viousest and pompiusest gals in these diggings."

The white inhabitants in the West at that time were not less a noteworthy and picturesque population than the Indians. There was an old lady to whom Lieutenant Davis owed many kindnesses, who was so fearless, that, armed only with an axe, she once kept at bay a party of half-drunk Indians, but she had a great horror of ghosts. Once, in one of his many reconnaisances, he had been detained until late one night, and had taken shelter in a cave, which had been a sepulchre where he had slept peacefully until morning. On returning he told his hostess where he had passed the night; her face blanched and she asked him how in the world he could manage to sleep in such a terrible place, it had been an Indian burying ground. He answered, laughingly, that as they were dead. Indians they did not trouble him, whereupon she rejoined: "I don't like them when they are dead; I am not afraid of any live Indian that I ever saw."

He had a store of such memories, furnished from peculiarities of the frontier people, among whom he spent the most impressionable part of his early manhood.

It was wonderful, in view of the crude state of the country, how the traditions of civiliza

tion had operated upon the young people, who only knew it by the tales of their parents.

There were no schools, for there were not enough white children to support a school. The sister of General A. C. Dodge rode on horseback four hundred miles to Lexington, Ky., to reach a school. When he was first elected delegate to Congress from Iowa, he received forty votes at the Fort Snelling settlement, where St. Paul and Minneapolis now stand. In 1840 that region paid one hundred and twenty dollars taxes to the Clayton County tax-gatherer!

"West

Now when demagogues rail at Point education," "shoulder-strap aristocracy," "would-be satraps," "toy soldiers," with all the other choice epithets such critics have always in store, it would seem that in looking over the teeming, smiling West, while the whole United States feels the force of the golden stream pouring in from it, Æsop's fable of the quarrel among the members of the body might be suggested. The art of defence is learned in weariness, watchings, and self-denial. Had the art been new to these daring young men, who had been educated and refined, only to throw them out as a barrier against barbarism, to dwell among the unlearned for the best part of their lives, they must have succumbed to the forces arrayed

against them; but the devices of science were united to the expedients suggested by the frontiersmen, and these magnificent powers were incorporated into a body which wrought great good in the undeveloped wilds of the Northwest. Shall the head not be respected by the hands?

CHAPTER XI.

THE BLACK HAWK WAR.

THE events of this period, called the "Black Hawk War," have become so shrouded in the mists of time that a short statement of the causes will not seem inappropriate.

The name Sauke, now abbreviated to Sac, means yellow earth; Musquakee, now Fox, red earth. These two warlike tribes eventually became amalgamated; they were originally from the St. Lawrence River. The Foxes first settled at Green Bay, and the river near which they made their abode still bears their name. There they sustained a signal defeat by the united forces of the friendly Indians and French troops, and the slaughter was so great that the hill on which the engagement took place has ever since been called the " Butte des Morts." *

From this and various other causes the two tribes were so depleted that they joined forces, and, though still keeping their com

*This was modified by an old frontier settler, Mrs. Arndt, into "Betty Mores."

munity independence, became practically one tribe. The subsequent war with the Six Nations left them too weak to stand alone. La Houton speaks of a Sac village on Fox River in 1689, and Father Hennepin, in 1680, speaks of them as Ortagamies, and says they were residents of the Bay of Puants, now Green Bay.

Major Forsyth said: "More than a century ago all the country commencing above Rock River and running down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Ohio, up that river to the mouth of the Warbash, thence down the Miami of the lake some distance, thence north to the St. Joseph's and Chicago, also the country lying south of the Des Moines, down perhaps to the Mississippi, was inhabited by a numerous nation of Indians who called themselves Linneway or Illini, and were called by others Minneway, signifying "men."

After many wars, surprises, and massacres in their contests for supremacy against the Sacs, Foxes, and their allies, the four hundred braves who met them had dwindled to thirty or forty. The savagery of these tribes is almost incredible now; among the Miamies were cannibal Indians, who fed upon their prisoners when they did not burn them at the stake.

The Sacs and Foxes held their own terri