ern North Dakota and northern
Montana clear into Canada, above.

This cold, high country of vast plains made them hardy and roaming. In
their proud bearing and good size they resembled the Dakota Sioux, but
with the Sioux they had little to do, except in war. They were at war
with the Mandans also, and other nations to the south. In the north
they mingled with the Ojibwas or Chippewa people who had journeyed
westward into Canada. The Ojibwas had given them their name,
As-si-i-bo-in, meaning "They-cook-with-stones."

The Assiniboins were horse Indians and buffalo hunters. They had two
peculiar customs. They did cook their meat with stones, just as the
Chippewas said. Instead of using kettles, they used holes. They dug a
hole about the size of a large kettle; then they pressed a square of
raw buffalo-hide into it, for a lining. This they filled with water;
they put their meat in, and heating stones, dropped them in, too, until
the water was boiling.

Their other peculiarity lay in their style of hair. The longer the
hair, the better. They divided it into strands, and plastered the
strands with a paste of red earth and hoof glue, in sections of an inch
or two.

When the hair did not grow long enough to suit, they spliced it by
gluing on other hair, sometimes horse-hair, until it reached the ground.

In the year 1831 Wi-jun-jon, or Pigeon's-egg Head, was a leading young
warrior among the long-haired Assiniboins. It was a custom of those
days to have chiefs and warriors from the various Indian tribes sent to
Washington, to talk with their White Father and see how the Americans
lived.

This was supposed to teach the Indians the value of white man's ways,
and to show them how useless was war with the white race.

The Assiniboins were still a wild people. They were located so far
from St. Louis that they knew nothing about white man ways, except such
as they noticed at the fur-trading posts--and here the ways were mixed
with Indian ways.

So in the fall of this year Major J. F. A. Sanborn, the Indian agent at
the American Fur Company's trading-post of Fort Union, where on the
border between North Dakota and Montana the Yellowstone River empties
into the Missouri River, decided to take a party of Indians to
Washington.

The Assiniboins, the Cheyennes, the Blackfeet, the Crows--they all came
to Fort Union, to trade their furs for powder, lead, sugar and blankets.

Major Sanborn asked the Assiniboins for