sion, nor a more burning zeal, than did old Shay-day-ence. There is a very imperfect sketch of him in this Society's Library, so I will say no more of him.

With what feelings does the Ojibway regard the coming of the white man into his vicinity? With a feeling of apprehension, and a wish that he would not come. When the whites within the last five years were about to come near Cass lake, the chief, an excellent man, told me that he wished they would not come, because it would break in upon their "righteousness of life." We, who saw how they lived, would not regard it in many respects as "righteousness of life;" but that was their feeling.

TREATMENT OF THE AGED.

How are the old treated by the Ojibways? Oftentimes a daughter will do a good deal for her aged parents; but a son cares very little for them (I am speaking of the heathen), and does less. It is with them as with ourselves, the women are a good deal better than the men. But it seems to be an unwritten law among them that an old man, and especially an old woman, must shift for himself or herself somehow. They have a contempt for the aged and useless, like all heathen. The son never seems to think he is under any obligation to do anything for his aged father or mother. Nor do they make any complaint of him, for they do not seem to expect anything. And one always hears the complaint that food given by the government, or by charitable persons, does not get to the old persons for whom it was intended, but is eaten by the well and strong.

Going a few years ago to the house of one of our Indian missionaries, I noticed an old heathen woman lying on the floor, who seemed so feeble she could not sit up. On inquiry it appeared that her son had told her, in the very coldest of January, to go out of doors and make her bed in the snow, because he was afraid to sleep in the house with her, fearing that she was about to turn into a man-eating witch. That, of course, was only an excuse; the real reason was that he was tired of her, and yet she had been a good and devoted mother. So she had to go, and slept out several nights, and was so badly frozen that she died in the hospital to which we had her taken. The missionary and his wife had brought her

to their house, as soon as they learned of it. When dying she sent for her son, but he paid no attention to it, and left it to strangers to bury her. It excited no comment, nor was he apparently lowered in the estimation of the community in which he lived. Taking a general view, we must say that the old are badly neglected and have a hard time. One good old woman who was blind was generally reported to have starved to death, though her relatives, who were numerous, might easily have given her rabbits or a little something to eat.

TOBACCO SMOKING AND CHEWING.

Tobacco is largely used by the Ojibways, men, women, and children. They smoke it mixed with the inner bark of the red willow, and also chew it. All the children think they must have their tobacco the same as their elders. The women from Cut-Foot-Sioux are the greatest chewers I have seen. Ordinarily the heathen man thinks he must have a plug as long as one's arm and as thick. It is doubtful, though, whether they use more of it than certain classes of our own people. I once asked the principal merchant at Leech Lake, how much money he took in in a year from the Indians for tobacco. He made a calculation, and said $2,000. There were three stores there, and if the others sold as much it would make $6,000 a year in that one village. There were about 1,000 persons around the lake, and perhaps two-thirds of them got their tobacco there. The total government annuities for 1,600 Indians were $10,666. For a people as poor as they were, often starving, this was a serious drain on their resources, and it seems strange to us that they did not apply that $6,000 to food. An Indian at Leech lake lately went to a merchant and told him that he and his family were in such a state of absolute starvation that he must have five dollars' worth, on credit, to save them alive. The good-hearted merchant consented, and told him to name the kinds and amounts of provisions to take up the five dollars. The first item the man gave was tobacco, a dollar and a half.

MORTALITY OF CHILDREN.

Although the Indian women, beginning early, bear so many children, comparatively few live to maturity. Ask any

aged woman how many children she has had, and the answer will usually be from eight to twelve. Ask her how many are alive and the answer will usually be one, two, or none at all. The hardships of the life, cold, hunger, insufficient clothing, the carrying children to heathen dances, and the want of knowledge how to care for them in sickness, are the causes of their dying young. For instance, in the winter of 1873 there was an epidemic of whooping cough in White Earth. I constantly saw children clad only in the cotton shirt, cotton leggings, and moccasins, standing in the road in the cold snowy weather, coughing violently with the whooping cough; no wonder that over fifty died, out of a population of some hundreds, while out of the same number of people in the white town from which I had come, and where there had also been an epidemic of the same disease, not one had died.

AVERSION TO BATHING; HOUSES OF ONE ROOM.

I have never known the adult heathen Ojibways to wash their bodies or bathe. The boys and girls and young people sometimes bathe, but never the grown up people that I have seen. As they all live in one-roomed houses, they have no facilities for doing so. Yet I have known some to live to ninety-two years, and some indeed to be considerably older, with very poor food, and in defiance of all sanitary laws, who I am sure had not washed, except their faces and hands, for sixty years. They do not seem to think it necessary or beneficial. When children are taken into a boarding-school, there is apt to be a great fight with the parents to allow them to be washed, as they think that water will seriously injure them.

The reason why they prefer the one-roomed house is on account of the sociability and for greater warmth. They are gregarious. They love to see and hear each other, love laughter and jests, and as they have no books or newspapers or any other means of passing their time, they find their amusement in each other's society. It is therefore by preference and not from poverty that they have the one-roomed house. Then in their cold winter climate one room is much more easily heated than several. The chief of Cass lake, a Christian man, when his three daughters married, built for each one and her hus

band an addition to his house, a log room at the end, each room communicating by a door with the rest of the house. In this room the new family was installed, and so were private. But I have never known a heathen family to have more than one room, in any house they built themselves. The missionaries and some of the Christians have more than one room, and in the new houses built by the Chippewa Commission within the last five years for the new removals to White Earth there was usually an upstairs part, which could be used as a sleeping room. But to the mass of the people the idea of shutting one person alone in a box of a bedroom seems an unnatural way, and far inferior to their own. They can sleep far better with the children crawling over them, and a warm fire at their feet.

HUNTING AND KILLING GAME.

The Indians kill game at all seasons, everything that has life. All summer long they hunt deer by torchlight. A few years ago we sent an Indian clergyman to Cass lake in May, and in two months he killed twenty-five deer, mostly by torchlight, up the Mississippi, in his canoe. The Indians at the Narrows of Red lake, opposite to the Agency, killed in one fall, by actual count, eighty-seven moose, swimming in the lake, near their village, to escape from the flies. That was in 1887, I think. Last winter many Indians about Sandy lake had killed, by December, sixteen deer each since the snow fell. Many of the Indians of the White Earth reservation killed that winter, of 1896-97, forty deer each, as owing to the unusually deep snow the deer could not get away from them. They pursued them on snowshoes, and killed them with axes. I myself saw deer pursued and floundering in the deep snow, making very little headway. Last winter I was at the village of Home-returning-Cloud, near Leech lake, and found he was absent with most of the women. I learned that they had gone to pack home five moose, which he had killed about twenty miles away. He had previously killed two moose. One would think that this indiscriminate slaughter of the deer and other animals winter and summer would result in their extermination; but, strange to say, their numbers have

been constantly increasing within the Indian reservation, until last winter. For instance, when the Indian clergymen went to Red lake first in 1877, they noticed that it was a rare thing for any deer to be killed; there were very few deer, but afterward they kept constantly increasing, and the Indians every year kept killing more and more. This continual increase of the deer furnishes a curious confirmation of what the Indians are always saying, that "the Great Spirit always sends something for His Indian children, and seems to specially provide for their wants. He sends them the wild rice which they neither plant nor cultivate nor fence, but only reap, and He sends them many other things." I suppose the explanation of the increasing plentiness of the deer, notwithstanding the continual slaughter of them winter and summer, is that given by the Indians, namely, that as the country south becomes settled the deer go north into the reservations, the only unsettled part of the country, and although so many are killed off they still keep coming in. It may be also, though the Indians do not say so, that the English working on the Canadian Pacific railway scare them down this way. But their numbers reached and passed the high water mark, I think, in 1896 and 1897, in that last winter of deep snow, when almost every man was out after them, and many hunters, as has been said, killed forty each.

Indians, as is well known, never leave any game for a future time, or for future needs, but kill everything in sight, even if they have so much flesh that they are unable to use it. Usually, all winter long, one can buy moose meat and venison in Red Lake village and Leech Lake for five cents a pound, and sometimes for much less. In the beginning of November most of the men move out and establish deer-hunting camps, and stay out till about the first of January. Heretofore about Cass lake has been the best place for deer and moose. Some reindeer were also killed there several years ago, but very few of late years. In a letter to the state fire warden a few years ago I gave an estimate, made with the aid of the bestinformed Indians, of the numbers of deer annually killed by the Indians of the different villages, and it ran up into many thousands. The deer and moose skins are all utilized for