39

nearly as good a that of young that few persons can tell the difference. This is the true Indian bread, and is used as bread when they have fresh meat. Boiled, it makes a soup very nutritious. So long as the Indian has this dried meat and pemmican he is entirely independent of all other food. Of late years, all the beef issued to the Indians no reservations, and not needed for immediate consumption, is treated in this way.

The dressing of skins is the next work. The thickest hides are put in soak of alkali, for materials for making shields, saddles, riatas, etc. Hides for making or repairing lodges are treated in the same way but, after the hair has been removed, they are reduced in thickness, made pliable, and most frequently soaked.

Deer, antelope, and other thin skins are beautifully prepared for clothing, the hair being always removed. Some of these skins are so worked down that they are almost as thin and white as cotton cloth.

But the crowning process is the preparation of a buffalo robe. The skin of even the youngest and fattest cow is in its natural condition, much too thick for use, being unwieldy and lacking pliability. This thickness must be reduced at least one-half, and the skin at the same time made soft and pliable. When the stretched skin has become dry and hard from the action of the sun, the woman goes to work upon it with a small implement, shaped somewhat like a carpenter's adze. It has a short handle of wood or elk-horn, tied on with rawhide, and is used with one hand. These tools are heir-looms in families, and greatly prized. It is exceedingly difficult to obtain one, especially one with an elk-horn handle, the Indians valuing them above price. With this tool the woman chips at the hardest skin, cutting off a thin shaving at every blow. The skill in the whole process consists in so directing and tempering the blows as to cut the skin, yet not cut too deep, and in finally obtaining a uniform thickness and perfectly smooth and even inner surface. To render the skin soft and pliable, the chipping is stopped every little while, and the chipped surface smeared with brains of buffalo, which are thoroughly rubbed in with a smooth stone.

When very great care and delicacy are required, the skin is stretched vertically on a frame of poles. It is claimed that the chipping process can be much more perfectly performed on a skin stretched in this way than on one stretched on the uneven and unyielding ground, but the latter is used for all common robes, because it is the easiest.

When thinning and softening process is completed the robe is taken out of its frame, trimmed, and sometimes smoked. It is now ready for use. It is a long and tedious process, and no one but an Indian would go through it.

But all this, though harder work, is the mere commencement of the long and patient labor which the loving wife bestows on the robe which the husband is to use on dress occasions. The whole inner surface is frequently covered with designs beautifully worked with porcupine quills, or grasses dyed in various colors. Sometimes the embellishments are paintings. Many elegant robes have taken a year to finish.

Every animal brought into the camp brings work for the squaw. The buck comes in with a deer and drops it at the door. The squaw skins it, cuts up and preserves the meat, dresses the skin and fashions it into garments for some member of the family. Until within a very few years the needle was a piece of sharpened bone; the thread a fibre of sinew. These are yet used in the ornamentation of robes, but almost all the ordinary sewing is done with civilized appliances.

All Indians are excessively fond of bead-work, and not only the clothing, moccasins, gun-covers, quivers, knife sheaths, and tobacco pouches, but every little bag or ornament is convered with this work. Many of the designs are pretty and artistic. In stringing the beads for this work an ordinary needle is used; but in every case, except for articles made for sale, the thread used is sinew.

Only a few years ago the foregoing description of the ordinary employments of Indians was true to the letter for almost every tribe west of the Missouri and east of the Rocky Mountains. It is yet true for momst of them, but some few have taken, within these few years, long steps on the "white man's road," and the occupations of both men and women of those tribes will not conform to this description.

The life in the winter encampment has scarcely been changed in any particular, but with the earliest spring come evidences of activity, a desire to get away, not attributable, as in the "good old time," to plans of forays for scalps and plunder, but to the desire of each head of a lodge or band to reach before any one else does the particular spot on which he has fixed for his location for the summer. No sooner has be reached it than all hands, men, women, and children, fall to work as if the whole thing were a delightful frolic.

The last five years, more than any twenty preceding them, have convinced the wild Indians of the utter futility of their warfare against the United States Government. One and all, they are thoroughly whipped; and their contests in the future will be the acts of predatory parties (for which the Indians at large are no more responsible than is the Government of the United States for the acts of highwaymen in the Black Hills, or train-robbers in Missouri), or a deliberate determination of the bands and tribes to die fighting rather than by the slow torture of starvation to which the Government condemns them.

But the buffalo is gone, so also nearly all the other large game on which the Indians depended for food. They are confined to comparatively restricted reservations, and completely surrounded by whites. They are more perfectly aware of the stringency of their situation than any white man can possibly be, for they daily feel its pressure.

With no chance of success in war, with no possibility of providing food for themselves, they thoroughly comprehend that their only hope for the future is in Government aid, grazing cattle, and tilling the soil.

They do not like it, of course; it would be unnatural if they did. They accept it as the dire alternative against starvation.

Does any one labor for the sake of labor? A man who spaded up a field simply to give himself labor would be considered a fit subject for the lunatic asylum.

Labor is the curse on Adam, and, however necessary and ennobling, is not an end but a means. We labor for money, for ambition, for health, for anything except for labor itself.

Basing arguments on the Indian contempt for work, many men in and out of Congress talk eloquent nonsense of the impossibility of ever bringing him to agricultural pursuits. The average Indian has no more hatred of labor, as such, than the average white man. Neither will labor unless an object is to be attained. Both will labor rather than starve. Heretofore the Indian could confortably support himself in his usual and preferred life, without labor; and there being no other incentive, he would have only proved himself an idiot had he worked without an object.

But now, with the abundant acres of land that his white conquerors, with great justice, have alloted to him in the shape of reservations, with no opportunity to think of the excitement, honor, and glory of battle, his life is changed. He now finds that fences are to be made, ground broken up, seed planted, and the peerless warrior, with "an eye like an eagle," whose name a few short years ago was a terror, and whose swoop was destruction, must learn to handle the plow, and follow in fact, what he has often claimed in desire and spirit to follow, "the white man's road."

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nearly as good a that of young that few persons can tell the difference. This is the true Indian bread, and is used as bread when they have fresh meat. Boiled, it makes a soup very nutritious. So long as the Indian has this dried meat and pemmican he is entirely independent of all other food. Of late years, all the beef issued to the Indians no reservations, and not needed for immediate consumption, is treated in this way.

The dressing of skins is the next work. The thickest hides are put in soak of alkali, for materials for making shields, saddles, riatas, etc. Hides for making or repairing lodges are treated in the same way but, after the hair has been removed, they are reduced in thickness, made pliable, and most frequently soaked.

Deer, antelope, and other thin skins are beautifully prepared for clothing, the hair being always removed. Some of these skins are so worked down that they are almost as thin and white as cotton cloth.

But the crowning process is the preparation of a buffalo robe. The skin of even the youngest and fattest cow is in its natural condition, much too thick for use, being unwieldy and lacking pliability. This thickness must be reduced at least one-half, and the skin at the same time made soft and pliable. When the stretched skin has become dry and hard from the action of the sun, the woman goes to work upon it with a small implement, shaped somewhat like a carpenter's adze. It has a short handle of wood or elk-horn, tied on with rawhide, and is used with one hand. These tools are heir-looms in families, and greatly prized. It is exceedingly difficult to obtain one, especially one with an elk-horn handle, the Indians valuing them above price. With this tool the woman chips at the hardest skin, cutting off a thin shaving at every blow. The skill in the whole process consists in so directing and tempering the blows as to cut the skin, yet not cut too deep, and in finally obtaining a uniform thickness and perfectly smooth and even inner surface. To render the skin soft and pliable, the chipping is stopped every little while, and the chipped surface smeared with brains of buffalo, which are thoroughly rubbed in with a smooth stone.

When very great care and delicacy are required, the skin is stretched vertically on a frame of poles. It is claimed that the chipping process can be much more perfectly performed on a skin stretched in this way than on one stretched on the uneven and unyielding ground, but the latter is used for all common robes, because it is the easiest.

When thinning and softening process is completed the robe is taken out of its frame, trimmed, and sometimes smoked. It is now ready for use. It is a long and tedious process, and no one but an Indian would go through it.

But all this, though harder work, is the mere commencement of the long and patient labor which the loving wife bestows on the robe which the husband is to use on dress occasions. The whole inner surface is frequently covered with designs beautifully worked with porcupine quills, or grasses dyed in various colors. Sometimes the embellishments are paintings. Many elegant robes have taken a year to finish.

Every animal brought into the camp brings work for the squaw. The buck comes in with a deer and drops it at the door. The squaw skins it, cuts up and preserves the meat, dresses the skin and fashions it into garments for some member of the family. Until within a very few years the needle was a piece of sharpened bone; the thread a fibre of sinew. These are yet used in the ornamentation of robes, but almost all the ordinary sewing is done with civilized appliances.

All Indians are excessively fond of bead-work, and not only the clothing, moccasins, gun-covers, quivers, knife sheaths, and tobacco pouches, but every little bag or ornament is convered with this work. Many of the designs are pretty and artistic. In stringing the beads for this work an ordinary needle is used; but in every case, except for articles made for sale, the thread used is sinew.

Only a few years ago the foregoing description of the ordinary employments of Indians was true to the letter for almost every tribe west of the Missouri and east of the Rocky Mountains. It is yet true for momst of them, but some few have taken, within these few years, long steps on the "white man's road," and the occupations of both men and women of those tribes will not conform to this description.