71

THE
SUNDAY CHRONICLE,
FEBRUARY 19, 1888

DOINGS AT THE WILD WEST.

CHRISTENING THE PAPOOSE.

To the ordinary Briton the manners and customs of the Red INdian, as he is familiarly termed, are an unknown quanitity. The uninitiated no doubt picture him as a fierce and untamable savage-one of those bloodthirsty creatures which the pen of Fenimore Cooper loved to depict with such a vivid realism. The visit of the WIld WEst Show to these shores, however, has done much to remove ideas at once exaggerated and fallacious, and those who have seen the denizens of the Far West "at home," as it were, within their camp, must be filled with wonderment at the marvllous changes which the march of civilisation has brought about in the social and mental condition of the Indian people. The race is gradually being shorn of al its old associations, and ere long it is not drawing too much upon the imagination to assume the "noble savage" contesting with the white man for the prizes or otherwise, which fall to the share of those who enter the lottery of a commercial or agricultural career. True it is that, outwardly, the Indian retains much of his old originality, and the figure cut by a full-blown chief, in all the glory of his war-pain and feathers, is both striking and unique. Those who live amongst the Indians, however, tell us that the red man is gifted with an extraordinary intelligence and sagacity, and so heartily has he entered into the varoius phases of civilised life that he is now a devout and sympathetic worshipper of the Deity. It was not surprising, therefore, that when "Little Chief," of the Ugawalla band of Sioux Indians became the happy father of a bouncing "pappose" the other week,