the Wilderness). She was in my study when an Indian, the Red Lake mail-carrier, came in. After some conversation, she found he was a relative and tenderly kissed him. Then she asked him what he did for a living. He told her he carried the mail. "Oo,” said she, using the woman's long drawn out exclamation of surprise, "isn't that nice, no work at all to do; only to pick up your money at the end of the road."

LONGEVITY; RECOLLECTIONS BY OLD MEN.

Many Indians live to ninety years and upwards, in constant suffering from hunger, lack of clothing, and cold, and in the most unsanitary conditions. In 1897 died Nindibewinini, at the age of ninety-two years. He was the Leech Lake Indian who in 1839 remained behind, hiding in ambush, after the treaty of peace near Fort Snelling, and killed the Sioux, bringing as a result the disastrous battle in Battle Hollow at Stillwater, and another battle, which proved fatal to more than a hundred Ojibways. For many years his life was in danger from the rage of those who had lost relatives on that disastrous day. Though often urged, he never would become a Christian, saying that he had been the cause of too much blood having been shed, that God would not forgive him. The oldest man who has died in the present generation was