ple have a better use of their five senses than the children of
the wilderness. We could smell as well as hear and see. We could feel
and taste as well as we could see and hear. Nowhere has the memory been
more fully developed than in the wild life, and I can still see wherein
I owe much to my early training.

Of course I myself do not remember when I first saw the day, but my
brothers have often recalled the event with much mirth; for it was a
custom of the Sioux that when a boy was born his brother must plunge
into the water, or roll in the snow naked if it was winter time; and if
he was not big enough to do either of these himself, water was thrown
on him. If the new-born had a sister, she must be immersed. The idea
was that a warrior had come to camp, and the other children must
display some act of hardihood.

I was so unfortunate as to be the youngest of five children who, soon
after I was born, were left motherless. I had to bear the humiliating
name "Hak[=a]dah," meaning "the pitiful last," until I should earn a
more dignified and appropriate name. I was regarded as little more than
a plaything by the rest of the children.

The babe was done up as usual in a movable cradle made from an oak
board two and a half feet long and one and a half feet wide. On one
side of it was nailed with brass-headed tacks the richly embroidered
sack, which was open in front and laced up and down with buckskin
strings. Over the arms of the infant was a wooden bow, the ends of
which were firmly attached to the board, so that if the cradle should
fall the child's head and face would be protected. On this bow were
hung curious playthings--strings of artistically carved bones and hoofs
of deer, which rattled when the little hands moved them.

In this upright cradle I lived, played, and slept the greater part of
the time during the first few months of my life. Whether I was made to
lean against a lodge pole or was suspended from a bough of a tree,
while my grandmother cut wood, or whether I was carried on her back, or
conveniently balanced by another child in a similar cradle hung on the
opposite side of a pony, I was still in my oaken bed.

This grandmother, who had already lived through sixty years of
hardships, was a wonder to the young maidens of the tribe. She showed
no less enthusiasm over Hakadah than she had done when she held her
first-born, the boy's father, in her arms. Every little attention that
is due to a loved child sh