ly sent
out scouts, and felled trees for a stockade, barely in time to meet and
repel the predicted attack. Five years later, he repeated the service,
and again saved his people from awful slaughter. There was no confusion
of figures or omens, as with lesser medicine-men, but in every incident
that is told of him his interpretation of the sign, whatever it was,
proved singularly correct.

The father of Little Crow, the chief who led the "Minnesota massacre"
of 1862, was another prophet of some note. One of his characteristic
prophecies was made only a few years before he died, when he had
declared that, although already an old man, he would go once more upon
the war-path. At the final war-feast, he declared that three of the
enemy would be slain, but he showed great distress and reluctance in
foretelling that he would lose two of his own men. Three of the Ojibways
were indeed slain as he had said, but in the battle the old war prophet
lost both of his two sons.

There are many trustworthy men, and men of Christian faith, to vouch
for these and similar events occurring as foretold. I cannot pretend to
explain them, but I know that our people possessed remarkable powers of
concentration and abstraction, and I sometimes fancy that such nearness
to nature as I have described keeps the spirit sensitive to impressions
not commonly felt, and in touch with the unseen powers. Some of us
seemed to have a peculiar intuition for the locality of a grave, which
they explained by saying that they had received a communication from the
spirit of the departed. My own grandmother was one of these, and as far
back as I can remember, when camping in a strange country, my brother
and I would search for and find human bones at the spot she had
indicated to us as an ancient burial-place or the spot where a lone
warrior had fallen. Of course, the outward signs of burial had been long
since obliterated.

The Scotch would certainly have declared that she had the "second
sight," for she had other remarkable premonitions or intuitions within
my own recollection. I have heard her speak of a peculiar sensation
in the breast, by which, as she said, she was advised of anything of
importance concerning her absent children. Other native women have
claimed a similar monitor, but I never heard of one who could interpret
it with such accuracy. We were once camping on Lake Manitoba when we
received news that my uncle and his family had been murdered sever