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.

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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. "0-0," 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

Gegwedjisa (Trying to Walk, as nearly as it can be translated) of Leech Lake, who was considered by the traders, after careful investigation, to be a hundred and fifteen years old. versing with him about twelve or fifteen years ago, I found that he perfectly remembered General Pike's visit to Leech lake, which was in February, 1806, and described him. Being asked at what age he was then, he said he was married and had a daughter "so high," running about. He was probably twenty-five years old then. Indians never know their age, but describe themselves as being "so high," if it was in their childhood, when some noted event happened, such as "when the Indians nearly all died of the small-pox," or "at the time of the great sickness caused by the rotten flour issued after the payment."

Old Shay-day-ence told me that when a child he remembered seeing old men with the hair of their heads all pulled out (such as we see in the pictures of Indians) and only the scalp lock left. He said the old fellows used to come into the wigwam where he was, and, bowing, as it were, alternately to one side and the other, would say in a deep guttural voice, "Oongh, oongh." He said he was mortally afraid of them and their smooth scalps. He said the hair was pulled out very quickly, a handful at a time, and that it caused them very little pain. The same old man was once with me in St. Paul, about the year 1882, I think, and we sat on a hill, the Park Place property, I believe, overlooking the city. For some time he did not recognize the place, it was so changed by the buildings; then all of a sudden it came back to him and he recognized it. "There," said he, pointing to a certain place, "was Little Crow's village; and there was where the road led out of his village into the country, and it was beside that road that two Indians and I were secreted, when two women, I think, and a man, not suspecting any danger, came out along the path and were killed and scalped by our party, who then made off to the Ojibway country." Such was life in St. Paul at that early time. He did not say that he killed any of them, and I hope he did not; but even if he did, being a heathen man at that time, and a recognized state of war existing, and it being according to their ideas of right or even merit, we should be slow to pronounce judgment in the case.

HABITS IN WORK; LOGGING, RIVER DRIVING, GARDENING.

When the Ojibway man works, strange to say, he works very fast, much faster than a white man. Perhaps that is one reason why they so soon get tired of it and give it up, because they exert themselves so strongly while they are at it. This is seen, for example, in hoeing a field. The men, and the women also, are excellent with the ax, being trained to it from earliest infancy. When some boys whom I sent to school were in Illinois, the people there used to turn out to see those boys chop. Though it was a wooded country, none there could handle the ax as they.

Ojibways hired in a logging camp usually do not stay very long; a week or two, till they get a little money ahead. Then they go home to spend it and rest. This is a relic of the old life, when a period of violent exertion was succeeded by a prolonged rest. Occasionally, however, one will be found who will stay in a logging camp all winter. The lumbermen say that while they do work they are as good hands as any. They like working with the ax better than almost any other labor.

One kind of work they excel in and are particularly fond of, river-driving. The excitement, the continual change, just suits them. Monotony in anything they cannot stand. The constant repetition of performing the same act over, over and over again, as white people do, for instance, in manufacturing, is insupportable to them.

Contrary to what would be supposed, the Ojibway excels the white man in making a farm or garden, when he wants to do it; not in wheat-farming, however, or such farming as he has not been used to, but such as he knows, vegetable raising. A skilled white farmer and gardener went on a journey of a hundred and twenty miles through the white man's country from Gull Lake settlement to Hubbard and back; and he told me the best gardens by far that he saw on the road were Indians' gardens. The white men could not begin to equal them. Similarly a resident of Bemidji, an old farmer, told me that the best garden in all that region was that raised by Shenaw-ishkunk, the old Ojibway who had always lived on the town-site of Bemidji. The Indian has genius; he can do