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138 tribe are able to conduct personal correspondence in their own language. They have a special fondness for parade, and eagle-feather war-bonnets are particularly numerous in this delegation. Among those in attendance were several men of prominence, but no generally recognized chiefs. Their tipis, some of which are tastefully decorated, were set up in a circle, following the old custom of the plains tribes. The Watópana, "paddlers," or Assiniboin, are an offshoot from the Yankton Dakota and speak their dialect. Their range was north of that of the Dakota, extending across the Canada boundary. They now number about 1400, gathered on two reservations in Montana, besides a small number in Canada. They brought with them a fine specimen of the old-style heraldic tipi.

The Crows (Absárokě), numbering now about 2100 on a reservation in Montana, occupied the Yellowstone country, west of their hereditary enemies, the Dakota. Although predatory in habit, they have never been at war with the whites, but on the contrary have usually furnished a contingent of scouts for the government service in the various Indian campaigns of that region. They have marked tribal characteristics, which would well repay study, as they are practically unknown to the ethnologist. The most prominent man of the delegation was White-swan, a former scout and the sole survivor of the Custer massacre in 1876, in which notable engagement he was shot and hacked almost to pieces and finally left for dead, but managed to save his life by covering himself with the blanket of a dead Dakota. With his hearing destroyed by blows of the tomahawk, his hands crippled by bullets, and his whole body covered with enduring scars, he is still able to tell the story in fluent sign language.

The Sǐ′ksika, or Blackfeet, known to ethnologists through the researches of Grinnell, are an important tribe numbering about 6000, in various subtribes and bands, formerly ranging over the whole country from the Yellowstone to the North Saskatchewan. Nineteen hundred of them are now gathered on a reservation in