ble] out and Walking--The Ladies
also".[275] It meant a speedy return of summer pleasures and summer
visitors. For when, even at a remote military post did these fail as
three sure signs of spring--pleasant weather, flocks of geese, and
ladies and gentlemen out walking together?

They were very human, those men and women of Old Fort Snelling.

VII

THE FORT AND INDIAN LIFE

It was a humane but visionary plan which Reverend Jedidiah Morse in 1822
presented to the Secretary of War as the correct method of procedure in
the task of civilizing the Indians. At various centers in the Indian
country were to be established "Education Families"--groups of honest,
industrious whites who were to have houses and farms, where the natives
could observe their activities. And without any forcing it was expected
that the red men, seeing the superior advantages of civilization, would
be themselves gradually transformed.[276]

To the north and east of Fort Snelling was the home of the Chippewa or
Ojibway Indians--extending from the Mississippi to the Great Lakes. To
the west, on the great prairies, the Dakota, or Sioux Indians lived and
hunted. The veteran missionary, S. W. Pond, estimated that the five
bands of Sioux, which most often came into direct touch with the
government at Fort Snelling, numbered in 1834, seven thousand, and
wandered over southern Minnesota and South Dakota, near the lakes of Big
Stone and Traverse.[277] Major Taliaferro reported in 1834 that the
number of Indians in his agency was 6721, and that they extended as far
as the Sheyenne fork of the Red River.[278] To one man, the agent, was
given the task of civilizing these thousands of Sioux. While it
was for this tribe that the agency at Fort Snelling was established, yet
the Chippewas often frequented its headquarters. One hundred and seventy
warriors of these northern Indians arrived at the agent's house on the
evening of August 4, 1830.[279] The presence of these red men more than
doubled the work of the agent, because there was now the difficulty of
keeping peace between two warring tribes.

Indian life was not so worthless as sometimes pictured. It is true that
one could see laziness and poverty during the months of January and
February, if he came upon an Indian village pitched near a wooded slope
and above a frozen stream. There could be seen the smoke curling from
the dingy tepee, the women dragging home wood for the ever-diminishing
pile outs