While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
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 moccasins 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.
