and observed that he had seldom seen the
stars so bright as they had been all the way
from Loches.

PIC-NICS IN THE PRAIRIE.

A YOUNG Englishman, Mr. Edward Sullivan,
who, according to his own phrase, has been
enjoying rambles and scrambles in North and
South America, has brought home a cheerful
budget of small talk from various regions of
the New World: some from the Ojibbeways,
the Sioux, and the buffaloes; some from the
presence of the Victoria Regia, up the
Essequibo. His small talk is published for the
common good, and about some of it we now
propose to gossip; that is to say, about so
much of it as may refer to Indians, and
prairie life in North America.

From St. Paul's—which is a town of two
or three thousand inhabitants, some two
thousand miles up the Mississippi—Mr. Sullivan
started in the middle of September, with
two fellow-travellers of his own party; Mr.
McLeod, a trader, two Sioux half-breeds, one
Creole half-breed, and three Indians in their
paint and feathers. Being in a feverish state,
he was relieved on the first night by Doctor
Nature, who prescribed a bleeding from the
nose; a circumstance which placed it in the
power of the Indians to call him Bloody Nose;
his two friends being Water Rat, and Big
White Man. Crossing the Arrow Prairie,
and picking up by the way the bit of information
concerning Indians at home, that they
are much subject to diseases of the lungs and
throat, the travellers swam the St. Peter
River, and rested at the lodge of a half-breed
Scotchman, a descendant of Claverhouse,
whose squaw prepared for them a feast of
ducks and tea. Indians who dropped in to buy
powder and shot looked upon the strangers
as curiosities; and the old men, very strictly
speaking, looked upon them—watching them
gravely by the hour together, but without
impertinence, the young men only being
troublesome. The young Indian, like the
young European, is apt to break out as a
dandy. He paints and greases himself with
studious care, and dallies elegantly with his
pipe and tomahawk. He aspires to possess a
looking-glass, and when he gets one, dresses
by it more than seven times a day. It, is,
however, not only a vain thing—it is serviceable
to him in the prairie: since, by flashing
it against the sun, he can make signals visible
by distant friends before his own dark body is
to be descried; and that, on many critical
occasions, may be a property that makes the
looking-glass a valuable friend. Mr. Sullivan
estimates the smoking power of the Indian
at fifty pipes a day, but his tobacco is diluted
with three times its quantity of the dried
bark of the red willow, which makes it hotter
to the mouth, but much diminishes its sedative
effect.

The travellers, after certain days, having
quitted the timber regions, crossed the Chippeway
River, and reached Lac-qui-Parle, there
found a camp of about two thousand Sioux
Indians collected in some two hundred lodges.
They were awaiting the arrival of McLeod
the trader, with powder and shot. The first
glimpse of the pure white cow-skin lodges in
the sunset, with hundreds of horses tethered
about, and ten score of young warriors doing
a scalp-dance to the music of ten score of
squaws was tolerably striking. The squaws
were assembled about forty poles, from which
were suspended the scalps of Pawnee men,
women, and children, that had been brought
in by a war party some days before. Every
now and then some fine fellow darted aside
from the dance to strike his tomahawk into
some particular post, on which hung a scalp
of his own taking. Then the squaws lifted
their voices to the highest, lauding him by
name—the smiles of beauty rewarding the
toils of chivalry—till they broke off into a
yell of malediction against the deceased. The
daughters of these squaws wear their hair
in two long plaits down the back, tied and
ornamented at their ends with ribbon.

These Indians, says their missionary, pray
to their evil spirit; they believe in a good
spirit, but believe that, as he is good, he does
not need entreating to be kind to them.
They believe in the transmigration of souls,
and they worship fire after a fashion, never
poking it up rudely, and taking it as their
totem or tutelary genius. They make also
totems of animals, sometimes of wolves,
sometimes of foxes; and connect with their totems
and other auguries so many superstitions,
that they are often restrained by them from
the war path, though their passions burn,
and so the devastating warfare between tribe
and tribe is often checked. After death the
final alternative is a region in the south of
happy hunting grounds, or cold and hunger
in the north. The missionary who had dwelt
among them thirteen years informed Mr.
Sullivan that he had made in all that time
only a single convert, and that he recanted as
soon as he was old enough to go out with his
tribe in search of scalps.

The Indians are much attached to their
young children, but condemn their squaws
and their dogs to hard labour, beating them
both equally without remorse. It is not, so
far as the squaw is concerned, a happy thing
to take part with the Indian in his native
wilds; suicide, however, is but rarely sought
as an escape from misery. They believe it to
be a crime seriously punished after death, and
that they who hang themselves will be
compelled to drag about with them in the next
world, as a clog for ever, the tree from which
they were suspended. When, therefore, they
do hang themselves, they choose the lightest
sapling that will serve them for their purpose.

From Lac-qui-Parle, the three English
travellers set out with a guide named
Rainville, son of a half-breed trader and a Sioux