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

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

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