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Updated: May 2, 2025
Can any master of Indian dialects tell us whether that word, too, means "him of the silver eye"? If it does, revoke, O student, your shrill eheu for the Greekless and untrousered savage of the canoe, suppress your feelings, and go steadily into rhabdomancy with several divining-rods, in search of the Pierian spring which must surely exist somewhere among the guttural districts of the Ojibbeway tongue.
For nearly 200 miles the country is still theirs, and the Pillager and Red Lake branches of the Ojibbeway nation yet hold their hunting-grounds in the vast swamps of North Minnesota. These Indians have a bad reputation, as the name of Pillager implies, and my Red River men were anxious to avoid falling in with them.
What savages, too, are they, the successors of the old race savages! not less barbarous because they do not scalp, or war-dance, or go out to meet the Ojibbeway in the woods or the Assineboine in the plains. We had passed a beautiful sheet of water called Lake Osakis, and reached another lake not less lovely, the name of which I did not know. "What is the name of this place?"
Since the days when the Bird of Ages dwelt on the Coteau-des-Prairies the Ojibbeway and the Sioux have warred against each other; but as the Ojibbeway dwelt chiefly in the woods and the Sioux are denizens of the great plains, the actual war carried on between them has not beena unusually destructive.
'It is said by scientific men, said Mr. Holt, 'that if the theory of walking over soft snow were propounded, not all the mechanical knowledge of the present day could contrive a more perfect means of meeting the difficulty, than that snow-shoe of the Ojibbeway Indians.
Besides, he had taken to himself an Indian wife, and although the ceremony by which that was effected was frequently wanting in those accessories of bell, book, and candle so essential to its proper well-being, nevertheless the voyageur and his squaw got on pretty well together, and little ones, who jabbered the smallest amount of English or French, and a great deal of Ojibbeway, or Cree, or Assineboine, began to multiply around them.
I made no reply, but was reminded of some good and unhappy women I had known on earth, who were inconsolable because their babes had died before being sprinkled with water by a priest. These babes they, like the Ojibbeway matrons, "could not expect to meet again in paradise."
This was very different entertainment from what I had been led to expect in the morning; would it had been my lot to be always so agreeably deceived! The village of the Lake of Two Mountains is inhabited by two distinct tribes of the aborigines viz. the Iroquois and the Algonquins; the latter are a tribe of the Sauteux nation, or Ojibbeway, and live principally by the chase.
"But, sir," I cried in painful confusion, "there is here some great mistake. To this remonstrance my Ojibbeway Virgil answered, in effect, that in the enormous passenger traffic between the earth and the next worlds mistakes must and frequently do occur. Quisque suos patimur manes, as the Roman says, is the rule, but there are many exceptions.
It seems to be one that is innate in the savage mind. An Ojibbeway was apparently pleased with the new religion that was proffered to him, and thought of being baptized, but, dreaming that he went up to a fair prairie covered with numerous trails of white men, without the print of a single moccasin, was cured of his desire.
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