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tatoes they could use; or a few days' fishing in November, when the winter's supply of fish is taken, would have put them beyond want. And it does not apply to all the villages, but to that one in which the people were the most improvident of all. Oftentimes when suffering severely from hunger in the dead of winter, they bitterly lament their own improvidence in not having planted some corn and potatoes, and vow that if they live through till spring they will do differently, and provide food enough for the next winter. But when the abundance of summer comes, the starving of the past winter is forgotten, and the time is passed in dancing and pleasure, with no thought for the future and no provision made for it. All the Indians who are middle-aged recall the severe starvation to which when young they were periodically subjected, and through which they hardly lived. Yet these severe lessons did not lead them to provide, what they might so easily have provided, abundance.

HABIT OF GOING IN DEBT.

Since the first French traders came among the Ojibways, it was their custom to outfit the Indian for the hunt, to give him in advance ammunition, tobacco, and everything he needed as clothing for himself and for his family. When he brought back his pack of furs he paid this debt with them, and immediately took a fresh debt upon him, as much as his trader would permit. This has come down to the present day, and has become ingrained, so that every Ojibway goes in debt to his trader just as deeply as he will allow him. It is not considered right to contract a second, third or fourth debt, to as many different traders; and the traders often have a tacit understanding among themselves to prevent that, nevertheless it is frequently done, and very generally attempted. The Ojibway is no more dishonest than any other man, but owing to the vicious system in which he has been brought up, of going in debt all that his trader will allow him, and also owing to his usually not working, and so having nothing to pay with, he is usually deeply in debt, and finds his necessities driving him to go in debt more. The experience of the traders with the heathen Indians is that every man is trying to go in debt all he can, while the payment is slow and with many doubtful.

As the traders express it, "Every man is striving to get something for nothing." The annuity also that was promised to them under the Rice treaty of 1889, has operated disastrously to them in that way, as in many others, for the Indian goes in debt on the strength of his annuity, and many persons will trust him on the strength of it; so it is usually swallowed up many times over beforehand. And being very small, at the most only $9.20, it operates as a bait to go in debt on the strength of it, rather than as a help. Many Ojibways, however, are conscientious to make payment, and it is astonishing to us how much their traders will allow them to go in debt. Some of them go in debt to the amount of $200, with no property in the world but a gun and some traps, and they pay it. The traders, being mixed-bloods, understand getting it out of them; but it is doubtful that a white man could.

CHIEFS AND ORATORS.

The office of chief does not now amount to anything, owing to the great numbers of chiefs that have recently been created by United States Indian agents. Formerly there were only two or three chiefs of the whole Ojibway nation; now some chiefs enroll only eight in their band, counting men, women, and children. The chiefs are no wiser nor better than the mass of the people, but rather inferior to them if anything. It is now a mere honorary title, without power or authority.

We hear much said of the eloquence of the Indians. Many of them are good and ready speakers and present things clearly and forcibly. They do not much use the metaphors and similes that popular imagination has credited them with, but talk like sensible and therefore truly eloquent men. While many are admirable speakers, there is only one who is a genius, a truly remarkably eloquent man. He is the Chief Wendjimadub (Where he moves from sitting), or, as his French name is, Joseph Charette. He lives at White Earth, and is about fifty-five years of age. He has a little French blood. I consider him perhaps the best speaker, the greatest orator, I have ever met. Although without education-he does not know a letter-his powers are remarkable. He has all the vehemence, the fire, the energy, command of language, range of thought, of the true orator. As another said, "Every word comes like an

electric spark from his heart." I think he would be considered a wonderful speaker in any nation.

The lineal descendant of the old hereditary chiefs of the Ojibways lives at White Earth, Mesh-a-ki-gi-zhick (Sky reaching to the ground all round). He is now about sixty-eight years of age, a remarkably fine looking man, with a strong, typical Indian face. He would attract notice anywhere. He is a man of many noble qualities.

There was one of the chiefs who towered above all the others in the great nobility of his nature, and who fulfilled any ideal of the nobility of the Indian that Cooper or any other person ever drew. That was Med-we-gan-on-int, the head chief of Red Lake, who has just died, at the age of about eighty-four years. He was made by nature one of the greatest men in mind and body that I think I have ever seen. He was of commanding stature, six feet four inches, and of imposing presence. Nobility was stamped upon all his actions and words and in his looks. It would seem that he could never have done a mean thing. He was very level-headed, true to his friends, patient under seeming neglect, unselfish, and of such a broad vision and sound judgment as would have made him an ideal ruler anywhere. His distinguishing characteristic was his wonderful judgment. Amid all the perplexing questions that he had to deal with, and where the wisest man, white or Indian, could hardly discern what was the proper thing to do, his unerring judgment infallibly picked out the true path among so many misleading ones and followed it. He never was carried off his balance, never mistook the trail. He was as sagacious as Washington himself. Even when he was a heathen man, he was always noble. For the last twenty years of his life he was a Christian. When Christianity came to his village, he at once accepted it, and had all his children, grandchildren, and relatives do likewise.

When a young man he was a great warrior and hunter and of remarkable bodily powers. A young man came out from Washington, provided with instruments to measure Indians for the Columbian exposition; but the width of the chief's shoulders, the length of his arms, the size of his head and chest, made all the measuring instruments useless. He told the writer that when, as a young man, he picked up his canoe

and inverted it over his head, he would not lay it down for twenty miles. About two miles is as far as most men, even the strongest, wish to carry a canoe, without a rest. He was

no orator, and said very little; words, that ended the matter.

but when he did say a few All felt that "Daniel had come

to judgment." He alone of all chiefs was revered and obeyed by all the people. He was free from all the weaknesses which, in different forms, attached to all the others, as they do to all men, and he towered over them all. Looking back on his career closed, one sees that he was made by nature and his Creator a truly great man. It was his delight to go every summer, on foot, even up to eighty years of age, with a party of men of his band, hundreds of miles over the prairies to visit the Piegan Indians. He could not understand a word they said, but they were relatives, he said; their fathers had hunted together long ago, and the pleasure of seeing them was, to him, great. His nature craved that excursion on the boundless prairies every year. He pointed out places on the White Earth reservation where the Sioux had chased him, and the clumps of poplars where he hid from them and was safe.

THE OJIBWAYS OF RED LAKE.

About eight hundred Ojibways live along the south shore of Red lake, and about four hundred on the long point at the Narrows between the southern and northern parts of the lake. The houses of those living on the south shore are built by themselves of logs, plastered with clay. being small and with one room only. A feature of the Red Lake home is the chimney, made by themselves out of a whitish clay. It burns a very great deal of wood, but is admirable. There are no chairs, tables, beds, or stoves, in the house; but there is a board floor cleanly swept, with rush mats all round, on which the inmates sit, eat, and sleep. The chimney is in the corner farthest from the door, and nothing can exceed the warmth, comfort, and cheerfulness of a Red Lake home on a winter evening when the bright fire in the chimney floods the room with light and heat. The wood is pine, cut four feet long, and is placed on end in the chimney. It ignites readily, and burns with a bright flame. The family or families and visitors are sitting all round on the mats, with their bed-covering neatly

folded up by the wall, and animated conversation and cheerful laughter are heard on every side. No enjoyment that we have in our homes, with the fire shut up in an iron box, is equal to the flooded light and warmth of the Red Lake home. The food-it may be boiled corn alone or perhaps with fish-is neatly and cleanly served on plates laid on the mats, beside each person.

It takes a great pile of wood to keep the fire going in the open chimney for twenty-four hours. It is the business of the women to supply it. Every day one can see, about four o'clock in the afternoon, long strings of women, each with her ax and packing strap, going out into the woods perhaps a mile; soon the woods are vocal with the axes; and then equally long strings of women are seen issuing from the woods, each with her load upon her back, and each woman packs an immense quantity. This is thrown down at the door of the house, and brought in as needed. If a woman at Red lake meets a man on the path, she goes off to one side, perhaps into the snow above her knees, about four feet from the path, and there patiently waits for the man to pass.

The Red Lake Indians are the most industrious of all the Indians; they are apt to be always doing something to make a living. They will starve with the seed corn by them, rather than eat it. They have raised quantities of corn in their little fields by the shore of the lake, for a hundred years past, planting the same ground over and over again, and it does not seem to be exhausted. Sometimes the land is not even plowed, or hoed over deeply, for the new crop, but just planted as it is. Along in the 70's one could see strings of women packing corn on their backs a distance of five miles or more, to sell it to the traders at a cent a pound for goods. As the railroad was then far from Red lake, perhaps a hundred miles, the prices of the provisions they got in exchange for their corn were very high, flour $5 a sack, common tea 50 cents a pound, four or five pounds of pork for a dollar, and sugar about the same, so that their corn brought them very little, only equal to a small fraction of a cent a pound.

The four hundred Ojibways at the Narrows lived in a more heathenish way, in those days, than any others of this people. There was the log house, but extremely small, and extremely

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