n, only to find that the
little fellow had caught a fish so large that it was pulling his canoe
all over the lake. "Ugh," exclaimed the father, "if a mere fish scares
you so badly, I fear you will never make a warrior!"

It is told of him that when he was very small, the father once brought
home two bear cubs and gave them to him for pets. The Boy was feeding
and getting acquainted with them outside his mother's birch-bark teepee,
when suddenly he was heard to yell for help. The two little bears had
treed The Boy and were waltzing around the tree. His mother scared them
off, but again the father laughed at him for thinking that he could
climb trees better than a bear.

The elder Hole-in-the-Day was a daring warrior and once attacked and
scalped a Sioux who was carrying his pelts to the trading post, in full
sight of his friends. Of course he was instantly pursued, and he leaped
into a canoe which was lying near by and crossed to an island in the
Mississippi River near Fort Snelling. When almost surrounded by Sioux
warriors, he left the canoe and swam along the shore with only his nose
above water, but as they were about to head him off he landed and hid
behind the falling sheet of water known as Minnehaha Falls, thus saving
his life.

It often happens that one who offers his life freely will after all
die a natural death. The elder Hole-in-the-Day so died when The Boy was
still a youth. Like Philip of Massachusetts, Chief Joseph the younger,
and the brilliant Osceola, the mantle fell gracefully upon his
shoulders, and he wore it during a short but eventful term of
chieftainship. It was his to see the end of the original democracy on
this continent. The clouds were fast thickening on the eastern horizon.
The day of individualism and equity between man and man must yield to
the terrific forces of civilization, the mass play of materialism,
the cupidity of commerce with its twin brother politics. Under such
conditions the younger Hole-in-the-Day undertook to guide his tribesmen.
At first they were inclined to doubt the wisdom of so young a leader,
but he soon proved a ready student of his people's traditions, and yet,
like Spotted Tail and Little Crow, he adopted too willingly the white
man's politics. He maintained the territory won from the Sioux by
his predecessors. He negotiated treaties with the ability of a born
diplomat, with one exception, and that exception cost him his life.

Like other able Indians who fores