University of Virginia Library

IV.
INDIAN CHILDREN.

The children among the Sioux are early accustomed to look with
indifference upon the sufferings or death of a person they hate. A
few years ago a battle was fought quite near Fort Snelling. The
next day the Sioux children were playing foot-ball merrily with
the head of a Chippeway. One boy, and a small boy too, had
ornamented his head and ears with curls. He had taken the skin
peeled off a Chippeway who was killed in the battle, wound it
around a stick until it assumed the appearance of a curl, and tied
them over his ears. Another child had a string around his neck
with a finger hanging to it as an ornament. The infants, instead
of being amused with toys or trinkets, are held up to see the scalp
of an enemy, and they learn to hate a Chippeway as soon as to
ask for food.

After the battle, the mother of a Sioux who was severely
wounded found her way to the fort. She entered the room
weeping sadly. Becoming quite exhausted, she seated herself on
the floor, and said she wanted some coffee and sugar for her sick
son, some linen to bind up his wounds, a candle to burn at night,
and some whiskey to make her cry! Her son recovered, and the
mother, as she sat by and watched him, had the satisfaction to see
the scalps of the murdered Chippeways stretched on poles all
through the village, around which she, sixty years old, looked forward
with great joy to dance; though this was a small gratification
compared with her recollection of having formerly cut to
pieces the bodies of sundry murdered Chippeway children.

A dreadful creature she was! How vividly her features rise
before me. Well do I remember her as she entered my room on
a stormy day in January. Her torn mocassins were a mocking
protection to her nearly frozen feet; her worn “okendo kenda”

hardly covering a wrinkled neck and arms seamed with the scars
of many a self-inflicted wound; she tried to make her tattered
blanket meet across her chest, but the benumbed fingers were
powerless, and her step so feeble, from fatigue and want of food,
that she almost fell before the cheerful fire that seemed to welcome
her. The smile with which she tried to return my greeting
added hideously to the savage expression of her features, and her
matted hair was covered with flakes of the drifting snow that
almost blinded her.

Food, a pipe, and a short nap before the fire, refreshed her wonderfully.
At first she would hardly deign an answer to our questions;
now she becomes quite talkative. Her small keen eye follows
the children as they play about the room; she tells of her
children when they were young, and played around her; when
their father brought her venison for food.

Where are they? The Chippeways (mark her as she compresses
her lips, and see the nervous trembling of her limbs)
killed her husband and her oldest son: consumption walked
among her household idols. She has one son left, but he loves
the white man's fire-water; he has forgotten his aged mother—
she has no one to bring her food—the young men laugh at her,
and tell her to kill game for herself.

At evening she must be going—ten miles she has to walk to
reach her teepee, for she cannot sleep in the white man's house.
We tell her the storm is howling—it will be dark before she reaches
home—the wind blows keenly across the open prairie—she had
better lie down on the carpet before the fire and sleep. She
points to the walls of the fort—she does not speak; but her action
says, “It cannot be; the Sioux woman cannot sleep beneath
the roof of her enemies.”

She is gone—God help the Sioux woman! the widow and the
childless. God help her, I say, for other hope or help has she
none.