ry speaking the Indian language and his friends.

[Illustration: INDIAN IN NATIVE DRESS, FORT BERTHOLD.]

A third class of Indians was found at Fort Berthold. This reservation
is a hundred miles north of Bismarck, Dakota Territory, on the east
side of the Missouri. There are three small tribes combined in one
large village for protection against their ancient enemies the Sioux,
namely, the Arickarees, the Mandans, and the Gros Ventres. These
Indians have latterly made great advances in civilization. They have
800 acres under cultivation, all looking admirably and well fenced
in, and they are taking great pride in their work and asking for more
land to cultivate. They have comfortable homes, or "lodges," as they
are called, made in an octagonal form, of logs completely covered
with earth. They are eagerly obtaining from the Government such
comforts of civilization as they can--reapers, cooking-stoves,
baking-powder, and the like. And yet this people display some of the
grossest elements of savagery. Polygamy is common. The disgusting
scaffold burials still go on, and the air in the neighborhood of the
village is sometimes foul from the adjacent cemetery. Buffalo heads
and poles with red streamers, as offerings or invocations to spirits,
surmount many of the lodges and bear witness to the heathenism of the
people. Many of the men are terribly scarred on the shoulders, breast
and arms with the cruel practices of the sun dance. Men and women
alike wear the dress of their savage life. There has been as yet
little success from schools or church work. Few care for schools, and
the attendance at the mission chapel is not large. The fault,
however, is not with the devoted missionaries, Rev. C. L. Hall and
his helpers of the American Missionary Association, whose
faithfulness is unsurpassed, but with bad white men who visit the
village. For years these Indians have been brought in contact with
some of the worst influences of civilization, and in consequence the
women have become gross, the men have lost their sense of honor, and
the people are manifestly more degraded and harder to reach than the
wild Indians on the Sioux Reservation.

After observation of these three types of Indians, the Christianized,
the wild and the polluted, certain conclusions were inevitable.

1. There is a natural nobility in the Indian character. The Indian is
debased by heathenism and his wild life, lazy, improvident, filthy,
obscene and cruel; and