essfully.
Yet he never claimed that the gift entitled him to any peculiar regard,
except as the instrument of a power whose operations he did not pretend
to understand. He had an imperfect knowledge of the Catholic worship,
distorted and intermixed with the wild theogony of the red man. He would
talk with passionate devotion of the Mother of God, and in the same
breath tell how the Great Spirit restrains the Rain Spirits from
drowning the world, by tying them with the rainbow. I have often seen
him make the sign of the cross, while he recounted, in all the soberness
of implicit belief, how the Old Man (the God of the Blackfeet) formed
the human race from the mud of the Missouri,--how he experimented before
he adopted the human frame, as we now have it,--how he placed his
creatures in an isolated park far to the north, and there taught them
the rude arts of Indian life,--how he staked the Indians on a desperate
game of chance with the Spirit of Evil,--and how the whites are now his
peculiar care. Ma-que-a-pos's faith could hardly stand the test of any
religious creed. Yet it must be said for him, that his simplicity and
innocence of life might be a model for many, better instructed than he.

The wilder tribes are accustomed to certain observances which are
generally termed the tribe-medicine. Their leading men inculcate them
with great care,--perhaps to perpetuate unity of tradition and purpose.
In the arrangement of tribe-medicine, trivial observances are frequently
intermixed with very serious doctrines. Thus, the grand war-council of
the Dakotah confederacy, comprising thirteen tribes of Sioux, and more
than seventeen thousand warriors, many years since promulgated a
national medicine, prescribing a red stone pipe with an ashen stem for
all council purposes, and (herein was the true point) an eternal
hostility to the whites. The prediction may be safely ventured, that
every Sioux will preserve this medicine until the nation shall cease to
exist. To it may be traced the recent Indian war that devastated
Minnesota; and there cannot, in the nature of things, and of the
American Indian especially, be a peace kept in good faith until the
confederacy of the Dakotah is in effect destroyed.

The Crows, or Upsaraukas, will not smoke in council, unless the pipe is
lighted with a coal of buffalo chip, and the bowl rested on a fragment
of the same substance. Their chief men have for a great while endeavored
to engraft teetotalis